The battle came from all directions at once.
That was how the witch hunters had always operated — Katherine had understood this from the memories, from the specific way they had moved in the village in sixteen ninety-two, but understanding from a memory and standing inside it were different, and standing inside it now in the lamp-lit square of Miralba the understanding became the immediate real thing.
They came from the shadows at the edges of the square, from the doorways and the narrow streets and the spaces between buildings, and they came with the particular coordination of things that had been built to work together, not shouting, not announcing, simply moving in the way of people who had done this many times before and had no need to discuss the doing of it.
Twelve hunters.
Seventeen chosen ones.
The math looked right until it didn't, and the reason it didn't was the same reason it hadn't in the memories — the hunters had been built specifically to counter witches and chosen ones, had been built with knowledge of how they fought and what they could do, and the building of that knowledge into their training meant they were not twelve equal opponents but twelve people with a structural advantage that numbers alone didn't account for.
Katherine felt this in the first exchange.
The hunter who came at her moved through Carlyle's water blast with the specific technique of someone who knew exactly how water-based power moved and how to move through it, and Katherine responded with fire, which the hunter also had a counter for, and the exchange was four seconds and told her everything she needed to know about what the next however-many minutes were going to require.
Not power alone.
Combination. The specific combination of seventeen people who trusted each other completely and had spent months learning to move as one thing rather than many, deployed against opponents who had been built to counter each individual thing but had not been built to counter the specific combined expression of all of it at once.
"Together," she said.
She didn't shout it. She didn't need to. The group had been together long enough that the word at the right volume reached the people it needed to reach.
The formation shifted.
It shifted the way it shifted in the basement in the early months — not all at once, not with explicit direction, but responsively, each person feeling the movement of the people around them and adjusting, the specific collective intelligence of a group that had been doing this long enough for the collective intelligence to be real rather than approximate.
Niall's earth came up through the stone paving of the square — not vines here, not the garden's logic, but the deeper grammar of ground itself, the stone cracking and shifting under three hunters' feet simultaneously, the particular disruption of something you cannot fight because it is the ground you are standing on.
Kristen blinked. Not randomly — the specific pattern she and Katherine had developed over months of working together, the blink sequence that created a distraction on one side of a hunter's attention to enable a real strike from the other, and Katherine read the pattern and came in from the right while the hunter's attention was going left.
One down.
Courtney's Blood Magic moved through the square in the specific way it moved in tight spaces, not waves but precise threads, finding the specific vulnerability in each opponent that was not a physical vulnerability but a probability one, the subtle shift in the weight of what was likely to happen next that changed outcomes in ways the hunters couldn't name or counter because they couldn't see it working.
Dean was moving through the battle the way he moved through all battles — without drama, with full efficiency, the particular economy of someone who understood that every unnecessary movement was a cost and was not interested in paying unnecessary costs.
Engel was fighting with the contained focus of a man who had spent years keeping himself and his daughter safe and had developed from that necessity a specific and highly effective approach to threat management.
Samantha — and this was the thing Katherine had not been certain of until she saw it — Samantha in a fight was not what her quiet suggested. The wind element was her power and the wind element in a confined space, in a square with buildings on all sides, was something the witch hunters had evidently not fully accounted for. The air in the square shifted and moved in ways that were not the wind of weather but the wind of intention, deflecting, disrupting, catching the throw of a weapon three feet from its target and sending it wide.
Fenix.
Fenix was fire, the same element as Katherine, and the specific thing Fenix's fire did in a fight was something Katherine had only seen in practice sessions until now — it did not spread in the way you expected fire to spread, it moved with a precision that said someone had spent a very long time learning exactly what fire could do when you stopped thinking about it as destruction and started thinking about it as direction.
They were holding.
More than holding — seven hunters down, five remaining, and the square rearranging itself in the group's favor the way it had been arranged to rearrange.
And then Sebastian moved.