"Phoenix?!" Eagle Eye repeated, his violet eyes wide.
"What in Spark's name was that?!" Zenith shouted.
"He just disappeared!" Eagle Eye stammered in a whimpering voice.
"What, did those eyes of yours go dead?! He was yanked somewhere!"
"Shhh!" Crimson slid down on a rope and landed between the two. "Keep it down!"
Zenith leaned over, whispering hoarsely. "Did you see anything from up there, boss?"
"Not a thing. That's just it. We may be surrounded."
"Yeah?! By what?!" Zenith exclaimed, spinning around with his polearm extended.
"I seriously see nothing!" Eagle Eye remarked. "Not a thing!"
"If we're dealing with Enforces, then they've changed their wilderness tactics."
"We don't know anything yet, Zenith."
"We're dealing with Phoenix being a flippin' ghost!"
"Maybe if I called out for him—" Eagle Eye began.
"No!" Crimson hissed, unsheathing his hammer. "Everypony, calm down! We'll figure out so long as we're surrounded by all these trees!"
"Anything could be anywhere—"
"The ruins!" Eagle Eye pointed at the nearby walls of stone.
"Right." Crimson nodded. "Fall back to—"
There was a whistling sound through the air.
All three stallions spun—
With a loud thud, Phoenix's lone mace landed hard, embedding itself into the forest floor. The handle of it wobbled and then was still.
Crimson, Zenith, and Eagle Eye stared quietly at the sight. All of the sudden, Crimson's ears twitched, as if detecting something quieter than sound. He turned about—
But it was too late; two coils of black metal shot out of the forest. In one swift movement, they latched around Zenith's body and yanked him off into a cluster of bushes.
"Gaaah—" Zenith pratfalled, slamming his chin hard against the earth. He yelled as he was dragged away into a muffled fate beyond the foliage. His polearm rattled to a stop on the ground behind him.
"Zenith!" Eagle's voice squeaked.
"EE!" Crimson shouted. "Your shield!"
"Nnngh!" Eagle flung his disc hard into the foliage. There was no immediate sound of it colliding with anything. After five seconds, the shield suddenly flew back, twice as fast as the petite stallion had thrown it. On its return, however, it was brimming with flickering manabombs.
"Get down!" Crimson shoved Eagle Eye away with his telekinesis while diving towards the opposite side.
A few of the charges flew off the spinning disc while all of them exploded at once. The west end of the ruins shook from fire and shrapnel. Eagle's charred shield was flung away so hard from the blast that it embedded halfway through the trunk of a massive oak. Smoke and ash littered the space between the floor and the tree canopy of Foxtaur. Through the settling miasma—swift as a shadow—a dark shape with crimson trails blurred and was gone again.