Lee Jia sat in a treetop, meditating. She was well out of range of the attack formations, for now. It was possible that they would work on developing them into more complex artillery formations, but that would probably take a long time to finish. Time—just how long did they have for the qualifier anyway? There hadn’t been a time limit given in the rules, but surely there was some way to resolve a stalemate. Jia decided to forget about it for now, there was no sense making guesses. Instead she focused on the ways that she might be able to break this stupid one-woman siege.

The barrier was hardly a comparison for one of the real shield formations used by the cities of her homeland. Those had been developed and iterated on for centuries, while this one was slapped together by a pair of students in a few hours. The way she saw it, there were a few ways that she might defeat it.

The first was to just wait. If they fell asleep, they’d be disqualified according to the rules. When she was in the second stage, Jia had already been able to go for a week or more without sleep if she focused on it. Since breaking through she’d barely needed any, and she’d made sure to go into the qualifier well-rested. She had no idea how long that would take, though—and she suspected that the instructors would intervene before it came to that.

Instead, she would have to overwhelm, starve, or bypass the barrier. Those were the methods that Do Hye had described for dealing with such formations. Overwhelming was the most obvious—they could only block so much energy at a time, and if you could deliver more than it could handle, the formation would break. If Eui were here, that’s what Jia would go with—her ability to deliver enormous amounts of power in one strike was second to none among their peers. By herself, she would have to create her own attack formations, or take her chances with some of her extremely valuable emergency talismans—and even then she wasn’t confident.

Starving was another option that she would have considered more if she had Eui with her. As Yoshika they could just devour all of the mana in the area. By herself, Jia would have to draw a formation around the entire barrier to disperse the mana—that would take forever, and it wasn’t really her strongest area. Besides, they’d probably blast her to pieces while she tried to draw the formation.

The final option was bypassing it entirely. No barrier was perfect, and there were usually ways around any defensive formation. Do Hye had regaled their classes with stories of overconfident students suffocating themselves because their barriers blocked air, or cooking themselves alive in a formation made to protect them from the cold. Theoretically, even the great shield cities had weaknesses in their formation—though Jia didn’t have the slightest clue what they were.

If Jia was going to bypass this one, she’d need to find those weaknesses for herself. She’d discovered one already—the barrier didn’t stop her domain from sensing what was within it. Jia could observe what was happening within the barrier from a safe distance that way, though she hadn’t quite gotten the hang of making out sounds through her domain. She had also tried using the noxious aura of her Corruption of the Fetid Bog technique, but either it was being stopped by the barrier, or the distance was too great to have a noticeable effect.

With her domain, she could also sense that the barrier made a perfect sphere, extending into the ground below them—obviously Do Hye had taught Tae In-Su well enough to avoid the most common pitfalls of barrier formations. Lee Jia would have to get creative. She continued to test and observe the barrier and how it interacted with the world around it. Air and water could pass through it, but not if it was manifested from essence, and it blocked all creatures from entering or leaving.

Jia frowned as she puzzled over it. The formation didn’t block all essence, but it did block any manifestations of essence. It had been made in a hurry, so it had to be fairly simple. It blocked attacks from both directions, otherwise they would have attacked her when she showed up. That was what the formations they were adding to it were for—their manifestations would form outside of the shield. It stopped all living creatures and all manifestations of essence, but not naturally occurring mana or elements.

“Hmm...”

The beginnings of a plan started to form in Jia’s mind, but first she’d need to test a few other ideas. She started by descending from her perch and searching the ground for some loose pebbles. When she found a suitable stone, she tried hurling it as hard as she could towards the barrier. Lee Jia watched in her domain as the stone soared through the air, over the treetops, and straight past the barrier.

Jia maintained a flat expression. She told herself nobody was watching—nobody had seen her embarrassing miscalculation. Nevermind the fact that every noble visiting the academy had access to one of those scrying stones. They’d all missed it.

Definitely.

She tried again, more carefully measuring her strength. This time, her aim was true, and the stone landed harmlessly on the grass inside the barrier. Perfect! She had correctly guessed that mundane objects could pass through. That was actually a pretty big flaw, but not a surprising one. It was an easy way to make sure that there was no strangeness like suffocation or freezing to death, and it’s not like a bunch of immortal practitioners had much to fear from hurled rocks or arrows. Especially not with Jia’s tragic aim.

Still, it was a weakness—an important one. Now, to see if her plan could go anywhere, she tried another rock, but this time she put a tiny bit of her ki into it. It was technically the same thing Eui did with her charged knives when she used Six Arms of Asura, but with lightning instead of destruction. The less volatile element would probably not have the same dramatic results as one of Eui’s knives, but it would do for Jia’s purposes.

After another three or four tries, she managed to land another rock inside the barrier. It was harder to aim while focusing on maintaining her control over the lightning infused in the rock, but she still managed it. As she had hoped, the lightning-infused rock made it past the barrier without any issues—that was a much wider weakness. Once again, Jia regretted that Eui wasn’t with her—she was the natural enemy of barrier formations.

Someone inside the barrier noticed the rock and moved to investigate it. When they picked up the rock, it discharged its lightning, causing them to yelp and shake their hand. Jia couldn’t make out what they were saying, but the event had caught the attention of Tae and Sun, who both scrambled urgently towards the main formation circle after a brief exchange.

Oops. Jia had given herself away—she was going to have to move fast before they figured out a way to close that weakness. She was improvising here, but Jia was pretty sure she knew how to break the barrier. She dug around for another rock that was about the same size as the others—hopefully her aim would be a bit better after all that practice, since she didn’t really have much time.

With her weapon in hand, she took a deep breath. Jia wasn’t sure how many attempts she was going to have at this, and it was something she’d never tried before—mixing different techniques together into something entirely new. First, she circulated her qi to match the patterns of Corruption of the Fetid Bog, but rather than expelling that corrosive qi to manifest itself into her technique, she returned it to her dantian. Next, she used her lessons from Steps of the Stalker to suppress her natural lightning ki affinity, bringing the corrosive essence up from her soul to her body. She ignored feelings of nausea and heartburn that accompanied that, and moved the ki through her body according to the last technique she needed—Six Arms of Asura.

It took a lot of effort, and more than a few false-starts as she tried to maintain her concentration on so many moving parts. Jia was certain that she could have done this easily as Yoshika, but the fact that she could do it at all without Eui was a testament to just how much they had begun to internalize each other’s memories. Finally, she had a rock that was charged with the power of death and decay—it wasn’t quite as destructive as, well, destruction, but it was close.

Now Jia just had to throw the damn thing from almost half a mile away and land on a small target while maintaining concentration on her technique until it landed. She frowned—she hadn’t really considered this part much, but it was a lot harder than she imagined it would be. Jia did her best to summon the muscle memory from all her other attempts while picturing Sun’s stupid, smug face. Then, she threw.

Sweat formed on her brow as Jia maintained her concentration. She couldn’t even check the trajectory to guess whether her aim was true, she just didn’t have enough focus to spare. The stone arced through the air before plummeting back to the ground—a potentially deadly piece of improvised artillery. It passed through the barrier, and Sun Jaehwa flinched backwards as it passed dangerously close to her head. Jia grinned ear to ear and started running at full speed towards their position as she released her technique—she’d struck her target.

---

Tae In-Su dove out of the way as the rock—didn’t explode. Instead it just seemed to melt and disintegrate. Sun and Tae stared at it in confusion for a moment before they realized what was happening. The crumbling rock dispersed through the ground, corroding everything it touched—right in the middle of the formation circle. The barrier winked out as some crucial part of the formation was erased, and Tae In-Su began screaming urgently.

“Stay alert! The barrier just went down! Lee is going to be here any—”

His words were cut off by a cry of pain from one of the imperial disciples as Lee Jia surged out of the forest like a streak of lightning and broke his jaw from the sheer force of a kick at that speed. Lee didn’t waste her momentum, jumping impossibly fast from place to place and delivering pinpoint strikes that quickly disabled her opponents. Within the first five seconds of her arrival, she’d put eight people on the ground—none of them eliminated, but out of the fight for now.

Tae In-Su snapped out of his stupor and sprang into action. He cast his mana shield—metal element, to counter her lightning—and began to prepare his strongest attack spell. Next to him, he knew that Sun Jaehwa was doing the same.

The others had finally started reacting to Lee Jia’s presence as well, casting spells and using longer range spiritual arts. Tae In-Su was a little envious of the spiritual artists—it was like they carried attack formations around with them at all times—but he hadn’t yet figured out how to awaken his qi, and his Qin allies weren't forthcoming about it. He regretted agreeing to this stupid alliance—he’d made his peace with Lee Jia, and this was clearly threatening it—but it was too late to back out now. He knew what he’d signed on for.

Nearly two dozen on one, and Lee Jia seemed almost untouchable. She was absurdly fast, and the moment they started to overwhelm one position, she would zip over to another in a flash. He could see how her martial style was meant to resemble the force of the heavens. She bolted from one opponent to another, as swift and unpredictable as a real bolt of lightning. What she lacked in raw destructive power, she made up for in unmatched speed and flexibility.

Tae In-Su was broken from his awestruck admiration of Lee Jia’s martial prowess by Sun Jaehwa’s shrill voice.

“I’m almost ready!”

He sighed—what they were doing went completely against the spirit of this competition, but he would do his part.

“My spell is prepared. What about Zheng and Han?”

“We’re ready—you can begin at any time.”

Sun nodded and unleashed her spell—the first part of their combination attack. Her signature spell was one of the most feared types of spells among the Goryeon colleges—a concentrated beam of pressurized water. It was a complex working, indicative of an incredible talent for spellcraft. Tae In-Su doubted he’d be able to write a spell like that even if he had another decade of study.

Lee Jia seemed to have anticipated the attack, and the wall of stone went up almost before Sun Jaehwa had even cast her own spell. This was where Tae In-Su came in, he placed his fully charged talisman on the ground and guided its power towards Lee’s position, causing the earth to churn and break apart under the wall she now hid behind. At the same time, Zheng Long—enhanced by Han Yu’s elixirs—created a powerful gravity field that caused the wall to collapse right on top of Lee Jia—turning her own defense against her.

She had no way out of it. If Lee fled the collapsing wall, she’d be cut apart by the water beam, but if she stayed where she was, she’d be buried alive. Tae In-Su grimaced—what was he doing? Was this what he had worked so hard for? Clawing his way up through the colleges as a commoner, being appointed as a city administrator, earning his place in the Grand Academy—all just to bully some poor girl to satisfy the wounded pride of some nobles? It left a bad taste in his mouth.

The rubble settled, and Sun’s spell ended. Lee Jia had made her choice, and was now trapped in the crushing tomb of stone. Zheng Long would maintain his gravity field until they heard the announcement for Lee’s elimination—there was no way for her to dislodge herself. The group relaxed, fractionally—they would still be fighting each other after Lee was eliminated—but Tae felt like something was wrong.

He couldn’t sense Lee’s aura, but he felt the mana around them moving strangely and he knew it had to be her. It was gathering on her location, building up for something that made him extremely nervous.

“Uh...Sun, I don’t mean to alarm you, but I think—”

He never finished the sentence as he saw a chunk of rock just melt away to reveal a bloodied Lee Jia with a furious expression on her face. She was crouched down in a way that Tae In-Su couldn’t help but compare to a cat about to pounce, and she was glowing. A bright, white aura that turned blue and then purple at the edges, with arcs of lightning grounding themselves all around her. He saw where her technique got its name—she really did resemble a goddess of lightning.

Before Tae In-Su could even react, she vanished in a flash of light and a deafening roar of thunder. She appeared right next to him, seemingly displacing Sun Jaehwa entirely until he saw her crash into a distant tree with a sickening crunch, her body falling limply to the forest floor.

“Sun Jaehwa has been elim—”

Tae In-Su never got to hear the end of that announcement before arcs of pain shot through his entire body, sending him writhing to the floor before he mercifully lost consciousness.

---

“Tae In-Su has been eliminated!”

Jia didn’t have time to celebrate the defeat of two more opponents. She still had a dozen to go, and she was in bad shape. Not only had that gravity earthquake whatever-the-fuck attack hurt her badly, but she was also suffering the backlash from her unorthodox usage of a technique she’d only invented five minutes ago. Also, she’d broken a shoulder when she hit Sun with the strongest form of her Lightning God Transformation.

Zheng Long and Han Yu were nearby, still startled by her sudden reemergence. Zheng Long looked particularly spooked—maybe there really was something to the rumor that he got jumpy around lightning. She happily took advantage of his surprise to knock his feet out from under him and follow up with a full force strike to the head.

“Zheng Long has been eliminated!”

Han Yu was barely worth her attention, but she didn’t like him, so he was next. A simple slap to the jaw was enough to put him down—pathetic. Of course, she was still vibrating with energy from her technique, so her attacks had a fair bit more force than she was accustomed to. It wasn’t going to last forever, though, and once it ran out she would be helpless.

She had been avoiding using too many of her talismans, but she couldn’t afford to hold back either her attacks or her resources now. She dropped two of the mage girls with lightning bolts—the lucky ones. Two more fell to bone-shattering kicks and claws that sent concerning sprays of blood across Jia’s face. The last girl shrieked her surrender, the look of sheer terror giving Jia a moment of pause.

Only a moment, though—she had to keep moving, keep up the momentum before she ran out of energy. She didn’t even hear the announcements anymore over the rush of blood and the deafening pounding of her own heart in her ears. The remaining opponents tried to swarm her, overwhelming her with a press of bodies while the more cowardly ones struck at her immobilized form with their spells and spiritual arts.

Jia flicked her hand, and a talisman appeared within it. Not a simple mass-produced paper talisman, but a carefully crafted masterpiece that had taken her a month of work to finish. A spell of her own invention that she’d used in combat only once before. She’d worked out the kinks since then, and this time she wouldn’t injure herself with it. Probably.

She pushed what remained of the lightning surging through her body into the talisman, giving it the same overcharged power that she had been using to fight for the last few...seconds? It felt longer. The pale wood of the talisman exploded, sending arcs of lightning in every direction, chaining from one opponent to another in a terrible nova of electricity. Occasionally a bolt would catch Jia, but as she had designed it, they simply bounced harmlessly off of her, chaining to the next target before their power was spent.

Every single opponent within twenty feet of her fell to the floor, with the closest ones charred to a worryingly dark shade of black. Jia really hoped she hadn’t killed anybody. Cultivators were pretty resilient, but she hadn’t held anything back. She heard the sound of Do Hye’s voice, but it felt distant and faded—she couldn’t make out the words. She felt her body go slack as the rush of adrenaline faded and her technique ended.

Lee Jia stared up at the sky as the pain of her injuries started to catch up with her. She was covered in cuts and bruises, her shoulder was dislocated, and she was pretty sure she had several other fractures. Jia hoped that it was over, that she had won—she hadn’t really been counting. She was about to pass out and she knew there was no way to stop it at this point. Grimly, she really hoped that none of the remaining enemies held enough of a grudge to kill her in her sleep.

She wished Eui was there with her as her vision faded to darkness.