Alistair kept his wand at the ready as Juno, Finnian, and Zola fired at Professor Yuber with their wands at the same time.

Zapp! Zapp! Zapp!

Their opening attacks bounced off his carapace as the professor jumped forward and snapped one of his claws together. This produced a wave of force that slammed into Finnian, who had been on the verge of summoning one of his creatures.

“Finn!” Lauren shouted as the boy flew past her, hit the ground, bounced twice, and remained down.

Juno: He’s out! He’s not responding to Spectral Text! No, Finnian, noooooooo!

Zola: Focus on the professor. We still got you, me, Alistair, Lauren, and Dawn in the fight!

Next to Lauren, Dawn summoned a spectral serpent with wings, which shot off toward Professor Yuber and absorbed his next claw attack.

Ghost: What are you waiting for? You’re already down a man. Hit that bastard with something!

Alistair used Lightning Firestorm, the bolts igniting the ground all around Professor Yuber, one of them even managing to take out a chunk of his armor. Yet the rest of his shell protected him, and Yuber was on the move in a matter of moments after conjuring an orb filled with bubbly mana.

“Get out of the way!” Zola cried as she dove left, the girl dragging Juno with her.

“Holy monster balls!” Juno cried as the orb Yuber had summoned sizzled, releasing the bubbles trapped inside, Juno’s statement causing several of the students to snicker.

The bubbles floated over the battlefield, creating explosive obstacles for the students to avoid. It was Lauren who discovered this the hard way as she bumped into one of the orbs and it sent her spinning backward.

“Ugh!” She managed to land without knocking herself out, Lauren back on her feet in a matter of moments. Determined to stay in the fight, she summoned a panther with scaled armor. It rushed forward, avoiding the mana bubbles as it neared Yuber. Yuber knocked it to the right with the broadside of his crab claws as Zola’s Dragonmaid Oni rushed in with fiery fists, which he also managed to beat back.

“You all can do better than that!”

“Piglet, kick his ass!” Juno yelled as he summoned his cactuswine, which immediately ran into trouble with the bubble obstacles. They exploded and Piglet was thrown to the side, where he hit another bubble, and another. “Nooo!” Juno cried as some of the students in the stands laughed at his misfortune. “Nooo!”

“At least Piglet—I hate that name—is clearing them out!” Zola said as she tried to fire at Yuber with a manabound lance that Alistair had never seen her use before.

Ghost: This should be easy. All of you should just hit him at once, but there is no strategy here; you’re letting his form confuse you!

“Just shut up for a second,” Alistair told Ghost as he used Mistmeld, which obscured the battlefield.

“Ah!” Dawn shouted as she ran into one of the bubbles. She was blown into the air, where her summon managed to catch her.

Ghost: Your answer to literal mines on the battlefield was to obscure the terrain?

Alistair pointed his wand at Yuber and hit him with Nova Strike, which caused him to stagger backward.

Alistair: I can still see.

Ghost: That’s because of your Moonlight skill. Not everyone has something like that.

Lauren’s panther yowled. Alistair watched as it landed on the back of Yuber’s shell and drove its claws in. Yet the panther didn’t quite understand the assignment, and Yuber quickly threw it off his back.

With the flick of his wand, Alistair cast Rain of Blades, sending daggers hurtling at Professor Yuber. The professor batted many of them away, but one happened to strike one of the glowing pieces of his armor.

Ghost: Nice! Two down, three to go.

“Everyone, behind me!” Juno shouted as he cast Striped Barrier, which created a shield of mana around him made of strips of energy.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Before Alistair joined him, he summoned Ziggy and Noctarii. “Not now,” he told the fae just as he was about to say something. “Deal with Professor Yuber!”

Squish? Squish! Squish! Squish! Ziggy asked as it hopped up and down.

For some reason, Alistair was able to interpret this as a lethal suggestion. “No, don’t kill him. We need to break the glowing parts of his armor.”

“The slime and I will handle everything!” Noctarii said, but then one of the mana bubbles exploded near him.

As Alistair joined Juno, Ziggy approached the fallen shadow fae, the slime seemingly oblivious to the students firing on their professor or the hovering mana bubbles. Squish? Ziggy poked Noctarii. …Squish?

Ghost took over at that point as they huddled behind Juno’s shield, which had already started to fade. “Dammit, Ziggy, focus!”

Juno burst out laughing as he went for his Ghost impression: “Wraith is on the scene. Fatal funnels for all binded professors!”

“Juno—!” Zola shouted.

“Monster sack!” Juno let out a little shriek as a huge reptilian creature leaped out of the mist, indicating Professor Yuber had taken a new form. Yuber swung his scaled tail at the students and took Juno out, who bore the brunt of the attack.

The professor threw his head back and roared with laughter.

“Lauren!” Alistair said as he reached a hand out to her. He pulled her closer to him just as Yuber slammed his barbed tail down onto the stone.

“I’ve got it!” Lauren swiveled, the girl still in Alistair’s arms, as she released an oval-shaped burst of oscillating mana from the tip of her wand.

“Argh!” Professor Yuber cried as her blast temporarily blinded him.

“Thanks, Alistair!” Lauren kissed his cheek, patted him on his lower back, and moved on.

Ghost: Don’t just stand there. Wait. No. No. It can’t be? Was that your first kiss?

Momentarily oblivious to everything, Alistair reached his hand to his cheek, as if he could somehow capture the kiss.

Ghost: Alistair? Alistair! Snap out of it! I can take you to a pleasure house in Solaria, if that will help—

Wham!

Alistair was struck by Professor Yuber’s tail. He did something akin to a cartwheel and landed on his neck. Everything flashed black, but then the color returned as Ghost took over. “We’re not going down like a pair of little bitches!” the assassin growled.

Alistair tried to remind Ghost that the assassin couldn’t use his wand, but Ghost didn’t care.

He rushed toward the lizard creature, wand-in-hand. As he had done before, the assassin threw himself into the fray. Ghost landed on the lizard monster’s spiked back, where he pounded his fist into a glowing bit of armor.

“Mr. Blackstar?” Yuber asked, his voice with a jagged edge to it. He stopped swinging his massive tail around, grabbed Ghost by the cuff of his overcoat, and lifted whom the professor assumed was Alistair as the boy kept trying to punch him.

Lauren’s panther struck Yuber, causing him to drop Alistair.

This was followed by a fiery burst from Zola’s summon and finally the roar of a bear as Zola called her Runestone Onikuma forward. It leaped onto Yuber and began mauling him as the three girls rushed over to Alistair.

“You’re crazy!” Lauren said, excitement in her eyes. She looked like she wanted to kiss Alistair again. She even moved closer to him, yet Ghost put his hand up, pressed her face away, and looked ahead toward the professor.

“This fight isn’t over yet.” Ghost got to his feet, found Alistair’s wand which had happened to land near him, and brought it up.

Ghost: You’re in. Looks like Yuber is changing forms again.

Ahead of them, Yuber had managed to beat all the summons back aside from Ziggy, who was attached to his leg and trying to climb up his body. He drove a set of reptilian claws into Ziggy, ripped the slime off, and tossed it to the ground.

Squish…

Yuber’s form morphed back into his normal body as Perseus’s head pressed out of the professor’s chest, only this time, the Oni-Djinn’s eyes glowed an intense red as they produced a bolt of searing mana that cut into the stone. A portion of it ran across Dawn’s arm, the girl crying out in pain.

“I’m fucking out!” Dawn said as she stumbled toward the reps from the campus hospital, who had already gathered Juno and Finnian.

Ghost: Now or never. He tried to kill Ziggy!

Alistair felt an anger surge through him, one that he answered by pulling Hooty’s card from his chest and crushing it in his hand. The two melded together and Alistair stormed forward.

“You will regret this! No, Perseus!” Yuber shouted as the summon’s jaw dislocated and a mana-charged fist burst out of his mouth. It struck Alistair directly in his face and did much worse as Alistair felt his body shift, like he was being pulled out of his binded form.

Whomf!

He slapped against the ground, Alistair in his body again, everything around him fuzzy.

Wheehmf!

Lauren landed on top of him, the girl thrown by Professor Yuber and now out cold. Alistair moved to get out from beneath her just as Zola took the brunt of another burst of mana, which saw her drop to her knees, wobble and fall forward, face-down.

Alistair pushed himself out from beneath Lauren, his eyes tracing over the ground as he looked for his wand. A new sensation came over him as everything went black. Alistair fell, and landed in a heap on the ground next to Lauren.

The last thing he remembered seeing were Lauren’s eyes, which were dazed, her pupils’ twitching.

Alistair reached a shaky hand out to the other girl as consciousness left his body.