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.
She wouldn’t win this on her own.
I pushed upward, but the vines below me were too strong.
If I wiggled, I could just barely reach the function runes.
I didn’t have a tool to carve a whole new rune and change the function, but maybe…
I concentrated on the energy in the active runes, identifying the earth mana. It wouldn’t work to activate the other runes, of course, since they were designed to use other types of mana.
But what would happen if I mixed in some of the wrong type of mana?
I had a pretty good idea, and I knew it was going to hurt.
I shoved transference mana into the rune.
The tile beneath me exploded.
Fortunately, my chest was far enough off the ground that my shroud actually did its job.
Unfortunately, it was still enough concussive force to throw me a good ten feet into the air.
…And I landed on an identical tile only a few feet away.
This time, I had the presence of mind to roll immediately, and the vines only managed to entrap my leg.
I coughed, producing a mixture of blood and phlegm that would have worried me a great deal more if I wasn’t still wearing a ring of regeneration.
I tried to stagger to my feet, but I barely managed to get to a knee. Marissa blazed by, ducking and slashing through the vines with the aura around her hand.
“Tha—,” was all I managed before I collapsed into a coughing heap. That was definitely not a good sign.
I wiped myself, pushed myself to my feet, and decided I needed to end this fast.
I staggered back to pick up my cane, while a visibly exhausted Marissa continued to do her best to pursue Patrick.
Patrick was slowing down, too. And I knew that if Marissa could catch him, she stood a good chance of winning that fight, even with his electrical aura.
I decided to help with that, and I had a better idea of how the tiles worked now.
I dodged a quick shot from Sera, shooting her a dirty look in reply.
She gave me a mock bow, stepped back, and fired at Marissa again.
I shot Sera’s attack out of the air, then turned to Patrick and Marissa’s chase, watching closely before I fired.
I hit a tile right in front of his path.
Patrick jumped back, anticipating the tile triggering from my attack.
Which it didn’t. I knew it wouldn’t — the activation runes didn’t work on gray mana intake — but I also knew that Patrick wouldn’t know that.
And his hop took him back just far enough for Marissa to close the distance.
She hammered him with a haymaker before he had a chance to recover. His electrical aura was still active, but she was ready now. She braced for it, charging her fists with her own aura and slamming them into his chest again and again.
Patrick fell backward, managed to duck a punch, and waved his hands outward — blasting Marissa back with a gust of wind.
She hit a green square, the column of energy cracking her shield.
That just made her angrier.
So, for just one punch, she turned on the bracer I gave her — and she hit Patrick hard.
Patrick vanished as his phoenix sigil and shield sigil barriers collapsed in one strike.