by Andrew Rowe
Teft folded his hands. “I don’t know is the wisest thing I believe I’ve heard you say, Master Cadence. Miss Callahan, can you think of any ways he could have improved?”
“Hm. I knew about his ring of jumping before the match, but I didn’t know how much force he could charge up in his hands like that. If I had that kind of skill, I would have gone for a ring out. Maybe ran to the edge and then just blasted my opponent at an angle. Or maybe he could have used the ring itself and just launched me out? Don’t know.”
That was a really good strategy, and one I hadn’t seriously considered. I was so focused on exploiting the mechanics of the match that I hadn’t even bothered with something so...conventional.
I needed to improve on that for the future.
“Good. Master Cadence, you may have had the most complicated victory that I’ve seen this year. That is not a compliment, but it does speak to a degree of strategic ability, and an improvement over your last performance. While I heard some of the students speculating that you would be penalized for cheating, I do not intend to punish you. I do have to ask, however — if you are going to fight dishonorably, why not do something that guaranteed your victory?”
He shook his head. “You had full access to the arena before the match. You could have added a new function to the tiles that depleted the shield of anyone who wasn’t wearing your boots, for example.”
I shrugged at that. “Or I could have just set up a single square that gave me an insurmountable advantage, or that would have turned off my opponent’s shields instantly. Or I could have changed the voice activation for the arena to respond to my voice, as well as yours.
“I considered all that, and I determined that it would have defeated part of the point of the test. While preparations for a duel are expected, a real duel would not allow me such an obvious and instantaneous route for victory. I was hoping to find a way to make the match easier, while remaining fair.”
Teft pointed a hand toward the arena. “No match in that arena, or any other, will ever be fair. If your goal is to be fair, you are already sacrificing performance. You won by a hair today, but you will not win every fight in your life while holding back.” He paused. “In the next semester, I expect for you to show me that you have learned this lesson.”
“...So, I pass then?”
“You both pass. Master Cadence, you, won against a superior opponent through preparation, in spite of your mistakes. You receive a grade of B+. Miss Callahan, you lost the match, but your raw fighting ability remains easily the best in the class. Master Cadence, what could she have done better?”
I thought about that for a moment. “That blade-hand technique she used to cut the tiles. She almost definitely could have broken my barrier faster with that, rather than just punching me.”
Marissa winced. “I’d probably have cut you, too, though. I can’t control it that well yet.”
Teft made a gesture of acknowledgement. “A valid concern, given how dangerous that style of technique can be. The solution is to practice your control to the extent that you do not need to have such concerns the next time you have such a match. But that would not have been my advice for this particular match. Instead, I would have advised you to keep your distance, rather than charging in.”
Marissa and I both raised eyebrows at that, and she responded. “But you told him that he was bad for letting me get in close.”
“Indeed. However, what you should have realized was that once he was disarmed, he was practically useless at a distance. Once he was the one who wanted to get into melee range, you could have harried him at a distance with ease. His shield would not have lasted forever.”
We both nodded at that. He was right — my transference mana control wasn’t good enough to hit her at a long distance, and I could only do it a few times. Even now, my hand’s mana hadn’t fully recharged, and we’d been resting for a while.
“In spite of that, your performance was more than adequate. I award you a grade of ‘B’ for this test, and you will retain the highest overall grade in the class as a whole. Unless, of course, one of the later duelists proves superior.”
Marissa breathed a sigh of relief. “Thanks. Can we go watch the other matches?”
“Indeed. In fact, I believe one you’ll be quite interested in is just about to start.”
“Ooh!” Marissa grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the door. “C’mon, let’s go!”
I accepted her grasp with less than the usual amount of awkwardness. I think a round of punching each other had braced me for a degree of physical contact.
And, more importantly, I was just relieved that Teft hadn’t told Marissa that the hand mirror I’d used in the fight wasn’t magical in the slightest.
Maybe I’d fooled him, too.
***
Marissa cheered out loud when Rupert Kent lost to Desmond Vyers, and I was glad to see her excited. I had a hard time focusing on most of the matches, though, because my mind was elsewhere.
I was worried about Sera.
Both Sera and Patrick looked incredibly nervous. I suspected Patrick would be fine even if he lost, but Sera was already having a difficult few weeks. I wasn’t sure how much she’d recovered the use of her attunement, but I doubted it could be much.
I offered to let her borrow the mana regeneration bracer, but she declined my offer.
“I don’t want any unfair advantages. I have to do this myself.” She was still only capable of speaking at a whisper, and even that seemed like a struggle for her, but at least she could talk.
I shrugged at that. “I’ve made items for both you and Patrick. You’re injured, he’s not. I don’t think it’s unreasonable.”
“Don’t worry. I have a plan.” She gave me a weak smile.
“You always do.”
I was curious exactly what that plan was. Had she prepared for the arena itself, like I had, or was she working on some other style of strategy?
The wait was frustrating for me, and I could tell it was agonizing for Patrick and Sera. It was nearly an hour later when they finally entered the arena and took their positions.
“Bow to your opponent.”
They bowed.
“Begin!”
Both combatants moved.
Patrick thrust out a hand, firing a blast of lightning.
Guess he’s not going to hold back.
Sera stepped to the side, both avoiding the blast and putting herself on a purple square.
Unfortunately for her, the tile configuration had changed since my match.
Ice began to spread up her legs.
Patrick caught her with the next blast of lightning, cracking her barrier. She winced, ducked, and waved her right hand.
The ice shattered.
Sera had her power back. Or, a fraction of it, at least.
Neither Patrick or I knew how much of it she’d regained — which, I suspected, was part of the point.
Sera jumped forward over a blue square and onto a green one. A soft glow enveloped her, and her damaged barrier began to recharge.
Had she already discerned this particular tile pattern, just from one square? It was possible — there were only six combinations. Even so, I was impressed.
Patrick mirrored her, stepping onto a green tile next to him and removing her only obvious advantage. Then he hurled another blast of lightning.
Sera turned sideways to present a smaller target, but he hit her regardless. More cracks appeared in her barrier, showing it was close to breaking.
I guessed that the phoenix sigil’s barrier could only take two more hits, then she’d be stuck with just the regular shield sigil. That would probably take two hits to disable total.
The recharge tile was helping, but it was too slow to handle the kind of damage she was taking. She needed to do something to fight back.
Sera knew that, of course.
When Patrick fired his next shot, she clenched her right hand into a fist.
A wall of ice shot up
in front of her, blocking the lightning.
Then she snapped her fingers and the wall broke apart into shards, hovering in the air for an instant before flying in Patrick’s direction.
Patrick countered the ice with fire, blasting the projectiles out of the air one at a time. A single shard impacted his shield, shattering and dealing him a minimal amount of damage.
By that point, Sera had moved, jumping onto a red square. Her dueling cane began to glow, and she pulled it off her belt to fire a shot.
Patrick blasted the cane’s energy out of the air easily, but Sera just kept firing a steady stream of mana in his direction. He was forced to draw his cane to begin batting the spheres aside.
When he returned fire, Sera managed to hit him with two blasts, easily deflecting his own.
Good.
She’d forced Patrick onto the defensive. He hopped back a tile, hitting an orange one and triggering a cloud of smoke to rise around him.
That didn’t stop Sera from attacking. She sent a barrage of energy into the smoke, aiming both high and low in case he was ducking.
When Patrick jumped out from the other side onto another green square, he didn’t seem to have taken any further damage.
It was only when Sera’s next blast neared him that I understood why.
His entire body was crackling with lightning.
That lightning lashed out like a living thing, smashing her orb right out of the air.
Sera fired two more shots in rapid succession, but each time, the lightning aura deflected them harmlessly.
I blinked, turning on my attunement, and realized what I was seeing.
Patrick had a shroud. He’d hit Carnelian sometime in the last few days, and he’d already learned how to charge his shroud with lightning.
I immediately felt a bit of envy that he’d picked up on how to manipulate his shroud so quickly, but more than that, I felt concerned.
Sera’s odds had been bad enough before.
Patrick turned sideways, assuming the same dueling stance that Sera had. Then he dropped his cane and began to gather a large ball of lightning in his hands.
That’s not good.
Sera whispered something into the air.
With the arena’s enchantments for amplifying sounds, I was just barely able to hear her.
“Vanniv, I summon you.”
Patrick hurled the sphere.
A winged man with skin like stone appeared in the way.
He was, unfortunately, only six inches tall.
“Ah, Summoner, you finally got around to—”
The ball of lightning flew right past tiny Vanniv. Sera waved a hand, however, and a blast of ice managed to weaken the sphere before it hit her.
The lightning knocked her back a step, but she managed to remain on the same square. The barrier from her phoenix sigil shattered, completely destroyed by the intensity of the blast. If she hadn’t weakened it, I suspected it would have gone straight through her other barrier as well.
Vanniv flapped his tiny wings, turning toward Sera. “What is the meaning of this? Why are you gigantic?” He floated around. “Wait, why is everyone gigantic?... Oh.” He folded his arms. “You probably can’t tell, but I’m glaring at you very intensely right now.”
I couldn’t quite hear Sera’s response, even with the arena’s enchantments. Something about “later”, maybe?
Vanniv turned toward Patrick just in time to see another blast of lightning coming. The tiny karvensi pointed his hand and the electrical energy shifted trajectories, flying harmlessly into a nearby tile. “There. I contributed. You are undoubtedly impressed and ingratiated toward me for this, and thus, you should—”
A handful of jagged icicles flew from Sera’s hand. Patrick blasted at them with lightning, but three shards survived, impacting him hard. He dropped his cane as cracks spread across his shield.
“Just defend me.” Sera instructed Vanniv.
“Fine, fine. But you’re paying me double for this.”
“Twice zero is still zero, you know.”
Tiny Vanniv raised a hand to his forehead, looking aghast. “I’m not getting paid? What sort of relationship do you take this for?”
Three more bolts of lightning flew their way, but Vanniv redirected them without difficulty.
Patrick took a more nuanced approach to his next attack, firing a bolt of lightning that split apart in mid-air. Vanniv managed to redirect the original, but one of the pieces arced around and hit Sera from behind. She staggered, her barrier weakening.
One more hit will end it, I suspected.
Sera dropped down to a knee. At first, I worried she was injured, but then I saw her touching a tile.
She wasn’t an Enchanter. She couldn’t charge or manipulate runes in the way I could.
What was she doing?
Thin lines of ice spread out from her hand, across the tile and onto adjacent ones.
For a moment, nothing happened; and then three of the tiles around her activated all at once, raising clouds of smoke and bursts of light.
She dove into one of the smoke clouds, then blasted more adjacent tiles with frost, activating them in a similar fashion.
Patrick hurled another blast of lightning at her, but Vanniv intercepted it. When that failed, Patrick tried fire, but Vanniv handled that just as easily.
More blasts of ice impacted with orange tiles. In moments, there was a contiguous wall of shadow between Patrick and Sera.
Then Sera moved again, jumping to a purple square just as Patrick fired another blast in her direction.
Vanniv floated close to her again. “I know you know this, Sera, but I don’t have an infinite amount of mana to protect you with.”
She raised a hand to her mouth in a signal to be quiet.
Patrick ducked down, rubbing his right hand. The aura of lightning around him faded, then vanished. His eyes searched, but it seemed like he couldn’t find Sera’s location.
Sera conjured a spike of ice in her hands, then levitated it to where she’d been standing a moment before. After that, she waved a hand and sent it flying in Patrick’s direction.
Patrick saw the shard of ice, blasted it with a ball of fire, and then sent another attack in the direction where the ice had come from. It missed Sera entirely, just as she’d clearly intended.
She probably hadn’t planned for him to start throwing balls of fire into the walls of shadow. Most of the fireballs detonated immediately, clearing the frost on the tiles.
With the pressure from the ice gone, the walls of shadow began to disappear.
Not all of the shadows were gone, but Patrick had cleared enough to see her. He turned toward her and nodded once.
With her concealment gone, she began a familiar incantation.
“Child of the goddess, I call upon your aid.”
She didn’t get a chance to finish it. A ball of fire flew out from inside of one of the few remaining walls of smoke.
Vanniv pointed and detonated the sphere in mid-air, but a second fireball flew out from another shadow wall and exploded behind Sera.
She stumbled forward a step, losing her focus on the incantation and hitting a yellow square. A beam of light shot upward, hitting her shield and breaking it.
Sera vanished.
Vanniv stared at the spot where she’d been a moment before, sighed, and then flew toward the infirmary.
The match was over.
I rushed to the infirmary.
***
I worried that Sera would be crying when I found her inside.
I was wrong in a couple ways.
First, they wouldn’t let me into the infirmary. I probably should have expected that.
Second, when Sera finally emerged, she looked smug.
Patrick came out a few moments later, and he looked pretty pleased, too.
“You two okay?”
Patrick was practically vibrating with energy. “We both passed! Sera had this great plan—”
She shot
him a glower and he cut himself off, then leaned in closer to me to whisper. “—and it got us both good grades!”
His idea of whispering was still about as loud as a normal speaking voice, so Sera continued to glower for a moment, before dragging both of us out of the way. Teft emerged from the room a moment later, heading over to prepare the next pair of combatants.
“Discretion, Patrick. Use it,” Sera whispered.
“Right, right. I’ll, uh, tell him later?”
We went back to the stands, where Marissa waited with hugs for both Patrick and Sera. The four of us headed back to Derek’s house together after that, with Patrick explaining on the way.
“So, as soon as Sera got her voice back, she started asking people from Teft’s other classes about how his grading worked. Some first-years, some second-years. She made a big list of factors that he seemed to take into consideration, then made a checklist of things we’d need to do in our match to take advantage of that.”
“You weren’t really dueling against each other,” I concluded. “You were just trying to do everything you knew would get more points with Teft.” I rubbed my chin. “That’s...a great strategy, actually.”
I’d been so focused on winning in a traditional fashion that I hadn’t considered going at it from a higher level and focusing on what would earn a grade, as opposed to a victory. Sera had seen that the real goal was graduation, not winning the match, and planned her strategy around that.
To emphasize Patrick’s point, Sera reached into the pouch at her side and handed me a folded note.
Demonstrate that you have determined the pattern of the tile.
Use at least one tile to your advantage.
Use at least one tile to cause a disadvantage for your opponent.
Use at least one spell to interact with a tile, rather than directly targeting your opponent.
Deal at least some damage to your opponent’s shield.
Move to another tile at least once.
Last for more than five minutes.
The list went on after that. I handed it to Marissa to look over next. I’d seen what I needed to see.
Marissa skimmed it, then nudged Sera. “Could have shared this before the match, you know.”