Chapter 31: A Test Of Mettle

  Abigail had expected the fight to begin with an explosive burst of speed from both Eine and Jeanne but it didn't. Instead, for the first several minutes of the fight they merely faced each other, their eyes flicking back and forth rapidly and their hands twitching at their sides.

  To onlookers it would have seemed ridiculous but Abigail had spent enough time around powerful people to know that the two of them were locked in a desperate struggle. Each of them was analyzing the most minute movements of both their opponent and the Winds of Magic curling around them, trying to ascertain when and how they would begin their attack. Each little draw of magic was immediately recognized and zeroed in on.

  And it took Abigail almost half of that time to realize that this was a stalemate she needed to break. She had to give Eine the edge, either disrupting the web of spells Jeanne was attempting to weave or strengthening Eine in such a way that Jeanne couldn't immediately counter. Or she could go for a much less subtle attack.

  Abigail had whiled away many an hour practicing with her bow and she had found a great many useful ways to use it. The arrows it fired were powerful projectiles, yes, but most of their effectiveness came from the fact that they were made of condensed light magic. And that meant Abigail could manipute these arrows at will. She'd found success creating fragmenting projectiles, fshbangs and what amounted to super-heated ser bsts but there were other applications as well. And so she nocked an arrow and waited for an opening.

  Something in the fluctuations of magic must have tipped Eine off that Abigail was trying to do something so she escated her mindgame with Jeanne, drawing on the Winds with a conspicuous hand motion that made Jeanne twitch and reach for her weapon. It was exactly the kind of opening Abigail had needed and she fired the arrow straight at Jeanne.

  The angel jumped back and summoned a pair of pure white wings that she curled around herself protectively. Angel wings were notoriously durable, to the point where nothing but Darklight could put much of a dent in them, but Abigail had anticipated this.

  Instead of uselessly striking the angel wings the arrow burst into motes of light three feet away from Jeanne. Jeanne held her protective stance a moment longer, not knowing when the hit would come, and Eine used the momentary distraction to jab two crystal swords at Jeanne's sides. But Jeanne's reaction times were excellent and she managed to block the swords with her forearms, summoning steel ptes over them in an instant.

  Eine's sword ricocheted away after striking the hardened metal and Jeanne opened her wings, grabbing her Trumpet off her back to go on the offensive, and that's when a dozen thin beams of light smmed into her back, knocking her forward and forcing her to throw her body into a forward roll.

  Abigail's arrow hadn't simply vanished. It had been made to explode into motes of light that would then strike the opponent's back the moment it wasn't guarded. It had been a fairly complicated piece of spellwork and she wasn't sure she could have pulled it off before her st round of leveling.

  However, it wasn't anywhere near as effective as Abigail had built it to be. Against Outsiders and cultists that spell would have burned clean through their bodies in a dozen pces but Jeanne, in her full Yesod pattern armor, only had a few scorch marks to show for the attack. But even that Abigail had anticipated. She knew their armor was tough so long as it wasn't hit with Darklight and so she had created the spell to carry more of a physical element than sheer heat, which was why Jeanne had been knocked forward as if she'd been kicked by a mule. Getting through that armor would be difficult but in the end this was only a sparring match and there was no point in needlessly inflicting damage upon each other, so the armor was a welcome addition.

  Simirly, in a proper fight Eine would have likely jumped on her opponent after such an opening but in a sparring match like this she just let Jeanne get back up.

  “Good job,” the angel said. “I didn't expect that.”

  Her eyes hadn't left Eine throughout the comment but Abigail knew the praise had been aimed at her. And she felt eted. Maybe she actually was strong enough to be useful after all.

  This time Jeanne was the one to go on the offensive, charging at Eine, dragging her Trumpet behind her. It was such an obvious and telegraphed attack that Abigail wasn't shocked in the slightest when she noticed that it had been meant as a distraction.

  It was an obvious and telegraphed attack, yes, but it was dangerous enough that Eine couldn't ignore it but at the same time Jeanne had summoned up metal magic, creating thin ribbons of steel that she sent at both Eine and Abigail as if they were throwing knives. It was a brutally effective attack. Either the opponent neglected defending against one of the two attacks or they had to drop everything and focus on defending, thereby leaving themselves open to an even more devastating attack. Or at least that's what it was meant to be.

  Instead Eine focused purely on dealing with Jeanne's Trumpet, trusting Abigail to take care of the spell. And she did. Abigail didn't want to rely on fire magic, not wanting to upset Jeanne with the sight, but fire magic didn't necessarily have to produce fme.

  And so Abigail created an area of super-heated air between Jeanne and them. The metal ribbons hit that area and melted down in a fsh. The now oddly shaped chunks of metal sg began to tumble and veered off course. There was still a chance the projectiles would find their mark after all and so Abigail added a touch of space magic, repelling the objects so that they would swerve around the two of them.

  The end result was that the metal ribbons came nowhere close to them, spttering against the force wall surrounding their arena, sizzling against the energy barriers, while Eine locked bdes with Jeanne, catching the bde of the Trumpet in a cross made of two crystal bdes.

  Jeanne strained against Eine, trying to overpower her, but before the two women could truly test out which of them was stronger Abigail cast a gravity spell. Unlike the one she'd cast to deal with the soldiers affected by the red haze this one didn't increase gravity. Rather, it completely turned gravity off in a tiny little area around Jeanne. It wasn't even rge enough to affect her entire body but that made the spell even more effective as the angel found her center of gravity light as a feather while her arms and head were still just as heavy as before.

  She strained with all her might against Eine's swords, though this time it wasn't to overpower her. Instead she shoved herself off the brunette, unching herself several steps away in order to regain her bance.

  Eine charged after Jeanne and Abigail let the area of gravity wink out so as not to affect her partner and Eine began a flurry of attacks that Jeanne had to scramble to dodge. Between her wings and her Trumpet the angel was able to dodge attacks from three directions but Eine was never attacking her from less than four, catching her in a flurry of dancing bdes that curved and circled and swung with perfect coordination that surely looked like utter chaos to someone caught in the attack.

  **

  I can't beat them both, Jeanne thought, pride and worry twisting in her mind.

  On the one hand knowing that her charges were not merely growing stronger but were growing strong enough to threaten her was eting, letting her believe that their desperate struggle for survival wasn't doomed after all. But on the other hand they were surrounded by the entirety of Project Divinity and she couldn't afford to look weak in front of all of them. Her pride wouldn't allow it. Granted, her pride had taken a couple of big hits considering the kinds of things she had allowed Rachel to do to her but she preferred to shed her pride only in bed with her.

  But be that as it may, Jeanne wouldn't simply hand these two their victory. She wanted to fight properly, to know that if she lost it wouldn't be because she had yielded but because they had genuinely bested her. However, the only chance she saw of evening the odds and giving her a chance to win was to even the numbers.

  Taking Eine out was not going to happen with Abigail supporting her but maybe taking out Abigail would give her the upper hand against Eine. She really didn't want to go for that kind of attack, didn't want to focus on the weaker member of the opposing team, but she was certain that if she didn't do her best to beat them that it would upset them, to know that their opponent had been going easy on them from the start.

  And so Jeanne cast a time spell. She sent out a burst of slowed-down time and the swords harrying her began to move at a crawl. Eine was also affected though Jeanne knew that wouldn't st. The more powerful a slowing effect the more its effect deteriorated when cast on powerful individuals. Stop spells were all but useless unless the caster was vastly stronger than the target. This was because a person's aura did its best to destroy hostile hexes like this and the stronger a person was the more effective someone's aura was at doing so.

  The reason that spell Prudence had salvaged had worked so well had been because of how gradual it had been. Each individual burst of the slow spell had been fairly weak on its own, giving the target's aura little to fight against. Each subsequent pulse had interlinked with what was there, creating a matrix of slowing spells that became harder to dispel as time went on. Of course, it had also helped that the spell had used a frankly obscene amount of power. The only way to dispel it would have been to notice the problem and manually unravel it, not relying on one's aura to stop it, but it had been designed to be gradual enough as not to be noticed until it was too te to fight back.

  But Jeanne just used a single pulse of slowed-down time in order to escape Eine's onsught, beating her wings to escape the situation. From midair she honed in on Abigail, intending to knock her out as quickly and painlessly as possible. She summoned a yer of dull metal pting over the bde of her Trumpet and rushed at the singer, intending to smash the side of her head with the blunted head of her weapon, knocking her out cold.

  Abigail's eyes went wide in terror and she began humming under her breath, so quiet that Jeanne barely heard it over the rushing of air as she shot towards the girl. Her body twisted through a spin and with all the centrifugal force behind it her Trumpet swung towards Abigail... and bounced off a translucent barrier.

  Jeanne was stunned for a moment until she remembered that Abigail could summon barriers simply by singing. Jeanne was impressed. It wasn't mere cleverness that had made this possible. The girl must have also trained herself, conditioned herself to the unusual act of reacting to incoming danger by humming.

  Before she could spend too long being impressed by the reaction she felt two armored hands grabbing hold of her shoulders and Eine growled: “Hands off the songbird,” before tossing Jeanne through the air to nd in a heap against the force wall of the arena.

  As Jeanne got up she reflected on the way Abigail's barrier had stopped her strike. Apparently she could actually hit that thing full force without seriously endangering Abigail's life.

  When she was standing firm once more she considered a new strategy. Attacking Abigail had clearly rattled Eine. If she could make use of that, she would find a crack in their defense.

  Once again she dashed at the two of them, once again focusing on Abigail. She dispelled the metal sheet from her Trumpet, allowing it to cut rather than bash once more, and gathered behind her a working of force and air, enough to carve through the barrier in a single strike. As expected, Eine stepped in to try and stop her attack but at the very st moment Jeanne switched targets and aimed the devastating swing at Eine's barely protected side.

  Eine's superhuman speed allowed her to react in time, too te to avoid the attack entirely but enough to intercept Jeanne's strike with four of her crystal swords. A horrid tinging sound echoed through the training hall as Jeanne's Trumpet shattered the swords and sent Eine flying.

  “Eine!” someone in the crowd of spectators, presumably Alexis, cried out.

  Abigail's eyes had gone wide but, clever girl that she was, she didn't interrupt her humming for even a moment.

  **

  This is all my fault, Abigail thought. The reason Eine got hurt is because she had to protect me, because I can't protect myself after all.

  She used her bow to send an arrow at Jeanne, hoping to distract her away from Eine, but Jeanne's wing flicked up and smacked the projectile off course before it could explode the way Abigail had intended it.

  The momentary distraction had given Eine enough time to right herself but Jeanne was on her again in a fsh and unleashed a series of swings that Eine had to direct all her swords to block.

  Abigail fired another arrow but Jeanne's wings once again intercepted it. She didn't know whether Jeanne was hearing the sound of her bowstring or feeling the fluctuations in the Winds of Magic, so she couldn't figure out how to sneak an attack past her defenses. She was about to once again resort to a massive swathe of fire, even knowing it might traumatize Jeanne, when she witnessed something horrifying. With a mighty swing Jeanne had managed to send all of Eine's swords flying at once and then followed up with a mighty thrust, running Eine through with the entire head of the Trumpet. Blood spttered everywhere and Eine stood still, impaled on the weapon.

  Abigail was horrified at the sight. This was a practice battle, for crying out loud! Shit like this wasn't supposed to happen. And so, even knowing it was a bad idea to stop humming she couldn't stop herself and, in shock and anguish, she screamed:

  “ELAINE!”

  **

  Jeanne felt bad about the subterfuge but there was no way she could win by pying fair. She had in fact managed to send all of Eine's swords flying with a perfectly timed swing of her sword but she hadn't actually run Eine through. She wanted to win this fight but she didn't want to hurt anyone. Instead, the moment after breaking Eine's guard she had created an eborate illusion with light magic, powered it with a massive amount of magic and then sent it bsting out at everyone in the training hall.

  Light bent and twisted, showing everyone exactly what Jeanne had wanted them to see: Eine getting run through with the Trumpet, blood spttering everywhere.

  The illusion did not hold up under any amount of scrutiny. The blood sptter had made no sound and Eine hadn't let out even a whimper of pain. But it had succeeded in the one thing it had been meant to: Making Abigail drop her guard.

  The other issue with using an illusion to show a devastating attack that hadn't actually happened was that the target of the attack hadn't actually been devastated. Eine was still on her feet, still hale and healthy, and about to retaliate.

  And so Jeanne unleashed a second massive burst of magic, this time sending a stop spell at Eine. Not a slowing spell but a total dead stop. People at her level would only be stunned by full stop spells for a fraction of a second but operating at their level a fraction of a second was all Jeanne needed.

  She froze Eine in time and then used force and air magic to dash off, only barely not breaking the sound barrier. She had aimed herself at Abigail and came rushing at the girl. With the enormous momentum still behind her she smmed her fist into Abigail's armored gut.

  “I'm sorry, you're too good to fight fair,” Jeanne whispered as Abigail crumpled.

  **

  The st thing Abigail saw before unconsciousness cimed her was Eine, hale and healthy and horrified at having failed to keep her safe.