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“Oh, that was nothing, Mom,” I laughed. “Don't worry! It's just his knot stuck inside me, is all. You'd think, with how long I've been letting him do this, that he'd have figured out by now he can't pull out right away! But you can't fight instincts, I guess. Now I just have to wait until he shrinks down enough to get it out again. It shouldn't take too long.”

She formed two more rings and used them to parry his thrust, then tried again to slash his throat. Noah conjured an illusory handgun and shot her in the arm, leaving it numb and breaking the spell. Shocked and worried by the sensation in her afflicted arm, the assailant launched a blast of explosive wind with her other hand, launching herself up and away like Bower with his fire magic. She flipped through the air, landed gracefully fifty feet away, and then hurled another ring at Noah. He shot it out of the air, shattering it like a clay pigeon, along with each subsequent ring after.

But at that moment, a memory flashed through his mind, something Noah said to him after he lost his arm. ‘People don’t know how to fight someone with missing or prosthetic limbs. It throws them off balance, and he took advantage of that. No one expects to be kicked in the chest with a peg leg.’ He glanced at Ingram, focused entirely on the fall and keeping Roc restrained. From the look in his eyes, he was most worried about Roc’s free wing getting in the way or failing to pull away in time and crashing with him. For all of his focus, all of his determination, his guard was dropped entirely.