Patrick mirrored her, stepping onto a green tile next to him and removing her only obvious advantage. Then he hurled another blast of lightning.
Sera turned sideways to present a smaller target, but he hit her regardless. More cracks appeared in her barrier, showing it was close to breaking.
I guessed that the phoenix sigil’s barrier could only take two more hits, then she’d be stuck with just the regular shield sigil. That would probably take two hits to disable total.
The recharge tile was helping, but it was too slow to handle the kind of damage she was taking. She needed to do something to fight back.
Sera knew that, of course.
When Patrick fired his next shot, she clenched her right hand into a fist.
A wall of ice shot up in front of her, blocking the lightning.
Then she snapped her fingers and the wall broke apart into shards, hovering in the air for an instant before flying in Patrick’s direction.
Patrick countered the ice with fire, blasting the projectiles out of the air one at a time. A single shard impacted his shield, shattering and dealing him a minimal amount of damage.
By that point, Sera had moved, jumping onto a red square. Her dueling cane began to glow, and she pulled it off her belt to fire a shot.
Patrick blasted the cane’s energy out of the air easily, but Sera just kept firing a steady stream of mana in his direction. He was forced to draw his cane to begin batting the spheres aside.
When he returned fire, Sera managed to hit him with two blasts, easily deflecting his own.
Good.
She’d forced Patrick onto the defensive. He hopped back a tile, hitting an orange one and triggering a cloud of smoke to rise around him.
That didn’t stop Sera from attacking. She sent a barrage of energy into the smoke, aiming both high and low in case he was ducking.
When Patrick jumped out from the other side onto another green square, he didn’t seem to have taken any further damage.
It was only when Sera’s next blast neared him that I understood why.
His entire body was crackling with lightning.
That lightning lashed out like a living thing, smashing her orb right out of the air.
Sera fired two more shots in rapid succession, but each time, the lightning aura deflected them harmlessly.
I blinked, turning on my attunement, and realized what I was seeing.
Patrick had a shroud. He’d hit Carnelian sometime in the last few days, and he’d already learned how to charge his shroud with lightning.
I immediately felt a bit of envy that he’d picked up on how to manipulate his shroud so quickly, but more than that, I felt concerned.
Sera’s odds had been bad enough before.
Patrick turned sideways, assuming the same dueling stance that Sera had. Then he dropped his cane and began to gather a large ball of lightning in his hands.
That’s not good.
Sera whispered something into the air.
With the arena’s enchantments for amplifying sounds, I was just barely able to hear her.
“Vanniv, I summon you.”
Patrick hurled the sphere.
A winged man with skin like stone appeared in the way.
He was, unfortunately, only six inches tall.
“Ah, Summoner, you finally got around to—”
The ball of lightning flew right past tiny Vanniv. Sera waved a hand, however, and a blast of ice managed to weaken the sphere before it hit her.
The lightning knocked her back a step, but she managed to remain on the same square. The barrier from her phoenix sigil shattered, completely destroyed by the intensity of the blast. If she hadn’t weakened it, I suspected it would have gone straight through her other barrier as well.
Vanniv flapped his tiny wings, turning toward Sera. “What is the meaning of this? Why are you gigantic?” He floated around. “Wait, why is everyone gigantic?… Oh.” He folded his arms. “You probably can’t tell, but I’m glaring at you very intensely right now.”
I couldn’t quite hear Sera’s response, even with the arena’s enchantments. Something about “later”, maybe?
Vanniv turned toward Patrick just in time to see another blast of lightning coming. The tiny karvensi pointed his hand and the electrical energy shifted trajectories, flying harmlessly into a nearby tile. “There. I contributed. You are undoubtedly impressed and ingratiated toward me for this, and thus, you should—”
A handful of jagged icicles flew from Sera’s hand. Patrick blasted at them with lightning, but three shards survived, impacting him hard. He dropped his cane as cracks spread across his shield.
“Just defend me.” Sera instructed Vanniv.
“Fine, fine. But you’re paying me double for this.”
“Twice zero is still zero, you know.”
Tiny Vanniv raised a hand to his forehead, looking aghast. “I’m not getting paid? What sort of relationship do you take this for?”
Three more bolts of lightning flew their way, but Vanniv redirected them without difficulty.
Patrick took a more nuanced approach to his next attack, firing a bolt of lightning that split apart in mid-air. Vanniv managed to redirect the original, but one of the pieces arced around and hit Sera from behind. She staggered, her barrier weakening.
One more hit will end it, I suspected.
Sera dropped down to a knee. At first, I worried she was injured, but then I saw her touching a tile.
She wasn’t an Enchanter. She couldn’t charge or manipulate runes in the way I could.
What was she doing?
Thin lines of ice spread out from her hand, across the tile and onto adjacent ones.
For a moment, nothing happened; and then three of the tiles around her activated all at once, raising clouds of smoke and bursts of light.
She dove into one of the smoke clouds, then blasted more adjacent tiles with frost, activating them in a similar fashion.
Patrick hurled another blast of lightning at her, but Vanniv intercepted it. When that failed, Patrick tried fire, but Vanniv handled that just as easily.
More blasts of ice impacted with orange tiles. In moments, there was a contiguous wall of shadow between Patrick and Sera.
Then Sera moved again, jumping to a purple square just as Patrick fired another blast in her direction.
Vanniv floated close to her again. “I know you know this, Sera, but I don’t have an infinite amount of mana to protect you with.”
She raised a hand to her mouth in a signal to be quiet.
Patrick ducked down, rubbing his right hand. The aura of lightning around him faded, then vanished. His eyes searched, but it seemed like he couldn’t find Sera’s location.
Sera conjured a spike of ice in her hands, then levitated it to where she’d been standing a moment before. After that, she waved a hand and sent it flying in Patrick’s direction.
Patrick saw the shard of ice, blasted it with a ball of fire, and then sent another attack in the direction where the ice had come from. It missed Sera entirely, just as she’d clearly intended.
She probably hadn’t planned for him to start throwing balls of fire into the walls of shadow. Most of the fireballs detonated immediately, clearing the frost on the tiles.
With the pressure from the ice gone, the walls of shadow began to disappear.
Not all of the shadows were gone, but Patrick had cleared enough to see her. He turned toward her and nodded once.
With her concealment gone, she began a familiar incantation.
“Child of the goddess, I call upon your aid.”