Alex had noticed exactly none of this, nor had he noticed that Elza hadn’t, either. They were up next, and frankly, he hadn’t noticed the transition from standing with his classmates to standing on the battlefield, ushered out there by Julian and Leor. He was going over a thousand different permutations of how the duel could proceed. He just responded to stress that way: If something worried him, make it rational, make it understandable, take it apart and piece it back together with knowledge and gain mastery over it. Understanding Elza eluded him - a combination of not enough information, and things contradicting his average expectation of his fellow student, and the overly-sharp, flashbang-like memory of her kissing him drowning out proper thoughts made strategizing about her effectively impossible. Though it took him until he was most of the way out to the asphalt strip to realize that.
He’d have to understand it through a general methodology. He was, after all, currently the highest ranked student in their year, let alone their class. His mastery of magic was enough to at least be described by the word “mastery”, even if it was nothing compared to a proper Angel, and his knowledge of the physical world and the ways in which magic could alter it was impeccable. He could, and should, utterly dismantle Elza, even if she was, currently, ranked right up there alongside him. Even if the gap between first and second was just one number, it was one that he had the power to prevent from ever being crossed, especially by someone he now knew so…
He wanted to think “knew so well”, especially after being inside her mind for God knew how long during their curing of the maleficus. But he didn’t know her at all. He’d hardly taken note of her, other than as a goal to beat, and at the Pairing ceremony, she was anything but predictable.
Still. You’ve got this, he reassured himself.
Across the way, she smiled at him, and nodded.
Leor’s flag dropped.
“Are you sure?” Tabbitha asked.
“Yeah,” Gabriel said, nodding. “They’ll be fine. Alex is a nice guy.”
Tabbitha gave him a look. Rachel tugged at his arm, and asked, “Do you know Elza?”
Alex didn’t see the spells that Elza cast, only their effects. She was engulfed in guttering flames, sending off sparks and gouts with reckless abandon, and she flew at him with blinding speed. He couldn’t tell if she was running, or if she’d just kicked off with absurd energy and carried on with momentum. It hardly mattered. He needed a defense. Not a technical defense, not something clever, she’d punch through that from what he saw, just raw power.
Channel your will into ice. You know what it’s like to be cold. Make it real.
With that thought, he sucked the moisture out of the air, out of the plants, out of the twin gulleys of water aligned with the battlefield to fuel effects just like this, and kicked up a massive spike of ice directly in Elza’s path. It didn’t stop her - she just shattered it, using rapid-fire spellforms to manipulate the momentum-course of the ice shards back towards Alex - but that was enough for him. He kicked back - of course, she aimed at where he would be rather than where he was, but Alex gave his kick just enough power to take him a half-meter past where her ice-spikes landed. She was still flying through the air towards him, and so, he imagined the solidness of iron, and mirrored it to the air just above his right foot, and kicked off it, putting him just out of the line of her attack. She hit the dirt, rolling, and came up with both fists at the ready. She was fast, moreso than Alex had ever had to reckon with.
He raised his fists, and with them, a half-dozen defensive spells ready to fire off. He could deliver devastating force with second-order abstraction and sense-mirroring, but if Elza gave him the few fractions of a second required to conjure up a few Irinaen spells, he’d do so. The greatest of Angels weren’t just powerful and righteous - they were cunning.
So, it seemed, was Elza.
She charged at him again. A lesser student would have fired off his defensive spells and considered that a done deal, secure in their victory. But that would not have worked. Alex could see that Elza was channeling several defensive spells, forming a bubble of insulative air around her and reactive magics that would repel most basic attacks, while simultaneously enhancing the strength of her muscles, adding momentum to her fist, which lead the charge. Alex’s only valid move was to dodge out of the way.
She, somehow, saw this coming. Of course. She’d been in his head. And her arm bent towards him. He saw it, and stronger than his feeble, human muscles could allow, he tossed a pile of momentum into his right leg, which had already kicked off the ground, and was thus free. Alex twisted, slightly, in the direction of the punch headed towards his face, lessening the blow, and landed the tip of his foot into Elza’s ribcage.
Still, she hit like a freight train.
Alex crashed into the dirt, a few meters away from Elza. They both responded quickly, repulsive auras pressing against each other - both had defaulted to channeling magnetism, improbably, as a first-order abstraction, taking the sense of a ferrous metal - in each case, the zippers of their uniforms - straining ever so slightly against a magnet on one of the many pillars of elements alongside their battlefield - and used it to generate a magnetic field, which pushed against each other with enough force to kick them back several meters.
Neither broke their stance, still maintaining a wary crouch, even if they’d kicked up a half-kilogram of dirt.
“Elza,” Alex said, not getting much further before finding out just how much debris had made its way into his mouth, and spitting it out. Elza, in turn, was wiping away a bit of blood from a split lip, and it formed a crimson streak against the red sleeve of her uniform. She smiled, breathing heavily.
“Yeah?” she said. She seemed to be having an alarming amount of fun with this.
He could still reason with her. “You’re good. Real good. But-“ he coughed up some more dust, but Elza, perhaps respectfully, didn’t take advantage of that. “You know this goes poorly if we go all-out.” The words sounded stupid the second he said them. Elza did not seem like the type to listen to reason.
She didn’t. Instead, she laughed. “Is that a challenge? I’ve been going easy on you. You’re soft.”
That had to be a bluff. Alex had never been outscored by her on exams, and while she was impressive, what she’d been doing had to be at least within an order of magnitude of her maximum capacity. Still, Alex felt like he should be cautious - he didn’t know what instinct, what fear, was being tripped, but he took up a defensive posture. He let his mind and eyes de-focus: taking in everything around him, able to respond with lightning speed. Focusing on nothing, paradoxically, meant focusing on everything, and it was one of his better tricks, one that he’d tried to teach to Max and Chess, but it hadn’t taken with either of them.
“Come at me, then,” he said, mustering as taunting of a tone as he could while not looking at, or even truly thinking about, her.
Elza bit her lip hard enough to draw even more blood, and then, showing just a fraction of hesitation, she looked to the bleachers. Even Elza didn’t want to be summarily expelled, with whatever that would entail. Maybe she would have run away, depending on what happened a few nights ago, but being kicked out was something different entirely. “May I?” she asked, looking at Julian.
He looked to her, to Alex, and back to her. “Do what you will,” he said.
The second the sentence came down, so did Elza. He didn’t even see her move, instead just feeling the impact of her boots on his chest. But he didn’t get his position in the class for nothing. He grabbed her by the ankles, and rotated, not just backwards to reduce the strength of the blow, but sideways, taking her momentum and wrenching her, face-first, into the snowy ground. She bounced, kicking up drifts and dust and flecks of mud and snow-melt, but flipped unnaturally in the air, landing on her feet. Elza charged at him yet again.
Alex, morally trained by the True Church, did not have an adequate supply of expletives. In those moments of extreme stress, the mind acted faster than conscious thought, and so, in a fraction of a second, he ran through all the possibilities that he had. Spellforms would be too slow, and she kept that insulation field up, nullifying most of what he could do to her. He even had to wrangle his mind to focus on her - she was clearly using some combat variation of that same forbidden obscuration spell - the gall of using forbidden spells in the view of everyone! - He felt his mind slipping off her, and as much as it shook him, he dwelled on the sensation of pulling the walls of his soul down, on the feeling of that kiss, and punched straight through the obscuration spell.
But she was too much. She was, improbably, faster than him. More intense than him. If this duel was any indication, it was a minor miracle that she was still human. There was only one answer, and despite the risks, Alex would rather take it than lose now. Rather than lose to her.
Intuitive magic.
He focused not on methodology: taking the steps from “identifying what was needed” to “what effect would satisfy those requirements” to “what spell he knew would satisfy them” was too slow, as was replacing the third step with first or second-order abstraction. Even if this was a purely theoretical exercise, she was too fast. He could feel the heat of her body, the heat of her pushing aside molecules of air, before he could so much as react.
So, all he had time for was intuitive magic.
He let down barriers trained for thousands upon thousands of hours. He could intuit what he needed to happen: “stop her”, and his mind, his brain, could auto-complete the necessary steps and render them into magic before passing through any steps of language or definition. It was dangerous, but he was in Arcadia. He was surrounded by Angels. It was the safest place possible to do something horrifically dangerous.
The air gelled. Time slowed. Elza was caught in it, if only for a fraction of a fraction of a second, like a fly in a trap. He could pluck her wings. Just do whatever it took to stop her. He could not lose. Razorblades of air and dust would tear through her flesh and bones and he would pull the bandanna from her shattered, broken body.
Before someone healed her, of course.
Elza, however, did not slow down.
Alex couldn’t identify any of the sensations he was feeling. Like vertigo, but inverted. Like trying to pass a boulder through his temporal lobe. Like a dot stretched on the surface of a balloon. Nothing made any sense in any context, and he realized, far too late, that she’d resorted to the same thing he had.
Her knees crashed into his chest just in time to knock reality back into a solid state for both of them. She rode him a good five meters, thumb and forefinger crushing his throat, while the other hand, unsighted, was already untying the bandanna on his arm.
He tried to swat her away, and his right arm, previously a source of strength, caught her boot in his wrist. He also caught a glimpse of tights well up the long skirt of her uniform, and that too, struck out against him. For God’s sake, Alexander, he thought, before she shoved her left pointer and ring finger down his throat, pre-emptively keeping him from even subvocalizing spells.
It was over, he realized.
And at the same time, he realized that this girl was on another level entirely. She was above him and Francesca. Maybe she had been the whole time, and just had tested poorly. As she pulled the bandanna free, Alex laid in the dirt and snow.
Regardless of whether or not she was going to successfully become an Angel, she was incredible.
Alex could not stomach this defeat. He had to best her.
And he was bewildered. Intoxicated. He’d only felt anything close to this in his training duels with Chess.
But this ferocity…
In his haze, he barely heard the words from Leor.
“Elza wins!”