“Whoa, whoa, big guy, careful there. Don’t trip over yourself,” Roxas sneered as Sain got back onto his feet. “The match has barely started and you’re already close to tapping out? Come on, you gotta try harder than that. There are people watching this, and they wanna see a good show.”
Roxas shot a haughty glance at the spectators. Sain didn’t follow suit. Instead, he kept his eyes on Roxas.
“If you think...” Sain said, his voice raspy and strained.
“Eh?”
“If you think... that I’ll always be the same loser, then you are very wrong!”
He kicked the ground and lunged forward, moving into melee range. In the process, he looked hard at Roxas’s arms — specifically, the angle of his palms. Most spells start at the palms. So long as he kept track of where they were pointed, he could predict the trajectory of his spells.
“You dumbass! You think you can just tackle me?”
Roxas laughed as he opened his right palm.
Here it comes!
Sain’s hand shot to his waist, pulled up his sword — sheath and all — and placed it in the path of Roxas’s attack.
“Eat more fire! Flare Shot! ”
A second salvo flew at him. Dozens of pellets traced red hot trails through the air like flaming rubies. They grew bigger at alarming speed in his view as they came straight for his head, but he didn’t stop. His fingers tightened around the hilt of his sword.
“Hngh!”
He repelled the pellets with the scabbard of his sword.
“What?!”
This caught Roxas by surprise, who had expected his spell to stop Sain in his tracks. Flare Shot was fast and had a large area of effect, making it very difficult to dodge. Its downside, however, was that each individual pellet was fairly weak. When facing it head on, blocking worked better than dodging.
Unprepared for Sain’s determined approach, Roxas was a tad late to react.
“Darku! ”
With his sword knocked off course by a colliding pellet, Sain held up his empty hand and launched a bullet of darkness at his opponent.
“Y-Yowza!”
Roxas narrowly avoided getting hit by jerking his head away. He stumbled back a few steps before sneering again.
“Hah! Nice try, but your little darts can’t hurt me!”
Sain chose not to point out that they clearly could, considering that Roxas almost gave himself whiplash trying to avoid it. Beginner-level spells like Darku lacked both speed and power, but they weren’t the kind of thing one could take to the face and shrug off. A direct hit was still potent enough to stagger. That would have created an opening, allowing Sain to follow up with his sword, but he hadn’t quite hit the jackpot there.
Roxas backed away, putting some distance between them before unleashing a larger spell.
“Orb of fire, purge with raging flames — Flare! ”
The Alicia special. Like Flare Shot , it was also fire magic, but that was where the similarities ended. This time, a single, massive fireball flared into existence. It was hot and dense, and parrying it was not an option.
“Try blocking this!” shouted Roxas as he threw the fireball at Sain.
Seeing that his prior quantity-based attack had failed, Roxas immediately switched to quality. Like the commentators had mentioned before the match, he did indeed have a solid, balanced approach to fighting.
Sain kept his calm and held out his hands at the fiery threat. In the month since the field exercises, he and Marni had continued their training. Not a day went by where he didn’t practice his dark magic.
“Orb of gloom, devour with shadow and darkness... ” Black particles gathered in his palms. “Dardia! ”
A large black orb rivaling the fireball in size appeared before Sain.
“What?!”
Again, Roxas stared in disbelief as the two spheres collided. Flames thrashed against the darkness, their efforts ultimately futile as the black energy slowly wrapped around the fireball, swallowing it like a gaping maw. The orb of gloom shrank steadily as it digested its blazing opposite number. Bright flares continued to erupt like devoured prey fighting for survival, but even this eventually ceased, and both spheres vanished together. In the end, the two spells canceled each other out. This made Roxas roar with rage.
“You... loser! You’re a damn loser! You think you’re as good as me?!”
Angry veins bulged in his temples as he threw another round of Flare Shot at Sain. In his fury, he failed to take proper aim and his shots flew wide, allowing Sain to evade it with ease.
It’s not hard to push this guy’s buttons, is it?
Sain was pretty sure he knew exactly why Roxas was furious. The fact that their orbs canceled each other out suggested they were equal in power, which in turn implied that their casters were an equal match, as well. For Roxas, who’d been looking down on Sain all this time, that was not a pill he could swallow. So, he got mad.
I’ve got nothing to fear from him.
Confidence welled up within Sain. The hurdle represented by Roxas, which had seemed so high, now felt much smaller, and he knew with absolute certainty that he could clear it. They’d thrown themselves against each other, and in doing so, discovered how strong each of them truly were. Roxas did indeed employ a balanced fighting style, but that also meant he was, for all intents and purposes, a jack of all trades, master of none. He had no trump card, no big spell that could seal the deal in one go. Granted, most people didn’t have something like that; it was Sain who was out of the norm in that regard.