The instructor conjured a simple dome with a wave of her hand that deflected the small earth darts that quickly broke apart. ‘If I am going to get her to move I will need to use bigger and more powerful attacks.’ Arthur thought as he saw his attack easily countered. As if the instructor knew what Arthur was thinking she began launching several fireballs at Arthur.
At first blocking the fireballs was almost easy, but soon the stone shield started to heat up. For the time being it would only be a little uncomfortable but if she kept up Arthur would need to drop it since he hadn’t learned how to make something its size float without draining his mana rapidly.
‘I need to either stop her from casting fireballs or I need to cool down the shield. Hydromancy should be able to do that, water does after all extinguish fire.’
Arthur conjured a layer of water on his shield that helped distribute the heat and the shock waves with minimal mana consumption. The only problem now was how he was going to defeat the instructor. Her defense was easily just as effective if not even more so, she has clearly spent a lot of time mastering both pyromancy and what Arthur assumed was aeromancy.
As the fight drew on Arthur was getting more and more desperate, none of his attacks were working on her. Regardless of what element he used he could not make her move, all his projectiles simply were deflected or broke on impact with the barrier. The biggest problem was that his mana was also getting quite low, due to the shield he held made from stone and water being conjured and not taken from the environment he would need to constantly expend energy to maintain them, that did not even account for repairing any of the damage from blocking spells.
‘That barrier blocks both solids and liquids. If I want to do any damage I will need to use either pyromancy or aeromancy to do it. But I don’t know how to, I tried to do some of both on the journey here but they are clearly way different from hydromancy and I didn’t even know where to start.’ Arthur recoiled from the blast of another fireball thrown his way. ‘The only choice I have is to try to overwhelm it and make it break, but if I do that I probably won't have enough mana to defend myself.’
Another fireball hit Arthur again, but this time it was empowered with a bit of aeromancy giving it a bit more force than the others. The force pushed Arthur right to the edge of the circle he stood in.
‘It’s now or never. If I keep doing this I will fall, but if I go all out I will have a chance.’ Arthur started conjuring upwards of at least fifty of what he called earth and water spikes that were about a foot long, they were a sixty-forty split between earth and water. After the instructor stopped her bombardment of fireballs she waited for the smoke to clear.
‘This one is quite a hard nut to crack, I expect he would make an excellent mage knight. He has very good defensive capabilities for someone that hasn’t joined the guild yet. As far as I am concerned as long as he passes the background check he has passed.’
Suddenly out of the smoke at least fifty projectiles that consisted of a mix of water and earth pierced through the fading smoke all at once, all aiming for her. She had to quickly reinforce her barrier to keep from getting hurt, but even the barrier distorted under the combined strength of all the projectiles but thankfully that was all.
When the smoke finally cleared the instructor saw the examinee had lost his shield and had fallen to his knees as he panted for air. So far he had lasted the longest of all the current examinees but looked like he attempted to end the fight at the cost of all his mana leaving him unprotected. The instructor smiled and with a gust of aeromancy she pushed him back and he fell outside the circle.
About an hour later, all the examinees completed their exam, several were happy with their performance, others believed they had flopped completely. Arthur was one of the few who just wanted to know if he had passed or not so he could actually start learning magic properly.
The elf that had appeared before at the beginning of the exam appeared again on the stage and addressed the examinees. “Thank you everyone for taking part in the mages guild entrance exam. You will each be given a letter that will detail how you performed with a grade and a short explanation of what your instructor saw and how you could improve, the letter will contain whether or not you pass. I would also like to ask that you only open this in private to prevent the public from knowing everyone how passed.” The last bit confused everyone. Why was who ended up accepted into the guild important? Would it pose a threat to their lives? None of those questions were answered, all the elf said was “Dismissed.”
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Arthur following the crowd exited the guild and looked for a bench he could sit on. He found one a short ways away from the market where he took out one of the breakfast burritos and ate it. While it wouldn’t help him recover his mana he was still quite hungry from all that happened during the exam.
Arthur looked at the letter in his hand, this letter would decide if he would join the mages guild and get a proper magical education. Arthur quickly wolfed down his burrito and cleaned his hands with hydromancy, he opened the envelope and took out the letter within. ‘Alright, here we go.’ Arthur looked at the letter.
Arthur of Dom Badaher
Based on your performance in the mages guild of Antium we congratulate you on your acceptance into the guild.
You have displayed the necessary skill, dedication, and critical thinking that we expect of all our members.
There will be an orientation in the guild in room 3 at noon tomorrow, we recommend you attend as it will help you pick courses to plan your future in the magical community.
We look forward to seeing where you will go.
* Alwin of Northsomin Cove
‘Well that's good. I do wonder who this Alwin of Northsomin Cove is though. My only guess is that he is the elf who gave those two speeches before and after the actual exam.’
Arthur quickly put his letter away and placed it in his bag. ‘I don’t want anyone in the guild to bother me about keeping this stuff a secret. They must have had problems with when they accepted people in the past if they don’t want us to go around telling people.’
The rest of Arthur's day wasn’t all that exciting, he simply chose to practice his hydromancy and geomancy in his room. What he was trying to do was create his own spells, so far he had only mimicked what other people had done like with the water whip or the earth armor and even the water and earth spikes were something he saw some of the other mages doing during the expedition before. It was time he did something by himself, even if someone else had done it before he wanted to do it on his own without any outside inspiration.
Arthur’s experiments went late into the night with the best he could do is create objects with geomancy such as weapons, but the one thing he realized he could do is make keys with it. He could in theory use it to pick locks if he needed to get inside something such as a locked room or chest.
But since it was getting quite late Arthur decided that it was about time to eat and go to sleep since he wanted to go to that orientation with the mages guild. As such he ate his last burrito and used his hydromancy to clean himself up a bit and disposed of the accumulated sweat out the window. But when Arthur opened the window he could see someone in the empty plot of land walking through the overgrown plants. This person looked to be human given their height and was wearing a robe that looked to be dark red in color, they carried no lantern or any other light source with them but somehow they were easily able to navigate through the plant life with little issue. Eventually the person disappeared into the dark leaving Arthur confused, was that real or was it just in his imagination. ‘That was weird. It is getting late so perhaps I simply imagined that person, I'll check to see if they left any traces of their passage tomorrow just in case there was a person.
*********
The morning came rather quickly for Arthur who had the strange person still on his mind even as he went downstairs to get something to eat. He bought three breakfast burritos like the day before and ate one before he placed the other two in his bag for later.
Since there was still at least three and a half hours before the orientation in the mages guild would happen Arthur decided to look to see if there was any trace of the person in the red robe. Unlike the person Arthur saw the night before he was having a bit of a hard time moving through the overgrown plants. ‘Ok, it is definitely unlikely that someone could move through all this without having a hard time. If I don’t find anything after like half an hour I am giving up.’
Arthur waded through the grass and other plants as he looked for even the slightest amount of evidence of the person in the red robe, soon he did find something. A small path that from a distance would be very difficult to see, it was formed from several people walking over the same spot many times over a long period of time. The path was clearly designed for one person to walk at a time, or a group in a single file line.
‘Well someone has been using this path to walk through here quite regularly.’ Arthur walked along the path while he looked up to the windows to make sure that he actually could have seen the person while on the path. As it turned out he could quite easily see several windows with a clear view and the small trees and other plants would block the view of many others, especially those on the ground level.