The final bell rang. Although she was skipping out on her club due to this, Silence was walking to the field from the exhibition match to meet her instructor. The espionage block was the furthest one from there, though, so when she finally arrived, the other three and another woman were already there. The latter waved as Silence came close.

"Hi little missy, are you Silence?" the woman asked.

With a nod in response, she started her introduction whilst rushing towards her, "Well, hi again. I'm Ms. Lucking, the magic instructor. Due to the emphasis this tournament has on magic, I coach both the magic tennis and the beam toppling events. You can tell how surprised I was when Spire told me you, a non mage with an audio ability, had passed the exhibition rounds that flawlessly."

Ms. Lucking stopped right in front of her target and shook her hand before walking back to the crowd. Bewildered by the teacher's personality, Silence sighed deeply before following her.

Now addressing everyone, the crowd looked her way as she carried on, "Hi, hi, I will be starting the session now! This session will be shorter than others since this will serve only to gauge strengths and weaknesses of all of you. Now, I know some things off the bat from Spire, so let's get the simple ones out of the way,"

The teacher pointed at Silence and stated, "Since she'll be the fastest, let's do Silence's first. Spire says you are impeccable against mages, but you still have weaknesses we'd like to iron out. From your confused look, I take it that I'll need to explain why."

Taking a deep breath, Ms. Lucking explained her criticism in more detail, "Basically, your attack was done by screaming your lungs out twice. This is a problem because it means that if you ruin your voice by screaming, you won't be able to continue and will force a draw or lose in later matches. And since there's a small chance that you'd be competing against someone that muting doesn't work on, you can still lose especially if you lose your voice. So we'd like you to find an alternative to screaming, and if you do that, you won't need any more training in our eyes. Any questions, or can I move on to Blaze?"

The recipient of the critique simply tilted her head in confusion before asking, "If there were the possibility for people muting was immune on, shouldn't they have more of a presence in this contest? I mean, a puppeteer could just have multiple puppets rush towards both opponents poles and win without much effort?"

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"You're new to this, aren't you? This will take a long time to explain, so please bear with it." she teased before stopping herself. "Sorry, whilst I do this, could I see a match between Blaze and Root? I do know some things you could work on, but the details are sketchy. I'll be watching, so please use the preset field in front of you."

Upon checking their states of readiness, the instructor started the countdown.

When the match was on the way, she took a deep breath started her lecture to Silence, "The reason chant-based magic is so good in this contest is because it's powerful and fast. Without the need to defend yourself, it massively outclasses most melee types due to their massive range advantage. With a puppeteer, the puppets are melee based and don't count as players. So mages could just destroy them with their magic quickly without any risk of getting countered. With chant-less magic, it's usually too weak or close ranged to topple the poles. Types of chant-less magic that can do this do exist, but they're extremely rare and so strong that it's only used in major events. Other abilities are just better suited to other events. Anyway, that's the full explanation. Hopefully, you can see why we want to you to just find a better form of attack. I don't think more questions would be necessary since our reason should be simple enough already."

Silence, who was diligently listening, accepted her task. Her only thought whilst making her time being, 'You know, if I win I can brag about it, secure a place in the dorm for the next years and not have the hassle of getting kicked from the team and be on maintenance duty or something... It's not like it'll take a lot of experimentation to do what's needed anyway.'

Looking at the field again, the spectators saw a wild match. Both competitors focused completely on attacking the other's beams. Blaze, who was on the blue side, had knocked over one of Root's poles but had lost one too. In her hand, the flames protruding from them were barely visible, whereas the roots under her final pole were visible.

However, Blaze didn't seem to be fazed by this. She combined her flames into both hands and attacked her own pole in a seemingly random movement.

The reason was soon apparent as the roots fire and shriveled. Using this time, she lit her palms and repeated the same attack. As the flames became the size of her head, her last pole was lightly tipped over by a branching root attacking from the side.

To declare the match over, Ms. Lucking came over to announce the result to everyone before dismissing them all, "Game over, Root wins. Thanks for doing that, I'll think about it until we meet again which should be Saturday noon until five. I told Gust what he needs to work on earlier and Silence should know what she needs to work on. So this should do it for today, I guess we'll start work in our next session then. Thanks for coming, and I'll try to schedule some games with other teams shortly."

Clearly annoyed, Blaze threw her balls of fire at Root's last pole out of spite, then took a deep breath and accepted her opponent's handshake. Silence had left as soon as possible. The rest noted her absence in slight annoyance before leaving themselves, due to this it seeming to represent her lack of motivation in competing.