For a moment, no one moved.
The clearing remained silent except for the wind passing through the trees and the heavy breathing of everyone still standing. The dead bandit remained between them, his blood slowly disappearing into the same earth that moments earlier had responded to his leader's command.
The axe-wielder looked around him and saw something he had not seen since Shion had arrived at the farm.
Uncertainty.
His remaining men had lowered their weapons slightly. Some refused to meet his eyes. Others looked toward the forest, measuring the distance between themselves and freedom.
For the first time since the trap had been sprung, the fight was no longer his to control.
"Fight," he ordered.
His voice remained calm, almost unchanged, but no one answered him.
A small tension appeared in his expression.
"Fight" still nothing.
One of the younger bandits stepped back. He wasn't running yet, just creating distance, trying to decide if staying was truly safer than fleeing.
The axe-wielder noticed immediately.
"Do you think they'll spare you?" he asked.
That got the reaction he wanted. Some of the bandits looked toward Shion and Eren, and fear returned to their faces. Fear of the two mercenaries standing before them. Fear of the guards waiting in Reka. Fear of whatever punishment came after this.
He saw that hesitation and immediately tried to reclaim it.
"They'll hang you beside the road. The guards won't care who held the knife and who simply followed orders."
Whether it was a lie or something he truly believed did not matter. What mattered was that the fear was no longer directed at him.
A woman among the bandits tightened her grip around her sword and looked directly at him.
"And what would you do?" The question made the entire clearing go quiet "You killed Joran because he wanted to leave."
The axe-wielder slowly turned his head toward her "Joran forgot his place."
"No," she answered. Her voice trembled, but she did not step away. "He remembered it."
The silence that followed lasted only a moment, but it was all Shion needed.
"Now" Eren moved before the word had completely left her mouth.
There was no hesitation this time. She wasn't waiting for a perfect opening or falling into the rigid pattern the guards had drilled into her for years. She had spent too much time fighting beside Shion to think of combat as a sequence of correct movements.
She understood the battlefield.
She understood the enemy.
And she knew exactly what mattered.
She did not attack the man himself. She went for his left side, the side where his magic always came from and the side he had protected throughout the entire fight.
He reacted exactly as Shion expected.
His hand rose.
The wind gathered around his fingers and his weight shifted to support the spell.
It was the same movement he had repeated every single time. Predictable.
Shion was already moving.
The greatsword came down in a heavy diagonal strike. She was not trying to kill him. The attack was meant to force him to commit, to keep both axes occupied and leave him nowhere else to look.
He blocked. The force of the impact traveled through his arms, stopping him in place for just long enough.
Eren arrived.
Her sword moved toward him, and for the first time during the entire battle his expression changed. It wasn't because he had failed to notice her. It was because he understood too late that she had never intended to strike his chest.
She was aiming for his hand.
The blade cut through flesh and bone, and the scream that followed broke the calm expression he had maintained from the beginning.
His severed hand fell into the dirt, the fingers still curled as if they were trying to grasp the magic that was no longer there. The wind around the clearing disappeared with it.
Shion did not give him a chance to recover. She stepped forward and drove the flat of her greatsword into his chest, throwing him onto his back. Before he could reach for his remaining weapon, her boot pinned his arm against the ground and the tip of her blade stopped just above his throat.
For the first time that day, the man looked afraid.
Not because he thought he was going to die.
Because he understood that he had lost.
The remaining bandits watched in silence. The woman who had challenged him was the first to lower her weapon.
"I surrender" that was enough.
Two more bandits dropped their swords into the grass. Another turned toward the forest and disappeared between the trees without looking back, choosing the uncertainty of being hunted over staying beside the man who had just executed one of his own.
The fight was finally over, but neither Shion nor Eren had the strength to celebrate.
As the adrenaline began to fade, Eren felt every wound she had ignored during the battle. Her shoulder burned, her leg ached with every movement, and her breathing became uneven.
Shion looked down at the severed hand lying in the grass and the blood pouring from the leader's arm, too much.
Her expression changed immediately.
"Eren" there was a different urgency in her voice now "We need to move" Eren followed her gaze and understood at once.
They had succeeded. They had captured the bandit alive.
But a dead prisoner meant no answers, no proof of who he was, and no bounty for the job they had accepted.
The same man who had controlled the battlefield, manipulated his followers, and condemned his own men without a second thought now depended entirely on the mercy and speed of the two mercenaries he had tried to kill.
Under different circumstances, the irony might have been satisfying.
At that moment, it was just another problem that needed to be solved.