Robert was still furious with the injustice of this tournament. More than thirty students died in the name of glory. This should be the XXIII Century Earth, not Ancient Rome.
Despite the tiny voice of reason telling him it was a bad idea, he invaded the deceased students' rooms.
Starting with Holy Light. Faber Crystal was a young boy of French ancestry. His family was influential and employees of a strong three-star faction. Given how powerful his talent was, he was sponsored by that faction to attend Imperial.
Robert entered the Faber's bedroom before it could be cleaned up. He used retrovoyance on every personal object he could find, slowly adding what he saw to the VHS tape inside his head. It wasn't really a VHS tape, just a mental collection of all the imprints from Faber's life and thoughts he could gather. Putting everything back in its place, he went to visit the others.
After a night of psychic burglary, Robert felt confident that he could create imprints of four students in his mental palace. It was dangerous to bring those mental patterns before he could finish his imprint. Should things go awry and the imprints go berserk, they could cause massive damage to his psyche.
He was still frustrated. In his mind, he would find a way to restore these people to life. At least Faber. His body was there, with all the talent and abilities. All he needed was to put the imprint back inside the head.
And yet, Noah and Amanda had a point. He couldn't just go and do psychic medical procedures on people without a contract in place.
Without recourse, Robert placed the four VHS tapes on a special shelf and gave up. It was time to watch Amanda's fight.
Back at the gym, he received some dire news.
"The tournament committee decided to cut the points professors of dead students in half. You can imagine that every single one of the affected teachers is protesting," Noah said. "The headmaster said that if they didn't cease their mutiny, he would drag them before the Empress and fire them. That made them shut up really good."
He could only imagine the effects it had on the teacher rankings.
*
*
Tuesday. The round of eight, also known the quarter-finals started. Each contestant was three steps from glory and one misstep from death.
*
*
Amanda climbed on the stage of glory. Her opponent mirrored her movements. This was it. The round of eight. The quarter-finals. Three fights from the great prize. The palm of her hands tingled.
"Begin!" The referee shouted. Everything went as usual.
Amanda stayed on her side.
The guy on the other side theatrically moved his hands as he did some sort of exotic Oriental dance. Then, at the apex of his short performance, he threw his hands down. Dark ink spread from his hands, rapidly pooling and spreading over the ground. The circle behind him remained transparent. A talent.
He walked on the Darkness lake, each step sending concentric ripples.
"Come into my domain!" He shouted at her, still riding on that theatrical streak of his.
Like hell would Amanda go into his "Domain of Shadows". She knew very well what happened to the last four fools who decided to take the bait.
Instead, she threw seeds to both sides, swirling green energy making them sprout even before they hit the arena's stone floor. They became a row of artillery pieces for her. In less than a minute, prickly pear shooters and what he called the Bean Gatling reached maturity.
Then she threw another two handfuls of seeds in front of these, growing the only plant she managed to create that could manipulate essence, the Shine Sunflowers. They glowed bright like spotlights, a curtain of light that made looking past them difficult.
The circle behind Amanda glowed green and wouldn't come off, alternating for a brief time a bright pale yellow from the sunflowers shine every now and then.
Too bad all that solar power couldn't be used to make a lawn defense at any hour. But they halted the spread of the Darkness lake, keeping it contained on the Domain of Shadows' side.
"Stay there, catch this!" She said. The bean pods rose from their hanging position and pointed at the guy on the other side. Beans, not peas, were ejected from the pods at near-sonic speeds.
The inky darkness rose from the ground to block the beans. The Domain of Shadows guy creased his eyebrows, sinking into a state of deep concentration.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
That was what Amanda was betting on. She moved her hands like an orchestra conductor, mimicking the gestures of the Minotaurs. The prickly cacti pears reached maturity and flew high over the arena in a ballistic trajectory. Shadow tendrils tentatively rose but returned down. The barrage of beans was relentless and unceasing. The pears reached their apex and detonated, sending a concentrated hail of needles in a tight cone in the guy's direction.
He looked up and stared at the incoming hail of needles, shocked. A bean struck his cheek, causing him to remember he was under assault from two sides. The guy crouched and the darkness rose to cover him as a dome.
The next second, the needles struck down the dome along with dozens of beans. The darkness rippled and wobbled as a muffled scream came from the inside. The guy retreated into his domain of darkness, the inky black substance moving backward like receding waves on a beach. The dome thickened and grew in size.
A second volley of prickly pears struck the shield. Amanda was glad Andronicus had made her take the rest of the day and the night off. She was completely rested and ready to use her talent. If she'd spent the night growing and evolving plants in hopes of finding a good variant with particular powers, she'd be suffering from talent fatigue right now.
But well-rested as she was, she could keep the barrage until she ran out of essence to use on her plant growth spell.
The circle behind Domain of Shadows flashed dark gray for the first time. Javelins of darkness flew toward Amanda. She strafed left and yelped in surprise as the javelins corrected course. Amanda pulsed a command and the sunflowers all shone five times brighter, like a photo camera's flash. The javelins crumbled.
That distraction caused her to lose focus on her artillery. The bean pods dropped and the barrage stopped for several seconds. The respite was what Domain of Shadows needed to mount his offensive. The circle flashed dark gray and pulsed in sync with the guy's essence expenditure. The dome burst out into a tsunami of black ink, the wave flowing forward and rising ten feet in the air, blocking sight.
Amanda recovered quickly and spared a moment to think what the pulsing circle meant. Staggered essence use? But the Domain of Shadows didn't need essence to move his lake of Darkness. Something was up.
She fired the next volley of prickly pears. This time, since she couldn't see where his opponent was, she had the needles fire to cover most of the other side. Then she focused. Planting both hands on the ground, she made a concave wall of stone shoot out of the floor to cover her sunflowers. It only came up in time because of the concept she upgraded the move earth spell with.
The Darkness tsunami crashed over Amanda's wall. It rose along the concave surface and caused interference waves with itself, diffusing its momentum. Then the traps Domain of Shadows had imbued along the tsunami fired. The bullets of darkness struck the stone wall and punched through, their trajectory chaotic as the stone wall caused them to lose track of their intended targets.
The bullets struck her plants at random. The sunflowers took the most damage but their light also weakened the projectiles. Most sunflowers died but her other plants were still fine.
With a grunt, Amanda pushed her wall of stone forward, forcing the rock to act like a liquid for a moment. It repaired the holes in the stone. She could hear the darkness gurgling behind the wall as the two elemental forces pushed against one another.
Amanda closed her eyes and focused on her druidic attunement. She could sense her plants and one faint animal signature other than hers. She adjusted her prickly pears and fired. They detonated right as they passed over the wall, firing their needles in the general direction of that signature.
A howl of pain was her reward. Since Domain of Shadows kept his lake of inky Darkness away from him, he was left with no defense. The pressure against the stone wall vanished as he recalled his Darkness.
Amanda let the stone wall crumble and had her bean pods fire at the same time. They struck the retreating wall of Darkness and caused it to ripple violently. Then she decided to use her last sunflowers in an alpha strike. The yellow petals closed as the sunflowers focused their light in a spotlight bean directly over the Darkness. It hissed and evaporated as the incessant hail of beans exposed more and more of it to the light.
The circle flashed dark gray again. Another wave of Darkness erupted behind the Domain's ink. A demon-like creature eight feet tall rose from behind the vanishing lake of Darkness.
Amanda redirected her efforts onto the creature. She dropped a black flat seed at her feet. Vines sprouted from the seed as a big fruit started to grow.
"Behold my evolved talent, Avatar of Shadows!" The guy shouted like a Chunny (8th grade syndrome) drunk on the copium.
The pears went up in the air again. With a target this big, the pears had no trouble aiming the spines. All the while, the staccato of the bean pods rang. Amanda took the fruit and ran toward her opponent. She was getting low on essence and her plants were already over-stressed and suffering from essence poisoning from the Nature essence she pumped into them.
"Fool! I'll crush you!" Domain of Shadows shouted.
The sunflowers died, their essence spent. The overwhelming light flooding the arena disappeared as if someone had flicked the switch. The last beans flew over Amanda.
"GIVE UP, YOU DUMBASS! OR DIE!" Amanda shouted.
Reaching the optimal distance, Amanda hugged her fruit and spun her body, like an Olympic hammer throw athlete. At the apex of her rotation, she let go of the fruit and crouched. The remainder of her essence was spent dragging as much stone as she could to cover her.
More darkness flowed out of the guy, repairing his Avatar. But the avatar stared at the incoming fruit.
"What? A waterme—"
Even hidden underneath a foot of rock, Amanda still heard the deafening explosion. Her rock shelter cracked and crumbled as the shockwave bounced on the shield and reflected back.
Superheated, high-pressure air hissed through the cracks of her shelter. She heard the muffled buzz of the horn.
Amanda let the stone crack and fall over her as she stood up. The whole arena was in ruins. The stone floor was all cracked, pulverized into sand. Around the epicenter of her Watermelon Nuke (as Robert aptly named it when they tested the plant in the liminal void), the layer of rock was stripped down to the shield generator plates.
She looked around. The opposing teacher was furious, glaring at Amanda. She shrugged. The woman said some slur words. Amanda flicked some sand off her hair and scoffed.
"Should've yielded when you had the chance, professor!" She shouted back.
Amanda searched for her opponent. Surely the healers had carried him out already. Then she met Robert's eyes. He was scowling. Robert shook his head as he let his shoulders slump. She closed her eyes.
Her victory felt bitter. She was sure the guy would survive the blast.
"Must the path to greatness be paved with corpses?" Robert mumbled to himself.
Noah clapped him on the shoulder. "it is the way of our world," the masked professor replied.