Orange dust clouded Alec's vision. It hung in the air like a solid, menacing fog, almost completely obscuring his opponent from view. Alec couldn't see him per se, but he could still tell when he was on the offensive. Every time he powered up to fire a blast, a bright burst of neon-green energy lit up the area, like a kind of brilliant emerald flare. It seemed excessive, a dead giveaway as to his location, which seemed more inconvenience than anything. Which was how Alec knew his opponent was doing it on purpose.

Despite the fact that he could see the general direction the blasts were coming from, it still wasn't easy trying to dodge. By the time Alec noticed the flare, the energy had already left his opponent's fingertips and was traveling straight towards him. Outrunning it was impossible; at best, all he could hope for was strengthening his armour as much as he could and tanking the blows until he could figure out a plan of action. It was more or less the same strategy he had employed initially to deal with this new enemy, but it had been far more useful before his twin started unleashing violent cyclones all across the landscape, stirring up the clouds of tangerine dust. Alec had long since lost sight of Maddison, but he caught the occasional grunt of effort here and there. The funny thing was, despite the clouds blocking off their sight, neither of the twins seemed affected by it at all.

Green light ignited the dust ahead of him, revealing a dark silhouette shrouded in the midst of the vividly coloured smoke, eye sockets blazing with harsh green light. Another blast tore through the dust immediately, striking Alec in the knee. Small pebbles broke off from the whole and Alec stumbled and fell lamely onto the floor, suppressing a cry of pain.

A soft chime of derisive laughter drifted over to him. "Ready to call it quits yet, big man?"

"How aren't you affected by the dust?" Alec said, gritting his teeth. The pain in his knee wasn't as intense as it would have been if he wasn't armoured up, but he wasn't going to be hopping around as readily as he had been doing anytime soon.

"Cute. Trying to distract me with a conversation so you can buy time to come up with a plan. It'd be a somewhat decent strategy if the last half dozen students hadn't tried it on me." Another neon flare. Another blast of energy, this time to the chest. He went sprawling across the ground, the wind knocked out of him. "As fun as it was playing whack-a-mole with you, I was kind of intrigued by your statement that you were actually going to do something earlier. I played it easy to give you the chance to do it, but apparently that's not happening any time soon. Oh well, at least you'll have plenty of company with the other dropouts in the Auditorium."

Another explosion of jade light illuminated the scene. But the blast didn't come as quickly this time. Alec noticed a certain pattern with his attacks; the more powerful blasts came after a longer buildup of time. He was charging up energy to deliver a final blow.

In the split second before he released the ball of energy, Alec ran his free hand across the floor. Orange dirt rose with the movement of his arm until it became a wall, then it hardened at once, like water solidifying into ice mid-splash. The sphere of energy collided with the wall like a heavenly bolt of lightning, sending huge fragments of rock and Alec himself scattered across the ground. He was sore all over, but he had survived a certain elimination. That was something, he tried to reassure himself, though he didn't believe it one bit.

"You're a stubborn little pleb, aren't you?" The voice sounded somewhere between impressed and exasperated, though leaning more heavily towards the former.

"I hear I get it from my grandpa," Alec wheezed out. The longer they fought, the more evident it became that the only solution out of this was to do exactly what had drawn the attention of Helix to him in the first place: shake up the landscape. It would likely cause the twisters to settle, and it could help get some distance between them while Alec got his bearings back. But there were two major issues with that strategy.

Releasing a wide-scale earthquake like that on this field could risk getting Maddison hurt, especially when he didn't have the slightest idea where she could be. On top of that, he didn't know how stable these platforms were. Whatever miraculous force was keeping them hovering above the sea was undoubtedly finite, and could very well be destabilized by the impact. There was a real risk of destroying them completely and sending all four of them plunging into a watery grave.

"I admire resilience, it's a great quality in a hero. But right now you're just annoying me." His silhouette came into view again, and this time Alec saw his arms extended above his head, with a giant ball of crackling energy swelling between them like a balloon.

The longer he watched, the more it grew, until it was almost as large as the very boulders scattered around them. If this connected, he was absolutely done for.

He wished he could send some sort of signal to Maddison, a warning to brace for cover, but he just had to trust that she could take care of herself. He jammed his earthen fingers into the ground and, within a moment, all hell broke loose.

The sound was terrible. It was exactly as it had been that night: haunting, splintering cracks as the earth tore apart, only this time it was ten times louder. Through the haze of dust Alec could see the silhouette of the twin shaking, then the ball of energy, instead of disappearing, tumbled out of his hands as the ground erupted in all directions. Sight was lost, but the sounds more than made up for it as the landscape was devastated around them. A faint glow to the left illuminated the ball of energy's path as it clattered into the sea; there was a great splashing noise, then a wave of energy roared up so violently it was as if some kind of titanic sea creature was leaping up onto the shore. Alec let it continue for a few seconds as the water slopped around the land and the earth heaved and hoed. Then it stopped. Not as abruptly or as smoothly as he would have liked, but the movement eventually settled.

The dust cleared after what felt like a few minutes, and soon Alec had a clear view of what was going on around him. Massive trenches had been gouged into the face of the path as if somebody had taken a heavenly shovel and scooped it out. Craters were left in some places, and in others the massive boulders where they had been now dotted the landscape, turning what had been a clear, blemish-less scene into a world of utter chaos.

Alec stood up and surveyed his work, noting that, win or lose, he was absolutely going to hear from Professor Wyatt about this. It was as he was looking around for Maddison that he realized the twin she had been fighting had taken to the air, hovering atop a semi-visible spout of air. He was observing the damage below with an air of utter bewilderment.

"Holy . . ." His voice trailed off, his mouth agape.

A movement to his left caught Alec's eyes and he looked around.

"You okay?" he called to Maddison.

"No thanks to you." Strangely, she didn't sound upset. If anything, what he detected in her tone sounded closer to awe. "A little warning would have been nice."

She made her way over to him, her eyes trained all the while on the twin she had been locked in combat with. There were numerous rips along her uniform, her hair was windswept and a bloody gash adorned her cheek, but otherwise she looked fine.

"How'd you stay out so long in the dust?" Alec asked her.

"Funny thing, he needed to be able to see too. Otherwise he'd risk aimlessly destroying the landscape — though there's no need to worry about that anymore. That or he'd possibly end up hurting his brother, or wasting energy making tornadoes that wouldn't hit anything.

"Every now and then he'd break open the dust cloud to get a glimpse of me, but I'd also get a glimpse of him too. Time that with the occasional flare from his brother and I managed to stay afloat, though only barely."

Alec was completely unsurprised. He had known that Maddison wouldn't have gone down that easily. But to think she had managed to maneuver through that dust cloud simply through periodic bursts of light and occasional glances at the enemy was incredible. A rumbling noise broke the silence, then another second later a beam of energy erupted upwards from the ground ahead of them, shattering the rock.

The twin Alec had been fighting emerged, body coursing with the same strands of bright green energy running about him. He was floating, keeping himself aloft by using the energy from his palms like propulsive thrusts. At once his brother sailed over, still riding his semi-visible spout of air.

"Looks like we were wrong about these two," said the one Maddison had been fighting. "You know I almost got crushed by that rockslide?"

"Honestly, I'm getting a bit tired of them as is," said the other. "Can we wrap this up please?"

"I wouldn't mind it." His brother gritted his teeth, looking as if he wanted nothing more than to trap them in a tornado and send them hurtling towards the ocean.

"Looks like they're getting ready for round 2, and they're not happy," Alec said.

"I see that." There was something almost like a sigh in her voice. "As if it wasn't hard enough to deal with them before, now they're coming back with a vengeance."

He understood her distress well. These two were like walking natural disasters — a lightning storm and a tornado on legs. Paired up they would be a nightmare to deal with, if not outright impossible. "I mean, it looks bad but I'd say we've got good odds."

He didn't completely believe that himself, but Maddison shook her head. "The odds aren't terrible, but they'd be better if we separated them." At his confused look, she went on. "It's a strange, extremely rare phenomenon, but sometimes superhuman twins share a kind of . . . I'm not really sure how to describe it. . . . It's like a kind of supernatural mental link."

"Huh?"

"It's not telepathy, exactly. Not a direct mental channnel into the other's head, but they're more in tune with each other's thoughts than should be normal. Like they can almost sense what the other is thinking or feeling, physically that is. Like a . . . a psychic connection. I don't know for sure, but I think maybe that's how they maneuvered so easily through the dust haze since this one can sense energy in living bodies." She jammed a finger at Alec's partner as the duo ceased hovering and settled on the ground instead.

"It's how he knew where you were while you were fighting. I didn't think it was relevant to mention before the dust cloud came up, and by then we were already separated, so no way to let you know."

"Consider my curiosity alleviated."

"Are you two done failing to make a game plan yet?" one of them called.

"Do they also share a supernatural sense of obnoxiousness?" Alec asked, scowling at the pair.

Maddison adjusted her stance, this time with a long staff-like object blooming from her palm. "I'm no scientist, but I wouldn't dismiss the theory."

"You do have a gameplan though, right?"

"I'm working on it," she said. "No brainstorms yet, but for right now, don't mind the specifics. Focus on playing offensive and breaking through their charge."

"Win by brute force, I like it."

"Good, because I think they just declared start." And so they had. Maddison's opponent had taken off again, zipping towards them on another spout of wind.

"Ready?"

"I guess." Alec shrugged, the duo exchanged another look and a wry grin, then they rushed off to meet their respective opponents. With the platform as cluttered and wrecked as it was, there were now more places to take cover, and luckily the new vortexes that Maddison's opponent made couldn't stir up more dust clouds as easily as before due to the explosive wave his brother had slopped all over the land. That at least eliminated their biggest problems.

Maddison took off, leaping into the air with a controlled burst of levitation. Instead of the usual daggers, she had changed her weapon to a strange contraption with a bulbous end that seemed like a ball joint attached to a rope-like spine. Her powers may have been effective but Alec couldn't deny they were equally disturbing.

Alec, meanwhile, threw his attention at his glowing adversary. He wasn't floating like his brother, instead he was pelting towards him over land, dodging the protruding rocks all over the face of the ground with expert skill and speed. A clump of boulders was coming up between them, and this time the energy-firing twin leapt into the air with a propulsive blast of energy, then sent a hail of energy balls raining down on him. Alec knew firsthand just how powerful those balls could be, but he didn't slow down to conjure walls to block them. Instead he hurtled onwards, dodging as best as he could.

He leapt to the left as the first one sailed towards him, watching as the significantly smaller shot stirred the wet dirt only a little. More came in its wake, like an incoming swarm of oversized fireflies twinkling in the unnaturally coloured sky, at which point Alec heaved three boulders out of the ground and sent them swirling around him, each rotating around him like a satellite and swerving to take each energy blast as they arrived.

They exploded into clouds of dust as the blasts hit their target, striking off more chunks with every blow. But both parties kept on running. More energy balls were coming towards him; Alec pushed off, creating a ramp of earth that shot up from the land like a bullet, pushing him into the air. It would have been more difficult to dodge like this, but something that was beginning to cement itself in his mind was that if he was going to win he had to take a few risks. The boy looked up at him, taking aim, and let a flurry of projectiles loose.

At the same time Alec pulled up more fragments of loose rock, but instead of letting them hover around him, he instead melded them into his armour, reinforcing it. As the blasts collided with him, fragments of rock broke off, leaving wisps of orange smoke in the wind behind him, and still he kept moving forward, closing the distance. Then he waved his arms.

Anticipating the attack, the twin tensed, preparing to defend himself. Unfortunately, he was looking in the wrong direction for the attack. Taking a deep breath, Alec jerked his fist at the ground underneath his feet. It wasn't instantaneous, but it happened so quickly that his opponent didn't have time to maneuver out of the way. The ground beneath him shifted into the closest Alec could get to an interpretation of quicksand, and his ankles sunk down. He tripped and almost fell but managed to keep himself upright. A grunt of fury erupted from his mouth as Alec drew closer; he was within fifty feet of him now.

With one hand the boy launched more projectiles, with the other he was trying to blow the sand away from his legs to forcefully extract himself from the trap. He was actually having some degree of success. The energy blasts he produced were powerful enough to send large waves of sand floating out of the hole. But Alec quickly adjusted to that. The sand shot up like a living thing, encasing his arms as well.

One thing Alec had to give him was that he was certainly persistent. Even while his limbs were restrained he was still fighting tooth and nail to break free. But Alec was almost there now.

Then something strange began to happen. His eyes glowed again, and it was Alec's turn to be surprised, because while he was expecting another shot, he didn't expect it to come bursting from his pupils. In hindsight, it should have been obvious.

The beam of light was thinner but far more concentrated than what he had released before. It grazed Alec's elbow, and even that single glancing shot was almost enough to send him crashing to the ground. He veered off course, but he landed against a boulder and held onto it fiercely to keep his balance. He saw that the twin was charging another blast, but with a gesture of his uninjured hand he manifested a solid clamp from the rocks behind them and forced it over his eyes.

His arm was aching. A hole had been burned into the shoulder of his uniform, the rock below it was singed and flooding with pain. But he pushed through it and moved on.

Even while every part of him was restrained the boy was relentless, lashing and screaming and firing energy blasts from every available opening to tear himself free. But it was too late for any of that, because Alec had already arrived. Just as the earthen goggles were blown from his eyes by another blast, Alec snatched the chip from around his neck. What happened next was a split second decision. The instant he secured the chip the boy was eliminated, but after all the punishment he had endured, even though it seemed mostly like overkill, Alec thought it most fitting to give their spat an actual conclusion.

He hardened the sand beneath their feet, not enough to become solid rock again, but enough to pack a significant (though non-lethal) punch, then it exploded as if a bomb had been set off underneath it. The twin erupted out of the hole on an orange geyser, then landed bodily on the platform, unconscious.

"Theo!" a voice shouted, before he could even think to celebrate his victory. He turned to watch Maddison and her opponent, who had paused to stare at his brother with widened eyes.

Something whizzed past his face, dangerously close to his eyes, and he seemed to remember that he was in the midst of battle. Maddison had flung a knife at him, clearly with the intention of reminding him that he had his own worries to deal with. He fought with renewed anger, setting off a gale-force wind that actually pushed Maddison back a few feet. The knives in her hand extended, lengthening into staffs that she jabbed into the ground to steady herself. Then with her free hand she threw something else.

It didn't look like a knife, nor did it move like one. Instead of flowing in a linear manner, it whizzed around to the side, like a kind of —

"Boomerang," Alec said. He had watched enough TV to know what Maddison was planning. As the boy unleashed another gust of wind, the spinning object returned to view behind him, completely unbeknownst to him, and nicked at his knee. The pain was so sharp and sudden that he faltered, and the wind keeping him aloft immediately vanished from underneath him. He tumbled out of the sky and Maddison rushed forward; by the time he managed to cushion his blow with another hastily conjured whirlwind, a sword was already at his throat and she was reaching towards his chip with a triumphant smirk.

"I believe this is — how do you nerds say it? — 'good game.'"

He glared at her for a long moment, then he sighed. "Fine, you win," he said grudgingly. "What'd you do to him?" He nodded at his brother.

"Don't worry about him. At worst, it's a bruised jaw and a damaged ego. Should be fine," Alec said.

"Yeah, I think I'll have the Healers do a thorough examination just to be sure," he said, with a very pointed glance at the ruined arena.

"Fair enough."

He took out his compass, which was now flashing red to register his defeat, and at the same time pointing in the direction of the nearest exit. Though where there could be an exit in this vast space of nothing was a mystery to Alec.

The boy conjured another whirlwind, pushing the motionless body of his brother into the air.

"Ciao." He gave them a faux salute, then took off.

"Nice work," Alec said to Maddison.

"Likewise. A little excessive with the knockout when you already had him restrained, but . . ."

"Meh, Professor Elliott's gonna eat it up anyway. He loves that kind of thing."

"Shall we continue then?"

Alec conjured a set of steps from the ground, elevated above the mess to make it easier to maneuver through it. Eventually they made it off the devastated platform and onto another they hadn't managed to wreck yet, but now they could see signs of fighting in the distance, though they were coming from different directions.

"Well, while the short partner up was nice, we have a bigger shot of dealing with our own enemies without collateral damage getting in the way."

"True," Alec agreed. "You go left I go right?"

"Sure. Next time we meet should be on Level 1."

"I'm gonna hold you to that," he said, smiling.

She smiled in return, then turned leftwards. Alec went right, moving in the direction of the grunts and gasps. Maintaining the Earth Mimicry for so long was a difficult task, so he had let it drop after their battle, but he believed he was rested enough for it. He bent down to absorb the ground's identity once more, then walked until new figures came into view.

It seemed he had arrived in time to witness the very end of the match, because as he approached, the winner, a stout girl with raven-black hair, was reaching down to collect her victory prize.

Alec stopped in place and stared at her as her disgruntled opponent, a bottled blonde, stood up to follow her compass to wherever it was leading her. At that moment the winner noticed her new challenger. She assumed a fighting stance, which was when Alec noticed something hanging from her side. It was a large pouch, and judging by the slopping noise it was making it was full of fluid. As far as he could tell, Professor Elliott hadn't made any allowances for students to bring refreshments, which meant this girl was clearly one of those few people who had been given exceptions to bring something necessary for her powers.

As he watched, a long thick stream of clear liquid emerged from the pouch, guided by the movement of her arms, hovering around her body and confirming her identity at once. Brianna Lance, the Water Elemental.