by Andrew Rowe
A blast of energy flared out, too fast to dodge. It slammed into Patrick, knocking him back and damaging his shield.
The attack carried him back several meters, but he never triggered any tiles. And I finally saw why—
He was floating. Both Sera and Patrick were. They were only an inch off the ground, so it was almost impossible to tell.
As an Elementalist, Patrick had access to air and fire mana. He usually mixed them for lightning attacks — but that didn’t mean he couldn’t use them on their own.
Marissa shook the square some more. Nothing happened.
“Probably needs time to recharge. Let’s get to safer squares.”
Together, we fell back.
Sera opened fire directly at the square that Marissa was carrying. She managed to get it out of the way, but the effort knocked her off balance. I stepped in and caught Marissa before she could fall on a more dangerous square.
Marissa looked chagrined. “Sorry, not fightin’ at my best.”
“You’re doing great. Better than I am. Just keep firing that thing as it recharges and we should wear them down.”
Patrick and Sera were backing off, too, which surprised me. I saw why in a moment. Sera ducked down with her dueling cane, produced the bladed portion, and began to cut out a square of her own.
That’s bad.
Fortunately, the blade on the dueling cane wasn’t meant for cutting stone, even when empowered with mana. It was taking her much longer than Marissa had.
I raised my cane and fired at her, but Patrick was right there in front of her a moment later, batting my attacks to the side with practiced ease.
This isn’t working.
“Hand me that. I’ll use it, you’re better at melee range. Close in and smash them before they can finish copying you. Yellow squares are probably safe, but I don’t know what they do.”
I hooked my cane on my belt. Marissa handed me the square and charged.
Patrick settled into a fighting stance.
Normally, he wouldn’t have had a chance in a physical fight with Marissa. But she was still sick, and Patrick was the kind of friend who paid close attention to everything about the people he cared about.
Including, it seemed, how to fight us.
Marissa was nearly in striking distance when Patrick threw his dueling cane at her.
She ducked it, closing in further, and threw a punch at him.
She hadn’t noticed that in the moment he’d thrown the cane, he’d charged his shroud with lightning.
Patrick blocked with his left arm, shuddering at the force of the blow, but the effect on Marissa was far worse. The electrical charge jumped into her, bypassing her barrier entirely because she’d been the one to make physical contact.
Her shroud might have absorbed a fraction of it, but from the way she shuddered and staggered backward, I could tell it hadn’t done much.
“I am so sorry about this.” Patrick stepped forward and shoved an open palm into her chest.
Marissa convulsed again as the electricity surged through her, and she fell to a knee.
I stepped to the side to get a better angle and shook the square in Patrick’s direction, but nothing happened. Connecting with the mana in the square told me that it was critically low. It did have a mana recharging function built in, but it seemed like it wasn’t meant to be triggered several times in rapid succession. Maybe it would have recharged faster if it was still connected with the other squares — I saw some transference runes I didn’t recognize.
I couldn’t count on it to recharge on its own fast enough to be useful. Fortunately, I didn’t have to.
I found the right rune and shoved my own mana into it.
Marissa tried to stand.
Patrick raised a fist before she could, but he never had a chance to swing it. The blast of energy from the tile caught him in the side and tossed him twenty feet out of the way.
Sera raised her own tile, triumphant, just in time for Marissa to smash it in half with a fist.
I advanced while Patrick picked himself off the floor.
Sera tossed her shattered pieces of the tile to the side, ducking one of Marissa’s swings and picking up her discarded dueling cane from the floor.
Marissa was moving a lot slower than usual now, the lightning clearly having taken a toll. That made her slow enough to let Sera blast a sphere into Marissa’s chest at point-blank range.
Marissa hadn’t lost any of her resilience, though.
She smacked the dueling cane right out of Sera’s hand right after that, then grabbed her and shoved her at the closest green square. The levitation spell apparently wasn’t strong enough to resist the kind of force Marissa could use.
The blast erupting from the floor cracked Sera’s shield, but it wasn’t enough to take her out of the match. She backed off rapidly, circling to try to flank Marissa alongside a recovering Patrick.
I couldn’t let that happen. My hand was burning — recharging the tile had taken a lot out of me — but I recharged it again.
I fired at Patrick again.
This time, he was ready.
The blast was too fast for any of us to dodge, save maybe Marissa at full strength. Instead, he snapped his fingers, and a wall of lightning appeared in between us. The blast of light crashed into it and deflected to the side, impacting harmlessly on the barrier outside of the arena.
He winced and grabbed his left hand with his right. He was starting to feel the cost of all his spells, too.
Slowly, I advanced. The burning in my right hand had changed to throbbing, which wasn’t a good sign. I was probably too low to safely recharge the square again without causing myself permanent harm.
My opponents didn’t need to know that, though.
I moved closer to Patrick, stepping on red squares as much as possible, feeling my phoenix sigil recharging just a bit with each step. I kept the square leveled at him, hoping to keep him too worried about it to focus on Marissa.
It didn’t work.
Sera had managed to reclaim her dueling cane from the floor, and now she was falling back and firing at Marissa from a distance. With Marissa’s injuries, she was moving slow enough that Sera was landing hits almost half the time.
Patrick ran for his own abandoned cane.
I couldn’t run effectively while carrying the tile. It wasn’t heavy - it was probably only a few inches thick — but it was large enough to stand on, and that made it cumbersome.
I threw it to the side, but I still didn’t run.
I stepped on a yellow square, planning to duck down and figure out what it did — but I didn’t need to.
The dueling cane on my belt started to glow as soon as I hit the tile, and I understood.
I pulled my cane back off my belt and fired — straight at Patrick’s cane.
The orb that emerged from my weapon was three times the normal size, more like one from a war cane, but without the loss of speed.
I didn’t hit the cane, though. Patrick was just quick enough to get in the way, and he slammed an electrically-charged fist into the super-charged sphere.
There was a flash of white and the sphere shot back in my direction.
I had not expected that.
I threw myself out of the way too fast to pay any attention to where I was landing.
My shroud did precious little to absorb the pain of impacting with a stone floor.
That wasn’t the real problem, though. When I tried to push myself up, I discovered that there were vines wrapped around my chest.
Oh, and I’d lost the grip on my cane, and it was a couple feet from my hand. So there was that.
Glancing up, I could see that Patrick was in bad shape, but he’d managed to get his cane. He was now running full-speed away from Marissa, while Sera was firing orbs at Marissa’s back. She was only occasionally connecting now that Marissa was moving, but Marissa wasn’t gaining any ground. She was injured, sick, and had to avoid half the squares that the other team
didn’t.
She wouldn’t win this on her own.
I pushed upward, but the vines below me were too strong.
If I wiggled, I could just barely reach the function runes.
I didn’t have a tool to carve a whole new rune and change the function, but maybe...
I concentrated on the energy in the active runes, identifying the earth mana. It wouldn’t work to activate the other runes, of course, since they were designed to use other types of mana.
But what would happen if I mixed in some of the wrong type of mana?
I had a pretty good idea, and I knew it was going to hurt.
I shoved transference mana into the rune.
The tile beneath me exploded.
Fortunately, my chest was far enough off the ground that my shroud actually did its job.
Unfortunately, it was still enough concussive force to throw me a good ten feet into the air.
...And I landed on an identical tile only a few feet away.
This time, I had the presence of mind to roll immediately, and the vines only managed to entrap my leg.
I coughed, producing a mixture of blood and phlegm that would have worried me a great deal more if I wasn’t still wearing a ring of regeneration.
I tried to stagger to my feet, but I barely managed to get to a knee. Marissa blazed by, ducking and slashing through the vines with the aura around her hand.
“Tha—,” was all I managed before I collapsed into a coughing heap. That was definitely not a good sign.
I wiped myself, pushed myself to my feet, and decided I needed to end this fast.
I staggered back to pick up my cane, while a visibly exhausted Marissa continued to do her best to pursue Patrick.
Patrick was slowing down, too. And I knew that if Marissa could catch him, she stood a good chance of winning that fight, even with his electrical aura.
I decided to help with that, and I had a better idea of how the tiles worked now.
I dodged a quick shot from Sera, shooting her a dirty look in reply.
She gave me a mock bow, stepped back, and fired at Marissa again.
I shot Sera’s attack out of the air, then turned to Patrick and Marissa’s chase, watching closely before I fired.
I hit a tile right in front of his path.
Patrick jumped back, anticipating the tile triggering from my attack.
Which it didn’t. I knew it wouldn’t — the activation runes didn’t work on gray mana intake — but I also knew that Patrick wouldn’t know that.
And his hop took him back just far enough for Marissa to close the distance.
She hammered him with a haymaker before he had a chance to recover. His electrical aura was still active, but she was ready now. She braced for it, charging her fists with her own aura and slamming them into his chest again and again.
Patrick fell backward, managed to duck a punch, and waved his hands outward — blasting Marissa back with a gust of wind.
She hit a green square, the column of energy cracking her shield.
That just made her angrier.
So, for just one punch, she turned on the bracer I gave her — and she hit Patrick hard.
Patrick vanished as his phoenix sigil and shield sigil barriers collapsed in one strike.
And then it was two of us against Sera alone.
By the time I’d turned back to Sera, she was already running.
It’s probably what I would have done in her situation, too, thinking that getting some distance and running out the clock would be a good way to force a draw.
But Patrick was the one who had been powering the levitation spell. She only managed to make it a couple squares before the spell faded and dropped her.
But maybe she’d anticipated that, too, because she landed on a yellow tile, and she still had her cane.
She fired at Marissa first, now shooting super-charged orbs empowered by the square. But even exhausted, Marissa had little difficulty defending when it was only against a single opponent. She punched and kicked the spheres out of the air with practiced precision, while I found a flanking position and returned fire on Sera from a yellow square of my own.
Sera matched me shot-for-shot, perfectly knocking each attack out of the air.
But every second she turned her focus toward me, Marissa inched a little closer.
Sera glanced back and forth, firing lazy attacks at each of us, probing.
We both deflected her attacks and advanced.
Marissa was only a few squares away when Sera charged.
Toward me.
I raised my cane and fired at her, but Sera ducked the shot and jumped between squares with surprising speed and ferocity. She only had the same safe spots we did now, but she was still outpacing the injured and exhausted Marissa. I assumed she wanted to isolate us, fight us one at a time.
I was almost right.
I managed to hit Sera just once with an empowered shot before she was right in front of me. I expected a close-range fight with dueling canes.
I didn’t expect her to jump on top of me.
I stumbled backward, half because of her weight and half because of my usual aversion to touch, and landed right on a green square.
Sera tried to sweep my feet, and I understood too late that she was trying to pin me on a square that would damage me continuously.
Her sweep didn’t quite work, though — I grabbed onto her as I toppled backward, and we tumbled onto the square together.
The square triggered a second time, engulfing us both in light. Then a third.
And then I was somewhere else.
***
I blinked, finding myself in a sitting positon in a medium-sized stone room on a bed.
Sera appeared a moment after me.
Patrick, of course, was already inside, sitting on another nearby bed. An older Phoenix Division student had a hand on Patrick’s forehead and an irritated expression.
Patrick grinned at us. “Ooh! Did you two manage a double-KO?”
I nodded. “Sure did. Sera managed to tackle me onto one of the green squares. That was a clever move. I didn’t expect it at all.”
Sera winced, shaking her head.
I could understand why — Marissa still wasn’t in here.
Which meant we’d won the match.
I let out another cough, and another Phoenix Division student approached me a moment later. “Any injuries?”
I pointed to my chest. “Coughing blood. Might be my lungs.”
“That’s not good. Hold on.” The student put a hand on my forehead, closing his eyes and concentrating, then let out a sigh. “Your lungs are fine. You just bit your tongue.”
I laughed, letting out a sigh of relief. “Thanks. You might want to check on Marissa when—”
Marissa appeared unceremoniously on a nearby bed.
“...She gets here.” I pointed. “Patrick gave her a couple electrical shocks.”
“I’ll check.”
It took a few more minutes for each of us to get a thorough check, as well as a few healing spells. The Menders were perplexed when they got to Sera.
“Miss, you seem to have quite a bit of mana scarring...”
“She knows,” I answered for her. “We’re looking into solutions.”
“I’m honestly not sure this is treatable,” the student replied.
He definitely needed to work on knowing what not to say to people. Sera’s expression had already been sour, but now it was quickly turning toward depressed.
“Don’t worry, we’ve got some leads on how to take care of it.” I turned to Sera. “I looked some things up, and I’m going to be doing more research later. I’ll tell you at home, okay?”
Sera nodded silently, but she didn’t turn to look at me.
Marissa stood up, walking over to put a hand on Sera’s shoulder. “Can we head on out?”
“Just wait a few more minutes, the professor will want to tell you how you scored.”
We’re ge
tting scored immediately? That’s unusual.
True to their word, Teft appeared a few minutes later.
“Well, that was a unique match, at least.” Teft folded his arms. “Marissa and Corin’s team won, as I’m sure everyone expected. You shouldn’t feel particularly proud, however. That was quite a debacle right at the beginning of the match, Master Cadence. You almost managed to turn a nearly insurmountable advantage into a defeat by taking so long playing with your toys.”
“I—”
“I’m not finished. Do not interrupt. Regardless of what you almost did, the result was that you learned how the tiles worked. Against most opponents, that would have given you an even greater chance at victory, and may have been worth the investment. But I fear you underestimated Miss Shard.”
Sera looked up, blinking.
“She took every bit of information that you gained and learned it by watching you. If she was in fighting shape, you would have been defeated soundly, and most likely without contest.”
I started to open my mouth again.
He raised a hand. “I said, do not interrupt. I am lecturing. You will listen. My greatest commendation must go to Miss Callahan, both for her individual combat abilities, which remain in the top of our class, and the ingenuity to cut out a tile and use it as a weapon. This was an excellent example of teamwork, as was the use of levitation, which I suspect was Miss Cadence’s idea and Master Wayland’s implementation.”
“In light of all these factors, Miss Callahan receives a grade of ‘A’ on this test. Master Cadence, you contributed to your team’s success, but leaned heavily on Miss Callahan. You would have failed without a team member as skilled as her. I begrudgingly offer you a ‘B’ for managing to discern and properly utilize the functions of the tiles.”
He turned to the other two. “Master Wayland, you carried much of your team’s weight, but you also failed to eliminate either member of the opposing team. Your general combat prowess was above average, but you were not able to apply it in a way that neutralized your enemies. You receive a ‘C-’. “
“Miss Cadence, you might have rivaled Miss Callahan if you were able to fight properly. You made a choice to fight in spite of your disadvantages — and it was the wrong choice. You were not ready. You will also receive a ‘D’, which is lower than what I would have given you if you had chosen to withdraw from the test. This is not low enough to expel you from the class, but one more of them would be. We will conclude the final exams with a second battle of this type next week. I will offer you a similar choice. I hope that next time, you will make the correct decision for your circumstances.”