Tabbitha was nervous. She was almost always nervous, but right now, she was nervous even by those standards. She wasn’t a fighter. She should never have advanced past the first round. Tabbitha was pretty sure that some terrible mistake had been made by her being born into the Angelic Order of Saint Michael, and that served as fuel for some intense fretting every now and then.
Across from her, Kennedy was bouncing on the balls of her feet, ponytail swaying from side to side, and Tabbitha thought that if you could somehow stick an electrical plug in her, you could power all of Arcadia. And, embarrassingly, she picked up on how Tabbitha was feeling.
“Come on, Tabbitha, this’ll be fun,” she said. Tabbitha was certain that it would be for Kennedy, but there was no universe in which this went well for Tab. Kennedy was strong and dynamic physically, and direct with her magic. If she had to guess, she’d imagine that Kennedy would run straight at her, do something that’d sweep her off her feet, and it’d be over in a second or two - which was the best thing about it all. Sure, Kennedy only came up a little past Tabbitha’s shoulder, but Tabbitha hadn’t yet figured out how to use her size to her physical advantage, and she wasn’t sure she ever wanted to. She’d prefer if people just didn’t notice her, which was a bit difficult when you were almost two meters tall.
“Eeeuuuh,” Tabbitha responded. She didn’t even want to look, and so, she didn’t, first casting her eyes to the ground, and then, flicking over to the Guardian bleachers, where Tessawyn, her Guardian, was on her feet, saying something encouraging. She was a fellow tall person, but if there was any hope of being unnoticeable, Tabbitha didn’t think she was going to learn it from Tessawyn. So, Tabbitha turned away yet again, and found the student bleachers.
There, her friends were watching - Elza’s attention was hard to hold, but it seemed purely focused on Tabbitha and her match, and Rosaline - her best friend, the best possible friend as far as Tabbitha was concerned, was on her feet. The stress had made most sounds unintelligible to Tab, and she amplified and focused her hearing magically to try and figure out what Rosa was yelling.
“You got this, Tab! I know you’ve got this! Show them all what you can do!” Rosaline called out.
Fighting Kennedy was hard to psyche herself up for. Winning was also not the greatest motivator. But showing off for Rosa? That, she could do. She just had to think like Rosa would. What would she do, faced with a physically stronger opponent, rushing her- oh, rushing her right now, Tabbitha realized, noticing mid-thought that the duel had begun. Rosa was more quick-witted than she was, so she’d need to buy herself some time to think - She reinforced her muscles, lowered her stance, mumbled “Hold fast to the ground beneath me” to stick herself down, and braced for impact. Kennedy led with her shoulder, about to tackle Tabbitha, and Tab raised both forearms, hiding her head behind them. When Kennedy hit, it rang Tabbitha’s bones like a bell, but Tabbitha held, and Kennedy rebounded off. She came at her again, and again, Tabbitha just tanked the assault. Kennedy could have just focused on stealing Tab’s bandanna, but Kennedy was the type who wanted to win fights, not just be declared the winner. If she was going to beat Tabbitha, it had to be decisively, and that, too, bought her a bit of time.
Rosa would probably have already come up with a plan. It’d have to be a quick one, since if you were weaker, you had to concentrate what strength you had to as much of a sharp point as you could. Even if you were slower at learning, for example, if you spent all your free time studying for one test, you’d probably ace it. It might mean you do worse at other things, but… The analogy wasn’t working for her. She had to think. She had to just be clever like Rosa, who’d-
Ah. She knew what to do.
One of the big limitations to be overcome in the use of magic was the difficulty of creating multiple effects at once. After all, magic was the mind and soul directly altering the world around it, and thinking two or more distinct things at the same time was just not how the mind normally worked. Irinaen spellcasting used language to take multiple concepts and form a sentence or phrase, mentally taking multiple things and boiling them down to one, much more complex, idea. You could also use the Irinaen conceptual language in visual symbols, or even in meaningful physical movements known as kata. But while that greatly increased an Angel’s limits relative to their fundamental mental and spiritual training, in the war to save mankind, you often needed to push things further. One technique for doing so, that they’d learned last year, was that of the “ideogram”.
Tabbitha had had a hard time wrapping her head around the concept, and Rosa spent long, long hours walking her through it, practicing, demonstrating, and it was only thanks to her help that Tabbitha had figured it out at all. Basically, in the same way that the Irinaen language compressed magical concepts into linguistic concepts, you could compress multiple Irinaen spells into a symbol. Imagine, if you will, that every time you saw the diamond-tipped cross of the True Church, you thought “That is the bulwark behind which all righteous men stand, and the sword beneath which all evil falls” - Eventually, the cross itself would mean that phrase to you, and it would automatically trigger that phrase being thought, narratively, in your head. If you did that with a spell, you’d have it right at mind the second you saw the triggering image. And then, if you did that with multiple symbols, and made an image containing several of them, that composite image would only seem like one thing in your head, as you were processing it, but it would contain multiple complex spells. That was the fundamental idea of the ideogram - custom-made artistic encoding of magic.
So, weathering charge after charge, blocking punches and kicks, Tabbitha constructed an image in her mind. She had to not think too hard about it in the moment, lest she read the spells that she was weaving together, but that was part of the difficulty of it all, and Rosa had taught her how to overcome that. She envisioned a kite shield, facing away so that the grip was visible, tip dug into mud, allowing it to stand freely, and just beyond it, a female Pairing student uniform, pinned to the ground by several spears. She closed her eyes and concentrated on this image, forcing it to become a single, unitary thing in her mind, and hoped that when she opened her eyes again, she wouldn’t be on her back.
When she did, Tabbitha saw Kennedy grinning at her from a bit further down the asphalt strip than where she’d begun the duel. “You’re one tough cookie,” Kennedy said. “I’m impressed, but you’re not gonna win like this.” It was around then that Tabbitha noticed that the asphalt behind Kennedy’s feet had been reshaped by her into little mounds resembling the launching blocks of a sprinter, and while Tabbitha was, again, not the most talented girl, even she could sense the immense amounts of magical energy Kennedy was pouring into her legs, ready to amplify anything her muscles commanded. Kennedy saw the recognition in Tabbitha’s face. “This is how you win,” she said, and kicked off. From the sheer speed and the arc of her jump, it looked like Kennedy wasn’t going to touch the ground before crashing boots-first into Tabbitha’s chest.
It was now or never.
Tabbitha called up the ideogram, trying to think of nothing else, and for an instant, a faded, monochromatic-purple, semi-transparent image of it sprung into being in front of her outstretched hand, before her mind flowed into it like molten iron into a cast. In that moment, there was no room left in her mind for coherent narrative thoughts, between the swirling sentences and concepts and ideas. She just had to trust her skills - which she didn’t - or, instead, trust Rosa’s guidance, which she couldn’t not do. So, she kept it going, as a wall of shining light sprung up in front of her, an extension of her soul, and Kennedy crashed into it. It felt like she’d hit Tabbitha right in the bones, but that didn’t matter - she fell, and Tabbitha did not. The top three centimeters of the asphalt she landed on cracked, split, and turned back into tar. She struggled against it, but only had the smallest fraction of a second to attempt it before arrows of blinding light, made of magnetically bounded plasma - pierced and burned through the edges of her uniform, seeking out loose bits of fabric and pinning her to the ground. A second, simpler ideogram, just an image of the arrows themselves, flickered into existence in front of Tabbitha’s face. She nearly went cross-eyed watching and maintaining it while also stepping forward, leaning down to grab Kennedy’s bandanna. Once it was firmly in her grasp, she let the spell fade, and the world came back into focus.
And with it, Tabbitha heard Elza and Rosa cheering her on.