Leaf Team POV
Tonight, the place felt wrong.
Not weak. Not shaken. Wrong, in the way a predator den feels when one of its animals has caught a scent it can't forget: restless, alert, unbalanced.
Lucan was gone.
Not dead, not lost, not even far, if distance were measured in roads and concrete instead of the stranger territory the evening had opened between the two teams. He had simply left with Snow Team as if the decision had never belonged to anyone else. No request, no report, one moment he had been standing with Leaf Team in the wake of the duels, black panther stillness wrapped around all that acceleration and violence, and the next he had crossed the line and stayed on the other side of it.
That wrongness was the thing sitting in the room now, taut and waiting, saturating the air until every breath felt risked.
