“Gina, Ring 81!” Grabbing her staff, Gina rushed off to the ring, her riding skirt billowing behind her as she jogged. She missed her normal skirt and the way it billowed as she moved, accentuating her curves and showing off her legs. She’d seen the way some of the boys in her classes stole glances as she walked past them, even caught a couple professors’ wandering eyes. But most importantly, they’d made her feel pretty and confident. Not just the bookish girl studying to be a mage she’d been before Forest’s Edge Academy.
But practicality came before beauty. Skirts fluttered up, and the instinctive, momentary embarrassment at having your unmentionables displayed for the whole class had led to more than one girl losing a match. Worse, some of the boys had taken to gleefully trying to shred as much of the girls’ clothing as possible during their matches, and the professors hadn’t done much to stop it. The Sergeant had even yelled that an enemy wasn’t going to show you mercy just because you accidentally showed a little skin. So the girls adapted. Skirts were replaced with pants or riding skirts, slitted on the front and back with multiple layers of cloth that looked like a normal skirt when standing, but were really cleverly disguised pants or shorts. Many spent their hard saved cash on expensive repair enchantments for their uniforms too, so much so that the enchanting students of the Academy had become particularly skilled at applying them. Makeup and fancy hairstyles were replaced with armor, goggles, and hairbands to keep stray locks and sweat from clouding vision. Practicality before beauty.
Despite what the students thought, the mixed Practical Spellcasting and Combat Skills classes continued throughout the term as their professors pushed them to fight and practice not just against their classmates, but against the professors themselves. She wasn’t looking forward to midterms next week. It’d already been announced that, like at the beginning of the term, their midterm tests would be to fight against the Sergeant.
Even though she’d been part of one of the only teams to “win” against the Sergeant, she wasn’t confident it’d be the same during the midterms. Her gut told her the Sergeant wouldn’t be holding back nearly as much, especially since all of her classmates had grown stronger after weeks of fighting.
As she got to her ring and saw who her opponent was, she swallowed nervously. Some had grown more than most. Across the ring from her, Gina eyed her opponent cautiously, her purple hair tied back to keep it out of her eyes. Her opponent’s body was wrapped in a tight fitting uniform, leggings and thin leather padding covering her legs, the school’s uniform jacket with more leather armor covering her chest, arms, and shoulders, and a dulled training sword and shield in her hands.
From her appearances, Jun looked more like a trainee warrior than a battlemage, her face still innocent and naive, though there was a hardness to her eyes that hadn’t been there months ago. But Gina knew better. Many in their class knew better after the past few weeks of sparring. Sure there were still many who thought her weak, especially those who liked Ivar and were still angry he’d’ been expelled a couple months ago, but Gina had stopped believing that after that first group training match against the Sergeant.
Nervously, Gina clutched her staff as she tried to take in the entire ring at once. Across from her, Jun seemed calm, almost bored, as they waited for Professor Marcos to start the match. She radiated a confusing mixture of nervous excitement bordering on naivete, and a bored confidence that said she wasn’t worried about her opponent. No, regardless of the rumors floating about her, some of which Gina and her friends had started months ago, she knew the truth. Jun was a talented battlemage.
“Begin!”
As soon as she heard Marcos begin to speak, Gina moved her mana into a series of spells. [Wind Armor], her newest defensive spell, an Initiate rank evolution of her [Wind Wall], wrapped around her body, forming alternating layers of hardened air that moved rapidly all around her, meant to block and disperse force and shred weaker materials that got close to her. [Levitate], a Novice rank support spell that made her lighter on her feet. [Cloud Sense], another Novice rank spell that spread her mana out like a cloud, letting her sense changes in the movement of air. The spells activated in less than a second thanks to the weeks of practice she’d had sparring against her classmates.
As the buffs coalesced, she threw all of her physical stats enhanced by [Levitate] into moving, barely dodging the trio of snares and shimmering wall of force that rocketed through where she’d been standing, her heart pounding. Grains of sand pinged off her [Wind Armor] as she moved and channeled her mana into her staff. Half her attention went into dodging the spells she only felt forming thanks to [Cloud Sense], while the other half formed her mana into a series of [Wind Blades]. One after another, the Apprentice ranked spells coalesced and shot off towards Jun as soon as she could shift enough Wind affinity mana to power the spells. A veritable storm of spells screamed for Jun, and against anyone else Gina would’ve been confident, but wind wasn’t the best element to punch through defenses like her opponent’s barriers.
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It would’ve been a waste of mana if she’d aimed for the defensive specialist. That’s why she didn’t. More thumps shook the sand of the ring as her spells hit just short of the girl’s barrier, throwing up dust into the air and obscuring Jun from sight. Using the sand as a screen, Gina launched herself up into the air as she overcharged her [Levitate], pushing herself into a slow moving arc in a random direction while Jun remained in place, trusting in her barriers to defend her even though she was blind.
Channeling her mana through her Wind affinity, Gina started to charge up her [Wind’s Fury], the massive spell she’d used on the Sergeant all those weeks ago. Wind magic was normally poor at shattering defenses, excelling more at wide area effects and small, rapid strikes. It was possible to do more focused devastation, but such spells took immense amounts of mana that took time to channel and shift to build up a devastating strike. Such a drawback meant such strikes were best used for ambushes, or against static targets like walls and buildings, or an enemy that’d been rooted down. Or an enemy that stayed still due to blindness and overconfidence. As the dust blinding Jun started to settle, Gina shifted the last of the minimum amount of mana she needed to cast [Wind’s Fury]. As the funnel cloud that was her tornado started to manifest at the top of the dome, she felt her mana drop precipitously as her [Wind Armor] shredded through a flurry of blows. Glancing at what attacked her, she blanched as she saw a forest of Jun’s snares grasping for her, the nearest lengths shattering as they tried to push through her armor. How was she aiming at her while blinded?!
Feeling the pressure, Gina tried to rush her [Wind Fury], dropping her [Cloud Sense] to push the trickle of mana from it into her offense, but it was too little, too late. Just before she channeled the last of the mana she needed, she felt something get through her [Wind Armor] and wrap around her ankle. Her carefully hoarded mana started to drift away from her spell as she coalesced it, the structure struggling to stay cohesive as the flows feeding it were slowly siphoned. Gina tried to bolster her spell with unaspected mana, the neutral mana providing structure at the cost of weakening the overall effect. Still, it was all she could do. Emptying her core of mana, Gina forcibly coalesced her spell and launched it at Jun’s position, willing it to pierce through her defenses!
Twisting winds lanced down in a small tornado as it slammed into Jun’s position, picking up grains of sand and accelerating them to awe inspiring speeds as Gina’s spell struck. Even weakened, such a spell would tear through even a well constructed stone house. Yes! Gina cheered in her mind as her spell ran its course. After ten seconds, the winds stilled, and Gina was sure she must have won, except she didn’t hear Professor Marcos call an end to the fight. That was when she realized Jun’s snares still held her tight. As the dust cleared, she saw it. A shining shell-like barrier where she’d struck with her spell, and within, Jun still stood ready to fight. Gina felt exhausted. Her mana was totally empty, her spells long shattered when her mana ran out, and what little she regenerated stolen away by Jun’s snares before she could use it, and the touch of her snares even felt like they were sapping her physical energy, making her eyelids heavier and heavier.
It took her long seconds to realize she was slowly being pulled back down to the ground. She thought she heard someone say something, but she was too tired to understand it. The only thing in her head as her vision faded was a single thought: How did she target me through the dust?
“Victory, Jun!” Professor Marcos yelled. With the match called, Jun dismissed her remaining spells while a healer ran over to check her unconscious opponent laying in the sand.
Jun looked at the unused weapons in her hands. They felt comfortable. Familiar. When did that happen? As soon as the match began, she’d been ready to fight, casting her barriers to protect herself and swarming Gina with snares. Even when the other girl filled the air around her with sand and dust, she was able to see the girl’s strange grey glow and sense her with her mana sense. She felt the other girl’s spells forming, gained clues to how her spells worked, and that was enough for her to stay confident in her barriers, even against her final, massive attack.
Stiffly, she walked out of the arena, though she couldn’t help wondering about the match. Everything had seemed so… easy. She knew her mother’s training was making her stronger, faster, more skilled, but all of her classmates had years of training over her. So why did fighting them seem so easy? Why did Gina, the battlemage who could summon a literal tornado, fall to her snares. What were the strange lights she saw around everyone? Why didn’t fighting seem to bother her anymore?
Who was she becoming?
