The forest blurred past Damien as he teleported from tree to tree, heading back toward the flag and, hopefully, the members of his team defending it. He hoped Kat hadn’t found it yet, but his fears were confirmed by loud crashes coming from the direction he was heading.

He kept low and tried to make as little noise as possible as he approached. The trees in the area had been decimated, forming a small clearing. A small fortress of shimmering blue ice covered the flag. Venus and Xil were within it, pouring magic into the ice while Kat wailed on it, slowly tearing their defense apart. She wasn’t even using much magic from what Damien could tell – the professor was just slamming her fists into the ice, shattering large portions of it with every blow.

Damien gathered Ether in his palms, overloading a Gravity Lance. She wasn’t paying attention to him, but that wasn’t his problem. The Ether churned, growing in intensity. He whipped the magic out and it shot through the air, dark streamers twisting off the compressed lance of Space energy.

Kat spun, raising a hand and blocking the spell with her palm. It detonated with a sharp crack. There had been enough force in the spell to tear apart a small building, but the damage was so minimal to her that, for a moment, Damien thought he might have somehow missed.

“Shit, that bloody hurt,” Kat snapped. She shimmered and Damien immediately Warp Stepped, appearing on top of a tree behind the icy barricade.

A ripple tore through the ground, shaking the trees and sending cracks racing through Venus and Xil’s defenses. Damien lost his footing and fell from the tree. He grabbed the branch, swinging himself back into the air and Warp Stepping before he could hit the ground.

“Kneel.”

Kat slammed to a halt just a few feet away from Damien. Her knees slammed to the dirt, but she caught herself with one hand before his magic could knock her completely prone. Damien drew on the new spell he’d created while fighting Quinlan and Kat’s shadow erupted, sending dark spikes into her stomach.

Instead of punching clean through like Damien had expected, the magic bent and screeched as if it had struck an invisible wall. Kat gritted her teeth and pushed herself up.

“Has anyone ever told you how annoying this ability is?”

Damien detonated a Gravity Sphere on her shoulder. Her body rippled and she staggered, but again, the spell failed to penetrate whatever armor she was using.

“About as annoying as whatever defense you’ve got going on,” Damien replied. Ether rushed past his head, coursing into Kat’s body. He took a cautious step back, drawing the runes for Devour before him in an instant.

The spell never came. Kat’s body bulged as two leathery red wings erupted from her back, splaying out to their full wingspan with a series of loud cracks. Scales rose up along her skin, covering her body as her teeth sharpened and her eyes turned green.

What the hell is that spell? Some transformation like Delph has done? Or a Manifestation?

“Manifestation,” Henry said. “Delph’s wendigo form was a poor copy. This woman has completely changed her body as far as my senses can tell. She’s full to the brim with Ether. You sure I can’t help you?”

No. This is a good test.

“Shatter.”

Lines of dark energy erupted from Damien’s hand, coursing out and racing over Kat. With a sound like a window plane dropping from a ten story window, they shattered. The air around her split, shifting as the spell snapped it.

Her scales cracked where the magic touched them and several tiny streams of blood slipped out from behind them, but the spell had been almost completely ineffective. Kat’s defenses were the strongest that Damien had ever seen, but she wasn’t about to let him marvel for long.

She didn’t vanish. She simply moved. One second, she was on the ground in front of Damien. The next, she was in front of him, her fist in his stomach. Henry hardened his mage armor instants before the blow struck, but Damien was still launched back, the air knocked from his lungs.

He slammed into a tree and wood splintered around him with a crash. The world flickered around him and he slumped, barely managing to Warp Step before Kat’s fist obliterated the tree he’d landed in.

Damien teleported again, not willing to trust his reflexes against Kat in her current form. He reformed in the air, and the back of his neck prickled. He teleported once more, narrowly avoiding the fist that whistled through the air behind him.

There wasn’t even time to curse. Damien reformed and staggered, gasping for air as he gathered all the Ether he could.

I take it back. Help me manage this. I can’t cast this many spells at once on my own.

Damien split his concentration, extending several dozen strands of mental energy to hold his Ether in place. His mage armor turned black as Henry took over it, cloth tendrils stretching out behind him and rising up defensively.

Kat appeared before him and they crossed in front of his face, barely managing to block the strike. She spun, bring her leg whipping around, but Henry intercepted the other attack as well. He wrapped the cloth tentacles around her limb, but Kat yanked back, tearing them clean off.

It wasn’t a wasted effort, though. Henry had bought Damien a few seconds, and their concentration wasn’t on keeping Kat from hitting him.

“Is this it, Damien?” Kat asked, cocking her head to the side. “If you don’t do something more interesting, I’m going to turn around and grab your flag. Or is most of your power currently not allowed to be used?”

“I’ve got a little more,” Damien said, baring his teeth. Then he dove – toward her. Kat’s eyes widened slightly, but she was hundreds of times faster than he was. Her knee came up toward his face.

Henry managed to soften the blow with two tendrils, but it still slammed into his nose, breaking it. Damien ignored the pain and wrapped himself around Kat’s leg as tightly as he could. Henry did the same, engulfing both him and her lower half in tendrils. A tendril reached into his pocket, yanking the runed papers out and pressing them between Damien and Kat’s leg.

Then Damien and Henry released all the spells they’d been holding in place. The world turned black as Gravity Lances appeared all around them, surrounding the two in a sphere of darkness.

Damien braced himself, holding onto Kat as tightly as he could as the spells all slammed into them. His eardrums popped from the force of the explosions as the gravity in the area was torn to pieces by his magic. He couldn’t hear anymore, but Kat was still standing. He detonated every single one of the papers.

A powerful blast hurled him back and through a tree as a ball of flame rolled up from Kat’s body. His vision flickered and he slumped down with a groan, barely able to make Kat’s form out as she stalked toward him, smoking. One of her wings hung at her side, and the scales covering her were cracked and shattered, exposing the bleeding and bruised flesh beneath.

Unfortunately, she was still standing. She drew up to him, but he couldn’t even form coherent thought. A splitting headache drummed violently, threatening to knock him unconscious. He drew a weak breath, vaguely aware of Henry trying to say something.

Kat’s mouth moved, but Damien couldn’t hear the words. The professor shook her head and raised a foot to take him out of the fight completely. Then she staggered, her eyes widening. The woman spun, revealing a shimmering ice dagger buried in her back.

He got a brief glimpse of Xil, who had left the safety of the ice fortress. Then he passed out.

***

Damien awoke with a start. The remnants of a headache still thrummed in the back of his mind, but the rest of his body only felt a little sore. Something cold and wet was pressed against his back. He grimaced, blinking and opening his eyes. He was lying on the dirt.

“Take it easy,” someone above him advised. “You did quite a number on yourself. That was a very impressive showing, though. Well done, kid.”

Damien craned his head back to see a Mountain Hall healer standing above him. His face was shadowed from the hood pulled over it, but he could still make out the grin on the man’s face.

“Thanks,” Damien said with a grunt. “Did we win? I saw Kat get hit with a dagger.”

“Nah. She dropped your friend with one blow, then took Venus out a few seconds later.”

“Damn. What happened to the rest of my team?”

“They ran into Quinlan and Kat right at the start of the match. It was just the three of you for the majority of the match,” the healer replied with a sympathetic smile. “You did pretty damn well, though. Nothing to be ashamed off.”

Bugger. I thought we had Kat at the end there. What kind of monster can get hit by that many powerful spells and just shrug it off?

“We were crippled,” Henry pointed out. “If you were using Void magic or I could go all out, this would have gone very differently. Also, you need to diversify your Direct Casting more. You’ve got what, two ways you use it right now?”

Yeah, you’re right. It’s just that I understand those two the most, and when I don’t really understand what I’m asking the Ether to do, things go somewhat poorly. I did figure that new spell out on the fly, though.

“Shadow spike,” Henry said. “Not a bad offensive spell. Very fast. Not the smartest idea to use it in combat without testing, but it turned out well. You should probably polish it up before using it again, though.”

Agreed.

Damien pushed himself upright and brushed the dirt off his back, taking a look around the forest-turned-clearing. Their battle had done a serious number on the trees. For hundreds of feet around them, broken wood and twigs were scattered across the ground.

The other students hadn’t fared much better. Everyone other than Blake and Kat was laid out on the ground, their clothes in various states of disrepair. Xil and Venus laid to Damien’s left, both mostly intact but unconscious.

Quinlan, Eren, and Tim were laid out to his right. Both Quinlan and Eren were covered by blankets, but everyone’s wounds had been healed.

“Damn, I wish I got to see that last fight,” Blake said, noticing that Damien had woken up. “I could hear it from all the way at our base.”

“Not much to see. Just lots of explosions,” Damien said, shaking his head to try and throw off the headache. “That was a lot harder than I thought. Kat, why are you so damn hard to hurt?”

“A lady has to have some secrets,” Kat replied with a smirk. “If it was something you could learn, I’d teach you. But unfortunately, I don’t think you’ve got access to body modification magic. And don’t even talk about terrifying – I don’t like the idea that I had to try this hard against a kid that was holding back.”

“Body modification?” Damien asked. “Like Cheese?”

“You know Cheese?”

“He goes to my school.”

“Ah, that explains it. Mel must have taught him as well, then. There aren’t too many of us around. You did quite a number on me, though. I wasn’t expecting that, especially with your spells restricted.”

“Not enough,” Damien said. “I’ve still got a lot I need to work on – strategy evidently being one of them.”

Kat laughed. “Oh, absolutely. Did your team really think that we would just rush toward any source of loud noise?”

“…Kind of, yeah.”

“Well, I suppose it did work in the end,” Kat allowed. “Just… after we’d taken out your advance team. Live and learn. Maybe try something a little more creative in the future. And don’t feel too bad, this was your first run at this. Your team did quite well considering you’ve never worked together before and you were all at a disadvantage.”

Kat looked down at Xil, her expression unreadable. “This girl in particular. Stepping out of safety to attack me – if she was just a little stronger, it might have worked. She capitalized on a flicker of an opportunity with almost no hesitation. Granted, the attack was pathetic aside from its speed, but… hm. Not bad.”

“What happened to Venus?” Damien asked. “You were in poor shape, weren’t you?”

“Oh, the rest of my team was waiting for our fight to finish,” Kat said with a chuckle. “Blake and Tim came in as soon as you went down. She took Tim out and did a number on Blake before we got her. I don’t think he’ll be doing any more shit talking about Xil. She did more damage to me than he ever has. As I said, not a bad showing at all.”

“I see,” Damien said. Then a grin crossed his face. “That was pretty fun. When are we doing it again?”

“Once everyone has time to process everything and improve their skills,” Kat said. “A week at the minimum. For now, just hang out a little to make sure the healers don’t throw a hissy fit. They’ll be all wrapped up with everyone soon, and then we can head back to campus. Lunch will be on me.”