“I know. I am preparing myself to do just that.”
“Are you now? I hope you aren’t lying, because that would be an awful insult to His Majesty after he selected you for an Order.”
Arcus scowled. He knew she wouldn’t be talking like that unless she had plenty of aether left. As much as he wanted to fight back, he couldn’t cast spells willy-nilly like she could.
She was off again, launching into another incantation that sounded like it required a hefty amount of aether. Her stores likely ran deeper than Lecia’s. She might even have been able to give Kane a run for his money.
Claudia’s aether grew in pressure and weighed heavily on him. It felt like he was on a rollercoaster and his organs were being pressed on by the g-force. Was this what he had agreed to when he took on the challenge of a Saifice? There was no end to her confidence. No end to her crushing aether. She was a being of pure strength.
She won’t shut up either! I’m just gonna blow her head off, dammit!
Launching his powerful Dwarf Star at her would most likely end the fight. The problem was that he didn’t know how much its strength would be reduced by. Would it have any effect at all, or was it powerful enough that it would come out with just the right amount of force? Miscalculating risked splattering the guts of the next headmistress all over the field.
Black Ammo: a spell that invoked weaponry.
Apollyon Tróvilos: a spell inspired by mythology.
Dwarf Star: a spell that caused an explosion on a designated target.
Evil Exasperation: a spell that rid its target of oxygen.
Sympathetic Cloning: a spell that exploited mirror images.
Zarach Ohr: a spell that combined fantasy and science, and was inspired by mythology.
These were Arcus’s trump cards. They were enough to instakill his opponent despite his lack of aether. Convenient as they were, their power meant he couldn’t just fire them off mindlessly—not in a duel against a fellow student. Not to mention that, without knowing how much weaker they’d be, he might just end up wasting aether. Then again, focusing purely on defending himself would also eat up his reserves without improving his position.
For now, he would have to dodge, all the while reading his opponent’s spells and identifying a pattern. At some point, the beginnings of a strategy should present themselves.
After that came the problem of her Saifice magic. It wasn’t defensive—there was no shield for him to break through—and without knowing what she had cast it on, it would be difficult to counter. It also seemed to affect every one of his spells.
That doesn’t mean I can’t win.
Claudia’s aether may have granted her an overwhelming advantage, but she still needed to cast in order to defeat him. There had to be something there that he could exploit.
“I think it’s about time I put an end to this.”
Arcus had drastically opened up the distance between them when Claudia started to incant again. It seemed she was out of patience.
Her spell was powerful and sweeping; she likely intended it to be her last. At full strength, Arcus would have used the opportunity to cast something short, but right now there was a chance it wouldn’t even reach her. He wouldn’t be dodging this spell with any normal means. He set both his Focus and his kan’are into action.
His range of speed warped. Everything around him slowed very suddenly. Claudia noticed nothing. Arcus raced off at once and circled around behind her. He lamented that he could have struck her from this angle and won the duel, if only the rules allowed it. He couldn’t use magic when these techniques were in effect either. He’d have to work on that later.
“Oh?” Claudia was looking around for him.
A moment later, one of her followers called to her.
“Lady Claudia! Behind you!”
“Behind...?” She turned around. Her eyes widened. “What did you do?!”
“That’s a secret.”
“Lady Claudia,” Sue called. “If this were a battlefield, that lapse of attentiveness would have cost you your life!”
“This is not a battlefield! This is a duel with rules!”
“Ah, of course. Pardon me for forgetting!”
Arcus had to commend Sue for her effective psychological warfare, and he appreciated the support. Maybe it was a little underhanded, but it was just inside the lines of what they could get away with. Sue responded to Arcus’s grateful glance with a cheerful grin.
The duel was beginning to drag. Irritation was weighing down Claudia’s chest. She had faced off against countless students before, but none had taken this long to defeat. Once the gap in aether had become clear and Suppress was in effect, her opponents tended to surrender after just a few spells. It was a hard truth to stomach, but she was struggling to take Arcus down. She hadn’t expected him to be quite this formidable.
He is rather skilled.
Secretly, she admired his talents despite how she taunted him. She had only managed to land a single hit on him so far. Until then, he had been exploiting the holes in her magic and even dealt a blow to her, albeit a small one. It was clear that he was packing spells to counter almost any situation.
His magic showed an accurate understanding of the mythos of the Ancient Chronicles. He used spells and alterations that couldn’t be found in any textbook. Some of them were even based on knowledge or theories that Claudia didn’t recognize, and that weren’t taught at the Institute.
Normally, the duelists would have prepared a selection of spells in advance, and the fight would become a competition of brute strength. A fighter’s biases would become clear in their repertoire, and if they had brought a defensive spell with them, it would be at most one or two. Arcus, however, seemed to have come with more reactive spells than anything else.
Human imagination had its limits. If a magician had an affinity or preference for a certain attribute, that attribute would be where most of their time had been invested. It was therefore common for the majority of a magician’s spells to fall under the same umbrella. The field was not the place to experiment, assuming the fighter even had the wherewithal to do so.