“I’ve got him!” Jasper yells, his voice cracking with the force of it in a girly way. He grapples with the air, mud and grass stuck to the side of his head, his eyes clenched tightly shut. “I have oof.”
Jasper’s hands slacken, but he continues to hug the air.
“Get off of me, fool!” A voice demands, Jason Kal’Leifer’s voice. It comes from the empty air just above Jasper’s groping fingers.
Jasper shakes his head, his eyes still closed tight, his shoulder shaking as another blow lands on him, but he does not let go. Down the side of the field, still peeling myself off of the ground, the water making my clothes sag and stick to the grass, I am too far away to do anything for him.
Our two teams stand tied once more, 3-3. For the last forty minutes we have scraped and snarled for every inch of ground, every foot we can push towards our opponent’s goal, and they have done the same. I barely managed to score a single point when I made a lucky break down one side of the field, Samielle picking up the other. It has become apparent to everyone that Samielle and Jason will decide this match. One, able to soar through the air, is just about as unstoppable as it comes for our team: I only hope that the other team doesn’t realize he cannot carry the Stoneball or the green ball at its heaviest and remain flying. The other, Jason Kal’Leifer, has scored every point for his team. Being able to make oneself invisible has proved a remarkably good ability in this game.
“Let go…” Jason reappears as the charging form of Clarice slams sideways into the air, her tackle full-tilt, holding nothing back. The man hits the ground awkwardly, his back arching painfully as both his arms are splayed out. The green ball he held in his hands fumbles into the mud, snatched a second later by Clarice.
The others are already moving toward the skirmish over the ball before I make it back to my feet. I consider joining them, but I have my own assignment.
At my feet, Kess splutters on the ground, her elven features soaked so thoroughly she looks drowned, blood forming a shallow pool of watery dribble on her upper lip. She wheezes, holding her stomach, looking up at me more frightened than angry.
I put her pain out of my mind, spotting Jor’Mari out on the grass, struggling to make it to the ball, Lord Brimman doing his damnedest to keep the man back. He can’t, no single one of their team alone can stop him, but they seem to have known that from the start. I see Graessa headed at him, ready to put his weight next to Lord Brimman’s, looking to keep the strongest member of our team too engaged to contribute.
My job is similar to theirs, but different in a very meaningful way. “Where has he got to,” I wonder to myself, scanning the field.
“There he is,” Galea says, pointing a claw through the rain toward a figure who only just now made it back to his feet.
I hurry into a jog, aiming at the wet and groaning form of Allann, his back bent, hands on his knees, trying to get the air back in his body. His head snaps up as my jog becomes a sprint, a look of horror coming over his face as he starts to run away from me.
“Stop! Stop!” he pleads. “I’m done. Stop!”
But I don’t stop. The boy is fast, just above average for those out in the field now, but I am one of the fastest, and I still haven’t grown tired. Over the past ten or so minutes of playing this part for the team, my tackling form has improved leaps and bounds. Running as fast and hard as I possibly can, I plant my shoulder into the middle of the boy’s back. The shock of the collision snakes through my shoulder, pinching as each vertebrae in my spine smashes together all at once, before the final impact of the side of my head with the ground makes me lose track of all of it. Allann croaks a gasp of air before I drive him into the grass, both our bodies skidding through the wet muck before coming to a still.
Allann writhes in my grip, droplets of water puffing from his lips, half his face still buried in the wet grass and watery mud. I snake back one arm trapped against the ground by his body. He feebly tries to grab my arm, but there isn’t much will in the attempt. I spit out a mouthful of muddy water as I make it to my knees, coughing up something wet that leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I look down at the boy, his face still soaking in the water, his eyes exhausted and unfocused.
“If you get back up, you are going to make me come back,” I tell him, not for the first time. Allann groans, trying to turn himself over with a hand, but sighing and giving up halfway through.
My fingers ache and my head feels like it has been kicked by a mule, but I push that aside, stumbling back to my feet. The world is a blurry haze of rain and moving bodies, and I need a few seconds before I realize that I need to actually focus my eyes. Mist puffs from my mouth as I pant in the rain, head slowly turning this way and that.
“She is back that way,” Galea says, pointing.
I see her now, Kess, crouching on one knee, a fist hammering into her thigh over and over like she is trying to punch some feeling back into her leg. I lurch forward, almost slipping, and need to stop for a moment to reclaim my balance. Kess sees me move, her head turning up in a mix of fear and resignation.
For the last two tries at scoring, my team has decided that we should use our numbers to our advantage. If they need to keep two members on Jor’Mari at all times to keep him from running over this game, then we should capitalize on that. I made it my job to create an even greater advantage for us by not allowing these two to even play the game. Somehow, charging at two players over and over again, tackling them to the mud, is not a violation of any rule as the game has been explained to me. It makes me wonder why we hadn’t tried it before.
A commotion downfield pulls my attention away. I turn, seeing that it is Jor’Mari holding back Graessa in a bear hug now, Lord Brimman sprinting away down field. The green light of the ball bobs across the field, held in the hands of Jess as she puts all she is worth into making it to the goal. Graessa’s hand scratches at the air, and I see a blur between his fingers, not the color of magic that I know, but a distortion in the air around his hand.
“Do not let them score, Graessa! Not again!” Lady Forendous yells at the man. Despite continuing to linger in near the center of the field, the short woman has been a constant nuisance throughout the match. Her green soul presence continues to flood the entire field, forcing all of us to keep on a constant move or find ourselves surrounded by frozen droplets of water ready to spear us through.
A disk of water as large around as a dinner plate and slightly concave wrenches out of the air in front of Jess as she continues to run, the ever-present green aura condensing in that spot. Jess twirls aside, dodging the spinning disk as easily as she dodges almost everything. Dozens, maybe a hundred more of the watery disks begin to solidify in the air in front of Jess as she continues. Clumps of mud and grass spin up from the ground, pressing themselves into the same shape as the water, moving to make themselves an obstacle for the lizardkin woman. Needles of the green energy pepper out of the aura, almost seeming to knit together the obstacles with an uncanny precision, but they aren’t enough. To Lady Forendous’ evident consternation, she begins to understand something that I learned long ago. Jess Keller is a Bladedancer, and any obstacle you place in front of her she will flow through with grace.
“Now, Graessa!” Lady Forendous shrieks, the entirety of her soul presence quaking with her fury. The disks move in a wild torrent, more stopping those trying to chase after Jess than they do the woman with the ball. “Stop her now!”
Graessa’s hand clenches, and all at once the rain throughout the indoor chamber ceases. An aching groan that reverberates through some far off and unseen stone draws my eyes skyward. The illusions of storm clouds that Arabella Willian conjured to go along with her rain streak downfield all at once, leaving the sky bare and made of white marble where they slink away from. It only occurs to me just then that perhaps Arabella Willian had not been the one to conjure the clouds and rain. The clouds form a ball that tracks above the jumping, twisting, and rolling Jess Keller as she makes her way through the swirling field of disks. They condense into something looking akin to a gray orb, a small spot against the alabaster ceiling that spins with a maddening fury.
There is no warning when the discharge comes. A bolt of lightning, a terrible beam of dazzling light, strikes down from above straight over Jess. I know in that terrible instant that it does not move to block her path, to strike into the ground just in front of her and blind her once again with a flash of luminance, but that the bolt descends to leave Jess scorched and ruined. In my moment of terror, watching deadly lightning crash down, the game is forgotten. They really are going to kill her.
But Jess does not die, the lightning does not strike her dead at the edge of the field, her reddish scales made a smoking ruin. Jess’ hand continues to move in an arc, as if she were dodging around a simple obstacle, coming up to balance her out from a flourish. The clawed tips of her fingers meet with the edge of the lightning and in that suspended second of time, I watch as a miracle happens. The edge of Jess’ longest nail and the lightning meet in a perfect instant, the two almost seeming to become one. The lightning turns at a harsh angle, the bolt of deadly heat and energy racing out at neck level across the field in a mad arc, crashing into one invisible wall of the chamber.
The astonishment that I feel at watching my friend deflect a bolt of lightning lasts for a but a moment. In the next instant, color and flashing displays of celebration erupt from the end of the field as she crosses the final line into the goal. The field falls silent as Jess turns, her shoulder heaving with exertion, a look of abject glee on her face.
“Four to Three!” she yells, her voice carrying over the silent field. “One more to win!”
Then, I am cheering, and I am not the only one. I am vaguely aware of the looks of shock on the faces around the chamber as I run down the field, crushing into Jess, cheering her and lifting her off the floor. We gather there past the goal, celebrating Jess, letting her soak up the adulation in the suddenly dry air.
My attention is pulled back across the field by the sight of Arabella descending on top of the Dispatch; I’m probably the only one on my team that notices. She descends on the dark cube toward Graessa as the man lingers in a patch of mud amid the wet grass.
“I allowed you to manipulate the environmental enchantments,” she says, barely restrained rage behind her words. “Such was an ability of yours, and doing such did not violate the rules. I thought that we had an understanding, but I can see now that I was incorrect. You tried to use the tools of the Willian Guild to strike down a competitor, a thing that is expressly forbidden by both the rules of this match and the rules that were relayed to you by the guild itself not more than a few days ago.”
“I did,” Graessa says, staring at the grass, his own breath ragged. “I will…make no excuses for it. I lost my head and…almost did something…very regrettable.”
“Get off my field,” Arabella sneers. “Do it before I fling you through the walls of this tower and make you find your own way north through the mountains.”
“How very…gracious of you,” Graessa says. There is an earnestness in his voice. He drags himself up to standing, and slowly, almost limping, makes his way off of the field.
The dry air on my skin is suddenly colder than the rain had been. Along with my team, I make my way back to the starting line, my boots squelching through the water and mud. The Dispatch hovers over the center of the field, just a little bit closer to our opponents, but not by an amount that has made the difference before. Five stare back at us from the opposite line, one of their most powerful members now sitting on the sideline.
“Don’t stop moving,” I hiss at Jasper as I catch the man resting his hands on his knees.
“Sorry,” he says, pulling himself up. His breath comes in a ragged wheeze, but it isn’t any worse than the rest of them. My entire team slumps, chests working like overtaxed bellows, feet hardly shuffling from their exhaustion. Jor’Mari is the worst of them; his face is gaunt, dark spots lined up beneath his eyes.
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“Are you okay?” I ask, making certain that I don’t linger for more than a moment in any given spot. Even with the rain having stopped, I don’t trust that woman on the other line not to take advantage of even the slightest let up.
“I’ll make it,” Jor’Mari says, moving his own feet in a weary shuffle to keep from falling prey to another cage of water. For the last twenty minutes, I have not seen the man take on any special form, but that hasn’t stopped him from becoming more and more haggard as the game has progressed.
“Just one more point,” I tell him, trying to sound enthusiastic. I’m tired as well. The last time I was nearly as tired was after fighting those three strange monsters in the bottom of that dungeon. “Just one more.”
The Dispatch buzzes in the air just in front of us. Arabella calls to each side, making certain that we are all ready, getting an assent from each team. The all too familiar whine of the black cube screeches through the air, and as it starts to rise to its peak, I let my feet settle for the barest moment, readying myself to spring forward.
A blast, so loud and noisy that it almost startles me into non-movement is let loose from the Dispatch, a black light slamming down from the cube faster than any bolt of lightning. The black ball crashes into the ground, and seeing it sets my blood on fire.
My feet has only risen a bare inch from the ground when the field in front of me rips itself up from the ground. “I WILL NOT FAIL!!!” I hear Lady Forendous bellow from the opposite side of the rising wall of dirt and grass. “I WILL NOT LOSE!”
I brace myself, expecting the wall of turf to slap down on top of me, to knock me down into the earth and bury me alive. Instead, the wall of detritus continues to rise, folding back on itself like an earthy bed-cover, thudding to the ground with a wet smack. A long patch of grass, roots, and muddy earth lays folded haphazardly in front of me, no more than ten feet deep but taking up the entire width of the field.
Lady Forendous stands there as the earthy curtain falls, the black ball held in her hands, arcs of magical potency ripping into the air off of her. The deep yellow of her eyes begins to glow brighter as she sneers at us like shining lights in the dark depths. A primal fear sparks in me, some sense that I am a deer staring down a wolf as it licks its chops. The green soul presence around us condenses and I know beyond a doubt that if she wished it, Lady Forendous could snuff out all of us with a thought.
Instead, sheets of grass, rising up like a wall peels away from the ground and I start to slide away on the sudden slope. Fire erupts along my hands, and I pour my power into the ground, burning a hole through the torrent of roots and scything grass that continues to climb in front of me. It isn’t enough, the waves of green are a tide, and my fire hardly does enough to keep my own feet inside the bounds of the field. I bob on a sea of roiling green. I catch sight of Lady Forendous amid the sea, light spilling out of her skin, the only solid bit of ground in the field beneath her bare feet.
I fall into the battle fever, the world slowing around me as I try to burn my way back to the center of the field. Already, I am one of the only people left on the field, my team lays sprawled on the edges, pushed all the way to the walls by the roiling earth. For all my effort, no matter how hard or bright I burn, there is always more pressing in on me. My foot stumbles, and I collapse to a knee, one arm stretched forward as a blaze of fire tries to fight back the tide. I can’t do it.
“We just have to stop her for a few seconds!” Jor’Mari yells.
A shadow soars past me, and I catch sight of a winged man shooting out over the field, carrying another man with him. There, amid the sea of green, a bulge of earth pushes up beneath Lady Forendous, before it starts to skid forward across the field at an impossible speed.
She is so close, almost to the goal line, when Samielle’s intercepting arc reaches her. Jor’Mari plummets out of the sky, his body wreathed in black chitinous armor and swelled to huge proportions. He crashes down atop the bubble of land Lady Forendous sails forward on, the entire mound of earth distorting from the impact as if it were filled with air and no thicker than a foot deep. The huge man clings to Lady Forendous, his armored arms wrapping tightly around the short woman, trying to wrestle her down. She is almost like a doll to him, one of his hands as large as her torso, but Jor’Mari cannot wrestle her to the ground. I see roots snarling around her legs, holding her tight to the ground.
I am running, sprinting over the bulbous ocean of green, fire bleeding off of me carelessly as I race forward. Lady Forendous screams, light shoot off of her skin in a blinding cascade, she bites and scratches and rages, but the giant man holding her is too sturdy.
“DAMN YOU!!!” she screams, and then the ball, glowing and pulsing an ominous black color, is thrown away from her. “If you drop this–”
The ball arcs along the ground its shadow drawing all eyes. A woman begins to pull herself from the roiling grass as easy as someone might surface from a pool of water. Kess, her hands outstretched, tries to catch the black ball.
“I told you to stay down!” I yell, and I see the woman flinch. I am just a few steps away, I can make it to her, I can stop them here and now.
My foot snags, a clump in the uneven ground catching my heel just as my fingers come within inches of grazing the ball. A bolt of magic kisses the tip of my outstretched hand as the ground comes up to meet me, and Kess stands there, all she needs to do is not move and she will have it.
The ball resounds with a glassy slap as two strong hands hammer down onto the orb from either side. Kess and I both stare, surprised, as Samielle swoops at the ball in the middle of its arc, his hands snagging it from the air. Power begins to arc up the man’s arms as he strains, his dark wings struggling with all their might to rip him into the air, but I know that he will make it. With that ball empowering him, nothing can stop him.
“I WILL NOT BE MADE A FOOL OF!” The screech is like a knife to the ear. The unsteady earth that I lay upon gives a massive heave before falling away from me. My hand flashes forward, scratching the grass as the entire lifted field collapses back to the earth or whatever it is that is solid beneath us. I fall along with it for at least ten feet and feel a terrible crack race up my arm all the way to the elbow as I land on my outstretched hand.
I have just enough attention left to me to see Lady Forendous’ soul presence race to a single point ahead of the streaking Samielle, condensing into a green sheet of dangerous magic. A huge mass of white flesh, a tentacle as large around as a tree trunk, shoots from the screen of magic. It arcs down, its terrible momentum aiming straight for Samielle. The man isn’t blind, and the glowing orb held in his hands offers him an incredible boost in raw magical potency. Even still, spinning to the side like an aerial acrobat, the edge of the white tendril scrapes against Samielle’s shoulder. The man crashes into the ground, flipping, spinning, ripping a long trench of earth from the grass.
The sheet of magic continues to slide backward, revealing a terrible monstrosity of white flesh and a thousand eyes pulled straight from the depths of the world. It’s eyes, each different and horrible, look in all directions as five terrible mouths, no two the same, open along its amorphous flesh. It screams, a roar so terrible that it wipes all the sound away. I feel wetness dripping from my ears and wipe it away. My hand, two fingers bent at strange angles, comes away slick with dark blood.
By the time that I look back up, Lady Forendous is standing astride the huge monster, the black ball once more clenched between her fingers. A murderous glee lights her face as she stares down at the ruination of the field, her mouth opened to proclaim something.
“No.” Despite the lack of sound, I still hear the word cut through the ringing as clearly as if it were whispered to just me. A lance of ice, at least eighty feet long and a quarter as wide, appears amid the disgusting white mass of the monster. Its eyes spin wildly, staring in all directions, most looking at the sudden ice piercing straight through it with the same disbelief that I do. It tries to drag itself forward an inch, but the attempt is pitiful. It’s flesh tears around the ice sticking straight through it, and it begins to sag forward, held up by the instrument used to kill it.
“This monster violates the rules.” Then, Arabella is there in front of Lady Forendous, already holding the black ball in the palm of one of her hands. She pushes the shorter woman, just a simple motion without much force, but it sends Lady Forendous reeling, tumbling down the back of her dead monster.
A hush falls over the field. Groaning, I push myself to my feet, looking around at the desolation. Odd ridges of earth and grass stand broken and rumpled throughout the entire chamber, white stone visible through grains of dirt where the grass has been fully ripped away. An entire swath of the grass burns, my fire having caught where I was pouring it into the grass. It does not burn as well as I might have expected. The lines of paint that marked the field are all but vanished, only hints of white grass here and there to even tell that anything but mounds of dirt and grass had been here before.
The others around the chamber are busy picking themselves up as Arabella begins to rise into the air once more, the black ball clasped between her fingers. I watch her and come to realize that she has been holding it for longer than seven seconds without it exploding. I check with Galea about the time to make certain, and she confirms that Arabella has been holding the ball for more than ten seconds without anything happening. Galea also shows me another time, and my eyes widen as I see it.
“This cannot stand!” Lady Forendous yells as she disentangles herself from the dead monster. Its body is left to languish on the field. “I am expected to lose now because of chance!”
I realize then that my hearing has returned. I motion for my team to make for the starting line once more. They hardly need prompting; they drag their tired and beaten bodies back toward the center of the field, making for a vague point that might be about where we are supposed to stand. Finding Samielle, the man’s right arm hanging limp at his side, I put my shoulder under his left and help him limp his way back to the start. My right hand pinches and burns each time a broken part of me twitches, but I will not stop. Our opponents, all except Lady Forendous, do not look much better off than we are: they were hit as hard by the shaking and rolling earth as we have been.
“Chance?” Arabella questions after taking a long pause. With a careless flick of the wrist, Arabella tosses the black orb at the dispatch, its impossible glow disappearing into the dark geometry. “Chance is always a component, but I doubt that is what you mean.”
Lady Forendous waves her arm around, her angry fingers roaming over her beaten and bedraggled team. “You have put me with these…incompetents. First you strap these heavy obstacles to my back, and then you constrict me with your arbitrary rules. You make a game where to test a magician’s strength without allowing them to display it! How could this be fair?!”
That last bit hits home for me. For the last few days I have been wracking my mind, trying to find some way that my power can be of use in this game, but finding nothing. Being second rank, Lady Forendous has twice the number of powers as I do. I can’t imagine how frustrating it must be to be trammeled as she is, but I don’t care to either. I have no sympathy for this woman.
Arabella snorts and shakes her head. “Did your father send you up here to show you how fair the world is? Do you think that we are here for your sole benefit, that we should cater all of our tests to show off your prowess? If you are so powerful as you seem to believe, should you not be able to succeed even under these stipulations?”
Lady Forendous sneers up at the woman dressed in goddess clothes, her sharp teeth grinding, but she holds her tongue. I think for a moment that she is going to attempt to strike Arabella, her soul presence writhes dangerously about her, but she sucks in a hiss of breath instead, her dangerous aura retreating.
“To the line,” Arabella says. “We do not have all day.”
Lady Forendous stomps over to the vague position that the rest of her team are milling about at, each other member of Team Forendous doing their best to stay far away. She stares across at us, beaten, some of us broken, all of us exhausted. I don’t know what all it is that this woman can do, but I do not doubt that something dangerous is on her mind.
Above the center of the ruined field, the Dispatch begins to whine. “Team Mari, ready?” Arabella calls.
“Ready,” Jor’Mari says through cracked lips. His cheeks are sunken into his face and his shoulders shake as he sways in his spot. This man is on the brink of collapse.
Fire sprouts from my hands, a plume of orange as big and bright as I can make it. Lady Forendous’ eyes flick towards me and the fire, contempt and anger painted on her face, her clawed fingers scratching at the air at her sides. My own eyes flick to the right, seeing something that only I in the room can see.
“You are about to lose to me,” I tell Lady Forendous. The words hit the mark; the woman’s shoulders bunch in agitation.
“You are speaking to me!” she screams.
“Team Forendous, ready?” Arabella calls from above the Dispatch.
“Everything that you have will prove to be shit,” I tell Forendous. “Your position and your power don’t mean much here. You are going to be beaten by someone who only touched magic for the first time just a few months ago.”
“You take your life in your hands, ant!” Spit flies from the woman’s mouth as she hisses through her teeth. “I am going to crush you! I am going to squeeze the red out from your meat and feed it to my pets!”
“Ready?” Arabella calls again.
“I would like to see you try,” I say, giving the woman my most winning smile.
Snakes of green energy leap off of Lady Forendous’ shoulders, the very air around her soul presence distorting violently. “I-I-I…You are dead! Your entire tiny life will be crushed to red paste! I will–”
“Time!” Arabella’s voice rings through the chamber. A shower of fireworks explode along the field, raining down over the top of us as the Dispatch slowly sinks toward the grass. “Team Mari is the winner, four points to three.”
My eyes slide sideways, once more seeing the window Galea holds between her hands. It has now been exactly one hour and five seconds since the match first began.
A cheer rips through our line, and suddenly I am being pulled into a hug by Jess, lifted off my feet and swung around by the muscular woman. My fingers shake with exhaustion, but for the moment that is forgotten. Pulled into the rest of our group, I catch Jor’Mari wiping away a tear from his eyes with the back of his hand, the smile on his face wide and sloppy. I am thrust at the man by Jess and am surprised when he manages to catch me enough to stop me from falling. Jess has already moved on by the time that I look back at her, scooping up Samielle like a princess and spinning him around.
“She is a wild one,” Jor’Mari says.
I turn back. His hand is still on the small of my back, as if he is afraid that I am going to fall over at any second. I must look as bad as he does if he thinks that.
“We won,” I say, trying to smile up at the man. “We won all three.”
“We did,” he laughs, a weak and tired sound. “We actually did.”