PART 4

  Respite

  What are you thinking of? a voice asked her.

  Where did all the time go? When did it all start? Her memory felt scattered as ever, bits and pieces of unfinished projects, all a jumble, skipping, skipping, skipping. She couldn’t think straight.

  That’s right, it was after the meeting with the Headmistress.

  How long has it been?

  Staring at the flickering flames in front of her, kneeling on the floor, hands empty, she took a deep breath before looking back to the plush armchair behind her where Theo sat—where he had sat all those months ago when they were mere strangers to each other—and saw that he was sleeping peacefully.

  She got up from her spot and walked over to a basket by the other couches and picked up a blanket, which she wrapped around his innocent, slumbering figure before brushing the hair out of his face, kissing his forehead, and sitting back down in her spot. He did not stir; after all, he had been working hard over the past month, despite everything and his finals.

  Three months, she answered for him. Two months, and then one. One since what happened.

  * * *

  At the end of her patience, fifteen minutes into the fight, Ty incapacitated Alex by deflecting Faris’s charm spell and spoke a few quick, short phrases that would end the fight.

  Dedgreas.

  Several long, thin stones emerged from the ground, converging dangerously close to her caster’s neck.

  “Good?” Ty called to the faraway Faris.

  “Yeah, whatever,” shouted her caster, grimacing while trying to eye the pages of his tome without moving and getting himself cut.

  Meanwhile, Ty went up on the tips of her toes and touched her hand to Alex’s head, dispelling the charming spell Faris had accidentally hit her with.

  Within a few seconds, stepping back, she watched the fog lift as Alex regained focus and remembered where she was: the field, in the middle of a fight with Ty.

  As she now lunged at her tactician, Ty desperately recounted to her what had happened while swiftly dodging the attack.

  “Oh!” Alex exclaimed, immediately stopping and holding her hands up in surrender. “Really?”

  Well, that was fast. Ty gave the duelist a reassuring smile and turned to Faris, who had deconstructed his stone prison and was walking over. “There he comes now.”

  “Oh, how could you?” huffed Alex with a stern pout, facing the caster. “I thought we were friends, Ferry.”

  Faris stopped in his tracks, jaw dropping. Undeniably pink in the face, he growled, “Wait, you were the one who made up that nickname, weren’t you?” His voice broke in the middle of his sentence, but the embarrassment did nothing to abate his anger.

  Alex’s stern gaze dropped. She lifted her hand to her mouth to cover her goofy smile, chuckling nervously. “Heh…do you hear that?” She started sidestepping away from them both. “I think I heard someone calling for me.” And then, without giving them any time to respond, she bolted to the benches, her speed rivaling even that of Elias’s that one time he had been caught eating in the common room instead of attending class.

  Ty turned to her caster, unaffected by the name-calling. “Your first performance after your week of academic probation was lackluster. That was a simple spell to counter, and you should have taken the time to ready a shield beforehand.” She felt too disappointed to sigh. “Sometimes you may not have a support or healer around to help you, and I’ve tol—”

  “Yeah, and I said whatever,” spat Faris bitterly as he stomped off to the benches as well, making a beeline for a particular student who was frantically picking up her belongings and leaving.

  It’s like nothing ever happened, huh? mused Ty to herself. Though the boys had finished their packages in fewer than two days, and it had taken a few extra for them to be cleared, they still missed out on their first two practices together.

  Heading back to the benches as well, eyes on Darius and Selene packing up at the lowest seats and discussing their most recent Snowberry harvest, she couldn’t help but wonder how, even after a whole semester, she somehow still knew next to nothing about the small, taciturn student.

  It was interesting, though, how Selene seemed so much more at home when she was with the Ancients, especially after seeing her during the second visit. Running off to the spellpaper hut after they were invited in, before Ty could even debrief everyone.

  Darius and Ty, of course, went to the elder’s hut again. Where, to no one’s surprise, even Theo’s, she knelt for hours, speechless.

  “Is class over?”

  The tactician looked up to see the remaining part of her Alex-Faris group. “Yes, Cyril,” she responded kindly, smiling. The healer had only recently started to speak to her again without that fearful look in his eyes. Yet something about it felt off. Off, like everything else. A growing sense of unease.

  “Sounds good,” he mumbled and nodded, lowering his head slightly. “Thanks for practice.”

  As he walked away, alone and without his usual rambunctiousness, she couldn’t help but feel bad for having spoken to him so harshly during the initial confrontation. He was human, after all. He made mistakes, just like her.

  When her healer finally exited the courtyard, all the while not making a sound or turning back, she looked back to the benches and found one student remaining.

  “Don’t you have class in half an hour?” she smiled weakly.

  “I think there’s a class in here in half an hour as well,” he replied without pause.

  “Yes, curious how the schedule works that way.” She dispelled the two swords in her hand from the battle and watched them fizzle away. “Not ready to leave yet?”

  “Was just feeling wistful.”

  Ty raised an eyebrow. “Wistful?”

  “You know, during the first semester. How we fought.”

  She chuckled. “You mean when I told you no, and you still attacked me?”

  “Mmm, is there a difference?”

  “Mmm, yes.”

  Theo got up, shedding his class robe and adjusting the tome bag on his shoulder. “I’m sure we’ll be done in ten minutes. What do you think?”

  Sighing, a weary smile on her face, Ty walked over to the benches to place her robe beside his. “Tome or no tome?”

  “No tome.”

  “You know that almost every time we duel, and I have no tome, you lose, right?” she called after her partner, who was now making his way toward the center of the courtyard.

  “Yes, but I think I’ve come up with a surefire way of winning this time,” he called back, his smile audible in his voice.

  Had it been any other time, she would have said no. But he was fresh out of academic probation, and during that first week he had sunk deep into despair from not being able to attend his first few classes. He had tossed and turned most nights from not being able to practice, and on several occasions, she had even caught him rifling through her own class texts to taste an inkling of the life outside.

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  “Come on, come on!” yelled Theo now, in position at the center of the courtyard.

  “We’ll only need five minutes anyway!” she groaned, walking toward her other half.

  What was she going to open with? Restricted to permissible spells, she still had a lot in her arsenal—though she did like to start with a shield, like most people would. Area-spells were useful, though if they were overwritten, the cooldown before she could rewrite it would take a while…

  “Ready?”

  Ty looked up from her spot, not a few steps away from Theo, watching him put his hands to his side.

  “Mhm,” she nodded, trying to do her best to smile though the melancholy finally hit her: the first time they had been in this courtyard, things had been much different. There was no mission, no goal, no purpose she had to fulfill. Just nightmares and inconveniences, trying not to worry about the class not liking her. Trying not to worry about fitting in. Trying not to let her secret go. Trying not to be weak.

  “Five.”

  Ty swallowed and took a deep breath.

  Getting to know the class had made her weaker. It had made her happier, but at what cost? Was it really so bad to be happy?

  “Four.”

  Yes. Yes it is.

  No more duels. No more of this.

  “Three.”

  Respectfully, she put her hands now to her side to mirror her opponent’s and found that her hands were shaking.

  I want to fight. I want to be strong.

  “Two.”

  She could hear the verses of text in her heart, scrambled beyond all recognition.

  Even if it was for a few months, I want to give back to the world what it gave me.

  “One.”

  Love.

  Revenge, echoed a distant memory.

  It was as if the ceiling had shattered, and large fragments of the sky were falling. And falling hard.

  Ty spared herself the chore of figuring out what spell had been cast and popped a detonating shield while she advanced toward Theo, feeling barely anything as the glass-like crystals shattered and reflected off her shield.

  Being smart, he began to back away and prepared a small front-facing shield to deflect the shards coming back at him, melding in a few other words of another spell while Ty quickened her pace, producing a glowing blue sword out of thin air while he did so.

  Well aware that she still had considerable distance to cover, and her shield was already about to collapse, Ty made a split-second decision to sprint the rest of the way toward Theo—and would have gotten there on time—except his adjunct spell finished at exactly the right time.

  Darkness.

  And then, suffocating her safe bubble, the purple shroud crushed her shield, detonating it outwards toward an enemy that was no longer there.

  Ty quickly prepared an area nullification spell, retracting her blade and standing still in her increasingly growing circle of light, trying to listen intently to the darkness.

  There.

  She turned ninety degrees and unflinchingly watched a large rock formation crumble like dust against her newly formed shield, sending back her conjured sword in its direction not a second later.

  Preparing her field change spell now, aware that her nullification shield could last at most ten seconds against Theo, Ty continued to observe her surroundings, trying to see if she could see any change rather than try to hear it over her own voice.

  There was nothing at first. And then, halfway through her field-change spell, there was a deep rumbling beneath the ground.

  If he could not get past her shield, going through the ground would definitely work—had she not seen it.

  Stopping in the middle of her field enchantment spell, Ty spoke a quick counter to the Earthquake, thinking for a moment how cliché the spell was when she felt something soar across the corner of her eye.

  Pain.

  Cursing herself, resuming her field change, Ty ripped out the large ice shard lodged in her left shoulder and watched her light, courtyard-wide nullification mist stifle the darkness.

  With that done, she turned around in her spot several times, trying to locate her opponent from her safe spot when it finally occurred to her that most of the ground under them no longer resembled grass.

  That time in the shroud—he had used it to spawn fifteen traps around her, all of which looked like pressurized domes of lava that would most certainly produce courtyard-demolishing fire tornadoes upon being triggered, given that they had been cast correctly.

  Knowing Theo, there was no dispute about the latter point.

  Another barrage of shards soared through the air as Ty contemplated how to get rid of the pockets of destruction without leveling the entire courtyard and attracting the unwanted attention of others. No legitimate spell could counter those easily, and not fifteen of them if they went off all at once.

  You just got out of probation, you fool, she thought to herself with a grimace, raising her left hand to absorb the projectiles this time and readying another conjured sword in the other.

  Her eyes followed the source of the shards and finally landed on a levitating shadow behind the lava pools, attempting to deflect them back to the floating figure. Luckily for Theo, he knew her well enough to keep himself on the offensive as shards were met with shards, producing a dusty snow-like powder.

  Properly annoyed now, Ty stopped trying to absorb the projectiles, held out a hand toward the shadow, and began a Collapse spell, deflecting the last remaining pieces of crystal with her sword.

  As Theo was forced to the ground, the tactician imbued her blade with ice before throwing it into one of the fire pools, immediately calling down an ice pillar to collide with the subsequent explosion.

  Fog. The mist grew denser, now laden with heat.

  Good. Next.

  Her concentration broke briefly just as she started to conjure her second pillar, when she heard Theo’s voice approach. It was finally loud enough; she could finally discern what he was saying.

  Miasma. Nullify?

  She called the second pillar down, ignoring the voice in her head. The cooldown of field spells lasted a whole five minutes. There would be no changing it this soon; he should have known that.

  Unless.

  The second pillar hit the bubble, producing another dense gray fog that she ran toward, desperately trying to put some distance between her and where she once stood, the growing sense that something terrible was going to happen had she stayed.

  And then—there it was, her own spell from earlier, Dedgreas. Her mind had registered the wrong spell.

  Watching the earth cage violently pierce the ground where she had stood made her head feel light. His spell was far less merciful than hers had been—they all took less than a second to emerge from the ground, the thin needle-like poles taller than her and intersecting at the top like sticks for a bonfire. Had she not moved, there was no doubt that she would have been gruesomely impaled.

  Nate’s lessons must be paying off…

  Ty wiped the sweat off her face and continued to make her way around the arena with her conjured swords, stabbing another pocket of lava, sending down another accompanying pillar of ice.

  Conjuring and moving, slowly destroying every growing trap while monitoring Theo, she finally realized that there simply wasn’t enough time to disarm every one of them at the rate she was going. Once he regained his energy and anima, the barrage of attacks would resume. He was tiring her out.

  She made her way back to the center, catching her breath while she looked upon all the remaining traps, ready to burst at any time. If they all detonated at once—when they all detonated at once—the damage would still take considerable effort to nullify. And she wasn’t allowed to use any of her advanced trigger spells.

  “You…you fool,” she barely uttered, lowering her head while trying to figure out what legitimate spell she could use.

  “Done already?”

  Before he even finished his sentence, she threw two conjured rapiers from both her hands in quick succession, slightly farther than where the voice was coming from.

  Puncture. Counter?

  Ty easily moved out of the way and used her strength to make another sword instead. By now, her circle was complete.

  “Time’s up.”

  Miasma.

  Without giving her opponent even an extra second, Ty dug the weapon deep into the ground and, with both hands, knelt down as she clutched it tightly, trying to channel the rest of the swords as she felt the poison begin to suffocate her.

  Purification.

  And then there was darkness no more, as if it had never happened. There was the circle of swords she had created, forming a glowing circle around most of the arena that she had made, and Theo at its edge, eyes wide with surprise.

  Ty pulled the sword out of the ground and slowly got back up, watching all the other swords rise with it into the air as she listened to her heartbeat.

  One, two. One, two. Too fast to tell the time.

  She arched her body back with her right hand on the grip and pointed it directly at Theo’s body, watching all the other spirit swords follow suit. She steadied her grip.

  He laughed.

  Shameful, she could hear her mother scold.

  She launched the swords at him.

  Instead of the satisfying clashing sound of the swords meeting her opponent, the makeshift metals sliding against the others as they hit a singular target, there was a sound like a shield had been canceled. Like she had opened the lid of a bubbling pot, and all was clear now. Exposed.

  And under the lid, she could hear a collective, growing rumbling sound that sounded far worse than the Earthquake from earlier. It took no time to become a deafening roar she could no longer ignore, making her second mistake of the day: taking her eyes off Theo.

  Her first mistake was not realizing that he had merged a detonating shield spell with the fire pools.

  Watching the towers of flame begin to grow and engulf the courtyard, the dark shroud making it worse by swallowing and twisting the flames into an apocalyptic vortex of destruction, Ty’s heart skipped a beat.

  What do I do?

  My swords. Even if they were pinning down her opponent, even if it would give her the win, losing the battle was the least of her problems at this point. She had to do something.

  Conjuring her final weapon, she raised it to the sky, pouring all her energy and anima into a singular, all-reaching Transmogrify Deluge.

  Then she cast the changing, turbulent sword on the brink of collapse into the sky, followed by all the others, hoping for them to reach high enough so that they could pierce above the field and nullify all under it. It had to. There was no way it would not reach. She couldn’t get into trouble again.

  Crack.

  The sky bathed itself in white as she reflectively shut her eyes, raising a hand up to her face to shield herself.

  But then there was warmth.

  She opened her eyes to a flameless, uncorrupted ceiling before looking down to see a hand on her chest.

  Break, her steady mind filled in.

  She let her hand fall and watched Theo lower his hand too.

  “I win,” he whispered into her ear after wrapping his arms around her.

  Rain fell all around them.

  Silence.

  “That’s cheating. We would have gotten in trouble.”

  “Is it cheating if it works? It’s not my fault your weakness is so apparent.”

  “Yes, it’s still cheating. Where’s the honor in that?”

  “What do you mean? The only honor that matters is winning.”