Two students were dead. Nora had sacrificed part of her shield to protect a third and been knocked prone for her efforts. Everyone else had managed to keep themselves largely safe from the explosions, but that didn’t meant they were ready for the follow-up.
Nine—no, eight—against four should have been an unfair fight in First Academy’s favor, especially when two of the Reserve members were master-class, but when it came to magic, raw numbers mattered less than situations. Paragon-class magicians had been killed by D-class magicians with a pistol and a great deal of patience before. With a much closer match like this and the benefit of the ambush to play off of, the cirumstances heavily favored their attackers.
Waylan, Ashley, and Uriel, all members of prismatic families as well as Graduate Reserve leadership, were well aware of who they were dealing with. This iteration of Auria’s Sanguine didn’t have a consistent modus operandi beyond their willingness to use underhanded tactics, of which this certainly was one.
All four magicians began the fight with B-class spell jammers.
Banned in ninety-nine percent of the functional magical states in the modern world, spell jammers relied on a rare material formally recognized as tetraplanarchaonite or 3P-chaonite but more commonly known simply as chaonite. Found only in high-class Gates and in upper levels of a Tower, said material was capable of producing heavy flux interference, disrupting any spell cast in the area. Given their ban and their incredible rarity, even a B-class one had to cost in the millions of dollars.
The Reserve was drilled on how to deal with these devices. Ashley, a member of one of the branch clans of the Gold family, specialized in wide-range area-of-effect fortification effects, so she moved to counteract the spell for all of them while the other Reserve members used A-class spells to bypass the interference, focusing their efforts on protecting Ashley and lighting up the area.
The undergraduates, however, were only supposed to be sent into combat theaters where the sheer distance of engagements made jammers impractical. One of the two surviving undergraduates managed to realize what was going on, but the other tried to counter what he assumed was a hostile area-of-effect conjuration spell with his own B-class magic, a sabotage-type single-target spell.
His spell fizzled, failing to form a magic process properly. Not understanding what was happening, he poured more flux into his spell attempt. The flux he’d spent initially hadn’t dissipated, though, and his spell process came no closer to completion.
“Allen!” Uriel cried, spotting out the undergraduate trying to cast through it. “Stop!”
Rather than casting spells, the ambushers drew assault rifles. Uriel threw up a set of A-class shield spells, warding off the bullets, but the din of supersonic projectiles in an enclosed area drowned out her words, panicking the undergraduate more.
Realizing his first spell wasn’t working and seeing the bullets coming his way—a situation he had never had to deal with in the tournaments—Allen tried to protect himself with a shield, not realizing that Uriel had already covered him.
One of many reasons why the refinement and sale of chaonite was banned was because of what it actually did to jam magic. If it was just a magical negator, that would be a powerful equalizer but not terrible. After all, one of the Five Systems of Modern Magic was Enhancement, which was comprised of fortification and sabotage magic. The latter was entirely focused around shutting down flux and negatively influencing energy, and it was significantly less regulated than chaonite.
What spell jammers led to was failed spells below a certain barrier of complexity and power simply bunching around the users, externalizing their internal flux and exposing it to the elements. When more flux was added to the mix, activation processes attempting and failing to formulate them into actual spells, magicians who cast into jammers became very potent sources of energy.
Energy, like most beings, sought to be free. When combined with a panicked magician, the results tended not to be pretty.
Waylan recognized this, cursed, and dashed not towards the enemy but Allen.
He tackled the undergraduate, slamming the butt of his manifested Phoenix Blade into Allen’s FCDs. It was a risky play, but his only other option in this moment was letting the student die.
The moment Allen stopped controlling his already chaotic flux, it exploded outwards, turning the competitor into a living bomb. With his FCD broken, it at least didn’t reroute through him, which would have guaranteed death.
Quarter second window, Waylan thought to himself. Three and a half feet.
He parried the explosion, redirecting the mass of detonating energy towards the nearest source of hostile flux he could sense.
It wasn’t perfect. The uncontrolled magic still seared Allen’s skin, charring it as it exploded out of him. It was the best Waylan could manage, though, and it proved to be enough. The magician he targeted had a gun in one hand and a spell jammer in the other, and he wasn’t able to reach his FCD fast enough to attempt to counteract the mass of energy. The backfired spell scorched the air, creating a seemingly red beam of force that tore through the ambusher like a knife through hot butter.
“Dome up!” Ashley called out, controlling her voice. “Spells good to go!”
Her tactical-class spell, Shrouded Veil, created an area where designated allies within it were surrounded by a layer of stable flux. Its primary use case was to activate as a countermeasure against spells that targeted flux specifically, but it was also effective against spell jammers. While within the area of her “dome,” her allies would be able to cast any spells without worrying about their flux being interfered with.
That marked the turning point of the ambush. Sanguine hadn’t sent the best of their best, and though the enemy magicians were tactical-class and had the jump, the Reserve had trained how to deal with this type of force. With the guns and spell jammers rendered not a threat, a dazed Nora and Lawrence put further defensive measures up together, using standardized spells to construct a defensive zone.
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Steven and Waylan played offense while Uriel focused on cycling her shields to keep her flux capacity up. Bullets drained magic quickly, so she couldn’t afford to lose focus.
“Allen!” the undergraduate girl who’d managed to get into the safe zone cried out. “He’s hurt really badly!”
Uriel’s eyes shifted to the ground, where Allen lay on his back in the water, barely breathing. “Start retreating once we’ve pacified this threat.”
Lawrence and Nora both drew guns of their own once they finished their one-way defenses, firing back. Their help drew the attention of the three surviving magicians, who were forced to throw up shields of their own—just in time for Steven and Waylan to materialize from the shadows and kill them, blades passing through body armor like it was made of paper.
The only conscious undergraduate watched two magicians die in horror, eyes widening as bodies toppled over.
“Last one,” Waylan said grimly. “Come on and—“
The water under them twisted, and they looked down, each of them wondering if they’d imagined it.
Only Waylan and Uriel had the presence of mind and experience to know what that sensation meant.
Cascadians.
Both of them leapt upwards, Uriel burning extra flux to use a movement spell. Their shouted warnings weren’t quick enough for others to react to, though, and with a series of splashes, the water itself dragged everyone else from First Academy down with a mind of its own.
From the knee deep water that they’d been fighting in, three more figures emerged, dropping their stealth spells in favor of conjuring weapons. All three wore pristine casual outfits that didn’t seem to have gotten wet in the slightest.
The one in the lead waved as he appeared, pistol in his other hand, and he shot twice.
Lawrence and Nora, both of whom were too busy struggling not to drown to focus on defensive spells, abruptly stopped squirming, dark red mixing into the water around them.
“Retreat!” Waylan called out, casting his seventh simultaneous spell to form a platform in the air to kick off from. “I’ll hold them off!”
Uriel nodded, dropping her protection spell to one that focused on repositioning large numbers of people. It was one of her secondary spells, intended to be used to get to vantage points that her group could then rain artillery magic down from, but it would work in this instant.
One of Waylan’s perception-type spells enhanced his flux sensitivity, giving him a better idea of what he was up against. These three were all tactical-class, he guessed, but they’d used the water, which meant they were almost certainly Cascadians. Magical battles weren’t strictly linear in terms of which power could beat which, and if this was their element, Waylan didn’t like his odds. His magic worked best when he was the aggressor, not the defender, but he needed to keep the others safe.
As the lead magician went to counteract Uriel’s movement spell, Waylan dashed forward, using the seventh spell slot to redirect his aerial momentum as geysers shot up in an attempt to bring him down.
A tactical-class spell surged from under him, water shooting up towards him in hyper-pressurized jets.
His window was ninety milliseconds and roughly three centimeters. Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t even have dreamed of trying to use Silent Mirror on it, but he knew where this spell would be going if he didn’t try. Waylan was a sword, and his purpose was to protect.
He parried the stream, redirecting it at the magician who’d fired it. Said magician simply held his hand up and caught the water, letting it splash harmlessly beneath him, then cast again.
At the same time, one of the other magicians raised an FCD, contesting Uriel’s movement spell. With his other hand, he pointed at Ashley, who’d been submerged underwater but hadn’t broken focus on her spells. The third fired a pistol at her heart just as Uriel passed a surge of flux into her spell, jerking Ashley just out of the way enough for the shot to hit her shoulder instead of a lethal spot.
It was still enough. Ashley bubbled out a pained cry, and her spell went down. As Waylan went to move again, three spell jammers switched on, limiting what he could cast to very high-level spells that would exhaust him in a single go.
“I can’t believe this is how I’m going to go out,” he muttered, preparing one of his three master-class spells—Supernova. It was a Red signature, and it was very rarely used given its tendency to exhaust the user to the bridge of death, but anything less powerful wasn’t going to work against them.
Uriel had managed to win her tug-of-war, but though she was telekinetically dragging the survivors, there were still three First Academy students here who’d be in the area of effect.
Waylan raised his FCD to cast anyway, hovering with the last of his movement spell—and a jet of water shot out from above him, cleanly severing his arm at the elbow.
The master-class duelist fell, his spells abruptly no longer active. As he fell, he tried to manifest his flux anyway, hoping he could provide enough of a distraction with a backfire that would be sure to kill him—and then, suddenly, a burst of flame appeared right next to him. His gut twisted as he suddenly felt as if he was falling upwards, and then he was elsewhere.
Next to him were Uriel, Ashley, the undergraduate girl, Steven, Allen, and, for some reason…
“Bianca?” he asked, shock numbing his mind to the pain of his arm. “Syl?”
“You’re still bleeding,” Bianca said. “I cauterized the wound to a certain extent, but you need medical attention immediately. Uriel, can you move them?”
“Yes,” Uriel replied. “You two shouldn’t be here.”
“No, we should have,” Syl said. “Go. They’re going to be pursuing, and you don’t want to be in water when they get here.”
Before Waylan could ask any more questions, Uriel was moving them again. He jostled, the pain and overstrain of everything that had just happened to him finally catching up to him, and he passed out.
#
“Good play on the movement,” Syl said. “I don’t think I could have gotten all of them out in time.”
“I was late,” Bianca replied. “There are four dead because I didn’t get there fast enough.”
Before Syl could reply, they heard other voices.
“I’ll leave you to this one,” Bianca said. “I’ve shown too much as it is.”
Syl nodded quietly, advancing.
“—because your people couldn’t get the job done,” one person was saying. “We’re all still stuck in here until the Gate opens, anyway. There won’t be witnesses who can confirm who we are.”
“Witnesses?” Syl asked, stepping into the open.
He’d already mapped this area out through his allies who’d just been here, so he was unsurprised by the bodies floating in the water, nor by the four surviving enemy magicians.
“And who the fuck are you supposed to be?” asked the magician who must have been from Sanguine, judging by the black and red on his outfit.
“Good question,” Syl said. “I was going to ask you the same thing. One of you, to be exact.”
“One?” one of the Cascadians laughed, his rough accent coloring the words. “Yeah, right. You’re just some kid. Did you think you were going to play the hero?”
“I’m not much of a hero,” Syl said. “I’ll let you live if you surrender yourselves right now.”
That got all of the Cascadians laughing, much to the annoyance of the surviving Sanguine operative.
“You look like you’re barely out of high school,” one of the Cascadians—this one a woman—said. “Do you think you’re stronger than me? Than us?”
“No, I don’t think that,” Syl said. “I know it. If you want someone I think I’m stronger than… Maybe Gluttony.”
Even the Sanguine operative laughed at that one.
“The Cascadian Sinner,” the woman whooped. “Look at this kid go.”
“I’m going to assume that’s a no to the surrendering, then,” Syl said. “That’s fine by me.”
He snapped his fingers, releasing the spell he’d been pre-casting from his other FCD.
Master-class wide-range absorption-type spell, Cocytus.
Every droplet of water in the cavern they were in froze.