Relia knelt on the pavement, forcing life mana around Kalden’s wound. Her other hand stretched toward the sky, maintaining a dome of pure mana around them.

“Sorry.” Kalden gritted his teeth through the pain.” Getting hit wasn’t part of the plan.”

“What was the plan?” Relia asked as she surveyed the parking lot. By now, the smoke had faded, but Blood Army had ceased their attack. “Are we invisible?”

Kalden nodded as she shifted his body to the side. The motion revealed a tiny black device, no bigger than a cell phone. Relia examined it in her Silver Sight and saw various mana types flowing outward, forming a larger dome around her shield.

“Starting prizes,” he explained. “Artisan-level camouflage units.”

Relia furrowed her brow. “Where’s the rest of it?” She’d never claim to be an expert on manatronics, but she’d seen her share of camouflage units. If this device was as strong as he claimed, then the battery alone should have weighed fifty pounds.

“Guess they took some creative liberties.” Kalden forced himself to sit up and look around.

“Oh?” She grinned. “They’ll have a field day with that in the comments section.” Then her gaze fell to the shards of broken glass on the asphalt. “How’d you make the white mist?”

“Numbat dust,” Kalden said. “Found it in a secret alchemy lab.”

She’d never heard of numbat dust, but the results seemed self-explanatory. Instead, she shifted her attention to the remaining members of Blood Army. Most of the soldiers had begun gathering the fallen equipment, but Tori and Lyra stared straight ahead.

“They’re gonna burst our bubble soon,” she said.

Kalden pressed a button on his wrist, and his eyes grew distant as he examined his HUD. “I took out six with the poison and explosives. That leaves about a dozen more.”

“Nice. Got any more fancy plans?”

Kalden fixed her with a look. Oh, Azul’s ashes. She knew that look.

“No,” she said at once. “No. Anything but that.”

“I’ll be fighting beside you,” he said. “And we need something big if we want to survive.”

She let out a long breath. “You don’t get it, do you? My aspect is illegal in Koreldon.”

“But this a game,” Kalden said. “It’s not against the rules.”

“Not yet,” she retorted.

“I know Elend’s talked to you about this.”

Relia ignored that. “Creta was one thing. That was life and death.”

“So is every day of our lives.”

That was technically true. He and Akari were on borrowed time; whoever had sent them to the Archipelago could strike again, and they needed to be ready when that day came. As for Relia … she only had a few more weeks before her krustoplegia caught up with her. Pills or no pills, things would eventually get as bad as they’d been in Creta.

“Master by twenty-one,” Kalden whispered. “You’re my friend, and I want you to live. That means we hold nothing back.”

His words kindled a warmth kindled inside her, but pushing herself wouldn’t make a difference in the grand scheme of things. She needed seven hundred more mana points to reach Artisan. Only soulshine could help her advance that fast, and she refused to become like her parents.

No point in thinking about that now, though.

Relia glanced at the surrounding soldiers, then she narrowed her eyes at Kalden. “This was your plan all along, wasn’t it? To get me in the middle of Blood Army?”

“This was my backup plan,” he said. “I really wanted you to join us. Tori betrayed me first.”

Sure she did. Hadn’t Kalden just admitted to killing six of them with poisons and explosions? That obviously took some planning. He’d even been holding the detonator and numbat dust when he stepped out to meet her.

“I’ll fight with pure mana,” Relia said. “But that’s it.” If she used her so-called death mana here, then it would prove every rumor about her. That footage would be permanent, too. Every screen in Espiria would show it, and all her peers would watch the replay, feeling justified in the way they’d treated her.

“Pure mana won’t be enough,” Kalden said. “We’re surrounded here. And we’re outnumbered six-to-one.”

“We’ve faced worse odds.”

“I know.” Kalden raised his blue prosthetic hand to emphasize his words. “But it’s not worth the risk. We’ll never fight in the interschool battlegrounds if we die here. Not together, at least.”

She stared down at her knees. “They’re called principles for a reason. You can’t just—”

“It’s not about your principles,” Kalden interrupted. “You think you’re going to die no matter what happens this year. You want people to remember you as a good person.”

Yep, guilty on both accounts.

“You think everyone hates you right now,” he continued. “But here’s the truth—they don’t care about you at all. They only hate your aspect because the news tells them to.”

Relia glared at him. “You think I don’t know all this?” On the bright side, this whole exchange would probably get censored. Audiences didn’t like being called mindless sheep, and the Artegium wouldn’t want things getting too political.

“But we care about you,” Kalden said. “Me, Akari, Elend, and Irina …” He waved a hand at the unseen cameras. “Stop fighting for them, and start fighting for us.”

~~~

Elend switched his tablet view back to the Blood Army command tent.

“Lygon,” Tori said to the surviving squad leader. “What were the starting prizes this year?

“Advanced camo units,” the lad replied.

Tori considered this for several seconds. “Okay. Get everyone back in position.”

He hesitated. “General?”

“Around the spot where Dawnfire and Trengsen went down. We need to hit that with our best techniques.”

The lad saluted, jogging off to give the orders.

“What are you thinking?” Lyra asked Tori once they were alone. “This was too easy?”

Tori gave a slow nod. “I only had one blade in Dawnfire when she fell.”

“I hit her once,” Lyra said uncertainly. “So did one other guy.”

Tori shook her head. “Dawnfire’s the top of her class and the best student healer in the whole Artegium. I’ll believe we pierced her Cloak, but not that we killed her.”

“We saw the white mist,” Lyra said. “Then again, Kalden just spent a whole hour in some secret alchemy lab …”

“Exactly,” Tori muttered. “And he didn’t throw that smoke grenade for nothing.”

The soldiers spent the next few minutes getting in place behind portable shield Constructs. The heavy hitters readied their techniques, while others aimed their Missile rods at the spot where Kalden and Relia had vanished.

Tori opened her mouth as if to give the order …

Then several Death Missiles flew out from the middle of the parking lot.

As always, Relia’s aspect was too slow to hurl at high speeds. This was a side effect of the artifacts Lyraina Trelian had chosen for her. But Elend had helped her refine this technique over the years, encasing the life mana within a pure, spherical casing.

These spheres took time to forge, but Blood Army had been too slow to react to Kalden’s trick. Now, Relia hurled a dozen of them around the parking lot, arcing around her opponents’ shields, letting the pure mana casings break on impact.

Clouds of green and gold erupted in the spots where they’d struck. The clouds hit the Blood Army soldiers, and they fell into helpless piles of broken bones.

The survivors stood their ground, bombarding the space with their strongest techniques. But Kalden and Relia blasted to the side, encased within a sphere of their own. In half a heartbeat, they’d moved from the safety of their invisibility and flanked a pair of soldiers to their left. Relia’s shield hit the soldiers like a truck, while Kalden finished them with several quick slashes of his mana blades.

The pair maintained their momentum, moving to their next opponents as quickly as they’d emerged. For all that, several powerful techniques broke Relia’s shield and struck her body as she ran. Stone mana hit her with bone-breaking force, but she healed herself before she staggered. Fire mana burned through her clothes, but the seared skin re-knit itself just as fast.

A few soldiers deflected Kalden’s blades with well-placed parries or shields, threatening to slow their push. Relia switched to the offensive when this happened, closing the distance and feeding death mana into their channels. At the same time, Kalden picked up their defenses, forging his own shields to guard their back.

A few more opponents turned and fled, and Elend didn’t blame them. These weren’t real soldiers fighting for a cause bigger than themselves. They didn’t even have friends relying on them. Why would they serve as cannon fodder if they didn’t have to? Why wouldn’t they take their chances elsewhere?

“Those two have been practicing together,” Irina noted from the other side of the car. “I can tell by their movements.”

“Aye,” Elend said. “Glim makes projections of them in the backyard—big clusters of enemies like this.”

Relia had always wielded pure mana during those practice sessions, but this display was far more impressive. One touch—one breath of the green-gold mist—and her enemies faded to clouds of white. Even Kalden moved smoother than he had a few weeks ago. He trusted Relia to guard his back, and he committed fully to every strike.

Akari and Kalden were often too ruthless in these games, alienating potential allies. But Relia had the opposite problem. She’d been too worried about what people thought of her, and too eager to prove them wrong.

Now, his students pushed each other, finding the middle ground between brutality and control. Now, Relia could finally become the Mana Artist she was born to be.