“It’s been a while since my friend, and esteemed colleague, here and I went into battle side by side,” Sharpe said, his voice ringing out with magically enhanced volume. “Longer still since we went toe-to-toe. He has sportingly agreed to dust off his considerable magical combat talents and help me with a little display. This is not so much about hurting one another, but rather demonstrating to our new student body how many ways there can be for them to turn the ubiquitous and shadowy ‘bad guys’ into bodies.”

Alfie and the rest of the first-year crew leaned forward. Even Grant looked like his whole concentration was focused for once.

Sharpe and Cane, one dressed in tweed and the other in his gray sports coat and awful tie, faced one another. They were divided by some twenty paces of empty sand.

“If you have sunglasses handy,” Sharpe said, “now would be the time to put them on.”

A glowing orange staircase, moving like an eldritch escalator, materialized instantly in front of Sharpe, and he sprinted up it, showing a great turn of speed for a man in his early sixties. Heat emanated from the staircase in radiating waves, but it didn’t appear to hurt Sharpe or affect him in any way.

Cane grabbed a dropped shotgun from the ground nearby, pumped it once to eject the spent casing, then ran his hand along it. Even from where he was sitting in the stands, Alfie could see the stormy purple glow that infused the weapon.

“He’s an Enchanter,” Howie said, his eyes wide. “Only… I never even guessed that someone could enchant an object that fast!”

Within seconds, Cane had the weapon pointed up at the conjured orange staircase. He squeezed the trigger. Instead of a bullet, a potent jagged bolt of mauve lightning ripped out of the barrel and punched into the stair that Sharpe’s foot had just left. Such was the quality and cleverness of the magic that the entire staircase shattered like it was made of glass.

Sharpe must have been twenty-five feet in the air when what he had been running on disappeared in a hail of magical shards. He plummeted downwards. Just before he hit the ground, a small platform of yellowish light, wrapped in the same halo of baking heat, appeared under his feet. It caught him easily, slowing his fall perfectly so that when he touched back down on the sand, he didn’t even stumble.

Cane raised the enchanted shotgun again and pulled the trigger, sending another denticulated beam of violet lightning streaking toward Sharpe. Sharpe raised his hand and conjured a convex lens of glowing red essence. At first, Alfie thought it was a shield. Then he saw that Sharpe had crafted it in such a way that he was able to turn the bolt of supernatural lightning back in Cane’s direction.

Cane dropped his weapon and rolled neatly aside. He moved exceptionally fluidly for such an unimposing man. It was like seeing an algebra teacher suddenly turn into a commando.

Cane snatched up a perfectly innocuous rock from the ground, squeezed it in his fist, and then let it go. The rock floated in the air, following him like some kind of geological drone as he ran toward a stack of crates that had been left out as cover.

Sharpe summoned a series of glowing throwing stars into the air. With flicks of his hands, he spent the spiked discs streaking toward Cane. They were moving so fast that they literally left molten streaks through the air, almost like tracer rounds.

Cane’s enchanted rock zapped the oncoming discs with tendrils of violet light. It was not enough to destroy them, but it was enough to frazzle whatever magic drove them. They crashed into the stone walls behind Cane, splashing against them like white-hot rocks into some horizontal stone pond.

Cane leapt over the crate, turned, and placed a hand on the large wooden box he had taken cover behind. Two seconds later, the crate had been transmogrified into an ominous expanding cloud.

“I thought he was a—what do you call it?—Voltaic Enchanter?” Alfie asked Howie.

“Common misconception,” the curly-headed young man said. “Voltaic magic is not drawn from the kind of electricity that powers our blenders and microwaves. It comes from storms.”

“Is that right?” Alfie asked, half-listening as he watched the cloud engulf Cane and effectively vanish him.

“It is,” Howie said. “I’m a Voltaic Enchanter myself.”

Below, Sharpe conjured another disc that raised him up into the air, above the cloud.

The storm cloud sent out a few testing zaps of lightning, but such was the strength of the platform Sharpe had materialized, they did nothing. They were merely deflected away.

When Sharpe had reached his target height, he banished the platform and took an elegant swan dive out into space.

“Woah, the guy’s barmy,” Will said, mouth agape.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

As Sharpe fell, silver hair fluttering and tweed jacket flapping behind him, he conjured a glowing suit of armor around himself. Alfie couldn’t help but be reminded of Iron Man as the provost hurtled downwards.

He disappeared into the storm cloud, there was a dull flash, and the cloud was lit from within by an angry red glare blended with violet light.

Then the cloud exploded outwards in an expanding ring of molten cloud fragments with such violence that Alfie felt the hair on his head lift and his ears pop as the pressure changed around him.

Francesca Hirst screamed.

And then there was silence.

“Right,” Cornelius Sharpe said, appearing from out of the rapidly thinning shreds of magical cloud that still lingered. “I think that’s enough to be going on with.”

Cane walked out from behind a wall of the obstacle course. He was holding a rod of crackling purple magic in his hand.

“You sly bugger,” he said. “That’s just because I was getting into the swing of things.”

Sharpe clapped his old friend on the shoulder. “Perhaps, but you know I was always ahead of you when it came to tactics.”

Cane chuckled. He dropped the crackling rod, and when it hit the floor, it returned to its original shape—nothing more than a branch.

“I hope you enjoyed the demonstration,” Sharpe called up into the stands. “Hopefully it has kindled your imagination rather than pickled your brains in worry. Now, if you’ll excuse us, I rather think I owe Schoolman Cane a drink. Enjoy your first nights in your new cottages. Dinner will be brought out to you by your respective porters this evening. Sleep well.”

“How did they get so good?” Alfie asked Will, Teo, and Howie. “Is that what we’re going to be like at the end of three years?”

There was a snort from behind them.

“You know,” Alfie said, turning slowly around, “you really should get that respiratory issue looked at, Grant.”

“How did they get so good?” Grant mimicked. He shook his head disdainfully at Alfie.

What with the exhibition of top-tier magic they had just witnessed, not to mention the insanely brutal fight that had preceded it, Alfie had almost forgotten that Aetherbright Academy’s Biggest Bellend had been sharing the stands with him. He had been listening to Grant and his cronies baying for blood out of the corner of his ear, but he hadn’t really been paying them too much attention.

“You know I’m openly ignorant about all this magical stuff, Grant? Right?” Alfie said. “I’ve got no shame in not knowing anything about this world. I’m not going to get all defensive about it. Just like you shouldn’t have any shame or get all defensive about having a brain that manages to lower the IQ of anyone talking to you. Just own it.”

“You better change your attitude, lad,” Grant sneered.

“Noted.” Alfie sighed in a bored voice. “Tell me, though, Grant, what would you change about yourself? Apart from the obvious, of course.”

This gave the haughty Scotsman pause for thought.

“What do you mean ‘the obvious’?” he asked, brow furrowing.

Alfie was about to answer when the arrogant young man waved him down.

“Never mind. It’s just hard to believe that even a numbskull like you hasn’t ever heard of the Djinn Wars,” Grant said.

Alfie had heard something about the Djinn Wars, but he had been about eight cups of faerie blood deep at the time, and the little that Will had mentioned to him in passing was a little blurry.

Charles Grant cocked his head to one side and then laughed in Alfie’s face in a fake, sarcastic, and condescending manner. Alfie got the impression that he did a lot of that kind of laughing. He was basically a professional at it.

“The Djinn Wars were the global battles back in the seventies that Sharpe and Cane made their names in,” Grant said.

“It happened at the same time that the Vietnam War was on,” Alfie said, a nugget of information floating unexpectedly up from the silty bed of his memory.

“Aye, good guess, numbskull. It was a war that happened at the same time, and alongside, the Vietnam War.”

“And?”

“If you’re too thick or wet behind the ears to know anything about it then I’m not going to give you a bloody history lesson, Turner,” Grant said smugly.

“It stemmed from an influx of Djinn—spirit forms given flesh and made solid by the Malum Nix, who is now trapped strictly in the Outer Realm,” Howie chipped in—the large man with the small voice and the big knowledge.

“All that matters is that it was bad, and magic users the world over came close to being eradicated,” Charles Grant butted in. “It mucked up a lot of mages, physically and mentally, you understand? Left a lot of the poor bastards who fought not right in the head, yeah? My uncle was one. Went completely doolally and ended up eating a shotgun round.” Grant sniffed and then grinned. His eyes shone as he looked out at where Fraus and Sharpe had been sparring. “Still, it wasn’t all bad. It might have made more than a few of our lot bonkers, but it made legends of many others.”

Alfie gave Grant a stony look.

“Plus,” Grant continued, casting an eye at Fritha Hookway and Molly Peery, “I got a sizable inheritance from that uncle that blew his head off. Very sizable.”

The two women exchanged disgusted looks.

“Wow, what a heart-warming tale,” Alfie said in a flat voice.

“War’s just a sign of failure for people who can think. It’s never right,” James Howie said fervently, epitomizing the idealist he was.

Grant gave another one of his snorts. “Listen to this naïve idiot, will you? Who cares who’s right in war? All that matters, at the end of the day, is who’s left.”

“You best be remembering that when it comes to this competition,” Alfie said.

The cabals exchanged a few menacing looks. The two men and one woman who made up the rest of Grant’s group had thrown in their lot with him. They might have been malicious bullies in their own rights, but Alfie thought it more likely that Grant’s family name did mean something in certain circles.

Grant held Alfie’s eye for a good five seconds or so. Neither of the young men looked away from one another. Then he grunted as if he wasn’t impressed with what he saw and wasn’t going to waste any more of his time.

“Blimey, Turner, I can’t wait to see how long a greenhorn like you lasts in here once we start class tomorrow,” Grant said. “It should be a right giggle… for the rest of us.”

Followed by the rest of his cabal, Grant turned and swaggered away.

Alfie left the arena at the end of the show in sober contemplation. His mentality had shifted somewhat after the whole magical combat school scenario, but he was also excited to become as proficient as either Sharpe or Cane were.

“You really think the likes of us can hope to get as good as them?” Will said when Alfie mentioned this to him.

Alfie breathed in deeply. The smell of lavender and mint was heavy in the air as they passed an herb garden.

“Only time will tell, mate,” he said. “Only time will tell.”