“So, today’s the day.” Alec muttered, sitting beside the campfire and using a simple wooden ladle to pour some heated porridge into a similarly simple wooden bowl.
“That’s one way of describing it.” Olivia muttered, yawning quietly into the crook of her arm as she held a hand out for the ladle, scooping herself up her own serving of porridge.
“You don’t seem very excited.”
“By watching my sister show off for who-knows-how-long all while spouting about how great her magic is? Not particularly.” The Kio girl replied spitefully, not that he could really blame her for that response.
Noelle had actually been rather nice to him, surprisingly nice given the circumstances, but even then, she had still been a bit of a bitch when it came to magic vs martial prowess even to him.
Growing up with that for just one year would have put Alec’s mental strain firmly in vein-popping territory, let alone the potential seventeen years that Olivia had been dealing with it.
“Yeah, that makes sense.” Alec agreed numbly, nodding slowly as he took his first spoonful of porridge.
As he slowly chewed, he couldn’t help but let his mind wander, bringing him right back around to why he had asked the question of Olivia in the first place.
“Listening to your sister gloat the whole time isn’t exactly my idea of fun, but being able to see a Great Water Spirit in person seems like it’ll at least be interesting. And seeing a fight between two [Gold-rank] fighters will be entertaining if nothing else.”
“So, you’re just looking to get a good show out of this?” Olivia questioned, though the slight upturn of her lips and tilt to her tone let him know that it was more of a humoured question than an interrogation.
“Not like I’m getting any battle experience out of it. Besides, the last high-level fight I was near I didn’t even get to see it properly.”
“What a shame.” Olivia hummed, taking a mouthful of her own porridge.
‘This is nice, when she isn’t at my throat for some reason Olivia is actually pretty cool to be around.’
“Any idea when Noelle will actually be up?”
“Better get comfortable, we’ll be waiting a while.”
“Oh, joy.”
“Joy, indeed.”
XXXxxxXXX
Great Water Spirit’s Lake, Midday
“Alright, you both stay back here.” Noelle ordered, one hand on her hip and the other pointed at a small patch of trees close enough to the lake that they could get a good view but thick enough to act as makeshift shielding if needed and far enough to let them get a running start if also needed.
Alec would have liked to praise Noelle, a [Gold-rank] adventurer, for choosing such a place for him and Olivia to stay in but she hadn’t been the one to find it.
Olivia had.
Which sort of ruined his image of [Gold-rank] adventurers just a little bit, but his image of [Tungsten-rank]’s had already long since been tainted by Alexandar so he really shouldn’t have been surprised.
“That’s the plan.” Alec deadpanned with a sarcastic thumbs up.
“Don’t let us slow you down. Go on. Get to it.” Olivia deadpanned, making a shooing motion with both hands towards the lake.
If Noelle was at all hurt by her sister’s actions and words she didn’t show it, just giggling and turning around to make her way down to the edge of the water.
Both teens tensed with every step that the young woman took, the mana in the air began to shift and the surface of the lake began to shake and roil in ways that were far from natural.
Tensely, left in suspense, both teens watched with wide, unblinking eyes and bated breaths for the appearance of the Water Spirit causing all of these unnatural phenomena.
However, the first thing to leave the water wasn’t the spirit itself, but rather a beam of water. Fired with speed that neither of the two teens could follow, with a diameter of about five centimeters, it was an opening move deserving of its status as a [Great] elemental.
However, Noelle had not approached the lake unprepared.
Showing her forward thinking for the first time since Alec had met her, the beam of water struck a mana-construct with an appearance much like that of a storybook pixie that left one of the many frills of her sleeve.
Alec had expected the construct to enter some kind of power struggle with the beam in the brief moment he was able to comprehend it. What actually occurred, however, was the complete shattering of the pixie near-instantly upon contact with the beam, its body disintegrating into tens of thousands of sparkling shards that surrounded Noelle in a circular barrier. The beam glancing off the barrier and flying high into the sky, where it then unraveled and fell to the ground once more in the form of a light sprinkling of rain.
“Oh wow, aggressive, aren’t you?~” Noelle giggled, watching the water of the lake bow inward, stretching the outskirts even further out, before suddenly rebounding back on itself, a large sphere of water bouncing out of the center.
The moment it did, a magic circle spun to life on the wet ground at Noelle’s side, mana gathering and condensing above its form into the next summon of her choice as the sphere began to morph its shape.
She was more than happy to let the water spirit have its moment to shine, it gave her just as much time to set up her ideal combination of summons without having to panic or engage in any fighting herself.
‘Oh, goody. Looks like its preferred form is a humanoid one, that means that my assumption for my summon was right.’
Noelle took a few steps back as her summon fully materialized, a frog-type beast with odd, warbled patterns on its back and legs, four eyes and standing at roughly the size of a large dog.
‘Its leaping power should be enough to stop it from being caught in most of the spirits wide-reaching attacks and its ability to stand on water speaks for itself. If its preferred form was a beast or leviathan this guy would have been in some real trouble.’
It was an odd peculiarity of elementals that had been noticed and reinforced many, many times over the millennia’s since their first discovery, the fact that despite being able to change forms at will, each individual one tended to have a preferred body-type to stay in. The latest theories on that particular habit, penned by the head of the Royal Litvarnan Magi Academy: Grethul Fira Vonnalis, labelled it as a psychological habit based on both the type of mana that made up majority of its form and notable things that had interacted with it in its past. Also describing that its body-type could give insights into the kind of fighter it was and the tactics it was likely to employ.
Between humanoid, beast, and leviathan, their forms could vary quite drastically, and their tactics even more so. For a summoner like her, who tended to split and categorize her summons into similar categories, it was like a game of rock-paper-scissors.
Beast trumped humanoid, humanoid trumped leviathan, leviathan trumped beast.
So now that she’d identified its preferred body type, she had this in the bag. She might even be able to finally get it through her sister’s thick head how great magic could be!
“Go.”
The command was simple, assured in itself and the summon followed it dutifully.
The ground exploded in a deluge of mud and roots as it kicked off the ground with enough force to probably cave Alec’s sternum into his spine. Its form disappearing from the teens’ sight but evidently not the elemental’s.
Spikes of water rose from the surface of the lake in an arcing pattern, the speed of their formation so quick that Alec blinked, and where once a regular lake had sat, now a spiked monstrosity of a wall jutted from its surface.
The only thing that let either of them keep track of the fighting was when the giant frog slammed to a halt against an upturned wave, dissolving it in a crack of condensed air and a spray of water more akin to shrapnel. Left momentarily halted in the air due to the lack of springboard beneath it, the summon reared its head back and jerked forward, its tongue launched directly at the abdomen of the elemental.
The elemental was slow, comparatively, in its response. Its body languidly turned in the air to face the incoming tongue and its arm outstretched towards the frog before its hand clenched.
The tip of the summons tongue came to a halt only about twenty centimetres from the elemental’s abdomen, aimed squarely at the dark, pulsing core sat at its center. The reason for it coming to a halt became clear to Alec when he heard a small intake of breath from Olivia and followed her line of sight.
Two of the frog’s eyes slowly rolled down as about seven separate spears of water skewered through the large beast, the tip of its front leg just barely kept above the surface of the lake.
‘Its lack of movement made it a pretty easy target. If it had kept moving it probably wouldn’t have been caught so easily.’ Alec thought to himself, looking over as a pulse of mana caught his attention.
A reaction that was shared by the elemental as its face sucked inwards and its entire head inverted, the water of the lake surging on top of Noelle and slamming down with enough force to make the ground rumble beneath the two of them sway the trees rather dangerously.
“Woooow!” Three beams of water shot from the surface of the lake, a pixie once again sacrificing itself to form a protective shield around its master.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Noelle sat on the back of a large eagle-looking summon, her hands alight with condensed mana as three magic circles glowed in the air behind her.
“You’re really skilled with those spikes, aren’t you? Their activation is way faster than everything else you do. It’s fascinating!”
Two more of the four-eyed frogs shot from their magic circles, able to use them as springboards and using that to fire at the lake more like missiles than living creatures.
The third circle, meanwhile, was summoning something a lot larger than just those two frog’s. An exterior more like carved stone than living flesh and an appearance not that dissimilar to a knight, a single glowing eye shining from the shadows of its helm.
With a slightly shaky breath, Noelle grinned down at the elemental, trying to act like the very faint fatigue gnawing at her wasn’t there in the slightest as her largest creation fell to the ground like a meteor. A small vapor cone covered its form as it fell, four more beams of water striking its ‘armour’ as it did.
Apart from small chips of the stone and gouges not that dissimilar to a small scratch on a regular person, they glanced harmlessly off the summon, yet even that much damage was enough to make Noelle’s eyes widen.
‘You’re kidding me. This golem is my most durable summon-‘
Briefly, against her own will, the memory of the Dune Worm from Alec’s memory flashed to the forefront of her mind before she shook her head vigorously.
‘-Second most durable summon in my repertoire. For its beams to be able to leave even that much damage is bad news.’
The golem struck the ground in a catastrophic clap of compressed air and cracked stone, its eye glowing brighter and brighter as its five-meter-tall form leaned forward.
A small heat haze wavered in front of the golem's visor, the glow of its eye eclipsing the shadows of its helm completely before firing a beam of pure fire directly at the elemental.
Steam and water vapor parted around the superheated air against its master’s will, carving a trench through the lake as it neared the elemental. The mana in the air surged and the banks of the lake lowered by a quarter of a meter as a tidal surge of water surrounded the elemental and its core.
Both teens on the sideline hunkered down and defended their faces with their arms as a blast of air and water vapor ripped through the forest surrounding the lake. Their eyes squinted and their hair waving in the wind as the beam continued its attempt to tunnel through the elementals shield and eventually came to a halt with a splutter.
Atop her flying mount Noelle cursed while trying to even out her breathing, a small bead of sweat dripped down her temple and onto her cheek as she stared down at the unharmed form of the elemental as the spherical shield began to spin and churn in place.
She had been hoping that the golems beam, one of the strongest attacks available to her, would be enough to at least put the core into harms way but evidently, she had overestimated the boost in difficulty that so much water would add.
‘Another four shots at that intensity and for that long and I’m toast. I’ll have to leave the bulk of the fighting to my Demon Frogs and just keep the golem in my back pocket if things get dicey.’
With her mental command sent to her three-fighting summons, her Demon Frogs were off with a vengeance. Gouts of water sprayed in the air and ripples of movement along the lakes surface turned to violent, churning waves beneath both their kinetic force and the water spirit’s own magical touch.
The water spirit’s arms waved not unlike that of an orchestral conductor, only about ten times faster, raising and lowering the water around it with a speed and precision that none of the three humans had ever expected to see out of a Great elemental of all things.
If the battle had been nearly impossible to keep track of with just one demon drog beforehand for the two spectators, then keeping track of anything now was genuinely impossible.
Or at least, it was.
The demon frogs were a lost cause for the two [Iron-rank] teens to keep track of and the golem was a near immobile fortress wall that had yet to do anything past its introduction.
The water spirit, then, was the only thing both staying still enough and active enough in the fight for their attention to turn to.
Both teens could only feel despair at seeing the gap in skill between them and two [Gold-rank] combatants, their own feelings of inadequacy gnawing at them relentlessly. Their hearts tore at them and their minds forced them to continue watching, unable to learn anything due to their own weakness and unable to look away because of that very same weakness.
The tongue of one of the demon frogs broke through the ‘radius’ around the elemental that it was keeping its defenses at, its right arm swiping up to rest behind its left shoulder as a thin stream of water burst from the lake beneath it. The stretching and elongated tongue met the stream of water and followed its flow up and to the right, flinging it away from the elemental’s core in a wide arc.
Alec’s eyes widened as the form of the water spirit briefly overlapped with an image of a faceless, featureless swordsman deflecting a blade to their side.
The demon frog flipped and twirled chaotically through the air for a moment with a surprised croak at its sudden change in orientation. The gaze of the water spirit locked solely onto its form and one of its hands rose in the direction of the summon.
The temperature of the air surrounding the lake rose by a fraction of a degree. The head of the elemental inverted once more to lock its cold, dead, and unfeeling, recreation of eyes on the glowing helm of the golem. Its arm went limp as its other arm rose to face the golem.
The tongue of the second demon frog punched clean through its abdomen and struck the deep blue core, pushed off course by the swirling water of its body but still able to fling the core outside of its main body and high, high into the air.
The elemental startled and for the second time, its arm went limp as its face inverted yet again to track the flight path of its core, watery wings almost identical to Noelle’s summon bursting from its back.
Olivia’s eyebrows rose and her fists clenched. A realization striking her as a logbook unfurled within her mind and scratched short, hurried notes down within its pages.
The water-made wings of the elemental beat once, launching itself into the air in a gust of wind and a spray of the lake water beneath it.
The wings of Noelle’s summon widened as far as they would go and beat powerfully, launching them both forward as sweat dripped heavily down her face and her fingers desperately clutched at its feathers.
Trees rustled and the wind whistled as the two teens took off running, their gazes on the water spirit with only the briefest looks needed to navigate the crowded and tangled expanse of the forest.
‘Its every movement is fluid; it rarely breaks the natural limitations of the human body. It can be replicated. Use the opponents’ force not your own. Circular motions. Waving motions. Thin streams, crushing waves.’ Alec leapt a toppled tree and kicked off the trunk of a tree at his side, thin slices left on the both of them.
‘It struggles to track multiple things. Offensive multitasking ability is high. Its head never turns more than 45 degrees in either direction. Defensive multitasking is low. Instinctively sticks to human sensibilities. Capable of breaking on conscious thought. Core is its top priority.’ Olivia leapt that same toppled tree alongside Alec, her fingers gracing the wood of the tree and denting it beneath her grasp far more than her physical strength would ever allow.
Both teens felt like they were seeing the world in a way that they never had before; their bodies burning, their brains throbbing, their mana pulsing. Colours seemed brighter and sounds seemed sharper. As if they had lived in a muted, grey-scale world of imagination before that had now been unlocked.
The two teens split around a tree perfectly placed in the middle of them, their trajectories near mirrored in their angles and speed. A flapping wing of actual, living, flesh caught Olivia’s attention, her neck craned just far enough to let her see the creature out of the corner of her eye as she ran.
A hawk, about the same size as a cocker spaniel, with black irises and a purple pupil stared back at her as she ran.
‘A psyhawk? They’re used for tracking. Why here? Why now? Why me?’ That feeling, that intense focus and frenzy, began to die down within her.
Both Olivia and Alec met back around the opposite end of the tree; the blue-haired teen immediately pulled a step ahead where previously they had been neck and neck.
‘No. NO! Ignore it! Not here, not now! The elemental! Focus!’ Her eyes focused back on the elemental, and even though it took a few more losing steps, she felt that same focus return to her as the water spirit fired three beams of water at her sister, killing yet another pixie.
Meanwhile, up in the air, the water spirit dove to catch its core before it could strike the ground, grasping it in its hands right before it collided with the ground with enough force to shatter its humanoid form and sway all the centuries-old trees around it.
“Now!” Noelle swiped her hand, a magic circle glowing over her palm.
Four gargoyles spawned to life in the air around her, their loud, high-pitched screeches igniting the air as they all flew down towards the impact zone of the elemental. Furling their wings, the four gargoyles hit the ground with heavy cracks in a square around the reforming water spirit, all four crouched in identical poses.
Arching their backs to raise their heads to the sky, four simultaneous screams ripped their way out of their throats. Their wings spread wide at their sides as translucent barriers formed between them, using their bodies as the corner points.
‘This is going to leave me on empty but that barrier will only last until those gargoyles run out of breath and I’d rather the elemental dead than be overly cautious.’
Noelle fought the wave of dizziness and nausea that overcame her as two more giant summoning circles appeared in the sky on opposite ends of the barrier. Two very familiar golems dropped from them and struck the ground with enough force to shatter the earth beneath them and topple trees even as far back as Alec and Olivia were.
The heat hazes around the opening of their helms began to grow more intense and the glow of their eyes grew ever brighter. The water spirit struck and collided with the barrier wherever possible to try and escape and found itself perfectly trapped inside, unable to do anything more than crack its prison with its quick, panicked attacks.
Once more, one final time, its face inverted to stare up at the sweaty, pale, darkly grinning form of its enemy. Its watery eyebrows furrowed as its expression twisted into one of pure rage. Four more arms of water burst from its abdomen, two on each side, and –rather than hold an open hand out towards her as it had done with her demon frogs– pointed at her.
From the outskirts of the fight, Olivia’s eyes widened as she realized what was about to happen before it even occurred, her arm reached forward, and her mouth opened in a scream that had yet to even make its way into her throat before it happened.
A bead of water appeared in the air and fired a condensed beam at Noelle, striking another pixie and glancing harmlessly off the shield it created.
Just as that shield faded, a second bead of water appeared, firing a condensed beam of water at her and murdering yet another pixie.
As that shield fell, a third bead of water appeared, firing a condensed beam of water at her, ending a third pixie in short order.
By the time that shield fell, Noelle could feel her confidence waning, a fourth bead of water appeared at her side and fired a condensed beam of water, ending the life of the fourth pixie without mercy.
Instructing her eagle-summon to dive low didn’t change a thing, a fifth bead of water appeared at her side all the same and fired a condensed beam of water at her, killing another pixie right as the beams of fire left the helms of the knights and the barriers flickered to death.
The two beams met in the middle atomizing the elemental without hesitation or mercy, the last thing to disappear of its water-made form being its sixth and final hand, still pointing right at her.
A sixth bead of water appeared behind her. The elder Kio sibling turned on her mount to stare at it in horror as she felt nausea and vertigo surge through her body, leaving her unable to do anything else but stare.
A condensed beam of water fired from the small bead, meeting no resistance as it punched right through Noelle’s lower back and out of her stomach in an explosion of mana and blood alike.
The mounted summon beneath her let out a shrieking cry of pain as its body began to dim and flicker, its wings no longer able to sustain their flight and causing them to nosedive.
‘This…isn’t right. I’m meant to be a cool…role model for my lil’ sis….’
“NOELLE!!!”