The students all take their places, then the start whistle sounds. Immediately, dozens of oversized rat things with several inch long fangs, claws and seemingly random bony plates appear and attack from all sides. With a gesture, Allia creates a dozen light barriers – square screens five feet to a side – to slow the rats down and funnel them into kill zones. The second wave starts ten seconds after the first, but Greg needs less than half that time, letting Allia glance over to see how her friend and rival is doing.

  As before, Sylvia is generating a whirlwind of shards. Fortunately, she wasn’t allowed to keep the stone she created for the individual trials, but she has already managed to create enough to impede most of the rats. Meanwhile, Emil stands next to her in the eye of the blade storm and picks off rats with his own bullet wand, or stab those that manage to get through with his rapier.

  A beep forces Allia's attention back to her own arena as a dozen more rats appear – this time with goblin riders armed with crude metal blades. Allia made as many barriers as she could for the first wave, but they’ve settled somewhat into existence, allowing her to add one more and move the rest to optimal positions. One goblin tries to bash through them, but the blows aren’t heavy, and the delay gives Allia time to slide another barrier over it – cutting it and the rat it rode on in two with the razor edge.

  Greg has a little more trouble with this wave than the last just from the doubling of targets, but manages to shoot most of them before they reach and cuts the handful that do make it with his sword, using only eight of the ten seconds given. Greg focuses on absolving his wand with the extra time, while Allia again glances at her competitors.

  Emil and Sylvia are, of course, taking their time, but several of the other teams also haven’t fully cleared the second wave when the third one appears. At this rate, half or more will drop out by wave five.

  The beep occurs again and this time six humanoids, much bulkier than most humans, appear with crude but cruel looking spiked clubs, along with, of course, a dozen more dire rats.

  Seeing that the orcs are likely strong enough to batter her barriers down, Allia changes approach. Her barriers have again settled firmly enough into existence that she’s able to add another to them, but then takes a cue from Sylvia and begins orbiting them around in two concentric circles of nearly the same size – one deasil and one withershin – slowly at first, but gradually building speed. The radius of each circle is about 10 feet and each barrier (bent into matching curves to glide past each other) has a gap of about 4 feet between it and the next one over in its circle.

  Two of the charging orcs misjudge (as much as an illusion can be said to judge) the convening barriers and are cut down, with a third losing its weapon arm. The ones who do make it pause briefly to properly time the crossing, but that gives Greg more than enough time to shoot them down. Likewise, while none of the rats get caught by the barriers, they are slowed enough to not be overwhelming. The two of them actually clear the wave with an extra second to spare from the last one.

  Another larger wave of orcs appears, but this time accompanied by a dozen hell hounds in addition to the traditional dozen rats, plus a bigger orc in the back with arcane robes and staff, indicating a mage.

  Rather than adding another barrier, Allia focuses on the caster by creating a spear above it and stabbing down as she did with the squamatans. As expected, she meets resistance from a shield, but overcomes it to fatally skewer the mage. Then, slowly, she moves the spear back to her so she can quickly launch it in the next wave.

  Greg isn’t struggling exactly with the rest of them, but is forced to use his sword to defend himself as several enemies make it past the barriers. None make it past him to Allia, though, as he casually intercepts them in a walk accelerated to a blur by his magic. However, the last enemy falls only an instant after the next wave starts, giving Greg no time to absolve his wand and leaving him only about half of maximum capacity.

  Fortunately, the next wave is smaller, having only an orc mage, a dozen hell hounds, a dozen dire rats and three fire-breathing grizzly bears.

  First, Allia launches the spear and skewers the mage. Then she creates a stationary barrier and dives behind it a moment before a trio of fire cones engulfs her defences. Despite the fire being an illusion, the system tied in with her haptic suit makes her feel the strain as if it were real. The barrier wouldn’t actually break, but the illusion would make it seem to disappear.

  Greg, seeing that they’re pinned down too much for his bullet wand to be of use and that they’re about to be swarmed, dashes out of the orbiting barriers and charges the illusory enemies. First, he shoots the hell hounds, killing each one with one well placed shot. He shoots the bears a few times, but only produces surface wounds, so he moves in and chops with his sword. The bears try to bite and swat him, but are far too slow to catch him as he methodically disables limbs.

  Meanwhile, Allia is crouched behind her barrier with her weapons drawn, ready for the rats to come. A few of the dire rats get toasted by their ally’s fire, but most make it through along with a hellhound.

  The rats are dangerous in a swarm, but likely can’t penetrate her shield spell in these numbers, while the hellhound’s saliva is a potent acid known for eating through shields. So, she shoots the hellhound first.

  Unempowered by Greg’s magic, it takes three shots to kill the hound, and she can only fire twice a second. Still, that’s enough to eliminate it and two of the rats before they reach her. The next few seconds are filled with stabbing and slashing with her short sword as she frantically, but not wildly, defends herself from the leaping vermin. One does manage to get through and land on her face, but her shield easily holds for the instant needed to bring the blade down on it.

  A few seconds and a half dozen dead rats later and it’s over. Real dire rats would likely be more hesitant to charge to their deaths like that, but the gauntlet cares more about quickly overwhelming than behavioural accuracy.

  Now unoccupied, she yanks back her spear and launches it into the skull of the least injured bear and kills it instantly. Then, feeling confident, she creates a second spear and kills another one, but lets Greg finish off the last one.

  Greg returns to the barrier circle with a few seconds to spare and is about to absolve his wand when Allia tosses him her own less discrete one. Greg looks at it, nods gratefully and tosses her his.

  “Stay back until the swarmers are handled and I’ll try to thin the big ones down for you,” Allia says, to which Greg nods while absolving the few shots spent from Allia’s wand. Then the next wave comes.

  This one has two orc mages, the three bears, half a dozen hell hounds, a dozen rats and two ogres ten feet tall and rippling muscles.

  Still not wanting to find out what the mages can do, Allia skewers both of them with her previously created spears. Then she creates a third spear and kills one of the bears. She makes a gesture for a fourth spear, but interrupts it with a strained expression – indicating she needs more time to establish her constructs before creating more.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  The bears open fire while the rest close in on them. Greg mows down the small ones quickly and is about to move to the larger ones when the ogres just walk into the circle, blocking their allies’ fire before just getting cut down by the rotating razor thin barriers with no action needed.

  “Huh, didn’t expect that,” Greg says, watching them fall.

  Allia doesn’t respond as she focuses on retrieving the spears, which she then uses to finish off the bears. They have about four seconds left before the next wave, so Allia gives Greg back his wand to absolve while she focuses on establishing her constructs, pausing briefly to look around.

  About half their competitors have been eliminated. When they are, the safety barriers denoting their zones shrink to give their neighbours more space to manoeuvre… and the monsters more space to spawn in force.

  The next wave starts with a thump as a thirty foot tall humanoid sparkles into existence along with a half dozen ogres and bears; three orc mages; a dozen orcs and hell hounds; and two dozen dire rats.

  “I think maybe they want this to be the last wave,” Allia says in comic understatement of the forces arrayed against them as she launches her spears to once again not find out what the mages can do.

  “Then let’s make them show us their backup plan,” Greg says with a smirk.

  “Agreed,” Allia says as she conjures a fourth spear to the side of the titanic humanoid and launches it through its armpit and into its heart with a closed fist gesture. The massive creature hardly feels it, but then she flattens her hand, which turns the round shaft of the spear into a flat blade, then gestures to the side to lengthen it through the wound, resulting in a blade nearly half the creature’s width. Finally, she makes a grabbing motion with her other hand to hold her construct in place as the titan continues to walk forward, using its own momentum to cut a massive gash out of its back.

  The titan lasts only a step before stumbling and falling – landing on several of its allies and eliminating them. At the same moment, a detonation is heard from Emil’s arena, and Allia instinctively looks to see Sylvia’s stone pillars having all been shattered – eliminating all of their enemies at once save for the titan and a few others. Emil then teleports behind the colossal figure’s neck and envelopes his sword with purple energy before slashing through its spine and instantly killing it.

  Panicked that they might lose, Allia turns her focus back on her fight and retrieving her spears, which she then uses to pick off the bears one at a time. Fortunately for their bet, the gauntlet isn’t over and every ten seconds more enemies appear, though in smaller groups which usually comprise of one ogre, two bears, some orcs, hell hounds and a few dozen rats, though occasionally mages or a titan show up to try to catch them by surprise.

  They get pressed at first, with enemies building up and Greg quickly expending both bullet wands dealing with the swarms of small enemies. But Allia is also able to gradually increase her number of spears and soon overcomes the rate of reinforcements with a flurry of light. Greg nearly exhausts himself cutting down the small foes that reach them, but then the reinforcements suddenly stop after Allia kills the last of the ogres and bears, and the rest quickly follow.

  They spend the next few seconds panting before Greg composes himself enough to begin absolving a wand and Allia again focuses on establishing the constructs – both of them knowing that the gauntlet does not have an end.

  A deafening roar proves them right a moment later as a fifty-foot-long dragon appears 10 seconds later, and immediately bathes them in blue fire.

  Allia snaps half of her barriers around them in a dome formation with two extras in front, then breaks the rest into more spears and launches everything at the foe at once. Most of the dozens of spears break on contact with a natural shield spell, but after about seventy hit, the defence is overwhelmed. Unfortunately, the dragon scales are nearly as tough, and she scores only superficial wounds with the rest. In the meantime, her remaining barriers begin to break from the flames. Fortunately though, with so many barriers gone, it’s much easier to make new ones and she quickly replaces them.

  Greg, knowing that he’d die instantly outside the dome, places his hands on Allia’s shoulders and channels his manifestation into her. Her barriers snap into place more rapidly, even giving her enough time to form a few spears, which she launches with far greater force than before. It looks like Allia might be able to win the battle of attrition, if her soul doesn’t become too discrete first.

  Then the dragon slams its claw into the dome, breaking it instantly and bathes them in fire. As soon as the fire envelops them it winks out of existence, leaving them standing with Allia examining her hand in a pout.

  “I think we nearly had it. Maybe if I had made something to keep it at bay more, or…”

  She’s interrupted by Greg’s joyous laugh. “No particular synergy my ass! We nearly took out a dragon! And before that we were amazing! We need to join the competition together at the end of the semester!”

  Allia regards him then nods. “Maybe… but um, let’s see how they do first.” She gestures behind him to Emil and Sylvia who are still fighting their dragon.

  Unlike the stationary defence Allia went with, Emill is, as expected, teleporting around the dragon with Sylvia, holding her by the waist, whenever it tries to breathe on them. However, his sword is simply unable to pierce its shield spell. Sylvia’s shard storm seems more effective in draining it than it should, but it’s quickly depleted as the blades shatter against the flickering field. Meanwhile, the dragon, continuously turning about to try to catch them with its breath, is turning the ground into magma.

  Seeing this, Emil takes them to the air. In the split second as they begin to fall, Sylvia begins conjuring the biggest shard yet, nearly four feet long when she launches it. Before it strikes though, Emil outstretches his hand parallel to hers, and the shard disappears in a purple flash before reappearing back in front of them and again launches in the dragon’s direction over and over, with each teleport giving Sylvia more time to propel the projectile. This continues dozens of times until their own momentum forces them to teleport away lest they hit the ground, and the lance finally makes contact after several seconds of build-up.

  The strike sounds like thunder as the shield flashes blue, then shatters. The stone spear also breaks, but a large shard continues and penetrates the dragon all the way into the ground. However, the wound is far too small to be fatal.

  So, Emil tries again, teleporting high and redirecting their momentum upwards. However, before they hit, the dragon also takes to the air and they’re forced to abandon the attack as they dodge a stream of flame.

  They try again a few times, but fail to build up enough momentum to wound it as it twists lithely out of the way. After the fifth try, Emil regards his partner, then drops her.

  Sylvia screams in rage as she hits the slowfall zone ten feet off the ground where an illusionary double splits from her and strikes the ground fatally, while she glides to safety – she’s out of the contest.

  Emil, ignoring this, draws his rapier again and teleports directly next to the dragon, his momentum changed to take him parallel to it. As he falls by it, he charges his sword with his power and drags it along, ripping a long but shallow line out of it. The sword, when empowered like this, doesn’t cut in the traditional sense, but teleports the flesh it strikes in random directions in a molecular thin bubble around it.

  It seems that Emil has come across a winning approach, but the dragon has tricks too. Seeing that the ranged threat is gone, it lands and aims its fire breath directly at the ground, which sends a curtain of fire up around it. Emil, seeing that it’ll just bake the surrounding air until he expires, decides to chance going through, and gets a strike in. Then the dragon and flames suddenly vanish as he exits out the other side of the curtain due to the system determining the flames would be fatal.

  “You dropped me!” Sylvia screams in rage after he lands safely.

  Emil gives a disarming smile and shrug. “We weren’t going to be able to set up another shot, and I would have exhausted myself trying. Moreover, I knew I could hurt it, but not while holding you. So, I went with the course that got us both more points.”

  “Points? Is that what you’ll say when you abandon someone in the field?”

  “Oh, come on, Sylvie. You know full well that if this were real, I would have teleported you away to someplace safe. But there was no safe place in the arena with the floor being magma, and it would have ended if we left.”

  She is not ameliorated and continues to berate him with hands on hips. “Then we should have left. Better to end it early and lose a few points than build a habit of killing your allies.”

  “As much as I love to see this,” Greg interrupts with a smile, “I do want to see the scores to resolve the bet.”

  Emil laughs. “What, you think you beat us? You know the score is going to be decided by how much damage we did to that thing, and we nearly killed it.”

  Greg laughs back. “So did we.”

  This takes Emil aback, who evidently was too focused on his own fight to pay attention to his competitors’ despite the radiance of it. “All right then,” he says with a smirk, “let’s see who got closer.”