Other than Kaiser’s match the rest of them had been suitably grandiose. Fitting for an arena such as this. Not that Luna especially cared about that though. She couldn’t really say she regretted being knocked out of the tourney either. The game was fun in concept, but ill suited to her. She was still useful as she could identify what the other team was preparing, but without an option to use melee force she was practically worthless as a fighter. It was a blow to her pride, but not a large one, everyone had their specializations after all. Even Azura had things he wasn’t good at.
The next names appeared, and like most of the others she couldn’t say she recognized any of the names. It seemed to be a team of 2 4 years and a 3rd year, against an all 4th year team. She wasn’t all that invested, but the rest of her friends were watching the fight with rapt attention. That was good, she could take this as a chance to think. She needed to be doing plenty of that. Her stupid grudge simply because Azura had made a couple poor decisions. Why couldn’t she just let it go. She had idolized him, and she was beginning to realize the phrase ‘never meet your heroes’ wasn’t just in case they ended up being jerks.
No matter how famous, or skilled they are, they’re still only human, and that meant they were fallible like everyone else. They had flaws, and they would make mistakes, and it hurt to watch your hero fail. No matter how small the failure. She knew she was being unfair, but that didn’t make it easy to let go of. She’d of course already apologized for her behavior to Azura. She knew she was in the wrong, but she couldn’t really help what she felt.
She was knocked out of her thoughts by a loud thunder clap. As lightning filled the stadium creating a flash so bright she along with almost everyone else had been forced to shield their eyes. When the spots left her eyelids she hesitantly opened her eyes. They proceeded to widen in shock, when that crazy light show had in fact not been the finishing blow. The fight continued, powerful spells were exchanged, fire and lightning crashed repeatedly in the center of the stage.
She was awed at the fierce power put on display. This was a magic battle between 4th years huh? She would have been disintegrated in an instant. Now tuned back into the world around her she caught the tail end of a conversation her friends were having. “... Lightning has an edge here. It’s more condensed, that and its speed makes it far more viable in a fight like this. If their power is even then type will become the deciding factor.” She must have missed an important piece, because she didn’t think the combatants were at even power, though she supposed it didn’t matter. Since the 3rd year was on the fire guys team, lightning guy would have won either way… or at least according to Azura he would have.
***
Azura found he enjoyed watching these fights a lot more than he should. This game was the closest he’d ever get to enchantment being acknowledged as viable combat magic. That, and the lack of melee as an option really made people get creative. Well some people got creative, others just spammed powerful attacks like the people down there now. This was the last match of the first round, and the clashing attacks felt suitably cataclysmic. Gale force winds, tsunami level waves, and lightning flew about the stadium as if to end the world. Of course the storm completely stopped the 2nd it reached the coliseum all. The headmistress couldn’t have the viewers dying in an accident after all.
“Not to doubt you Azura, but are you sure you can compete with that?” On his own, absolutely not. However he could enhance Elismera enough that keeping up with 2 or 3 4th years was doable enough. Of course the real threat came in the form of Kaiser, which he was significantly less confident in their victory against.
“Not at all, I’m just supporting this game, Elismera will be the one dealing with that assault.” There wasn’t another option. His enchantments wouldn’t be enough to keep him safe if that kind of force was brought to bear. Even his anti-magic fields had weaknesses, and these people were strong enough to exploit them without even knowing they were there.
“It shouldn’t be a problem, I’ve yet to see an attack of significant enough scale that I am not confident in my ability to repel it.” He didn’t doubt it either. He had yet to see even a fraction of Elismera’s full power, and he was honestly psyched to see what an all out fight between Elismera and Kaiser looked like. Or at least what it looked like in cyvran. He would like to have a school to go to afterwards of course.
The battle currently raging was intense, but in a lot of ways the intensity was far less frightening than Kaiser's quick display of strength. He may not be able to stop attacks on that scale, but he could at least react to them. Kaiser’s match had been over in the blink of an eye. He hadn’t even perceived the spell being cast. That was the sheer difference in ability. He’d have to go all out from the very start when they finally had their match. He hoped that would be enough.
Finally the battle ended when an eagle of lightning shot down from the clouds on the team that had been using water and wind. The glass shattering was completely subsumed by the crack of thunder. He wondered why there were so many lightning users. Lightning was a very effective offense, but it lacked adaptability, not that it seems to have hurt them much in this particular format.
“And that finishes up round 1! Well done to all of our round 1 participants. Now for the remaining 16, round 2 will begin shortly!” The voice sounded out across the arena. During the brief intermission he thought of all the people that had made it to round 2, and planned accordingly. Lightning was a fairly dominant element, but it was also easily dealt with a spell that acted as a lightning rod would be fairly easy for him to do. Fire would be a bit trickier, but making Elismera’s vines fireproof should suffice for that. Everything else was a bit harder to plan for, but also less dangerous so he didn’t mind playing it by ear a bit.
“There will be some other challenging fights, but as expected Kaiser is the only 1 I think we might lose to.” He had said it quietly, more mumbling to himself then speaking, but that didn’t stop Katy and Elismera from hearing him. He didn’t know elves had better hearing than humans, that was cool.
“What’s the plan for when we go against Kaiser?” It was a good question. That spell Kaiser used in round 1 wasn’t something he could ignore. If Kaiser went for an instant finish like that He wouldn’t have time to cast any spells. He could claim his half before the fight started, but it would probably be considered cheating, even if there were no actual rules about interfering with the stage the game is taking place on.
“Depends, do you think you could protect us if he does that instant knockout spell again? If you can buy me a few seconds I can get the ball rolling after that, but if not I may have to resort to being a bit sketchy.” He wasn’t a huge fan of cheating, but he was very competitive, and he was more than willing to ignore the spirit of the thing and just follow the rules as written.
“Yeah, I should be able to protect all 3 of us, it'll mean going all out and revealing a trump card of mine, but I think Kaiser’s fighting the way he is as a challenge to us. He’s not going to be holding back either.” Yeah, he had come to the same conclusion, and that scared him. The depths of Kaiser’s power were unknown to him, but he knew it was much greater than his. His friends probably had the wrong idea of Kaiser's power because of his fight with lux. He stood by his statement that Kaiser would probably take rank 6 in the 10 strongest knights, but that fight made it look like Lux was a lot less powerful than the reality.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“Ok, then after the opening salvo I’ll claim our space that will stop him from casting spells on our side at least. As for a direct counter to him, I’m not sure. Blood isn’t exactly a common spell type, and I have almost no idea what he can actually do with it.” A direct counter was probably out of the question, so he’d have to work on a ton of little things he could use to try and turn the tables. He had a few ideas already, and most of them should be fairly simple, just variations on spells he already had.
“Blood’s got a lot of iron in it, could you use that?” Not really, he’d need magnets of an unbelievable strength to even affect regular blood, whatever Kaiser’s spells did to it, the blood the heir Crimson used was anything but normal.
“Not likely, I don’t think I can do much to the blood itself, but I might be able to keep him on his toes enough that you could turn the tide. Although the other 2 members on the team aren’t going to make it easy for us to gang up on the man.” Really this wasn’t an ideal fight, there were a lot of conditions he’d give almost anything to change, even if the format itself was to their advantage.
“Why not just use your copies? Then we’ll vastly outnumber them, and you should have no problem getting your spells off.” Unfortunately the people who designed cyvran weren’t quite so foolish as to leave that glaring of a flaw in the game.
“Magic that takes place in the real world is against the rules, and my copies are a bit different from other spells. I couldn't cast them in the sub-dimension the rest of our spells go through. It’s all a bit complicated, but basically I’m not allowed to use them.” That wasn’t to say he didn’t have a use for his unique magic, but that was his little secret. A subtle use of his unique magic that no one had suspected. It was thanks to this subtle technique that he had been able to pull off the light refraction and gravity sinkhole spells so quickly. Just another benefit of his dip in the pool changing his body.
“I guess that makes sense, or at least as much sense as it can when I have no idea how your unique magic actually works.” He worked hard to keep the specifics hidden for that very reason after all. A trick is only useful as long as people don’t understand it. Knowing he can make copies of himself for example wouldn’t mean that they knew he could copy other things, and he more than anyone knew the value of hidden aces.
“Well I’m sure you are going to show me something quite impressive over this tourney, so maybe I’ll tell you a little bit about it, we’ll see.” Mostly because he was curious about the fruit she had given him by the void. If he copied the fruit would the copy have the same energy recovering ability, if it did he would become capable of practically infinite energy. Not to mention mass producing healing items at a level most would only dream of.
“I’ll hold you to that, you know.” He chuckled. Who’d have thought him and Elismera would get along so well. It was nice, Cynthia was the only other person he knew from a noble family of mages, and she got to avoid a lot of the terrible things that came with that due to both her condition and the fact her mother was unusually kind. Elismera’s upbringing however was similar to his, and though a lot of the shared traits were negative it was still nice to talk to someone so like minded from time to time.
“By all means, I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t intend to back it up.” In the noble world very rarely were things said out of hand, one always wants to keep a very tight reign on any words that were spoken. Words were important, and the wrong ones could be more dangerous than any blade. He may not like the noble culture, but that didn’t mean he was dumb enough to ignore it.
“I suppose I’ll have to show you something impressive then.” He didn’t doubt that she could, and frankly was even more excited for their next match just to see if she did anything new in it, or if she was going to save anything crazy for Kaiser. Frankly he didn’t think it mattered she and Kaiser had already seen most of the others abilities from the sounds of it.
“Round 2 is now underway, the names for the first match are up.” He smiled as he found his name not listed this time. Neither him nor Kaiser would be participating in the first match of round 2. That was good, it would be a bit suspicious if he was in the first match of each round.
***
It didn’t take long before they were called up to fight. There were only 8 matches this round after all. They were in the 5th match. Shockingly their opponent was the one who used a lightning bird from the sky. The team was fairly strong, but Azura wasn’t worried. He had plenty of ways to handle lightning. Although the very first move of the fight made him wonder if he’d have to. If this is what Elismera meant by showing him something impressive then she had certainly hit her mark.
It had formed in an instant. A tree tall enough to tower over the stadium, and wide enough to blot out the sun. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of vines shout out from the tree towards their opponents. They fought desperately against the tide, but no matter how many they destroyed more kept coming. Clouds tried to form around the base for the enemies signature attack, but the mana around the tree was too dense for the spell to properly form. He wasn’t even going to have to cast a spell was he?
If she had used something like that when they had fought he’d have been obliterated. Forget injuring her, he wouldn’t have even gotten close. Not that getting close would help since she was also vastly superior in melee, and as if that wasn’t crazy enough, if she was showing it here that meant Kaiser had already seen it and overcome it, and wasn’t that a scary thought. Still at least she was on his side for this bout, and there weren't really any consequences for failure which helped.
He tuned back into the fight to cast a quick spell to act as a lightning rod for an attack that has slipped past the thousand vines hoping to take out at least one member of their team. He felt a little bad about winning with extreme force like this, but hers was still nicer than Kaiser’s equivalent, at least the enemy team still had a chance to fight even if it was a losing battle from the very start. Sure enough a few minutes later the enemy team finally tired themselves out, and the sound of shattering glass filled the air.
“Man I knew you were holding back, but that was incredible. I’ve never seen something that big appear that quickly.” It was well beyond anything he had experienced before, to grow something like that from nothing, no wonder she’s the school's 2nd strongest student. Although perhaps just as impressive as her growing of it, was that it warped in on itself shrinking all the way down into a small seed. Caught the seed as it fell causing him to blink in surprise. When did she bring the spell out of the sub dimension?
“Thanks, it’s not quite the pinnacle of my spellcraft, or even the highest I can go, but it’s handy in a pinch.” He was speechless. What would further than that look like? That tree was huge, and was perfectly suited to offense, defense, and support, though it does admittedly lack mobility. “Here” She tossed him the seed.
“Uhh thanks?” What was he going to do with a seed? Not that he couldn’t think of any uses, but she obviously had a specific intention. Well if nothing else he could make it into one hell of a catalyst.
“It’s not going to heal you like the fruit, but it is still brimming with life energy, I figured you’d have some way to make use of it.” He smiled mischievously. Indeed he could. Nature magic was one of the hardest for him to pull off with enchantments, this seed would help quite a bit with that. He could use it like a shard, given a tool with the right enchantments was used. Well he was thinking he should make a regular sword anyway, that and he still had to make Elismera a weapon from the bark of yggdrasil, and himself one if she was nice enough to let him.
“Yeah, I can definitely make use of this, thanks. In fact, since I’ve perfected my item teleportation spell, I was just thinking I should make a lot more equipment for myself, since carrying it is no longer an issue.” Now if she was nice enough to let him take bark from the tree regularly he might even be able to make those weapons he owed the dragon within the year, as promised.