by Sophie Park
"Great! The Field of the Dead!" Smith was the only one who looked happy about this. He had a gleeful grin on his bearded face as he leapt up to the lectern. "The ruins of an ancient battlefield where mortal armies ground up against one another for three full days before the losing side was finally routed and slaughtered! Their vengeful spirits, convinced that they were betrayed and left for dead by their commanders, still cling to their corpses and seek to destroy the living. I love this one!"
"Uhhh, sir, any advice on what's dangerous out there?" Rod looked green in the cheeks as he said it.
"Don't get near the piles! Obviously. They'll sap your flux and probably make it hard to walk around."
"Thanks, sir."
"Now for the countdown! When I say Go, the crystals will lock you down to the first sphere and the contestant's circle will deactivate! Ready?"
Ash and Rod both nodded, their eyes on the ghostly fingers that were reaching for them.
When the circle deactivated, those fingers would be free to seek and to find and to scratch and to bind.
"Three!"
Ash adjusted her sash, making sure that her first sphere pins were close at hand.
"Two!"
The two duelists looked each other in the eye. Rod's face had hardened and there was only a trace of green left in his complexion.
Ash didn't know what she looked like, but the answer was probably: worried.
"One!"
Ash could feel the blood rushing through her head. Each heartbeat was like a drum and her awareness became hyper-focused on the terrain in front of her.
There were many strategies for dealing with the opening moments of the duel: most generally agreed that you should probably run and find cover so you could start weaving your defense together. There weren't many useful first sphere damage spells, so the opening minute was a good chance to protect yourself and make sure that you were set up for success when the second sphere activated.
"Go!"
Rod tripped Ash with his staff and dashed into the arena.
"What the-!" Ash gasped, completely unready for that maneuver, and staggered forward.
She fell.
She landed face first in a pile of bloody dirt, soaked with the life force of long-dead warriors and smelling like they had died messy, bowel-voiding deaths. The pain of landing on her face was matched only by the revulsion of being that close to the muck of death. Ghostly fingers started reaching for her immediately, crossing the now-defunct edge of the contestant's circle and getting ever-closer to putting their spectral claws on her skin.
"Ash! Get up!" Sam was yelling from the bleachers.
Ash jumped to her feet an ran in the opposite direction of where Rod had gone.
"Ha! How do you like that, Cook?" Rod was nowhere to be seen but his voice was coming from behind a five foot pile of bodies.
"You're an asshole, Rod!"
Ashley quickly found a shattered tower shield that was leaning against a boulder and ducked behind it. The metal of the shield would give her protection from Rod's spells and hopefully allow her to-
Rod was there!
He'd... he'd used a spell to throw his voice!
"What the-!" Ashley dashed backward as Rod lashed out with his staff again, nearly braining her in the process.
Ash backpedaled through the battlefield, hoping her brief mental map of the place was good enough to keep her from falling over, and touched a pin on her sash that looked like a suit of armor.
"Armor!" Ash had prepared this spell, like most of the others, ahead of time. All it needed was the right focus and command word and it would activate.
Of course, it still took about five seconds for it to materialize.
Tendrils of blue energy coalesced out of the air and started to form shapes. They started off slowly but gained speed rapidly. They tied themselves together, over and over, wrapping around one another until they created glowing blue pieces of armor. Greaves, breastplate, gorget, all of the trappings of plate mail!
As the pieces of armor formed, they dove out of the air and affixed themselves to Ash's body until, five seconds later, she was standing and covered head-to-toe in opaque magical armor.
"Let's see you hit me with your staff now!" Ash grinned triumphantly, feeling pretty good about herself.
"I was hoping you would do that." Rod laughed.
What did that mean?
"Missiles!" Rod pointed his staff at Ash and bolts of purple energy formed at the tip of it. They clung to his staff for a brief moment and then leapt forward, looking for all the world like a swarm of angry purple rocks.
"Oh shit."
Ash had forgotten the cardinal rule of dueling: always, always summon a Shield first. Magical shields could completely negate a missile spell; without it they could hit you unerringly and the physical barrier formed by the Armor spell was absolutely no use against them.
The bolts of energy passed directly through Ash's Armor and struck her in the chest.
Ash screamed and fell to her knees as pain ripped through her body. You would think she would be used to this by now since it happened so often. Missiles were actually some of the nicest things she'd been hit with in a duel.
No.
There was no getting used to this. It felt like getting shot, dozens of times, in the chest.
"Ash! You can do this! Work through it!" Sam's voice had an edge of desperation to it.
Ashley Cook was about to set a record for the fastest loss in the history of duels.
They hadn't even gotten to the second sphere.
"Shatter!"
Ash only heard Rod's second spell faintly. Her teeth were gritted from the intense pain of his first salvo and it was hard to concentrate. She felt like there were iron bands gripping her chest, squeezing her lungs and making it hard for her to breathe. They tightened, moment by moment, and it felt like she should be dying.
The wall of concentrated pressure hit her like nothing she'd ever felt before. There was a sound, so loud that it drowned out her scream, and she was flying backward. Air rushed past her and she soared over the top of one of the piles of corpses.
Her whole body felt like hamburger, like it had been turned into a fine paste in a matter of moments. Every nerve was screaming as loudly as it could and in the aftermath of the incredible boom of the spell the only thing louder than the screaming pain was the screaming Ash.
She bounced off the ground.
Bounced again.
Rolled.
Came to a stop, face first, in the dirt between two simulated mounds of dead people. She was convinced that, right now, they had it better.
"Ash, no!" The only sound besides Ash's desperate sobbing was Sam's heart-broken shout.
Then Smith's voice:
"And that's it! Miss Cook's crystal says that she's dead!"
*
Ash was usually the first one to arrive at Summoning 306, The Art and Theory of Advanced Summoning. Today was no exception, but instead of sitting bright and cheery at her desk ready to learn and also fawn over Professor Montgomery a little, she had her head down between her arms and was moaning softly in agony.
"Hey, Ash?" Cassandra DeVine sat down next to Ashley and poked her in the shoulder gently. "You okay?"
"Go away." Ashley groaned loudly to indicate how much she didn't want to talk. Her ears were still ringing from Rod's Shatter and her head was in splitting pain.
"What's wrong?"
It was hard to hear Cassandra over the ringing noise in her head but Ash managed it somehow.
"Duel today."
"Oh... right! Against Rod! How did it go? I've heard that he can have trouble sometimes in the short game, that must have... made it... you didn't win, did you?"
"He tripped me, Cass!"
"Tripped you? Oh! Oh, and you broke spell order didn't you?" Cass' voice had a dreamy tone as she said it, her mind spinning off to consider the possibilities of what might have happened after Ash broke spell order. Almost everyone at th
e school, particularly second years, loved to talk strategy for the duels.
"Yeah."
"He took you down with Missiles?"
"Yup."
"Oh, Ash." Cass giggled. "That's too funny."
"I set a record!"
"Uh oh..."
"Fastest loss! Rod was pretty damned pleased with himself."
"I'll bet. Hey, uhh, what's really wrong? You lose all the time."
Ash barked out a short, sharp laugh. Trust Cass to skip all the politics and gentle words and get straight to the real talk. That's what she liked about Cass, that's why they were such good friends.
"My head hurts like Hell."
"Oh? Oh, that Sam!" Cass leaned over and poked Ashley's ear gingerly. Ash swore and jerked her head away. "He didn't properly calibrate your auditory matrix. Those are tricky and they change all the time, and normally it doesn't matter. Rod must have used a sonic attack on you, right?"
"Ungggh, are you still talking? Can't you just let me die?"
"Here, I'll fix this."
Cass took out a large, gaudy necklace that she usually wore underneath her shirt so only the top of the chain was visible. Out in the open, it was covered in dozens of small charms, worked with jewels and actually quite intricately detailed. Cass came from a wealthy family who also happened to include several graduates of Wizards University, so they not only supported her financially but they also could give her excellent wizard presents.
The charms were Cass' foci. She thumbed through them until finding out that looked like a small cross, inset with emeralds. Maybe they were just glass or crystal? No, they were probably emeralds.
"Alright, hold still."
Cass concentrated, held the charm and touched Ash's ear gingerly.
"Mend!"
Ash gasped as a particularly fiery brand of pain lanced through her head. It was nothing compared to when she'd been hit by Rod's Shatter, but when she was already feeling like shit it made everything come into clear, sharp focus. She tried as hard as possible to keep from swearing and hitting Cass, she knew this was good for her even if in the short term it was painful.
Very painful.
Ash bit her lip and dug her fingernails into the luxurious cherry wood of the long, curved table she was sitting at with Cass. Briefly, she felt a bit of blood trickle down her chin but then her lip was introduced to the same searing pain that the rest of her head had been as the Mend fixed that, too.
It was over in less than ten seconds.
It felt like an eternity.
"Cass... oh, hey, that feels better." Ashley was about to curse Cassandra out for her indelicate manner with healing spells but then she realized that she actually felt better. Not just better, great! Mend was very nonspecific and it had cleared up all sorts of ailments all over Ash's body, big and small. Micro tears in her muscles from her run this morning, plaque on her teeth since the last time she'd brushed, fatigue because she'd been up a little too late last night, plus the damage to her auditory matrix from Rod's spell, they all disappeared in an instant.
"Of course it does."
"You... thanks." Ash smiled. She would have done that sooner, but she'd prepped mostly combat spells for the arena. No room for healing, especially since the crystal was supposed to keep that from being necessary.
"Next time I see Sam, I'm going to kill him for you."
"No, it's okay..."
"I'm serious! He needs to pay more attention, you could have gotten seriously hurt!"
"I can talk to him about it..." Ash frowned. Sam and Professor Montgomery's other Grad students were pretty much the only ones who shared her passion for summoning. The rest of the University looked down on it because the energy expenditure needed was so low compared to amount of injury you could do to someone with it. In short, it wasn't useful in the arena.
"Hey you two!" Brad sat down heavily on the other side of Ashley. "Oh, Ash. You look like you're just this side of one of Cass' healing spells!"
"Good guess." Ash winked.
"What!? No one ever complains about the results."
"Listen, Cass. Your technique is great but you could use a better bedside manner." Brad shrugged as he pulled out his laptop and started booting up. Like most of the students, he usually surfed Facebook rather than paying attention. Ash was the only one who truly listened and took notes, even about things that weren't going to be on the test.
"Well, next time you break something I won't help then."
"Hey! I'm not saying that, I'm just offering honest criticisms on your spells so that you can improve!"
"You're an ass."
"I'm also an ass."
They were at a stalemate. Ash was busy pulling up her note taking program while the two of them were staring one another down, trying to figure out the best way to continue the discussion. More arguing? New topic?
"Hey, do you guys see those markings on the ground?" Ashley stood up and pointed at the ground in front of the whiteboards. You couldn't quite see them when you were sitting down except as a faint discoloration but when you stood up you could see that they were, in fact, the most intricate magical circles that Ashley had ever seen. They made the contestant's circle in the arena look plain.
Intricacy did not always denote powerful magic, in fact it was much easier to mess up intricate spells and make them less powerful than intended, but they usually indicated an attempt at something powerful. Only a few wizards would dare attempt something like what Ashley was looking at, and none of them were students at the University.
All magic circles started with the simplest component: a circle. A single line, started and ended at the same point, drawn in a continuous motion. Circle drawing was an entire twelfth grade course at Magic High School, and most people failed it the first time they took it.
There was also an advanced circle drawing course in first year at the University, where you not only practiced the fundamentals of making a circle but also doing it with exotic materials so that, by the time you were done, you could do it in your sleep and by reflex.
There were two distinct spells on the floor of the room. One of them had been drawn with a yellowish substance that looked like it used brimstone as a base. Using brimstone to draw was always a pain, particularly on account of the smell. The other looked to have been drawn with powdered silver. Drawing circles with powder was actually a Graduate level course: you had to not only do it in a smooth, continuous motion but you needed to make sure that you poured it at a completely even thickness all the way around. There were also numerous way to prepare the powders so that they would lie properly after pouring and not move with small changes in air pressure or fluctuation in the magical currents.
Both circles were huge: larger than anything Ashley had ever attempted by at least twice.
After the outer circle, there was a ring of delicate runes, interlocking and so finite that you would have to be standing directly over them in order to even make out the shapes.
Ashley was now standing over them, scribbling furious notes on her tablet.
After the runes came another circle, more runes, and then a third circle.
Three circles.
Whatever these were meant to contain was powerful. Deadly powerful.
Inside the third brimstone circle was a whorling, swirling pattern that covered the entire interior of the design. Lines looped and swirled around one another, and each line was in fact composed of a myriad of tiny runes. Ashley couldn't go inside to look without disturbing the pattern so she used the camera on her tablet to snap pictures of the interior designs, hoping to go over them later on her own.
"What do you think they're for?" Ashley looked up and realized that she was the only one standing in the front of the class. Everyone else was sitting at the curving benches meant for students. Most were doing something on their laptops, a few were watching her with a mixture of curiosity and schadenfreude.
Why would they...?
"Well, I see at least someone is interested in my
little surprise for today's lecture!" A booming voice, thick and rich and devastatingly male, filled the lecture hall.
"Oh! Uhh, p... prof... professor Montgomery!" Ashley jumped back, narrowly avoiding ruining the circles and blushed furiously. She wanted to run back to her seat but she was frozen to the spot, rooted by shame and surprise.
"No, it's okay Miss Cook! I'm glad someone is interested in the scribbling of an old man."
Professor Montgomery was the most powerful summoner known. There was a large contingent of mages who would scoff at that designation, believing that it was nothing more than an interest in a dying art, but the fact of the matter was that no one could summon like he could. He taught most of the advanced summoning courses at the University, including this one.
And he had the most beautiful smile.
Unlike Professor Smith, he was clean shaven and well dressed. He always wore classy outfits: button-down shirt, tie, slacks. The only thing that would suggest he was anything other than a lawyer on a lunch break was his belt buckle. It was a perfect circle and inlaid with magical jewels. The pattern on it was difficult to look at, when you paid too much attention to it it seemed to slither and twist and try to escape your vision.
He claimed that it could summon his homunculus but no one had ever seen him use it and rumors swirled through the University. While most people thought he was a joke, unknown magic was always interesting and they were always interested. Every year, students planned this prank or another to try and make him use it but to everyone's knowledge he never had.
"I, uhh... what... what are they, sir?" Ashley was backing up slowly, keeping her eyes on the professor.
"That's a good question! Why don't you take your seat and I'll start?"
"Yes. Uhh, yes sir!"
Ash ran back to her spot. Brad and Cass were smirking at her and she ignored them as best she could.
"Alright. Excellent. Class, so far we have been discussing infernal and celestial beings in theory. I imagine that this is fairly frustrating."
