The next match was dangerous.
Aleste was one of the most powerful magic-users of their year, and was clever to boot.
Quint was almost as strong, and coldly rational.
The students were buzzing with excitement at what might happen. While the second round would certainly result in some exciting results, of the Pair-versus-Pair battles, this was one of the most likely to make sparks.
It was growing clear that, regardless of their ratings in grades, Leor had ordered their matches in terms of how he rated their power. While the escalation wasn’t consistent, overall, it was there, and considering who hadn’t been called up yet - namely, Rosaline, Nicolas, Alex, and Elza, things were about to pop off. And while the potential power of previous Pairs had been mitigated by personality issues, none of the following matches seemed like they’d be restricted by insecurities or mercy.
“Oh damn,” Elza said.
Alex would have scolded her for swearing, if he wasn’t immediately and forcefully reminded of their kiss the moment he looked at her. How was anyone supposed to adapt to such circumstances? Clearly, mankind was not designed for sudden, unexpected affection like that.
“Yeah?” Rosaline asked. Tabbitha leaned in, listening to the exchange. Rosaline’s usual verbosity was tamped down by the fact that she was almost certainly up next.
“Oh yeah,” Elza said, nodding. “Aleste is scary powerful, and Quint is… Well, he’s not as good as Aleste, but they’re both gonna run up against the limit of-“ she cleared her throat, attempting her best imitation of Instructor Leor, “Not causing permanent harm to each other”. Alex could swear that her tone was mocking, as absurd as it was to mock such a reasonable restriction.
“Yeah, that’s stupid,” Francesca chimed in. “If we can manage to really hurt each other, that’s more the fault of the Angels than us, right?”
Elza let out a sound closer to a growl than a word, and Francesca backed away with an “Okay?”. A brief flurry of non-verbal communication happened between Tabbitha, Rosaline, Francesca, and Elza, which caused those last two to keep their distance from each other. Alex wasn’t the best at social interactions by his own admittance, and it’d probably be ill-advised even for someone skilled to participate in whatever just happened.
Caleb, Francesca’s Pair, was still hiding behind Percy’s wall of muscle and authority, but Percy cheered on his friend.
“You’ve got this, Quint!”
Quint, characteristically, did not respond, instead focusing on a combination of meditation and taking in his environment through unfocused eyes, receiving as much information as possible as quickly as possible. If you were to evaluate the Pair in a physical fight, Quint would be the clear favorite. Maybe ten centimeters taller than Aleste, and quite a few kilos heavier, he could bench-press her entire body.
Aleste, were you to describe her as an element, was fire. Small, full of energy, consuming every bit of information she touched, she was dangerous.
Irving Camael VI, their Guardian, was taking time with setting up the two of them, delivering an unheard speech. He was the eldest of the Guardians - 38 years old, riding right up against his own life expectancy. Whenever he was redeployed to the front lines, he almost certainly wouldn’t be returning - but with the wealth of experience he brought, he’d probably be able to handle those two strong personalities. Probably. Quint nodded dutifully, while Aleste just smiled at him.
If Alex remembered correctly, Aleste was the 4th strongest in their year, right behind him, Elza, and Francesca. And she was…
Instructor Leor dropped his hand like a flag between the two of them, and the air lit up around Aleste in a cascade of runes.
Clever.
If you could hold the right balance of mental states, thinking different ideas at the same times, you could think multiple concepts at the same time. Now, if you really wanted to stretch the idea, you could consider more and more complex things to be a “concept”, allowing them to be held in a sort of bandoleer of the mind.
Aleste had carried this idea to its natural conclusion, pushing her knowledge of the Irinaen language, magic, and her understanding of the world to their absolute limits, compressing complex sequences of words into ideas - (Imagine a spiky palm tree full of green bananas with a pink gorilla tugging at the base - plenty of words, a single image), layered several times over, and then held at once. The form this took was glowing runes, hovering in the air at Aleste’s splayed fingertips. A lesser caster, pushed to their limits, would have ten spells at the ready, one associated with each finger, but she was better than that - she had twenty-eight, one for each knuckle, the images rendering themselves distinct from each other with each little flex of her muscles. She kept her eyes unfocused, ready to send her consciousness flying, full-force, down any of these potential magical pathways.
It was an incredible display of skill, even without being actually used.
Quint, however, wasn’t intimidated. In fact, he hardly seemed to notice.
Instead, he began taking poses - wide stance, fist behind fist, followed by rotating open palms, facing opposite directions, followed by- It was a sequence of kata, each one with distinct meaning. Aleste watched carefully - it was possible to obscure the meaning of a kata by means of applying a mental layer of “analogy” to the kata, taking the strong image and applying it to a related Irinaean concept, which would be beyond most of their classmates, but Aleste had experimented with it, and if Quint had been Paired to her, she’d be a fool to think that he didn’t know the technique himself.
Then, as Quint’s palm struck the earth, and the ground ruptured beneath her, it occured to Aleste that he might just be doing exactly what he looked like he was doing - incapacitating her with the terrain, using the restrictions it could incur to keep her as a non-threat - hands and legs bound, mouth full of dirt and dust, eyes full of tears from kicked-up bits of sand - and she went through a tree of decisions with a speed that even impressed her.
The answer to his direct assault was simple, obvious, and something only she could do.
She could just attack on every vector she’d prepared at the same time.
Dividing her mind into six discrete elements was about as far as she could go without significant dilution. Twelve, disappointingly, halved her influence on each spell. Twenty-eight would reduce her strength to a mere fraction of what it should have been.
But, of course, there was a work-around for this. There was always a way of getting what you wanted, with enough practice and knowledge of the systems involved, she found. She wasn’t supposed to know programmatic spells yet, and theoretically, none of the spells she’d prepared were programmatic spells. But with what little she knew of the theory involved, she’d applied a self-execution layer to them; safely looped only twice, lasting short enough that she’d lose the spells before she lost mental coherence, but long enough that the spells would successfully execute.
She steeled her mind, and fired off all twenty-eight spellforms at once.
What happened in the next moment was beyond her control, or the control of anyone, save the more attentive Guardians.
Her body and mind became slaves to the processes she’d set in motion, and for a moment, it felt like she was flying. For three of the spells, she quite literally was, but the feeling was more metaphorical than real. Lightning was effective - she’d tossed in two spells of that. Fire was strong, but in the quantities that were strategically valuable it’d cause more damage than would be allowed, so she’d stuck to one of those. Generating blinding light was good, as was creating distracting inputs from several directions: One whole finger had been devoted to slinging dirt from three distinct angles at Quint.
And then there were the spells that she’d considered difficult, so she just executed them twice: Direct bindings on Quint’s wrists and ankles, and a blade of air directed right at the backside of his arm, designed to cut his bandana open. If he blocked it, the force would still push his arm towards her - and considering that several of the spells had catapulted her towards him, that worked to her advantage.
This, and more, played out in the blink of an eye.
From Alex’s perspective, several bursts of light, steam, and flame shot out from around Quint just as Quint collapsed the ground around Aleste, and she flew through the air at him, though not in the most controlled way. She then crashed into him, taking them both to the ground, where they lay for several seconds, dazed. More spells had gone off during her flight, and upon impact, but it had all happened so quickly that Alex couldn’t decipher it.
Irving stood, conjured his wings, and flared them in one smooth motion, levitating his way down to where Aleste and Quint lay in the dirt. Instructor Leor raised his hand at Irving in that universal sign of “stop”.
“They’re okay,” he said, and when Irving gave him a skeptical look, he added, “I promise.”
And while it took another ten seconds or so for Aleste, and maybe twenty for Quint, the two of them picked themselves up off of the ground. And when they did, Aleste was holding Quint’s arm-band in her right hand.
“Students?” Leor said. As one, they nodded at him, excepting the rather bewildered Aleste and Quint. “I’m going to give you a write-up of that one. Not now, of course, but I seriously doubt most of you saw both what Aleste and Quint did.” Alex had been watching Aleste, and until Leor said just that, he didn’t think that Quint had done much of anything.
Leor turned to the two duelists. “Excellent work, you two.”