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Of Arms and Arcane: Chapter 153
🕑 Added 2024-10-24 12:38:42 +0000 UTCAfter our little talk, we lapsed into awkward silence while sipping our drinks, awkward for me at least, Alistair looked as cool as a cucumber.
After some time, I could hear the sounds of the performance that was supposed to buy me some rest time, ending as the audience gave them their closing applause, and when the door opened, we knew it was time.
I looked at Alistair and said, “Shall we?”
***
After the formalities were over and done with, we were on a stage facing each other.
“Mages, are you ready?” the referee asked, and we both nodded with our hands twitching by our side like an old western showdown.
“FIGHT!” the referee shouted as he brought his hand down and jumped backward.
Immediately, both Alistair's and my hands became a blur as we started casting spells at each other. It started with quick 1st and 2nd circle spells that we could cast with but a well-structured thought to maintain and feed mana into the magic circles we cached in our minds to handle the auto-casting while we weaved other spells.
Within the first few seconds, I predicted that this was going to turn into a magical slugfest as both of us started raising Earth Walls to form bastions to block each other’s constant barrage of small-spell-fire.
Once our walls were up, Alistair displayed the advantages of hailing from an ancient mage house by lobbing what must be a 4th circle spell my way as I just started weaving my own 4th circle spell, because the explosion rocked my position, and when I turned back from shielding myself from the explosion, I saw that my outer wall was gone and so was part of my inner Earth Wall.
This put me further on the back foot as I had to spend some of my attention on mending my defenses, only for another explosion to rock my bastion and demolish more of my walls. Even now, I do not know what spell it was, I know it was fire-based, but it was not the 4th circle spell, Burning Impact, because I heard it roar across the stage before it hit my position, Burning impact traveled silently until it hit an object, accumulate energy and explode.
My other problem in this dual was getting a line of sight on Alistair’s position without getting pelted by his auto-cast spells that were still going on, and I did not have a spell that could hit him without revealing myself… unless… I may have an idea.
It may be a stupid idea that may blow myself up, but it was the only good idea I had as my walls were being blown apart.
I pick up a piece of rubble the size of my fist and weave a Burning Impact spell but with a twist. In the part of the spell that delays the explosion after coming in contact with the object the spell intends to blow up, I tweaked the spell to delay the explosion to be around three seconds, once I was done casting the spell into the rock, I felt I was holding a hot potato by how unstable the spell felt.
I immediately lobbed the spell-infused rock over to where I remember Alistair's walls were, and just like clockwork, on my internal count of three, I heard an explosion, shortly followed by dirt sprinkling over my wall. But in good news, my improvised grenade was enough to break his concentration, stopping his barrage of auto-spells.
This was it, this was the time to close in for the kill, but something did not feel right. I did not hear any shout of alarm after an explosion, or shuffling around in the rubble left behind. I peeked over my wall to scope out the situation and saw that my grenade crumbled the side of his wall, but no sign of Alistair himself, and the fact that the referee did not come to check on his status, was a strong indicator that he was still in the game.
After a few seconds of silence, I wondered if he was even still behind his wall, and there was one easy way to test it. I sent my mana through the floor to make Earth Spikes explode up from where he was supposed to be, and to my surprise, my mana reached its destination unimpeded and blossomed with a bouquet of spikes, confirming that Alistair was no longer there.
I looked around the stage to see that only the referee and I were standing, just in case he was hiding behind some of his other Earth Walls, I leveled them and still found no trace of him, I even lowered my walls in case he was hiding behind my Earth Walls like I did Elise’s. I checked the air just in case he somehow had a way to fly, which I know is hard to do without magic tool assistance, but no luck there. Just in case he was hiding behind an illusion, I spun up a Wind Balde but modified it to expand in a circle around me and catch anyone hiding behind illusions, regardless of the referee’s presence on the stage, we were told not to hold back and that the referees could take care of himself.
Just as I released the nova of Wind Blade and the referee jumped to avoid it, I felt a disturbance in the mana at my 4 o'clock. I looked over my shoulder and saw it, just outside of my control of the earth around me to avoid the terrain being turned against me, a hole in the ground opened up, a hole that suspiciously opened at an angle that aimed at my head.
From that hole, an Earth Bullet sped toward my head. Having seen the danger before the attack happened, I easily ducked out of the Earth Bullet’s path, formed the Earth element hand sign, and stomped the ground, sending my mana into the ground to claim dominion over the dirt the stage was made of and push against the currently underground Alistair.
It was times like this that I wished I could use Instinctive magic to swiftly manipulate the earth with but a shift of my foot and flex of my will, but I had to keep up appearances and use orthodox magic like everyone else, and in order to do that, I needed to do the same thing I need to do in a math exam, I had to show my work process, that meant saying the right chants, the right hand signs, the right movements, this all take time, and in this case, it took me too long to claim a swift victory via ‘out of boundary’ by using earth manipulation to eject the part of the stage Alistair was hiding in off of the stage.
This gave him enough time to pop out of his hidey-hole and scramble forward as a chunk of the stage beneath him was sent a few meters away from the stage. At the last moment, Alistair managed to jump off the airborne part of the stage and landed on the corner of where part of the stage should be, except that it was now missing about three feet in height.
But despite his narrow escape from getting ‘out of bounded’ by me, I knew better than to give this guy any chances. From the broken-off part of the stage facing Alistar, I quickly cast Earth Spikes and forced more mana into the spell to extend the length of the spikes to hit Alistar.
Not having much time to do much of anything, Alistar raised a quick Earth Wall to block my spikes, but with my spikes braced against the side of the stage, it easily pushed through the wall and forced Alistar to retreat and eventually set foot on the ground outside of the stage.
The referee immediately raised his hand and announced, “Winner! Like Ironcrest!”
