Nevertheless, not a day had gone by when Amy hadn’t thought of her.
“You remember when Harold and the others took down the kraken, there was that boat that didn’t get away in time? That’s the girl from that boat!”
“I-I remember…”
As Isabelle confirmed the girl’s identity, her voice seemed very far away.
There was a bell-like ringing somewhere in the back of Amy’s head. Even the deafening cheers from the audience seemed to be muffled by some invisible barrier.
Amy could feel her own arms trembling as she held Tigger.
B-But…the girl back then had a different name…
Through her turbulent thoughts and emotions, Amy suddenly remembered that “Yasmine” had just been a nickname given by Harold. The thought didn’t give her any comfort. The heroine gave Amy a slight bow with a nervous look before returning to her original position.
On the tournament stage, Edward, Harold, and the heroine were lined up along their respective teams, facing each other at a distance.
Amy couldn’t even blink.
A loud ringing signaled the start of the match, and everyone moved at once.
Harold’s team was the first to launch an attack. Yasmine quickly took out an arrow from the quiver on her back and launched it overhead as she progressively fell back behind her teammates.
The arrow arched high in the air and split into several arrows on its descent.
“What?”
Just as Edward and the others were trying to get into their battle formation, the arrows pierced the stage with loud thuds in an evenly spaced, horizontal line just behind them.
Just one arrow had been shot, but nearly ten had come raining down.
The length and the makeup of the arrows had changed, too. Now nearly as tall as Edward, they lined up behind them like hard iron bars, preventing their retreat.
Clicking his tongue in annoyance, Kevin tried to run off to the side, but a shot fired from Nicholas’s crossbow pierced the ground right by his feet, stopping him in his tracks.
Yasmine continued applying pressure, sending arrow after arrow flying at them. They landed in lines along each side of them.
She’s trapped them in a long, narrow cage!
There was one small opening to the open-air cage, blocked by Gilbert, wielding his spear.
Just moments after the match began, Harold’s team’s long-range attacks had created an overwhelmingly favorable set-up.
Yasmine and Nicholas continued to rain arrows down upon Edward’s helplessly trapped team from overhead. Arrows that missed started to gather at their feet, and Kevin barely managed to deflect a spear attack with his sword by the entrance. They were backed into fighting purely defensively.
“Man, they didn’t waste any time!”
“They’re doing just as great as the last match!”
The audience’s excitement from the breathtaking outset of the match continued to bubble up, with cheers and screams echoing up into the sky with every movement.
No! Oh my god, no! Augh! That was so close! I can’t take this anymore! Watch out!
With every clanging and thudding sound that loudly reverberated with every exchange of blows, Amy flinched and ducked behind Tigger. This wasn’t Amy’s first time at an athletic tournament. She came to watch the last time her brother had participated.
But, perhaps because she hadn’t watched the match from so close up, or perhaps because her family had been totally relaxed about the whole thing, she hadn’t been too worried then.
She wished she could look away from the rapid-fire attacks, but not watching just wasn’t an option. Amy desperately kept her eyes forward, trembling slightly as she half-hid her face in Tigger’s fur.
She had been stunned by the iron bars that kept Edward’s team confined, but her parents only looked impressed. Edward didn’t look flustered either—he seemed to be coping with the setback well enough.
Yasmine’s arrow-morphing technique must have been used in previous matches, too. Her arrows looked totally normal, but they changed form and multiplied. There was only one way to explain such a phenomenon—magic.
“Yasmine uses illusion magic, then?” Amy asked.
“It’s not just any old illusion, either,” Joshua explained. “It’s a high-level technique that materializes the illusion into matter when visible. Quite impressive!”
Amy nodded.
Some magic could only be invoked if the individual possessed a certain magical trait. One of the most extreme forms of this was illusion magic.
As long as someone had magical aptitude and underwent training, anyone could use magic, at least to some extent. Even though Amy’s specialty, healing, was quite difficult to learn, it was still theoretically possible.
With illusion magic, however, no matter how much a person trained, if they didn’t have the right aptitude for it, they would never be able to use it.
In fact, this was the first time Amy had seen anyone use it besides Sir Dion and Finneas.
And Yasmine could not only conjure illusions—she could even materialize them. That was something not even Finneas, the greatest young magician in Luducia, could do.
Amy knew that Yasmine, outstanding at manipulating magic, had made a name for herself as an adventurer using this as her weapon.
It was only natural that the audience would get so excited about the illusion magic, which they rarely got to see. During their brief conversation, the cheering never stopped—and neither did the match.
Edward’s team assumed their battle formation—Kevin in front and Alexander and Edward at the rear—and returned fire.
Not a single arrow that Yasmine or Nicholas fired had hit anyone. Alexander had knocked away many of the arrows by swinging his sword above their heads, but that wasn’t the only reason for these miraculous misses…
An arrow slipped past Alexander’s sword and was heading straight for Edward.
Amy gasped, and then heard a hard sound. The arrow that was just about to pierce Edward’s shoulder was repelled and fell to the ground.
“Ed’s defensive barrier!”
Edward’s long sword—still in its scabbard—was planted tip-down on the ground, and as he gripped the sheath with both hands, he kept a careful eye on his surroundings. With the sword as a conduit, his defensive magic flowed out like water and was even able to reach Kevin and Alexander.