For the faerie fire fight, we spread out, each one of us taking a different position in the starting field. After all, this wasn't a team competition, and teamwork was actively against the rules, which meant if we wanted the best chance to all make it into a top slot, we would need to start as far away from one another as possible.

Even as the assistants began to walk through the field, passing out the rods enchanted with the harmless, clinging faerie fire spell, I drew my staff from my locker and began to chant.

First, I layered arcane armor on. Greater arcane armor might be stronger, but the faerie flames weren't an offensive spell. I didn't need a lot of power to stop it from touching me. The first circle spell took much less ether to cast, and would be perfectly suitable for now.

I conjured six separate shields, enough to cover me from every direction. The spell only lasted a minute, but the first few seconds of competition were usually the worst, as hundreds of students were packed together in a tight space, unable to move about. I needed the defense to survive those, though of course it was possible or even likely that someone would try and disrupt the casting and hit me. That was why I took extra care to work on layering each shield.

With that done, I began summoning. Amos and the other Wadjetktt weren't well suited to this battle, but a gadhar's ability to knock aside spells and other, stranger, powers would be very well suited to assisting my defenses. Orla burst from my ether pool, shaking her wings and wagging her tail as she took charge of the four summoned creatures. A pair of lesser air elementals joined the hounds to serve as my eyes, and Seren burbled discontentedly, annoyed he couldn't help. I patted his head and tried to give him some reassurance.

As one last layer of defense, I began to weave a curse in the air around me. It targeted anyone who attempted to hit me with a spell with misfortune in aiming. Curses weren't reality warping – no matter how much a misfortune I layered on someone, if they had a clear, easy shot, with enough ether to take it, they'd be able to hit me. But in the chaos of a large battle royale, there were many factors that could go wrong, and it might even help them get eliminated.

The break condition for the curse was simply that they had to stop targeting me, which let me save a lot of power compared to a more esoteric break condition. That was good, because I needed the curse to last thirty minutes, the maximum time this event would run. I'd never extended a curse that long before, and it took bucketfuls of ether to manage, more than even a fourth circle spell like arcane passage.

With my defenses complete, or at least as complete as they could be for this scenario, I checked on my ether pool. It was over half empty, so though I could have continued to layer on defenses, I stopped for now and began to practice Xander's massage, working to restore as much ether as I could. I'd need ether to power the wand, but just because I was done casting didn't mean that I was done entirely. I drew out my broom next, hopping atop it like a surfboard and preparing to fly away as soon as possible.

"Begin!" the announcer called out. In the same moment, the giant hourglass next to her flipped over. Unlike the multicolored one that the treasure hunt had used, this one was filled with what looked like tiny flakes of obsidian sand, each one catching the light.

As soon as the sand started to trickle down, chaos rushed through the crowd. I shot into the air, but people were already sending jets of faerie fire everywhere. It splashed against my shields, clinging to them and glowing a bright purple. But it was too far from my flesh and ether for it to sustain itself, so it was wiped away within seconds.

My curse was in overdrive, trying to target so many people at once, warping fortune on such a mass scale, everyone who fired on me finding their luck nudged ever so slightly off course. Orla and her kin were barking, redirecting volleys of purple-orange flame.

Beneath me, people were leaving the fight as they began to glow brighter and brighter purple. Those few sore losers who didn't quickly sheathe the faerie fire rod and start walking to leave the field were quickly snatched up by force spells cast by professors who floated even higher in the air than I was.

My air elemental crackled out a warning, and I spun around, raising my wand. Across from me, a mage who was flying under his own power had his wand pointed at me and was mumbling a spell. I recognized the pattern of the words of power flowing from him and deduced that he'd stored most of the general dispel within his wand, but with such a massive spell, he'd needed to keep a solid ten seconds of chanting.

That worked for me. I raised the faerie fire rod and shot a jet of purple at him, but it stopped in mid-air, caught by a perfectly invisible shield. That was a shame, but I hadn't expected to be so lucky.

I raised my wand and spoke a single word of power, shaping the spell in my ether pool. Disrupt casting wasn't very ether efficient unless you knew what your opponent was casting. I'd thought I knew, but he must have been using a higher circle spell with a similarity to the general dispel, because the spell drained a lot more power than I expected. Maybe he was using a dispelling wave, or something of that sort?

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But, inefficient or not, it still worked.

Seconds before his dispel could break my shields, it fell apart. I rushed him, and our shield spells collided, sparks of raw ether bursting out of the collision. Orla and two other gadhar barked, and shoved his shield aside. I raised the rod, and shot him in the head with a jet of faerie flames.

He sighed and began to fly away, even as my air elemental sent another warning. Flames were racing up from the air beneath me – most of the sea of people beneath me were gone, and some of those who remained had decided to target me. If they kept it up for too long, they'd be disqualified for teaming up, but for a few seconds, the combined streams threatened to break my shields, even as my curse set to work and my defenders worked to turn aside the illusionary fire.

I turned and poured on the speed, shooting away from the gathering, then sighed and cursed under my breath, raising the rod and firing at the smug looking face in front of me.

Wesley flicked his hand – not even a wand, just a hand – and the faerie fire was wiped away in an instant. Using disrupt casting on the wand felt like a terrible waste, but if he wanted to, who was I to stop him? I fired out more faerie flame, and they were caught on invisible shielding. Unlike the student whose shield I'd pushed aside, I was willing to bet that the white-haired prick had layered himself in a half-dozen shields, just like I had.

"Well met!" he called, his voice dripping with something that I couldn't identify. "Let's see if you can beat me."

I rifled through a couple of ideas as quickly as I could, then raised my wand.

"Let's settle this."

He lashed out with faerie fire and some sort of ray that eroded apart two of my shields, forcing me to open a hole in the rear of my defenses just to stop his flames. I didn't know how he was casting so fast – some element of his self-improvement affinity, I was guessing – but I managed to finally get my spell out.

Bright light and glimmering sand filled the area, and I flew as fast as I could to the ground. I hopped off my broom and tapped my bloodline. Glimmersands wasn't dangerous or powerful, but it was very distracting. I didn't know how long I had until Wesley recovered, but I wasn't expecting it to be long. Knowing him, he'd have found some way to improve his brain and eyes so it wasn't that distracting, just because he'd seen me use the spell in our fights.

So with my bloodline surging through me, I leapt into the air and slugged his shields with the meanest punch my body could manage. It exploded, and the momentum of my leap continued to send me up into the air. I reached out and tapped him on the chest.

Rather, I tapped the arcane armor on his chest. Just as I'd suspected, he'd cast the spell too. I sent my bloodline flooding into my hands even as I started to fall, and flicked him in the chest, dissolving his armor, then raised the rod and covered him in faerie fire.

Wesley was extremely competent. There was a reason that Sandara wasn't confident at beating him in the spell control exhibition. In a contest of shield on shield, dispel on dispel, disruption on disruption, I would lose.

I was more than a caster, though. I was a dragon mage – or at least, a neophyte on the path to becoming a dragon mage.

He was also a strategist, and would have put the least amount of power into his spells needed for them to stop faerie fire. We weren't allowed to use offensive spells. We weren't even allowed to touch one another. But I hadn't touched him, only shattered his force effects.

"That was a dirty trick," he told me, crossing his arms and huffing even as he floated down to the ground, glaring at me. I winked at him, then blazed away, casting new shields to replace the ones he'd broken, dodging and weaving through the air as I flew by others sending out burning jets of faerie fire.

I paused, throwing myself backwards just in time to stop myself from crashing into a massive wall of purple flame that erupted across the battlefield. Our wands only produced a line of flame, so someone had to be using–

There.

Bellowing with laughter, Jackson was sending out absolutely massive amounts of faerie fire. I was frankly impressed that his fire affinity was compatible with the spell, given it wasn't actually a burning flame. Neither Seren nor I could eat the faerie flames.Maybe Effervesce's boons were helping?

Either way, I turned and ran. I didn't want to face Jackson right now, and given the way he seemed to be throwing fireballs, calling up fire walls, and casting flamethrowers, all made of faerie flame, I wasn't sure I could. His magic might be simple, but by the hells, it was strong.

I nearly crashed into the storm mage from Sandara's team, who had played the emperor in the play, and only managed to avoid it thanks to warning from my air elemental. I had a moment to greet him with a cheerful hello before we were both flinging flame at one another.

"You seem a good enough fellow, but that won't stop me from beating you!" he called out, spinning winds to redirect my winds into opponents elsewhere on the field.

"You seem fine yourself – I can appreciate the reusing of my spells," I said, flicking my rod out as if I were about to try and punch through the wind with raw ether. Instead, I etherstepped behind him, burning one of the nuggets of metal that I'd purchased over the summer, and blasted him in the back of the head with the flame.

"Oh, Bexul," he swore, before nodding. "Good job."

I nodded and turned, bolting off. I continued to fight my way through mages. Most weren't combat mages, and had only survived this long thanks to the sheer number of people who had entered, but a handful of them were quite tough.

As people continued to be eliminated, though, the game slowly shifted. The campus green was large, and more and more of the people who'd survived by running were left. They were slowly whittled down until there were less than five people left. Jackson was one of them, as was I, but both Salem and Yushin had been eliminated, their magic not suited to this kind of fight.

Sandara was still there, and the final two were those students about to graduate, using their superior magical skill and larger ether pools to push through. There were only a few minutes left on the timer, so I raised my wand and rod, and prepared for a few last clashes.

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