When Alisa left the twins, it was with a significant amount of reassurance in Zen's decision. She didn't want to discount Lia's obviously well-meant advice, but she trusted Zen far more than either of their dragons. Also, how was she supposed to remember their names? Riss and Raxi, and one of their owners was named Reen. She wouldn't be surprised if no one remembered which one was whose.
Which ... might be part of the point? They seemed very attached to each other. Even though they'd been obviously friendly with Zen, Riss was obviously prior claimant on Raxi's affections. Zen just hadn't met a female Aelanir before and didn't know how to handle himself.
Typical tiny dragon boy.
Said tiny dragon boy currently slept draped over her shoulders, his tail flicking gently in time with his breathing. She'd have to get him something to eat in the next day or so, if the pattern held. He tended to get hungry less frequently the older he grew, but he ate prodigious amounts when he did. There was little to be done but indulge him, she had no idea of when to tell him no.
Maybe the bond would help. Maybe it would complicate things more.
She gently stroked his silver-grey scales, sending a little shiver down him as he reacted subconsciously, twitching in his sleep. Alisa smiled. He was her Zen. Her burden, her chain, her friend, her responsibility.
She wasn't sure she'd ever be able to sort out the tangled, twisted mess of emotion around him. She wanted to protect him, and if she could get rid of him completely she'd do it. She wanted to keep him forever; she wanted him to find someone else who could truly love him as he deserved.
"Time to actually attend some classes," she decided aloud. She was tired of having nothing to think about but herself and Zen. Now he was asleep, she had the chance to go visit a classroom and at least pretend she was doing her duty as a student. So far she'd survived every query with 'but dragon' but she wasn't sure how much longer that excuse would remain valid.
She stopped by her room to pick up her schedule, looked it over for which class she should be in, and headed for the lecture hall. She was just in time to catch the last few minutes of a class about the mathematics of gravity on spells, which was a bit more in depth than the similar class in battle magic. She wished she'd been here earlier, since she only had time to copy down a handful of the diagrams. She really had to stop blowing these things off. 90% of them may be useless, but some were not. She'd hate to miss out on the valuable ones.
Zen woke as the class ended, sleepily, looking grouchy at being disturbed, and then he noticed all the strange people and dragons and tensed. She coughed and wriggled, loosening his coils from the side of her neck. "Careful, Zen, I'm still here."
He was flicking his tongue wildly, head up, sniffing, looking, every sense alert.
"You've seen these people before," Alisa told him. "They're the same ones that were outside the other day, remember?"
He didn't respond, not even to stare at her, too absorbed by the cacophony that had been set off by the teacher's dismissal of the class. They talked and laughed and divided into groups - which seemed even more firmly drawn along dragon alliance lines. Alisa had noticed it before with the Blaze boys, but she could see that the types of dragons had quite thoroughly split the class into new directions.
She spent some time talking to Hana, a less outgoing girl who she'd always pitied for her odd-shaped nose and inclination to stare in an almost disturbing manner which combination led to her being somewhat shunned by the others. She had no enemies, but no friends either, and Alisa didn't think anyone deserved to be alone. Especially not for something as minimal as a creepy face.
Well, okay, Hana did have a legitimately creepy face, and Alisa may have spent nights laughing about it with Sadie, but that only made her feel even more pity for the girl.
Hana had the misfortune of not only having a disturbing face, but also an antisocial dragon. Her tiny Vectrin had been one of the first to hatch and yet still hadn't reached the size of her hand. To compensate for this fact, she had decided to be the most aggressive and standoffish brat of a dragon, despite Hana's attempts to curb her. The multi-winged little monster hissed and buzzed her wings furiously as Alisa approached, and Zen growled right back.
They conversed for only a few minutes before the better part of wisdom indicated they should retreat before the two dragons came to blows. Alisa didn't doubt that Zen could crush the little Vectrin monster, but she also didn't want to be responsible for the death of anyone else's dragon.
"You're just not good at making friends today, are you?" she asked Zen, who watched her without concern.
"Well, let's get back to my place."
When she reached her room, there was a note informing her that there would be a mandatory battle magic class in three days. Attendance was not optional, and she would be there no matter what.
Lane Ryvas had personally signed the note. Alisa nodded and made a mental note not to try to skip it, despite her misgivings about having Zen around so many dragons so suddenly and all at the same time. There were some teachers you could afford to get on the bad side of. The battle magic instructor? He didn’t seem like one of those people.
“Today we’ll be running an active strategic exercise,” said Lane Ryvas once everyone was gathered. “I need you to split into two teams.”
Francine immediately took charge of one group, which Alisa and Sadie did not join. They ended up in the team with Adrien, a taller boy with a spike-legged Gadori drake. He wasn’t anyone Alisa knew well, but she didn’t distrust him to the extent that she’d try to usurp his leadership. Some people she just knew ‘I’m never going to follow him’ and Adrien wasn’t one of them.
"For this scenario, one group will be assaulting the academy, while the other defends. You'll be using live spells, and we have teachers and teams standing by to dispel them before they do real damage. There will be recovery stations scattered throughout the academy in case you need a place to retreat, but there is no particular healing available beyond the ordinary. If you end up toasted, you should have been practicing dodging or shields."
Shields were, in Alisa's opinion, an utterly pointless waste of energy. Enchantments worked so much better. Reliable, only activated when triggered, and couldn't be mis-cast if things were chaotic. She didn't even know the hand-casting circle for a shield.
"Don't worry about damage to the grounds. This whole place is your battleground. Give your best."
Alisa couldn't help but feel uncomfortable at that. "Even the lodging buildings?" she asked hesitantly.
"Even the residence halls. If you want to protect your home, you can do that from anywhere."
Alisa had a bad feeling about the setup. "And which team will be attacking?"
"Yours."
She exhaled in relief. At least Francine wouldn't have an excuse to lead an invasion. Their home should be safe enough if they were on the attack.
Adrien immediately started assessing everyone's strengths and weaknesses, asking who could cast which spells at what casting rate, who had good aim, who had solid range.
Alisa raised her hand for the latter two, as her experiments with range had all given her a decent grasp of how the standard attack spells interacted with dragon magic.
But beyond that, she was one of the weaker mages. Many of the boys especially had elected to study battle magic for fun prior to this war being announced. Their repertoires already included vastly greater quantities of spells than Alisa could hope to match.
Adrien set about organizing the groups, Alisa assigned to be a rearguard with a target of the administration building.
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They were to begin at a paddock in the new outer academy ring, then fight their way in from there to the inner circle and claim the victory.
She'd mainly be watching and sniping anyone who seemed too successful at the defence. She couldn't let the front wave of attackers hit a group that was properly prepared for them, instead her task was to ensure that they were in disarray so her accompanying attack would shatter any organization they may make a pretense of.
It was actually a rather gratifying task, to her surprise. Alisa had always assumed that war and fighting would be dark, grim, horrible things, but the thrill of lining up her targets and casting her spells somehow cut through all the worry and turned out to be simply fun.
There was some slight concern about the potential of damaging the academy's grounds, but Lane Ryvas had insisted they not be bothered by it, so Alisa fired into Francine's well-organized defence formation and laughed when they lost cohesion and fell apart.
The rest of the attack did not go entirely as planned. Neither side was used to working in groups or any of this manner of fighting, so they didn't tend to do things particularly orderly or particularly well. The attack fell apart just as quickly as the defence, and in the end it was more a grappling fistfight than a strategic magic battle.
Alisa saw Sadie punch Francine in the face, while Mirva savaged the unfortunate Grandus from behind. The bigger, slower dragon twisted and snarled, but Mirva was small and fast for all her heavyset build, and nipped and clawed quite as eagerly as her mistress was hitting Francine.
Alisa wasn't sure if that was a good thing, though. Getting one over on Francine through cleverness and guile was one thing, a well structured magical trap another. But fighting her directly? That seemed unwise.
Still, there was nothing stopping her from putting her word in.
With a smirk, she charged up a nice fire spell, tuned it toward stone to give it drag, and lobbed it in a smooth arc toward the grappling girls.
Mirva squeaked and took to the sky, flying straight up for several seconds until she hovered far above the little fight. The Grandus, seeing a chance to gain an advantage over her smaller opponent, launched herself upward as well. Alisa's spell slammed into the ground just short of hitting Sadie, throwing up hot globs of fiery magic and clods of earth. Sadie reacted fast, twisting herself so Francine was between herself and the sudden explosion. Francine took advantage of the unsteadiness to trip Sadie to the ground, landing fully atop her. This only further exposed her back to the hot mud, and Alisa grinned when a particularly large clod splattered across the back of Francine's spotless blue dress.
To her credit, their longtime foe didn't shriek and jump up, remembering she was in a fight, and only scowled in response to the damage to what was certainly more expensive than all of Sadie and Alisa's wardrobes combined. Alisa fired another shot on the same trajectory, then adjusted the next to hit a little beyond the two. She didn't want to hit Sadie, but unless she could distract Francine it looked like her friend would be in for a hard time of it.
Then Mirva dove from the air, the Grandus right behind her. She swooped aside in the last second, leaving the larger dragon to flail awkwardly in an attempt to reorient from a power dive. Instead, she slammed full force into Francine's back, knocking the wind out of both her and Sadie. Alisa grinned and fired another spell in their direction, throwing it a little low so it would either knock the Grandus off the pile of struggling girls, or hit the ground right beyond them.
To her delight, the Grandus was too distracted to sense the incoming missile, and it splashed her full on, bowling her wing over tail in a tangle, and throwing off the balance of Francine's pin sufficiently that Sadie flipped her over and jumped off, getting safely away before the scrambling girl could disengage herself from her toppled dragon.
Alisa nearly jumped in the air with triumph as Sadie drew a quick stone hold spell and tossed it at Francine's feet, locking her in place until she could force a counter.
They'd begun learning about countermagic measures lately, though Alisa had been a bit distracted with her young dragon. Zen - currently leashed to her belt and disconsolately trying to figure out how to fly, feeling left out with all these other dragons zipping about in the air so freely - had been more of a handful than she'd anticipated.
Sometimes he was perfectly well behaved. Other times, he ran around in increasingly frantic circles, knocking everything that could possibly be knocked over onto the floor, deliberately clawing her curtains to shreds, or throwing himself against the window enough times that it began to crack.
She'd given him a very stern talking to for that one, and as far as she knew he hadn't repeated the attempt. but she wouldn't put it past him to break out one day.
Francine, it turned out, had been paying a lot more attention in countermagic lessons than Alisa, because she immediately drew her stylus and started writing on the spell itself. Sadie managed to get halfway to her target building before Francine threw the reformatted spell at her.
Alisa instinctively traced a tiny dart of air, intending to fire it off at hypermagic speeds to intercept the attack, but she'd neglected to factor her shifted magic into her impulsive action. She'd drawn the spell at normal size, not inflated dragon mage size, and thus the blob of useless magic hovered in place, formless and worthless. Alisa scowled and stabbed it with her finger, sending it bobbing slowly toward Francine.
Then something hit Alisa full in the face, and she flew backwards before slamming to the ground. She lay stunned, completely blindsided by the attack. What had--
Oh, look. Zack had decided that the best defence was to hunt down the sniper and take her out of the picture. His Blaze hissed in defiance and sprang at Zen, who lay tangled in his lead and unable to get free of Alisa.
She made a snap decision and fumbled at his back, unclipped his lead as she scrambled to her feet. "Go get him," she whispered, and Zen obliged.
The Blaze had taken it for granted that its opponent was tangled, using feints and nips at Zen's tail and wings then retreating whenever he turned to fight back.
Zen took full advantage of this, pretending to strain at the lead to swipe at the dragon, then springing suddenly with the full force of all four wings when he saw an opportunity.
The larger, more lizard-like dragon was taken completely off guard by Zen's sudden freedom. Before it could retaliate Zen had circled his middle body around its neck and forelegs, locking them in place. It leapt into the air, screaming and clawing with its back legs at the thin coils that circled it, to no avail. Zen's back plating was thick enough to withstand the grating clawing of the immature Blaze, though his back spikes were still soft and vulnerable. One broke off entirely under the frantic scratching and clawing. Alisa might normally have been concerned, but she had bigger things to worry about at the moment.
The dragon may have been distracted, but Zack wasn’t.
He'd adapted very quickly to dragon magic, and Alisa knew as soon as she saw the spell forming in his hand that she was outmatched. Zack had always been one of the better mages, and it was so typically unfair that he also happened to be good at adapting to sudden shifts in power type.
Alisa started tracing her own spell, but in the heat of the moment she did it too small again, using old instincts which would no longer serve her. The perfectly drawn counterattack ran together and blurred in its too-compressed form, making a small explosion of light and solid magic instead of the elongated diamond prism of protective power.
Zack's spell hit her full in the chest, slamming her back off her feet and sending her to the ground for the second time in as many minutes. She frantically traced a hasty stone spell in retaliation, but Zack had his own shield in place in time to negate her attack.
Maybe shields were good for something after all. How annoying.
And then he slammed her shoulders with the earthbind spell, and turned to help his blaze get free of the angry Zen.
Alisa couldn't move. She could still cast, but at her awkward angle she couldn't see what she was doing or where to aim. If she'd known how to counter the spell trapping her, she could have tried, but 'put foreign magic into it until it breaks' was about as far as her countermagic knowledge went. She knew item hacking well enough to disable Francine's amulet back before the insanity began, but hacking a spell was different than hacking an item.
Items were stable, containment devices for spells. If you could physically change the item's spell containment, it would alter the spell.
Free-floating spells were more like a solid fluid, like molten glass or frozen water, held in place by the caster's will more than anything else. It was that control that had to be subverted, rather than anything real.
A direct confrontation between mages would be determined more by strength than by anything else - one more reason dragon mages were so feared. Bringing the full magical strength of the most powerful of magic beasts to bear on any normal mage would fold them like dry parchment. Between dragon mages, the hierarchy tended to vary wildly by the individual.
And so Alisa lay trapped on the hill, casting spells blindly in the general direction of where her attacker stood, until the blare of Lane Ryvas's trumpet called them back and declared the exercise over.
Zack, who'd taken up sniping from her position just out of sight, came over and undid his spells and helped her to her feet with a sort of apologetic smile.
They spent the next five minutes trying to talk their dragons down, as the angry tangle paid no heed to things like trumpets and exercises being over. Zen was going to crush this upstart who dared be bonded to someone who'd attack his Alisa, and the Blaze was equally unwilling to give ground. Only when Alisa snapped Zen's lead back on and Zack pulled firmly on his Blaze by the middle were the tangled dragons finally forced apart, snarling and clawing all the while.
"Zen, relax! It was practice. A test fight. Nothing to be all worked up about. Calm down."
Zen squirmed his way out of her arms and ran to the extreme end of the lead, straining, flapping his wings madly as he tried to gain some momentum toward the equally furious Blaze. Zack was barely able to keep his dragon restrained, and nodded a quick apology to Alisa before sprinting off toward the gathering field.
Alisa followed more slowly, resisting the tug of Zen trying to make her run. She explained the purpose and nature of the exercise to him as many different ways as she could think of as they walked, hoping some of it would get through to him. Finally, he gave up, the tense loop of his back falling as he walked more relaxed and stretched out.
Alisa picked him up and told him he was a good dragon, and he seemed pleased enough, but she felt another concern beginning to grow. If he got much stronger, he'd probably be able to drag her around even if she did keep a hold on his lead. If he reached that level of strength before he was large enough around for their deal to come into play, he very well might end up unmanageable.
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