The duel you've all been begging for. Thanks for reading! Please support Paranatural on Patreon and Ko-fi! They just hiked up my health insurance premiums, what better excuse can you get to help sustain the story you're enjoying and the me that's making it. Thank you for your support!

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[Transcript]

        Ángel’s first step became another, then a jog, a stumbling sprint. Isabel would light up like the sun to have her book back. Quick, before the waves could change their mind! What impossible coincidence had blessed him with this gift?!

        His wake-up call did little to dispel the situation’s unreality. There was a flash of silver cord, a whirr of wire grazing metal, and a ripple where the missile had breached Bayview’s lucent barrier. Ángel felt as though he’d frozen in midstep, so quickly were his senses forced to calculate the danger. A silver-taloned grappling hook had closed around the spine of Eightfold’s book. 

        Ángel was a paragon of fury in an instant. Reflexes honed to the lethal speed of a lightning stroke propelled him in a vicious lunge, billowing black smoke, as a conjured claw lashed out to claim the book. Poltergeist force sent sand and sea spray scattering as shrapnel—Ángel’s projected hand had come up empty. Eightfold’s book had already snapped back beyond the barrier... and into a hand tipped with silver talons of its own, which shone in contrast to the sleek black leather of a brawl-weathered fingerless glove.

        “...You’re used to hiding your strength,” a voice growled from the shadows of the treeline. “That’s why you weren’t fast enough. A moment’s hesitation.” 

        A figure was standing on the wooded sandbar that extended past the barrier: a woman dressed in darkness, armed to the teeth with countless weapons—the harpoon gun that had claimed her prize included. 

        Ángel sighed, pushing his windswept hair from his eyes, as he returned to his considerable height.

        “A blade can’t mend what it has cut,” he said, suppressing his spectral energy once again. “It’s wise to measure twice, if you are strong.”

        “You would be wiser if you measured once,” the woman scoffed, pushing up her pitch-black sunglasses, “instead of taking careful aim at sand and empty air.” She’d opened Isabel’s book and was flipping through its soggy pages with disinterest.

        “Likewise, friend, the measuring comes first... but here you are appraising your prize now. What was your aim in stealing from me? Have you any clue just what it is you’ve taken?”

        “Something you want.” The woman snapped the wet book shut with a dissatisfying squelch.

        Ángel sighed again.

        “...You lash out without purpose, and grope for leverage in the aftermath of violence. Your methods are backward, my friend. If you want to make an enemy of me, there is a proper order to these things—for example, I should like to know the name of my antagonist.”

        The woman took a step into the sunlight. Though a heavy metal arsenal adorned her jacket, belts, and holsters, everything was strapped so that her movement made no sound. Shallow scars from close calls kept a tally on her dark skin, clear proof of both her talent and her fortune: a few of them, if they’d sunk any deeper, would have transformed the Cousinhood’s most dangerous hunter into the most dangerous game that she despised.

        “Shred,” the woman answered. “That’s all that’s left of my name. A single act of violence. Tattered scrap. Every other title is somebody else’s vain attempt to make sense of the pieces.” She looked away. “But senseless slaughter doesn’t make sense, nor a puzzle to be solved. The only thing it made... was a survivor.”

        “I... see,” Ángel mumbled empathetically, angling his face to hide his flop sweat.

        “Knight Eagle of the Raptor Sect.”

        “Hm?”

        “Is one of the meaningless titles they have given me.”

        “Ah,” said Ángel. “So it is.”

        “You also may have seen me on TV.”

        “I don’t think so,” said Ángel. He only owned a radio, which he used to play cassette tapes of The Classics (that was what he called most music from the seventies that sounded like a beatnik slowly melting in the sun).

        “Hmph.” Shred maybe seemed offended, or maybe relieved, or maybe both. She crossed her arms and looked away again, though she hadn’t yet looked back at him, and so really just turned farther towards the sea.

        “A blank slate, then, for both of us... should you return that book. My name is Ángel Guerra—”

        “Son of one Francisco Guerra, man-at-arms for the Consortium. My condolences.” 

        “...Indeed,” said Ángel, eyeing Shred suspiciously. “Ah. You meant for his death.” He smiled. “That was some time ago now.”

        “Heh.”

        Shred stalked closer, striding up to the barrier. Ángel mirrored her movements, pacing along his side of the forcefield like a tiger in a cage. She set a hand against the bubble, which repelled her, and the air rippled with a shimmer that her eyes couldn’t perceive. Her touch withdrew. Shred flexed her fingers.

        “One can never be too sure with Sector Zero.” The cool shades of the Cousinhood hunter flashed a bright white in the low morning sun.

        “Sector—?” Ángel cocked an eyebrow. “Do you mean Bayview?”

        “Is that what it’s called now? So much can change overnight... when ‘overnight’ can be a blink or even WEEKS in other time zones.”

        “That... is not how time zones work.” 

        Shred smirked and shook her head.

        “You’re throwing shade in Plato’s cave, Ángel. I’m not the one who doesn’t understand what I am talking about. You’ve been living in a bubble.”

        “...So I’ve noticed,” Ángel answered with a spritz of condescension; he tapped on Agent Walker’s forcefield as if knocking on a door.

        “You’ve been living in ATLANTIS. Neverland. The Bermuda Triangle, Ángel—connect the DOTS.” She gestured towards the other Bayview islands, but the spectral didn’t look away. She wouldn’t get an opening that easily. “I’ve journeyed long and far to find this place, while you were sleeping safely in your bed. If you wish to preserve that peace... then you’d be wise to help me cross the finish line.” Shred knocked on solid air as Ángel had, but slower, with grim purpose, like the reaper come to claim an ailing resident behind a home’s locked door. Tap. Tap. TAP.

        “Tourists are a boon for my small business,” Ángel replied, smiling like a saint, “but I expect you aren’t here to see the sights. What brings you to our humble archipelago, Miss Shred?”

        The Cousinhood’s Knight Eagle leaned in closer. They were only a foot apart, now, separated by the barrier. A sea breeze blew past unobstructed, taking sand beyond the border that Shred and Ángel couldn’t cross.

        “Heh. It’s as explorers always claim when charting the uncharted,” Shred hissed beneath the sound of squawking seagulls. “Here be MONSTERS.”

        “...It’s ‘dragons,’ and they claim that out of ignorance,” Ángel answered, sighing softly.

        “Dragons. Werewolves. Vampires. It doesn’t matter. I’ll slay any monster that would make prey of mankind.”

        Ángel’s expression darkened, and swirling clouds of black began to pour from his broad shoulders once again.

        “...It is the breadth of your expanding definition of monstrosity, Knight Hunter, that earns your ‘Cousinhood of Man’ the cold reception it deserves.”

        Shred grinned.

        “So you DO know who I am.”

        Two weapons, a sword and staff, whipped into lightspeed motion simultaneously.