Absolute Mana Dominion: All My Talents Are SSS

Chapter 12: 12 - One Second

They held it in the training hall under the upper passage, the same room where Adrien had watched a princess throw lightning at nothing that very same day.

By the time the officiant finished marking the ground, the balconies on three sides were full, and people were arriving behind them, because word of a duel travels faster in a castle than word of anything useful.

Margaret stood at the rail directly above the floor with the orange cat in her arms.

Léon walked to his mark with the staff already in one hand.

He rolled his shoulder, and mana came apart around his other palm, and a longsword formed out of it in under two seconds. Grey shine down the flat, the edge glowing where the mana ran thickest.

The balcony made a noise.

’Sword and staff. So he is a Spellblade.’

The memories gave him the rest. A Path carrying two disciplines out of one Core. Half the mana into the steel, half kept in the air, and a man who ran both had two answers to every question you asked him.

The memories were equally clear that it cost twice as much to keep running.

”Both parties ready?” The officiant sounded like a man reading out a delivery. ”The match ends on surrender, incapacity, or my ruling. Begin.”

Léon came off his mark before the word finished.

He crossed half the ground in three strides, and Adrien had exactly enough time to understand that a Two Star body moved considerably faster than a One Star body, and no time at all to be clever about it.

[Frost Lance]

Léon put the staff through it. The lance came apart on a disc of pale light that formed and vanished inside half a second, and he did not slow down.

The sword came across at hip height.

Adrien went backward and got most of himself out of the way. The tip opened his coat and the skin under it in a line that stung worse than it bled.

The balcony enjoyed that.

”That’s the SSS talent?” Léon rolled his wrist. ”Sensing mana. Go on. Sense this.”

He came again.

Two more lances went out on the retreat and Léon ate both of them on the staff without breaking stride, and the second exchange put Adrien six paces from the wall with a boot print on his ribs.

His head was clear, which was the strange part. His body was losing badly and his head was working fine.

’He’s faster. He’s stronger. That staff eats anything I throw at range.’

’And the sword has been out since before the officiant spoke.’

Every second that blade stayed in the world was mana leaving Léon Arquenay’s core and going nowhere except into holding a shape. The barrier cost him again on top of it.

Adrien got his feet under him and stopped retreating in a line.

He started retreating in a circle.

[Frost Lance]

[Frost Lance]

[Frost Lance]

He threw them badly on purpose. High, wide, at the floor, into the space the man was about to walk through. Each one cost Léon a barrier or a step, and each barrier took a little more of what he had left.

Up on the balcony, Margaret had stopped stroking the cat.

She had heard about the assessment like everybody else. Coreless for eighteen years, awakened days ago, One Star, one SSS talent that half the capital had decided was a scouting trick.

What she was watching was a boy who had been a mage for under two weeks refusing to fight the fight he was being offered.

’He’s not aiming at Léon at all,’ she thought. ’He’s aiming at the floor.’

[Frost Lance]

That one went into the stone two paces ahead of Léon and turned four square metres of it into a plate of ice.

Léon stepped onto it without looking down. His front foot went out from under him and he caught it, because Two Stars, and he was moving again inside half a second.

He also spent mana doing it.

Adrien kept working. He iced the corners, the lines of retreat, the ground behind his own heels, and every time Léon crossed a piece of floor that used to be dry he paid something to stay upright.

[Frost Lance | 1 Star | Novice 24%]

His head answered with the usual spike behind the eyes. He put it aside.

Four minutes in, the sword flickered.

It came back inside an instant, and nobody on the balcony noticed, because nobody on the balcony was looking at the sword.

Adrien was.

Six minutes in it flickered again and hung thin for a full second before it filled back out.

Léon was breathing through his mouth now. There was a shine along his forehead that had nothing to do with the room, the immaculate noble posture had gone somewhere, and the staff was riding lower in his grip than it had been at the start.

”Fight me properly.”

Adrien threw another lance into the floor behind himself.

”How many spells have you got left?”

That was the only thing he had said since the officiant started them, and it landed somewhere it should not have, because Léon Arquenay’s face did something four hundred people could see.

He charged.

It was a good charge. It was the charge of a man who has worked out that the next three minutes are worse than the next three seconds, and he put everything left in him into crossing that floor, and the sword came up over his shoulder for the kind of blow you use to end things.

Adrien did not throw a lance at him.

He stepped in.

Off the ice, inside the arc, close enough to smell the wine on the man’s breath, and by the time Léon understood that the mage had walked toward him instead of away, the sword was already committed over the wrong shoulder.

Adrien put two fingers against his sternum.

[Zap]

Margaret’s hands closed on the rail.

’Zephyr.’

She knew that spell down to the last thread of it. She had been throwing it around this exact room eight hours ago, and there was one detail about the boy on that floor that the entire kingdom had been told and repeated all afternoon.

Frost Lance was Aqua.

’That is not the same Affinity. That is not remotely the same Affinity.’

The discharge went into Léon Arquenay’s chest with a crack the whole hall heard.

His body locked. Every muscle from his jaw to his boots seized at once, and the sword did not come down and the staff did not come up, and the man stood rigid with his arm halfway through a swing.

Twenty-five centimetres of range. Almost useless at any distance. Perfect on somebody close enough to touch.

One second.

Adrien had known since the fourth minute exactly what he was going to do with it.

He took the staff out of Léon’s hand.

With his free hand he put a Frost Lance into the floor between the man’s boots at point-blank range, and the ice came up under him as the second ended.

Léon’s legs went. He landed hard on his back on his own frozen ground with nothing in either hand, and his sword came apart into specks halfway down.

The hall went quiet.

Adrien stood over him with the staff held loose at his side, and he was not breathing hard.

That was the part that would be in every conversation in the castle by morning. Thirty-four spells out of a One Star Core, and the boy looked like a man who had walked up a flight of stairs.

Léon tried to get an elbow under himself. It gave out.

”Do you yield?”

”I...”

Adrien waited. He did not say anything else, and he did not need to, because everybody on those balconies had been counting too.

”I yield.”

The officiant stepped forward.

”Surrender given. House Clairmont takes the match, and the wager is enforced under Crown law.”

The noise came off the balconies a half beat later, and it was four hundred people telling whoever stood next to them what they had just watched.

Margaret did not join in.

She stood at the rail with a cat in her arms and went back over the last ten minutes, and she came out of it with the same answer twice.

’Aqua and Zephyr. From a boy who woke his Core last week.’

Down on the floor, Adrien lifted the staff to look at it properly for the first time.

Dark polished wood running into a silver setting, a pale crystal held between curved arms, and the whole thing humming faintly against his palm.

The window opened in front of him.

[Item Detected]

[Analysing...]

...

AN: Add the novel to collections and send (power stones and golden tickets) support if like it ;)