Mallory’s claws forged around her hand, Araceli’s throat began to glow with light, and I let briars and bones burst from my spirit.

The monsters surged forward, and the eye focused on us, a ray of light bursting from its pupil. As the light fell over me, I felt something pushing against my mind, a fear effect.

Unlike with the draconic trial, though, this wasn’t overwhelmingly powerful. It was strong, but my mind-shielding ring pushed back, and I threw my will behind it, pushing back as well, even as the fear seeped into my bones.

Mallory conjured her dark aura, the one that seemed to generate power from her wounds, and dove right at the acid elemental, while Araceli leapt up, spreading her wings and releasing dragonfyre at the glass elemental.

I was left slack jawed for a second, simply astounded by Mallory’s… well, if she ever asked me, I’d call it courage.

I recovered quickly, however, and teleported into the air behind the eyeball creature, releasing a storm of briars and bones at it, but it cut off the cone of light and zoomed out of the way.

I teleported in front of it, locking my position and calling the bones to my hand before launching them out in a scattered pattern. I created a diamond shape around the creature, but it had some intelligence, as it dove in between the pattern, and I was forced to teleport in front of it again.

It unleashed a beam of light at me, and I felt a wave of disorientation and nausea come over me. If I hadn’t fought Bohn, I would have likely thrown up on the spot.

Even with my exposure and mild shielding ring doing a fair bit of heavy lifting, I still lost control of my mana for just a second. I fell out of the air and barely caught myself with another locking spell.

Even as I teleported back up and lashed out with more briars, I felt frustrated at how much my lack of access to the plants I’d stored in Dusk was limiting my combat power. If I’d been able to call on an overwhelming slash of Blademoss, I could have cut this eyeball illusion out of the sky.

I recalled the bones and tried a more triangular pattern, with one above and below, but the eye was able to just barely side out of the way, and fire another beam off at me. I teleported out of the way and brought my hand down with a briar on the trailing extraocular muscles.

It left a thin cut, but didn’t properly kill it. A splatter of white goop oozed from the wound, and the air was filled with a dizzying, powerful surge of mental, knowledge, solar, and life energy. It assaulted my senses, battering at my shielding ring, and my Magister’s Body began to churn, drawing energy from the Beast Mage’s Soul in order to fight and push it away.

I teleported across the empty space and took a breath.

What had that been?

I refocused and called my bones to me. I needed to be smart about this, if I wanted to defeat it.

Quickly, I glanced down at Mallory, just to make sure she was okay.

She was… Something. She leapt from place to place to dodge bursts of acid, the green light of a regeneration spell flowing into her, mixing with the black aura. Each time she landed on the ground, she slashed out with her claws, knocking drips of the acid and then hitting them with her freezing spell.

She was fine.

Mostly.

Aracelli was currently sitting atop the glass creature, biting it, and then spitting the glass to the side.

I wasn’t sure that was safe, but I also wasn’t going to tell a terragon what she could and couldn’t eat, so I turned my attention back to the eyeball creature.

It had flown across the room toward me, even in the moment I’d simply been hanging in the air, so I sent the Pinpoint Boneshards at it in a continuous stream. It dove to the left, and I conjured Briarthreads, slashing at it. It locked its wings and dove, twisting to fire a beam right at me, and I saw my chance.

I left a Material Echo in my place, which I hoped would trick the eyeball monster into thinking that I was caught in its mental distortion, then teleported behind and underneath it, before overcharging Briarthreads and sending all of them into the side of the eye.

Before they could even hit, I teleported several feet back, out of the way of the goo’s range.

That was when I figured out why its goo released so much power. For several seconds as the goo was undulating out of the eye, it was frozen, disoriented.

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I focused and set the spatial guidance onto the eye, then all of my bones slammed into it. It only took two more applications before the eye dissolved, and I recalled the bones to me.

I focused on the acid elemental, considering what I could do. My normal bag of tricks was rather cut down, but I still had access to my spells…

I tilted my head this way and that as I considered, then teleported over to land.

Not really seeing much else I could do, I sent bones and briars into the acid. It dissolved the briars quickly, so I eventually just fired off bones, while Aracelli shot off beams of dragonfyre to evaporate sections, and Mallory leapt around, freezing and cutting away chunks.

It took us a long time, none of us being particularly well suited for this fight, but eventually we managed to remove enough chunks of its body that it collapsed apart.

That must have counted as a win, because the door appeared. Mallory growled and shook herself, letting the aura fade. I checked myself over while she did. Honestly, apart from the acid burns – which she’d healed – we’d come out of this fight pretty clean.

We waited a half hour, so I could let my death mana recover a little bit. I focused all of my regeneration into death, converting my mana down and then up again at the same rate that it recovered.

Horribly inefficient for normal purposes, but my other gates had recovered while I was shooting bones, and there was no point leaving them empty. If nothing else, it gave for decent mana manipulation practice.

Once I was recovered, we stepped through to the next room, and found ourselves standing on a large field.

A large, familiar, field.

It was the standard grass field, with patches of rocks and dirt where it hadn’t been well tended. There had once been lines drawn onto it to define the right distance for various sports, but they’d faded from generations of feet trampling over them.

In other words, it was the sports field that sat outside of every school in Mossford.

On the other side of the field were twenty-one people, each holding a ball, and a rather rotund referee in the middle, with a whistle in his mouth.

“Alright kids,” he said, wheezing slightly as he did. “We want a good game of mana-dodgeball!”

As he spoke, abnegation enchantments rippled through the field, and I felt the access to higher gate mana cut off. First my second gate, then first, leaving me with nothing but my ungated mana.

No, that wasn’t quite right. I had my ungated, but I also had my full gate spells. Their more active uses were suppressed, since I couldn’t tap into my mana, and I thought that my burnt energy wouldn’t recover any faster than normal, but I’d still been modified by the spell. I still had more physical power than when I’d started, even if the pools of power weren’t entirely able to be tapped into.

I hadn’t played mana-dodgeball in ages, since it was mostly just used to teach basic mana manipulation.

“This was supposed to be throwing stones, but that’s stupid, and kinda abusive, think? I’m not a lawyer,” someone said next to me, and I leapt into the air. Next to me, Mallory whirled around, and we saw the Craftsman, holding a packet of pudding and shaking it out.

“Can it be called abuse if it’s not your kids? Or is that just assault and battery?” the Craftsman asked, then shrugged. “Anyways, I’ll let you all get on with this.”

He walked away, and the coach blew his whistle. A ball was soaring through the air at me a moment later, and I threw myself to the side, then grabbed it once it landed. I sent a spark of ungated mana into the ball, and it glowed slightly as its minor enchantments activated, then I flung it at the people.

Mallory caught a ball, but the coach seemed to be using the stupid ruleset, because he pointed at her and whistled.

“You’re out!”

She vanished, and I paused, caught off guard by the sheer stupidity. I managed to dodge the balls that came at me, but twenty-one to two were hard odds, even with both Araceli and I possessing stronger than normal bodies.

A ball struck me in the face before too long, and I was teleported out. Mallory glanced at me and let out a sigh.

“Did we really get caught out… by a dodgeball challenge?” she asked, growling.

“Yep,” I said, leaning down against the statue next to her.

“Primes,” she groused. “That thrice-cursed Craftsman, if he hadn’t popped in for another chat, I would have gotten through just fine.”

I didn’t say anything to that – it was pretty clear that she was coping with the loss by blaming it on someone else, and I was just glad it wasn’t me.

Aracelli appeared a moment later, so I closed my eyes and let my internal clock tell me when enough time had passed for us to be allowed back in.

This time, the fight in the first room was against a giant flying bee, autonomous flying blade, and a bone elemental.

This was a much better matchup for us, and we broke into the same strategy as before, with me taking to the skies to fight the bee with bones and briars, and Mallory cutting away at the bone elemental.

This time, Mallory actually finished the elemental off faster than I could finish the flying opponent, who kept using a glowing golden honey to cure its wounds, and Mallory was the one standing on the sidelines, chucking Ice Knives at the bee whenever it came in range.

We let our mana recover some, then headed into the dodgeball room.

This time, we had a team of five, with two random people joining Mallory and me, but our opposing team held thirty-five people.

“Are you delvers too?” Mallory asked.

“I’m so excited for mana-dodgeball, it’s my favorite day at school,” one of them said.

“I think that’s a no,” I said, and Mallory rolled her eyes.

“You think?” she snarked.

We launched into mana-dodgeball, and this time, we focused on using the two co-operative illusions as human shields, and not catching the balls, only dodging.

In the end, it took us several attempts at the dodgeball room to get through. No matter how many people – or lack thereof – appeared to join us, the opposing team always had seven times as many people. They could take seven times as many hits as each of us.

It did make me laugh that the challenge that was forcing me to go the hardest wasn’t some complex puzzle, but rather a children’s game. Mallory didn’t seem to find it nearly as funny as I did, but I thought Aracelli saw the humor.

Or maybe not. She was a terragon, and they were supposed to only be about as smart as a cat. She might just be excited because I was laughing.

We finally completed it on the fourth run through, and I felt a surge of relief pass through me as spatial magic warped me away.