Francesca was ready to have the time of her life. She could not have wished for a better final battle for the day. Aleste would have been good, sure, and so would Rosaline - their skills would give her plenty of room to show off just how dominant her knowledge and abilities were. Alexander was one of her top choices: There was something fundamentally fun about sparring with him, and after a day of disappointing battles, she could use someone who'd push her to her limits. Sparring with him was like... Well, it was like going through a history book. You had to run a mental subroutine constantly scanning for familiar touchstones of history and stories you've read, because often times you'd figure out that he was working out a gambit he'd read about several years ago, adapted to what magic he knew. And if you did that, you could figure out his next moves, act accordingly, and feel, for a moment, like you could read the future. You could take that information and use it like a medieval torturer, taking your knowledge and using it to inflict the most damage possible. It was a process that engaged her memory, creative faculties, and her magical training, and it was, well, fun.
She had a dozen spells ready for execution on the edge of her mind, and a couple decision-trees of nested ideograms ready to deal with unexpected circumstances. Beyond that, she had total command of all of the elements their well-constructed battlefield gave them. Basic, “conceptual elements” of the classical Chinese archetype - wood in the trees around them, fire burning in small pits spaced alongside the asphalt path, earth beneath them, metal in several varieties in pillars lining the way, and water in twin trenches flanking them, along with smaller concentrations of other elements and sensations - one of the pillars had a mass of cobalt, sodium, magnesium, and a small, gram-scale pool of mercury, while another had all of the noble gases sequestered within. She wondered if any of the other students had noticed that half the damn periodic table was available to them here, or that Instructor Leor was clearly inspecting all of these resources post-match to see if they’d been utilized. She’d quickly understood that this was part of the game, using a tiny bit of, well, if not everything, whatever she could in each match. It was a blessing that Tabbitha had bowed out. She didn’t respect the girl, but she hadn’t done anything to wrong Francesca, which was a fairly rare thing, and that meant that Francesca didn’t want to totally embarrass her. Though she would, if she had to.
Normally, she’d be running through her knowledge of her opponent. While they weren’t often matched up against each other, it was only human to compare people, and Francesca was aware of that. Even if she wasn’t competing against someone directly, she was being compared to someone in her evaluation - sometimes Elza, sometimes Aleste, sometimes Rosaline, and sometimes (though less than she’d like) Alexander. In a way, this was a shortcut to a fight against him - Elza was his Pair, and had defeated him, so any victory she took against Elza was a victory against him. Though that was less important than having an opportunity to spar with Elza herself.
Elza was strong, in ways that Francesca couldn’t totally comprehend. She could keep up with, if not match, Francesca in clever applications of the Irinaen language, and she could overpower Francesca in abstracted, semi-intuitive spellcasting any day of the week. If she went fully intuitive - and Francesca didn’t doubt that she could or would, in order to win, or in response to the events of the last couple days - she could easily overpower Francesca. She’d have to rely on her wits, or on resources of will that she hadn’t yet tapped into. Those were… possibly extant. You never knew just how far your mind could go until you pushed it, and Francesca enjoyed pushing her mind to the limits. Pain was just… well, part of the experience of existing.
It was taking far too much effort to keep the last few days out of her head. Unable to sleep, shaking in a cold sweat, faced with the realities of her decisions, and then desperately hoping that there were no consequences. That everything would just continue on as if none of it had ever happened at all. And it was looking, maybe, like she’d gotten away with it. That everything was normal again. But with Elza right in front of her, staring her down…
Screw this, Francesca thought, as she gritted her teeth, let’s go.
“El, ready to get your ass handed to you?” she taunted.
Elza said nothing. That usually got something out of her, even if she was in a truly awful mood. She’d just have to try again. “Too afraid to speak? I would be too, in your position,” she said, flicking back her long, silvery hair with one hand, while the other was planted dramatically on her hip. She even threw in a smirk for added effect. It was a little over the top, but it felt good.
Elza, again, said nothing. Instead, across the battlefield, at the other end of the asphalt strip, she just… stared at Francesca. It felt like her eyes were drilling holes into Francesca’s face. Francesca was starting to feel that something was off, not just with her, but with Elza, too. But she couldn’t help herself.
“Oh, you’re angry, aren’t you? Let’s see how much that helps you.”
About halfway through Francesca’s taunt, Instructor Leor signaled the start of the match. Just past the beginning of her second sentence, Elza planted her feet wide apart, and began a complex, swirling motion of arms and fingers - the tips of which glowed purple as they cut a sort of magical tracing line through the air, which began to shape into an Irinaen rune. Using the logic of a kata - physical embodiment of language reinforces its meaning - and applying it to the recall of a rune; fairly clever, Francesca thought. She’d tried the same, and while it amplified the power of the rune quite a bit, she could brace herself, and handle it. The downside was that it was slow to perform, and while for this one, she’d rather observe and pick up on what Elza was thinking, if she tried it again, it’d give Francesca ample opportunity to counterattack. In the meantime, she’d read whatever rune Elza was drawing, and rely on her reflexes to devise a defense.
She didn’t recognize it.
Around the time that Elza punched the center of the shape she’d just drawn, Francesca realized that it was, in fact, not a rune, but an ideogram, and that by layering compression and amplification techniques like that, whatever Elza had just done was about to unleash an utter storm of magic on her. The ideogram, upon being punched, exploded out into five separate runes, each one seeming to emanate from Elza’s fist, then blinking out of existence before Francesca could process them. “Vacuum Shield” was always a useful spell, using the inherent insulation of a lack of matter to protect oneself from effects, so she defaulted to that, devoting a bit of extra strength to it to extend it to cover her whole body, even if that meant it cut through the ground underneath her feet - when the effect faded, she’d drop a few millimeters, but that was fine. Alongside that, she used second order abstraction to mirror the ideas of hardness, impermeability, and insulation into her skin, along with a standard reactive sense-mirroring of “the feeling of pushing against something that does not move” - they’d never been taught a good term for it, and she figured whoever actually came up with one would end up in the textbooks of the Order of Saint Michael for centuries - in order to strengthen her muscles, and braced for impact.
The winter air, already cold and dry, became immensely moreso - her breaths felt like they would suck the moisture out of her nose, and the water in her eyes threatened to ice over, despite her insulation. The missing moisture condensed in a cloud above and behind Elza, and it swept forward, obscuring Francesca’s sight of her. With it, it brought shards of ice, thin and sharp, tearing exposed skin and tattering the edges of her uniform. Francesca threw her arm up in front of her eyes, shielding them from damage. None went deep enough to make her bleed, thanks to her defensive magic, and she could, quite literally, weather this storm. But Elza had used too many runes for this effect, and she rarely thought to use ice and chill in her magic. Francesca had to be alert.
And, turning her head slightly, peering over the edge of her sleeve, she saw it. A spherical area about the size of her head, less than half a meter in front of her, that the ice and sleet were bending around. It was transparent, and distinct in being the only spot of air near her that wasn’t full of weaponized weather. She could, and probably should, reach out to it, either physically or magically, to figure out what Elza was doing, but maybe that was the point of it - to pull her attention away from her defenses. Instead, she hunkered down further.
Elza burst through the sleet, already leaping, already punching, her fist already directing white-hot plasma, all of the heat she’d taken out of the air concentrated in one small space in front of her knuckles. She brought her fist down on the orb, which, as it roiled and expanded into a gout of flame, Francesca successfully identified as water in the air broken apart into hydrogen and oxygen - a fuel and an oxidizer - much more Elza’s style. Elza’s fist, and the concussive blast, hit Francesca simultaneously. The force of the impact tore her off the ground, sending her flying, smoking, through the air at great speed, until she slammed into a tree trunk, feeling just as much as she heard the crack of wood and bone.
Back at the Guardian bleachers, Julian leapt to his feet. Cassandra, only a few instants behind, followed, and grabbed his shoulder.
“Don’t interfere,” she said. “Francesca’s fine.”
He turned, and stared into Cassandra’s eyes. Reading her. Tessawyn could sense the tension in the air, and readied her mind - just in case. Slowly, cautiously, Julian sat back down.
Francesca was, at best, dazed, and at worst - Yes, those were some cracked ribs, and likely there were other injuries she hadn’t yet noticed. She tasted iron, and spat out blood. The up-side of her unplanned flight was that she now was far enough away from Elza that she would have a few seconds, at least, to heal herself. Her legs were half-bent, and she braced herself against the tree as she guided her mind, free-form, to feel the damage to her bones, and accelerate the process, knitting them back together as best as she could. She could have an Angel look her over later, now she just needed to be functional.
Functional enough to hit back.
Elza had also been singed by her own attack, but strode towards Francesca, her face twisting into a snarl.
What right does she have to be mad at me? Francesca thought. None of this is my fault. If anything, it’s hers, for starting all of this in the first place. She pushed herself off the tree, satisfied enough with her repair work, and more importantly, ready to hit back.
She fired off a few quick lightning spells - the way that they interfered with the nervous system, and the way they hurt, made them both fun and useful. Unfortunately, they could also be redirected if you just fiddled with the electrical resistance of the air around you. Fortunately, lightning was fast, spells were relatively slow, and electrical resistance was a hard property to sense-mirror. Unfortunately, as the bolts crashed into the ground around her, kicking up bits of dirt and snow, it seemed Elza was more than willing to use intuitive magic to get the job done. Magic was controlled by the systems of mental and spiritual restraints applied to it. Sense-mirroring limited its scope to a particular idea, spells recreated an established, safe sequence of thoughts, and in doing so, they protected the user from corruption - from the scope of their magic expanding far beyond its initial bounds. Intuitive magic was more along the lines of knowing something needed to be done, knowing what would be required in the physical world for that to happen, and then just making it real, with no intervening steps.
This just made Francesca angrier. In what world did Elza deserve to be this mad at Francesca? This determined to hurt her? Francesca decided to find out just how much she could deflect, and divided the focus of her mind as much as she could - Firing off electricity with verbal incantations, with the sense-memory of static shocks from carpets and doorknobs, tracing simple runes as quickly as possible with her left hand, reading them with her left eye, while working on slower, stronger runes with her right half. Dozens of bolts arced across the space between the two of them, and Elza could only deflect a fraction of them. She let out a scream as the pain and shock drove her to one knee, and Francesca redoubled her efforts, sensing victory.
But Elza pulled herself to her feet, and kept moving forward. Her screams dropped into a yell, a battlecry, and she broke into a run. Her right sleeve caught fire from one of the impacts, and instead of extinguishing it, she pulled the sense of heat and flame and mirrored it onto the dead branches of the tree above Francesca, and with a quick incantation under her breath, brought them crashing down on Francesca, whose barrage was lessened, though not entirely cut off. And then, the gap between them was closed, and Elza punched Francesca in the face. The force, again, took Francesca off her feet, and with Elza’s carry-through, her back slammed into the dirt, a chunk of fallen branch tearing through Francesca’s sleeve and upper arm. Francesca adapted. She swept her leg around, hooking the back of Elza’s knee with her calf, and Elza fell, face first. Francesca leapt into action, getting on top of Elza’s back, using one knee and shin to hold down the back of Elza’s knees, and a boot to keep down one of Elza’s wrists.
Elza clawed behind her with her one free arm, trying and failing to get purchase on Francesca. This was how things should be, Francesca thought. Her own blood ran down her face, and stained the arm of her uniform, but Elza was unable to move, unable to fight back, at her mercy. All she had to do was grab that bandanna off Elza’s arm - conveniently, the one she’d pinned - and she’d have won. Before she could act on that thought, though, Elza took her one free arm and pushed, hard, into the ground. Elza was taller and stronger than Francesca by a fair margin - not that that was difficult, Francesca was in the running for the shortest person of their year. She liked how it led people to underestimate her. It made them easier to manipulate and beat. She didn’t like how it, at the moment, led to her being flung through the air a second time, though with less speed and violence than the last. And this time, she landed on her feet.
Elza was up, too, and their eyes met. She still looked furious. Francesca scowled at her. “Come on, just give up already. I’m going to win this competition no matter how hard you fight.”
Elza’s expression didn’t change. “Do you think I care about that?”
“What?”
“You know what I’m talking about,” Elza said.
She was right. Francesca did. “Just shut up!” Francesca yelled, and reversed the concept of the vacuum insulation spell, applying it to an area right in front of Elza’s face, and then let it go. The sudden rush of air coming to fill the gap sucked the air right out of Elza’s mouth. Elza, in turn, lit the air around Francesca on fire, using the same technique as before, but sustained - less explosive, and more designed to char. Francesca fired off a blast of lightning, poorly aimed and poorly casted due to the fire obscuring her vision and the pain of the heat searing her flesh, but it hit hard enough for Elza to drop her flames.
“Is this… uh… okay?” Maxwell asked. He’d been clinging onto Alex’s arm for the last few minutes. Since the first exchange of spells, a hush had fallen over the students.
Alex would have been happy to assuage Max’s concerns, but he was beginning to worry, too. Francesca was usually prone to brutality, yes, but the intensity of her attacks, the damage they were causing to Elza, it felt… somehow different from where she usually drew the line. And Elza… she was an unknown to him, but she seemed like she was more concerned with causing damage than with actually trying to win.
The only answer he could have honestly given Maxwell was “I don’t know”, and that would have accomplished nothing. He knew that Rosaline was friends with Elza, and churned through the crowd of students looking for her. She and Tabbitha were standing off to the side. Tabbitha had one hand over her mouth, and the other was holding Rosaline’s hand. Rosaline, for her part, had a rather grim expression as she watched the duel.
“Rosaline?” Alex said, trying to get her attention, with Maxwell trailing just behind him.
She pulled her gaze away from the proceedings, looked at Alex, and blinked. “Alexander?”
“This isn’t normal, is it?” he asked.
Claps of thunder, explosions, and grunts of effort and pain punctuated their words.
Rosaline looked to Elza, and then back to Alex. “I don’t… No, it isn’t.”
A few of the other students turned to listen in, as Elza caught a heel to the cheek. They, too, had worried expressions.
“No?” Alex asked, looking for clarification.
Rosaline shook her head. “Those two can be… intense, sometimes, but this feels different.”
Alex nodded, and wished he could add his own insight. With the incident with the maleficus, and having to turn him in, Elza was probably emotionally compromised, and Francesca had a tendency to needle and push people, testing their limits. That was probably a bad combination, but explaining would lead to far too many questions. He figured that unless an announcement was made by the teachers or Angels about the discovery of the maleficus, they wouldn’t want him speaking about it.
Tabbitha made a fearful sort of squeak at the sound of Elza skidding across the asphalt strip, which she and Francesca had fought their way back to. One arm of her uniform was torn and soaked through with blood, and Francesca’s white hair was well on its way through pink to red. Drawing blood and minor injuries in combat training weren’t terribly unusual, but the standard response was to slow down, pull back, and get help. None of those three things were happening.
Elza picked herself off the ground. Her legs shook, her muscles felt like they were tearing apart, and a dozen different pains flared in her body, but she didn’t care. Francesca was still standing.
Francesca was feeling much the same way. She was starting to feel dizzy, either from constant adrenaline, blood loss, or a combination of both, and she hadn’t had a coherent thought for what felt like minutes.
Their attacks, mutually, were not taking the other down. And with them both staggering like this, they had time to aim for a decisive blow. That thought hit them both simultaneously. They were getting too shaky for properly executed kata forms, and their minds were too frazzled from the pain and the effort of so much spellcasting to conceptualize and hold on to an ideogram. So they both began chanting, quietly, repeating the same spells over and over again, setting up the conditions for a final strike. The air around Francesca began to warp and tremble, as more and more of the water vapor in it split apart into fuel, the remaining snow and ice around her meeting the same fate, stripping the ground of white in a wider and wider radius around her. And around Elza, the effect was less visible, but no less threatening. Her hair began to puff out as a negative charge built up around her, and a corresponding positive charge built in a swirling cloud above her. The potential energy of each attack rapidly outstripped any defense either could muster, and this led to a simple, but terrible problem. Whoever fired off their activating spell first - Elza delivering a spark, or Francesca letting the electricity flow - had to hope that their attack would incapacitate their opponent completely. Otherwise, their opponent’s spell could continue building, and would hit them even harder - and considering their already exhausted states, that would be the end for them.
Whoever fired first would determine who won or lost, but they wouldn’t know who was which until far too late.
They stared into each other’s eyes.
Francesca was the first to break. She couldn’t stand that tension, the anger in Elza’s eyes. She began to speak the final spell into life. And Elza, watching her closely, saw this, and reacted, doing the same.
The electricity flowed, the spark was lit, and their worlds went white.
And then…
Nothing.
No fire, no lightning, only silence, and Julian standing between the two of them, slowly looking back and forth.
Neither of them had seen Julian move. He had been on the bleachers, and then he was there, with no intermediate steps. Elza tried to move, tried to cast another spell, to lash out at Francesca one more time, and found that she couldn’t. And neither could Francesca.
“This is over,” Julian said, flatly, staring down Instructor Leor. The blood began to disappear from their uniforms, and it, along with the dirt and grime of combat, vanished from their faces. Francesca looked down, and saw the holes in her uniform knitting themselves shut, and she felt the gouges in her skin and cracks in her bones doing the same. It felt like her body was being hijacked, but as beat down as she was, and as powerful as the Guardian was, she couldn’t do much about it. Not that that would have been constructive.
“Good Lord above,” Geoffrey said, back at the Guardian bleachers, grabbing Cassandra and Tessawyn in excitement. “So that’s the power of a Hashmallim - you guys are incredible!”
Tessawyn ignored the puppy-like enthusiasm of the younger Angel. Even as a fellow Hashmallim, she’d had trouble seeing Julian act. She didn’t know what troubled her more: That no one, including her, intervened earlier, that it was necessary at all, or that Julian had done so so instantly and effectively, despite showing no signs of preparation.
“Well, uh…” Instructor Leor said, looking, pointedly, to Tessawyn, despite not being technically involved in this duel, while avoiding the intense gaze of Julian. “That concludes my evaluation of all of you. No one wins, but good effort!” Julian was still standing between Elza and Francesca, both of whom had, just moments prior, been soaked in blood. Flesh wounds were simple enough to repair, and weren’t, he supposed, a technical violation of his terms. “When we meet tomorrow, I’ll be expecting a five-paragraph write-up of each of your duels. Yes, that’s more work for the more successful of you.” He winked. “You should expect that. The better you do, the more useful you are to the world, and with that comes responsibility. Got it?”
Most of the class, at least, those who weren’t still on the battlefield, seething, and those who weren’t entirely consumed with watching them, nodded.
“And Guardians?”
Other than Julian, Cassandra, and Tessawyn, the Guardians looked to him. Those three were still concerned with making sure the events of the moment didn’t continue any further.
“I want to see write-ups as well. Not just of the duels between your Wards, but of every one they participated in.” Leor grinned, against his better nature. “I’m an Angel, too. I know you’ve had to write reams and reams of paperwork, and that this will be nothing to you. I want to see how you evaluate them. Don’t worry,” he said, winking at the students, “I won’t tell the kids what you really think.”
Francesca looked at Elza with growing horror. She… she could have killed her. She’d been having fun, but that was escalating far faster than she was prepared for, and… Well… Elza was prepared for it. Julian corralled Elza off the field, leaving Francesca to process the events alone.