Andrew Rowe - On the Shoulders of Titans

The attack carried him back several meters, but he never triggered any tiles. And I finally saw why—

He was floating. Both Sera and Patrick were. They were only an inch off the ground, so it was almost impossible to tell.

As an Elementalist, Patrick had access to air and fire mana. He usually mixed them for lightning attacks — but that didn’t mean he couldn’t use them on their own.

Marissa shook the square some more. Nothing happened.

“Probably needs time to recharge. Let’s get to safer squares.”

Together, we fell back.

Sera opened fire directly at the square that Marissa was carrying. She managed to get it out of the way, but the effort knocked her off balance. I stepped in and caught Marissa before she could fall on a more dangerous square.

Marissa looked chagrined. “Sorry, not fightin’ at my best.”

“You’re doing great. Better than I am. Just keep firing that thing as it recharges and we should wear them down.”

Patrick and Sera were backing off, too, which surprised me. I saw why in a moment. Sera ducked down with her dueling cane, produced the bladed portion, and began to cut out a square of her own.

That’s bad.

Fortunately, the blade on the dueling cane wasn’t meant for cutting stone, even when empowered with mana. It was taking her much longer than Marissa had.

I raised my cane and fired at her, but Patrick was right there in front of her a moment later, batting my attacks to the side with practiced ease.

This isn’t working.

“Hand me that. I’ll use it, you’re better at melee range. Close in and smash them before they can finish copying you. Yellow squares are probably safe, but I don’t know what they do.”

I hooked my cane on my belt. Marissa handed me the square and charged.

Patrick settled into a fighting stance.

Normally, he wouldn’t have had a chance in a physical fight with Marissa. But she was still sick, and Patrick was the kind of friend who paid close attention to everything about the people he cared about.

Including, it seemed, how to fight us.

Marissa was nearly in striking distance when Patrick threw his dueling cane at her.

She ducked it, closing in further, and threw a punch at him.

She hadn’t noticed that in the moment he’d thrown the cane, he’d charged his shroud with lightning.

Patrick blocked with his left arm, shuddering at the force of the blow, but the effect on Marissa was far worse. The electrical charge jumped into her, bypassing her barrier entirely because she’d been the one to make physical contact.

Her shroud might have absorbed a fraction of it, but from the way she shuddered and staggered backward, I could tell it hadn’t done much.

“I am so sorry about this.” Patrick stepped forward and shoved an open palm into her chest.

Marissa convulsed again as the electricity surged through her, and she fell to a knee.

I stepped to the side to get a better angle and shook the square in Patrick’s direction, but nothing happened. Connecting with the mana in the square told me that it was critically low. It did have a mana recharging function built in, but it seemed like it wasn’t meant to be triggered several times in rapid succession. Maybe it would have recharged faster if it was still connected with the other squares — I saw some transference runes I didn’t recognize.

I couldn’t count on it to recharge on its own fast enough to be useful. Fortunately, I didn’t have to.

I found the right rune and shoved my own mana into it.

Marissa tried to stand.

Patrick raised a fist before she could, but he never had a chance to swing it. The blast of energy from the tile caught him in the side and tossed him twenty feet out of the way.

Sera raised her own tile, triumphant, just in time for Marissa to smash it in half with a fist.

I advanced while Patrick picked himself off the floor.

Sera tossed her shattered pieces of the tile to the side, ducking one of Marissa’s swings and picking up her discarded dueling cane from the floor.

Marissa was moving a lot slower than usual now, the lightning clearly having taken a toll. That made her slow enough to let Sera blast a sphere into Marissa’s chest at point-blank range.

Marissa hadn’t lost any of her resilience, though.

She smacked the dueling cane right out of Sera’s hand right after that, then grabbed her and shoved her at the closest green square. The levitation spell apparently wasn’t strong enough to resist the kind of force Marissa could use.

The blast erupting from the floor cracked Sera’s shield, but it wasn’t enough to take her out of the match. She backed off rapidly, circling to try to flank Marissa alongside a recovering Patrick.

I couldn’t let that happen. My hand was burning — recharging the tile had taken a lot out of me — but I recharged it again.

I fired at Patrick again.

This time, he was ready.

The blast was too fast for any of us to dodge, save maybe Marissa at full strength. Instead, he snapped his fingers, and a wall of lightning appeared in between us. The blast of light crashed into it and deflected to the side, impacting harmlessly on the barrier outside of the arena.

He winced and grabbed his left hand with his right. He was starting to feel the cost of all his spells, too.

Slowly, I advanced. The burning in my right hand had changed to throbbing, which wasn’t a good sign. I was probably too low to safely recharge the square again without causing myself permanent harm.

My opponents didn’t need to know that, though.

I moved closer to Patrick, stepping on red squares as much as possible, feeling my phoenix sigil recharging just a bit with each step. I kept the square leveled at him, hoping to keep him too worried about it to focus on Marissa.

It didn’t work.

Sera had managed to reclaim her dueling cane from the floor, and now she was falling back and firing at Marissa from a distance. With Marissa’s injuries, she was moving slow enough that Sera was landing hits almost half the time.

Patrick ran for his own abandoned cane.

I couldn’t run effectively while carrying the tile. It wasn’t heavy - it was probably only a few inches thick — but it was large enough to stand on, and that made it cumbersome.

I threw it to the side, but I still didn’t run.

I stepped on a yellow square, planning to duck down and figure out what it did — but I didn’t need to.

The dueling cane on my belt started to glow as soon as I hit the tile, and I understood.

I pulled my cane back off my belt and fired — straight at Patrick’s cane.

The orb that emerged from my weapon was three times the normal size, more like one from a war cane, but without the loss of speed.

I didn’t hit the cane, though. Patrick was just quick enough to get in the way, and he slammed an electrically-charged fist into the super-charged sphere.

There was a flash of white and the sphere shot back in my direction.

I had not expected that.

I threw myself out of the way too fast to pay any attention to where I was landing.

My shroud did precious little to absorb the pain of impacting with a stone floor.

That wasn’t the real problem, though. When I tried to push myself up, I discovered that there were vines wrapped around my chest.

Oh, and I’d lost the grip on my cane, and it was a couple feet from my hand. So there was that.

Glancing up, I could see that Patrick was in bad shape, but he’d managed to get his cane. He was now running full-speed away from Marissa, while Sera was firing orbs at Marissa’s back. She was only occasionally connecting now that Marissa was moving, but Marissa wasn’t gaining any ground. She was injured, sick, and had to avoid half the squares that the other team didn’t.