With a wave of his hand, while almost no one was looking, Leor altered the scoreboard. Lucas, by sheer luck, had been daydreaming with his eyes in the right direction to catch this, and therefore was the first to see the official brackets for the second round of fights. Calling them fights probably wasn’t what the True Church would endorse, but that’s what they were, right? Like a dust-em-up between two Victorian boxers, maybe, the thought of which gave him an idea for a drawing - an old-style strongman from that historical period, in a dingy arena, surrounded by a screaming crowd, betting on the action, refusing to place bets on his rival - a skinny, emaciated Jesus Christ, Lord and Savior. There was meaning there, both the narrative one of knowing that the expectant crowd would be surprised by the power of God, and the more spiritual meaning of showing, in a way, Jesus in yet another sacrificial motif.
He just barely got knocked out of this train of thought by noticing that he was in the first match of the second round, dueling with Gwendolyn. She had been pretty efficient in her match, but he’d known her to be pretty nice, if a bit cold, in the classes they had together, so he didn’t have too much to worry about. Heck, he really didn’t even mind the prospect of losing. He’d prefer to win, but that’d mean going on to an even higher stress match later, and that would mean even less brainstorming about art. He might even let a few ideas slip away before he could get back to a paper and pencil, and that would be a miserable state of things.
And then, out of nowhere, he felt someone grab his hand.
“You’ll do great,” Yura said, softly.
“Oh, uh, um,” Lucas stammered. He shouldn’t be intimidated by Yura. By all means, he should be sure of himself - after all, he did just beat her on the field of battle, and he was the man of the Pair, and- Her smile was just so earnest, though.
He had to prove her right.
“Yeah, I will,” he said, and smiled back at her.
Alex hardly noticed the first duel of the second round. Apparently, Gwendolyn had overwhelmed Lucas, using an impressive-sounding array of invocation-triggered-spellforms, using quite a bit of linguistic compression, along with a few custom ideograms. That was more than he expected out of Gwendolyn, but nothing truly cutting-edge. He really just wanted the day to be over. Alex knew that if he slept it off, he’d wake up tomorrow refreshed, with a head full of confidence, and his loss to Elza would mean precisely as much to him as it did to history: Almost nothing.
Gabriel knew, though, a surefire way to get Alex’s attention. “Hey, it’s Francesca’s match next.”
Alex perked up a little. “Really?” She was always worth watching. Francesca was surely going to be one of their generation’s great heroes, brutally driven and as ruthless as a harsh world required. He could always count on her to keep up with him, and then, step forward where he faltered. “Who’s she up against?”
Gabriel grinned at Alex. “Me,” he said, confidently.
“Oh no,” Alex and Max, who’d been just outside of Alex’s temporarily very narrow sphere of attention, said.
Gabriel scoffed. “What? I’ll be fine.”
“No, you won’t,” Alex said, matter-of-fact-ly. He had a nearly infinite supply of respect for Francesca’s abilities, and Gabriel, while he was certainly competent - Alex wouldn’t let a friend of his not be - wasn’t even in the same league.
Gabriel’s smile looked like that of someone who’d realized they were in on a bit. “Oh, yeah, she’ll totally be too much for me.”
Alex shook his head. “You don’t get it. Find a way to lose gracefully, demonstrate your skills, but do not prioritize winning. You will not.”
“Alex is right, Gabe,” Maxwell said. “She’ll hurt you if you really fight.”
Alex wasn’t too keen on that conclusion. “She’s rough, but she wouldn’t risk disqualification. She’s smarter than that.” He didn’t, and couldn’t, contest that she had it in her to say, break Gabriel’s legs in several unpleasant spots in order to win. He just wanted to defend her a little, she deserved that much from him.
“So, neither of you believe in me?” Gabriel said in mock disappointment.
“Uh, I wouldn’t say-“ Max started.
“No,” Alex interrupted.
“I’ll just have to prove you wrong,” Gabe said.
Francesca smiled. She was on top of the world, and if that’s where she was at now, just imagine where she’d be in a few years. Her Guardian liked her, her Pair was, while lesser than her, obedient, and she was just about to get a only-a-few-holds-barred fight with a good friend of her best rival. Well, best rival in a friendly sense. She had the maximum of that title reserved for someone else who she’d rather not think about right now.
And she knew how this was going to go.
She didn’t even hear Instructor Leor give them the go-ahead. She saw his hand drop, and she leapt into action. For the past ten minutes, during the space between the first and second round of matches, she’d been manipulating the structure of the two pillars of iron alongside the strip of asphalt which formed their fencing-esque line of battle. Plenty of substances, elements, and sensations had been arrayed along them, and she’d been pulling a number of gambits with them, but iron was the one she’d had the most success with, and luckily, hadn’t been altered at all by the previous battle. She’d extended her mind to it, encompassing it - after all, physical objects with no consciousness of their own were relatively easy to occupy and mirror sensations to, and poured a combination of heat (rubbing her hands together to generate the sensation) and tension (pulling on her skin) into them. She could have done more complicated maneuvers with second-order abstraction, using her imagination rather than real sensations as fuel, but that would be less powerful relative to the effort she gave it. She could have used Irinaen incantations, kata, or any of the many ways of speaking that magical language into reality, but that was far more noticeable, and it was much more likely that Instructor Leor would pick up on what she was doing and reset the battleground back to its initial state.
Francesca could see how, if someone got particularly mad, this could be seen as cheating.
But that was stupid.
“Cheating” and “fairness” didn’t belong in the world they were going to occupy. They were going to fight against demons, monsters, and heretics, creatures who would do anything to win. It was their sacred responsibility to use every tool available to fight back, to save the world, to be righteous of purpose and deed. And, she thought, it felt good.
So, she magnetized them - unfortunately, this had to be done inefficiently, though she at least could imagine the sense of magnetism enough to do it that way, rather than Irinaen incantation - and shattered the pillars of iron, sending their shards into Gabriel’s uniform. She embedded them into places she knew were well-sewn - boots, pockets, the doubled-over collar - and then lifted them, mirroring a repulsive magnetic force onto them. She could go further. It would be easy, and it would be fun, but this was Lex’s friend. Not like she didn’t consider breaking a few bones. A humerus or two would really show off how dangerous she could be with simple materials, or she could do something truly heinous with Irinaen spells, though she’d kept her mind in abstract consideration of that, ready to pull whatever spells she needed out of her mental dictionary in response to an attack, rather than holding any one in particular in mind.
She walked up to him. Each step, the heel of her boot dug into the dirt. Each step, she could feel the class, the Guardians, Instructor Leor, staring at her, and Gabriel doing it with some alarm thrown in for good measure. It was intoxicating.
Francesca grabbed his forearm, and twisted until he cried out. He’d attempted a few spells in the interim, but she’d dismantled them by a combination of counteraction (a quick attempt to kick dust into her face was defeated by kicking it right back) and defensive use of spellcasting (Gabriel’s “Protect me against advances!” had aligned his mind against any approaching mass - an admirably general defense that most students weren’t going to think of - likely another bit of training from Lex - but “Gather the resources of the land and sling them against my foe!” had pulled up all the loose snow, dirt, and grass around them, and thrown them into Gabriel’s defenses, where they formed the inverse of an orb and gave his mind far too much to deal with to repel an entire Francesca striding into his sphere of influence.
His spells failed, and she withdrew hers before the bits of dirt and snow could slam into Gabriel’s face. Instead, she reversed the direction of the shards of iron, slamming him into the ground, and between that and Francesca’s hand, wrenching his arm in a pretty unnatural direction. She, frustratingly, had to pull back just before the joint would have popped out of its socket, and instead just held for the fraction of a second long enough to make him sore for the rest of the day.
She could just take the bandanna from him and win.
But she had come in third in the last set of class rankings. Lex was out of this impromptu tournament, so she couldn’t prove herself against #1. So, she’d prove herself against anyone and anything who came her way.
She placed her boot firmly on Gabriel’s throat, and conjured up an array of five runic spellforms, hovering in the air just at the edges of her sight. Holding them like that risked Gabriel reading them, but whatever, just in case he got it in his head to fight back, she had to have weapons at her disposal. “Gabriel?”
“Yeah?” he croaked out, eyes trying desperately to figure out what she was doing.
“Hand me your bandanna.”
“What?” he asked, and she put a little more pressure on his larynx. She didn’t weigh a lot, but she weighed enough.
Back at the Guardian bleachers, Isabel, Gabriel’s Guardian rose to her feet. “This can’t be good, right?” She looked at the other Guardians around her, trying to evaluate if she should say something to Instructor Leor, but the first to respond was Cassandra, Francesca’s Guardian.
“Calm,” Cassandra said, draping a hand over Isabel’s shoulder.
At Cassandra’s touch, Isabel felt anything but.
Back on the field, underneath Francesca’s boot, Gabriel squirmed. He tried to cast a spell that’d generate a blast of air compressed nearly to solidity and throw it into her ribcage, knocking her off him, but the moment he started thinking of the spell, Francesca saw the twitching sub-vocalization of his mouth, and fired off one of her spellforms, hitting him in the arm with a torrent of lightning, The world went white for a second, his muscles seized so hard it felt like they’d rip off of his bones, and then the electricity was gone. Francesca just smiled down at him.
“Okay,” he said. He couldn’t beat this. There was no way out.
Gabriel struggled to untie his bandanna with one hand, but Francesca waited patiently for him to finish.
When he finally handed it to her, Francesca smiled. “Good. You know your place now.”