[center][h2]Anne Mayer[/h2][h3]Nieve — Magic Shop[/h3][/center]
The Fae child's response was there and gone in a blink, but that was enough to flood Anne's heart with a rush of relief. Maybe she wasn't all the way back just yet, but that kid was still in there, somewhere, tiptoeing slowly back towards the waking world. There was still hope for her yet—if only Anne could keep her safe.

Again, a twinge of doubt urged her to leave this place altogether, and again, she reminded herself that it couldn't be left as it was. The further the tunnel went, the more she became convinced of this fact, as the true scale of the system down here became clear. Had someone really dug all this just to get in through the back of a single magic shop, or was this merely an extension of something far larger, a network that might stretch beneath the entire city of Nieve?

Before they could find out, a new threat reared its ugly head. Anne couldn't make out exactly [i]what[/i] had abruptly stymied the group's advance, but from the others' reactions she could guess it wasn't anything good. She stopped in her tracks and squinted, trying to get a lock on the number of enemies, to come up with a plan of attack before everything went to hell.

She never got the chance. Instincts honed over years of fighting screamed all at once in the back of her mind, and she whipped around just fast enough to glimpse a flicker of red disappear into the black. The projectile that followed was nearly invisible in the shadows, and Anne's tired eyes couldn't track it even as it sped straight towards her and her vulnerable charge.

It was only less than half a second before impact that she dropped to the floor and slipped beneath the mass of darkness like a ghost. Her free hand swept out the edge of her longcoat to clash against the lower edge of the magical attack, and for a brief moment the tunnel lit up with a faint blue glow as the Defensive Coat's hexagonal forcefields clashed with whatever energy had been thrown at her. An instant later, the dark mass ricocheted upward to splash against the ceiling, no longer a threat to Anne or her companions.

She hadn't seen that attack. It had been the Fae kid who picked it out, and the tight squeeze of her grip that alerted Anne to the projectile's timing and direction. She'd learned long ago that anyone's decisions could be conceptualized as a melody, a rhythm that dictated their every move in a fight, and the Knight could hear the girl's now, high and frightened like a string pulled taught on a fiddle. By reading the child, she could read what she was reacting to, even if Anne herself couldn't directly perceive it.

Quick as a whip, she rolled back to her feet, careful not to squash her charge in the process. She could already feel the ache in her bones, the urge to end this quickly before she had to start pushing herself for real. Normally she'd have lunged forward then, closing the distance and cutting down the enemy before they could get off another shot—but with an innocent's life in her hands, should she really risk going close-quarters with an enemy of unknown skill and ability?

She'd faced worse odds before. But this time was different: this time she was neither alone nor outgunned. Based on the prior positions of her allies, based on their fighting styles and their initial responses to the other enemies ahead, the correct choice was...

[b]"Lady Remilia! Behind us!!"[/b]

...To pray the vampiress wasn't so haughty as to leave her backup maid in a pickle.

[@Lugubrious][@FujiwaraPhoenix][@VitaVitaAR][@Rezod92]