Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Aeliana raised both of her hands high above her head.

The sky above the Keep literally darkened as the ambient starlight mana in the atmosphere violently converged upon her location.

”Burn,” Aeliana commanded coldly. ”Starfall Barrage.”

Ten volatile orbs of pure compressed starlight materialized in the air around her floating form.

They pulsed with destructive arcane energy, humming like miniature suns.

With a vicious downward sweep of her arms, Aeliana launched the barrage.

The starlight orbs rained down from the sky like an orbital artillery strike, seeking Rowenna with guided precision.

The crowd of girls screamed, frantically scrambling backward to get out of the blast radius.

”Hold the line!” Silas roared.

He didn’t pull his sword.

Silas stepped forward, instantly projecting his golden aura in a massive invisible dome over the spectators, creating a buffer to ensure none of his recruits caught a stray magical attack.

Rowenna looked up at the incoming orbital strike.

She didn’t have time to run and she didn’t have the physical speed to dodge.

Rowenna slammed both of her hands into the snow, screaming as she burned her rapidly depleting mana reserves.

Kinetic Repulsion Field!

A violent translucent dome of reversed gravity exploded outward from Rowenna’s body just as the first starlight orb made impact.

KA-BOOM!

The explosion was apocalyptic.

The starlight orb detonated against the repulsion field with a blinding flash of blue-white energy.

The shockwave ripped across the courtyard, instantly vaporizing the surrounding snowdrifts into a massive, choking cloud of hot white steam.

KA-BOOM! KA-BOOM! KA-BOOM!

Three more starlight orbs slammed into the barrier in rapid succession.

The shockwaves overlapped, shaking the very foundations of the library.

Inside the repulsion dome, Rowenna dropped to one knee with blood pouring from her nose.

The strain of holding a kinetic shield against an A-Rank Epic bombardment was physically tearing her apart.

The dome cracked, splintering like fragile glass.

’I can’t hold it,’ Rowenna realized desperately with her B-Rank core flashing a dangerous hollow red in her mind. ’She’s going to crack the shield... I have to go on the offensive!’

Rowenna dropped the repulsion field entirely.

She didn’t wait for the steam to clear, Rowena relied on her instinct.

Rowenna swept her hands across the frozen ground, rapidly etching two distinct complex runic circles into the ice simultaneously.

Glacial Rune! Fulgur Rune!

The ambient temperature in the courtyard plummeted even further.

A massive array of freezing sapphire light erupted from the ground as dozens of razor-sharp, six-foot-tall spikes of solid glacial ice shot upward through the thick steam, seeking the floating Elf in the sky.

But the ice wasn’t just physical damage...

Wrapped tightly around the rising glacial spikes was a violent seeking web of high-voltage golden lightning.

The Fulgur Rune chained perfectly with the ice, turning the physical projectiles into electrically charged surface-to-air missiles.

High above, Aeliana saw the golden lightning cutting through the steam.

Because she had burned so much mana on the teleportation and the barrage, she couldn’t afford to cast another Aegis shield in mid-air so she had to rely on agility.

Using her Elven Swiftness, Aeliana literally surfed the shockwaves of her own explosions.

She kicked off a pocket of dense air, twisting her body with acrobatic grace.

Three electrified ice spikes tore through the space where her torso had just been, grazing her ribs and singing the fabric of her white robes with the smell of sharp ozone.

As she flipped through the air, completely inverted, Aeliana extended her right index finger, pointing it directly down through the steam at Rowenna’s blurry silhouette.

’Arcane Piercer.’

A hyper-compressed beam of destructive blue starlight lanced from her fingertip, shooting downward with the speed of a laser.

Rowenna saw the blue flash and she slammed her palm into the dirt.

Terra Rune!

A massive six-inch-thick slab of razor-sharp obsidian erupted from the bedrock, forming a crude barricade directly in front of her.

The Arcane Piercer slammed into the obsidian.

The high-tier starlight laser punched directly through the solid rock as if it were wet tissue paper, melting the edges of the hole into glowing slag.

The beam didn’t hit Rowenna center-mass but it grazed her left shoulder.

”Ahhhh!”

Rowenna screamed as the intense compressed heat of the laser instantly cauterized the flesh, sending her spinning into the snow.

Aeliana hit the ground, landing in a graceful three-point crouch on the edge of the courtyard.

The blizzard howled around them.

The steam from the melted snow slowly began to clear, revealing the unmitigated destruction they had unleashed upon the courtyard.

The slate tiles were shattered, cratered with scorch marks, covered in jagged ice spikes, and littered with chunks of obsidian.

The two mages stood thirty feet apart, staring at each other through the swirling white flakes.

Both of them were completely running on fumes and Silas looked at their statuses again.

’Rowenna’s mana is at eighty,’ Silas noted, his eyes narrowing. ’Aeliana is sitting at roughly one hundred and fifty... Neither of them has enough juice in the tank to cast a wide-area spell or a high-tier barrier so they’re quite dry.’

Rowenna was swaying on her feet. Her left eye was completely swollen shut, blood was pouring down her chin, and her left arm hung limply at her side from the laser graze.

Her chest heaved, her breath coming in ragged, painful gasps.

Aeliana didn’t look much better. The pristine, elegant Elf was covered in dirt and soot.

Her expensive white spider-silk robes were torn, scorched by lightning, and soaked in freezing slush.

Her silver hair was a tangled, wild mess, and her green eyes were slightly unfocused from the severe mana drain.

They locked eyes through the storm.

There were no more tricks, no more traps and no more wide-area bombardments. It was going to end in one final brutal clash.

’Fuck it...’ Rowena thought as she channeled every last, agonizing drop of her eighty remaining mana directly into her right fist.

She didn’t etch a rune on the floor.

She etched the glowing crimson geometry of an Ignis Rune directly onto her own bleeding knuckles and her fist erupted into a ball of superheated roaring flame.

Aeliana didn’t back down.

The Elf pulled the last dregs of starlight from her core, wrapping the blue-white energy tightly around her right forearm, forming a crude condensed Arcane Aegis gauntlet over her fist.

They charged.

They ran directly across the shattered freezing courtyard, screaming at the top of their lungs, ignoring the blizzard, ignoring the pain and ignoring the terrified cheers of the seventy women watching them.

They met in the dead center of the ring and they simply threw everything they had left into one final devastating strike.

Rowenna’s flaming rune-etched right cross smashed directly into Aeliana’s jaw.

Aeliana’s starlight-coated armor-piercing right straight buried itself sickeningly deep into the center of Rowenna’s bruised ribs.

BOOM!

The simultaneous impact was deafening.

A massive, circular shockwave of concussive force, mixed with explosive crimson fire and blinding blue starlight, erupted outward from the point of impact.

The shockwave completely blew the falling snow away, clearing a fifty-foot radius of perfectly dry air in the middle of the blizzard.

A thick cloud of gray smoke and white steam engulfed the center of the ring, completely obscuring the two combatants from sight.

The courtyard was dead silent.

Nobody cheered and nobody moved. Silas slowly lowered his arm with the barrier dissipating as the energy faded.

The freezing wind howled, slowly dragging the thick smoke away. As the steam cleared, the silhouettes of the two mages slowly became visible.

They were both standing.

They were standing inches apart, staring directly into each other’s eyes with their fists still pressed against each other’s bodies.

Rowenna stared at the Elf.

Her thoughts were completely silent for a long moment then, a dull hum filled her ears.

’F-fuck...’

She couldn’t feel her legs anymore. They felt like they were made of water.

The fire on her knuckles had completely died out, leaving behind nothing but cold bruised flesh.

She looked at Aeliana.

The Elf’s jaw was bruised a dark angry purple from the flaming punch. Aeliana was swaying violently in the wind, her green eyes looking unfocused while staring blankly ahead.

But Aeliana was still standing. Her Epic-Rank biology was keeping her upright through stubborn pride.

Rowenna on the other hand felt the darkness creeping into the edges of her vision as the world began to tilt sideways.

’I lose,’ Rowenna realized with a crushing sense of failure washing over her numb brain. ’I gave her everything... and she’s still standing.’

She felt her knees buckle as the freezing wind felt strangely warm.

’If only...’ Rowenna thought, her vision turning completely black as she began to fall backward toward the slush. ’If only... If only I was a little bit stronge—’

Rowenna’s eyes rolled back.

She collapsed completely, falling backward and hitting the snow-covered slate with a soft, final thud.

Rowena fainted.

Reina, standing frozen on the edge of the blast radius, raised her spear high into the air.

”The match is over!” Reina announced, her voice echoing over the blizzard. ”The winner is Aeliana!”

The girls erupted.

The cheers were deafening, a massive roaring wave of respect for the two mages who had just turned a snowy courtyard into a apocalypse.

Morwenna whistled loudly, while Brida immediately sprinted forward with three glowing green healing potions in her hands that Eluned made.

In the center of the ring, Aeliana stood perfectly still.

She heard the cheers and she heard Reina announce her name.

A slow and incredibly genuine smile broke across her battered, soot-stained face.

She slowly turned her head, her unfocused green eyes searching the crowd until they locked onto the tall broad-shouldered silhouette of Silas standing there.

She held his gaze for exactly one second then, Aeliana’s eyes rolled back in her head.

Her knees completely gave out beneath her.

The Starlight Arcanist folded like a marionette with its strings cut, falling face-first straight down into the freezing snow, utterly and completely unconscious.

But as the darkness took her, a single incredibly happy thought echoed through her exhausted mind.

’I did it... My Lord...’

...

Rowenna woke up with a sharp gasp with her blue eyes snapping open as a dull, throbbing ache radiated directly outward from the center of her ribcage.

”Haah... Haah...”

She was lying on her back.

The air around her smelled of crushed herbs and damp linen, rather than the snow she had been in.

She blinked, her vision slowly clearing, and realized she was staring up at the familiar beams of the Barracks.

She felt something damp and cool resting across her forehead.

Rowenna reached up with a weak hand, pulling a cold wet towel off her brow. She slowly turned her head.

Silas was sitting right beside her cot.

The Lord had pulled up a heavy wooden chair, his broad shoulders hunched forward slightly with his forearms resting on his knees as he watched her wake up.

He had taken off his dark trench coat, wearing only his fitted black shirt.

The moment she saw him, the adrenaline and pride that had fueled her through the blizzard completely evaporated.

The reality of the match... the memory of her knees buckling in the snow and Aeliana’s eyes staring down at her crashed into her mind.

”I lost,” Rowenna whispered with her voice cracking slightly.

She didn’t try to sit up; she just stared at the ceiling, her chest tightening with crushing failure.

”I’m sorry, Lord Graves. I’m so sorry. I really wanted to embark on that whole journey to the Secret Realm with you.”

She swallowed hard, her fingers digging tightly into the rough fabric of her wool blanket. ”If I was just stronger... if I had just managed to hold the repulsion field a second longer...”

Silas let out a slow sigh.

He didn’t lecture her.

Silas leaned forward. He reached out with his large right hand, resting his palm gently on the crown of her messy, sweat-dampened blue hair.

He patted her head slowly, running his fingers through the blue strands with a reassuring warmth.

Rowenna froze. She slowly turned her head back to look at him, her blue eyes wide and shining with unshed tears.

”You fought an A-Rank Epic Hero in close quarters, Rowenna and no offense but you’re just a troop.” Silas told her, she couldn’t hear any bit of disappointment in his voice. ”So naturally a Hero is superior...”

He looked her directly in the face with his golden-ringed eyes locking onto hers.

”You weaponized your own defeat. You baited her into a trap while you were actively getting your ribs broken, and you forced her to burn her entire mana core just to survive. You didn’t lose because you were weak but you lost because you ran out of juice.”

He offered her a small smirk. ”Next time, you’ll pin her to the floor before she can even blink. You just need more reps.”

’I already told Aeli her own motivational words... I have to keep the two of them active yunno.’