Chapter Text
The fight was going badly enough that Chat Noir wasn’t making puns. The akuma’s power was nothing special: she could manipulate shadows and make a puppet of anyone whose shadow hers touched. It was creepy, sure, especially given that the akuma wore a featureless grey-black costume that showed only her eyes, and doubly so given that her rare utterances were in a language even the kwami couldn’t translate. But this power did no property damage and, while it could be used to puppet civilians into attacking the heroes, it seemed to wear off as soon as the shadow connection broke. If this was a normal fight, it would have been easy. As it was, Chat Noir was starting to think Papillon had akumatised a child soldier.
The first they heard about the latest possession was when a report appeared on local news of a hostage situation. Someone in a weird costume had pickpocketed a gendarme’s gun and was pointing it at him while saying “Miraculous”.
The akuma had laid a trap, waiting in a shadow and giving no clue to her power. She’d frozen them both with a strange hand gesture and nearly forced Ladybug to take her earrings off. If Chat Noir hadn’t extended his pole and knocked Ladybug out of the shadow, giving her a chance to lasso him to the safety of a rooftop, they might have lost within the first seconds of the fight.
The akuma was blurringly fast and a vicious fighter, clearly trained in martial arts. Worse, the akuma flickered her power on and off, interrupting their attacks and sending them stumbling when they tried to dodge. Even Ladybug and Chat Noir together weren’t a match for her in melee. She’d forced them to retreat to the roof of an office block, only to reveal that she could walk up walls! She’d chased them from roof to roof, easily keeping pace and nearly forcing Chat Noir to fall to the street by sending her shadow racing up his pole in mid-vault.
They managed to break away by crossing a major road that the akuma couldn’t jump across. Apparently Parisian drivers were enough to scare even an akuma. Five more minutes of running through back streets – “to make it harder to shadow us” - brought them to the temporary refuge of an empty third-floor room in a hotel.