What We Do to Survive

I stepped out of the classroom to find Camille waiting for me, arms folded under her chest and an unreadable expression on her face. She was standing in a very exposed and suspicious looking position, leaning against the wall across from Professor Meadows’ classroom where she had an unobstructed view of everyone coming out of the room. I saw several of my classmates eyeing her warily as they hurried away down the hallways.

She noticed me a few moments after I saw her and pushed off the wall towards me, “Hey, Orion!” she called out, drawing even more unwanted attention towards me. “Over here!” I suppressed a sigh, this was so very like her and one of the many reasons I was skeptical of her long-term success. It was a minor miracle she’d lasted as long as she had already.

Still, I didn’t want her making any more of a scene and it wasn’t like I hadn’t expected for her or the brothers to hunt me down sometime in the next few days. This wasn’t optimal, but it was well within my expectations. I raised a hand in acknowledgment and stepped out of the doorway as I waited for her to hurry over.

She dodged past a pair of arguing third years and then stopped beside me. “Hey Orion!” she said again, “Um, how are you feeling? Can we talk?” she glanced around, seeming to finally notice that we were very much not alone in the hallway. “Somewhere a little bit more private maybe?”

“I’m fine. A little tired, but it's nothing serious. I had a few things I wanted to look at in the library?”

“That works! Can I walk with you?”

I shrugged. “Sure, I don’t see why not. One second.”

Turning away from her, I peeked through the open doorway towards the last few stragglers still left in the classroom. “Miranda!” I called out sharply, making her look up from where she was fussing with her things, “Some stuff came up. I’ll see you at lunch?”

“Of course Orion. Until later then.”

I turned back to Camille, “Okay, let’s get out of here.”

In theory, it was only a short few minutes walk from Professor Meadows’ classroom to the Academy library. In practice, there was no way I was ever going to walk through some of the horribly exposed and well trafficked hallways along that shortest path so it was actually more like ten to fifteen minutes depending on how careful you wanted to be.

I led Camille a short distance down the hallway, then took the first left and immediately ducked into one of the safer stairwells that I tended to use. We descended down two-and-a-half flights, then exited into one of the smaller side-corridors lined with rentable individual study rooms. In my experience this area was almost always deserted, the study rooms here kind of sucked and it was a bit of a pain to get too since only some of the stairwells opened up into this between-floor area.

“So how are you doing?” I asked casually, eyes, ears, and mana sense peeled as I scanned the corridor around us for unwelcome presences. “Sorry I haven’t been able to make it to our meetings these last few weeks. I’ve been helping out a couple of second years with their combat magic on the weekends and with so much classwork to do I just haven’t been able to make time for it.”

“It's fine, don’t worry about it,” Camille told me in a tone of voice that just screamed that it was not fine and that I very much should be worried. “It's those two girls that got ambushed, right? I heard about that.”

“Yeah. The ones you told me about. Apparently after what happened to them, they decided they needed a bit of extra help and I guess I was a cheaper option than going to a fourth year.”

Camille laughed but even I could tell it was forced. “Small school I guess. How are they doing?”

I shrugged, “Can’t say much, but fine I guess. They’re second years, there's only so much I can do.”

“It wasn’t that long ago that we were just second years.”

I hummed thoughtfully. “True. But a lot can happen in just a few months.”

“I guess so.”

We walked in awkward silence for a minute and before I led us around another corner and up some steps into one of my favorite non-safe rooms in the Academy. It was a large open hall, dominated by a massive fountain of green stone surrounded by benches and flowerbeds. Despite technically being directly under another hallway, the room’s ceiling was open to the sky, filling the room with warm sunlight that danced and sparkled across the burbling water.

Back during my first year, I’d found this place while exploring and for a time it had become my favorite place to practice my mana control. That was quickly ruined when I came across a pair of fourth years dismembering another fourth year in the shallow water and discovered that, unlike most classrooms and other non-hallway areas of the Academy, this room was very much not on the list of ‘safe’ spaces.

Camille gasped and stopped walking. Apparently she’d never come across this room before, but I didn’t give her much time to look around. “Let’s keep going, this place is not on the list,” I called over my shoulder.

Her eyes widened and she hurried after me. “Really? That’s a shame. I guess that’s why I’ve never seen it before. Do you know who’s statue that is? It looks familiar.”

“One of the first Myrddin’s kids I think? The architect. There’s another sculpture of him down the hallway from the portal room.”

“That’s probably why. Weird that they’d put it in a place like––”

We turned another corner and suddenly I felt a spike of mana flair at the very edge of my perception. I felt hints of ice and force; a shield would be too slow. Flooding my circulations with mana, I shoved Camille to the ground and ducked under a volley of nearly invisible shards of ice that shattered into fine powder against the wall behind us.

Despite my misgivings, Camille was not an idiot. “Back!” I barked, and she scrambled out of the way a heartbeat before a dozen tiny bolts of fire that flew through the place she’d fallen. Whoever had cast the spell had done an excellent job with distribution, there was no room for me to dodge all of the bolts.

Fortunately, the spell had clearly traded power for precision and quantity. A tiny bubble shield formed around my hand and I swatted the two bolts that I couldn’t avoid into the walls where they detonated into tiny fireballs. A moment later I launched the bubble of force forward where it intercepted a powerful force spike meant to shatter whatever defenses I had mustered against the initial assault.

I could sense them now, three fourth-years and a third year standing in a loose formation some distance down the hallway. They were invisible, but casting those spells had forced them to drop their mana-suppression so that didn’t matter. Just in case I would be on the lookout for more invisible foes, but I was confident I would be able to feel them if they got close enough to make a difference.

There was no time to counterattack or cast any significant spells. I needed a moment to prepare but the ambushers clearly weren’t going to give me one. I could already feel spell matrices taking shape and Camille was currently a non-entity in this fight.

Well, discretion was often the better part of valor and the group had seemingly chosen a poor location for their ambush. Pausing only to scoop Camille up into a one-armed carry I sprinted back down the way we’d come and skidded around the corner.

The hallway was empty and I continued to pour mana into my physical enhancements. If I could get back to the fountain room I would be in much better shape to stand and fight. Empty hallways with no real cover in sight were a poor place to fight while outnumbered. I needed every advantage I could get and it would buy me valuable time. If I could just hold on for a few minutes then––

I felt two mana signatures suddenly appear ahead of me and for a moment I felt a touch of dread brush my heart. Then I realized that one of them was very familiar and smiled in satisfaction. I sprinted full-tilt into the room to find Miranda standing over an unconscious third-year, her eyes squeezed tightly shut as she focused intently on shaping a complex spell matrix.

“Excellent timing,” I told her as I quickly set a rather disoriented Camille down behind a raised flower bed and began to cast my own spells. I’d expected that something might happen today after my ritual for Professor Williams and had ordered Miranda to shadow me as much as possible throughout the day.

It seemed my preparations had paid off; I had confidence in my skills, but a one-on-five was rarely going to go well, particularly when there was an entrenched attacker waiting for me to run right into them. A three-verse-four situation was much more favorable, even if Camille didn’t seem to be doing much of anything yet.

A shield snapped into place over the entrance just in time to block an entire volley of spells launched from the end of the hallway. The multi-layered bulwark, one of Miranda’s go-to shield spells, shuddered and flickered, but held.

I finished my own spell a few seconds later and five crystalline disks formed just beyond Miranda’s bulwark. It was the same spell that I’d been practicing with extensively during my training sessions with Miranda and the others, though I could now conjure and control five shields instead of just three.

“Just like we practiced,” I told Miranda, deflecting another shield-breaking force spike into the ground with one of my shields, “I’ve got defense, you try to whittle them down. Focus on the guy on the left there, he feels sloppy.”

Miranda nodded, already focusing on casting her next spell. Her combat-casting wasn’t amazing, she just wasn’t very fast with the majority of her spells, but she had an impressive repertoire of more exotic combat spells than I tended to use. As long as I could give her the time to do so, I was confident she would be able to find something that sidestepped the enemy’s defenses.

“And what should I do?” Camille asked suddenly. I cast a rapid counterspell, disrupting the fireball I could feel one of the mages casting though unfortunately he managed to avoid the spell blowing up in his face.

“Um, help Miranda or something,” I snapped off quickly, unable to spare the focus needed to direct her more effectively. I winced as my next spell, a wind barrier meant to blow projectiles back down the hallway, fizzled out before it could fully form. Four sharpened metal disks slammed into Miranda’s bulwark and the shield finally flickered and collapsed.

The next few minutes were a blur of spellcasting. Defending against four other mages of a similar strength was a tough task, even if none of our opponents were particularly exceptional. Thankfully Camille and Miranda, mostly Miranda, were able to apply enough pressure that I was mostly just dealing with two fourth years actually firing back.

It helped that we were in a slightly better position than our opponents. While they also had a corner they could duck behind if necessary, we had a lot more options for cover than they did. Miranda cast her spells while half-hidden behind the statue at the center of the room, giving her a clear line of sight down the hallway but leaving most of her body shielded by Avalon’s durable stonework. Camille, who’s primary attack spell seemed to be an electric variation on the classic force spike, similarly spent most of her time ducking in and out of cover.

Several times the attackers attempted to circumvent this advantage by advancing down the hallway to engage us at a closer range, but each time they had to fall back under a hail of hard-to-shield spells like waves of scorching heat and my modified force lances.

It was a frustrating stalemate, but one that could not last forever. I was pouring my rapidly dwindling mana reserves into shield after shield and counter after counter, all the while doing my best to disrupt their own defenses as well. I could feel Miranda and Camille starting to flag as well, while the fourth-year’s more developed mana reserves were still concerningly high.

I was starting to think I would have to do something reckless when some of my other preparations finally bore fruit. I heard it before I felt it, a muffled roar echoing oddly through the gelatinous shield I was currently maintaining over the entrance.

Miranda heard it too and I felt an echo of relief wash through our link. A moment later, a pillar of writhing mana appeared at the edges of my mana sense, rushing rapidly down the hallway where I’d first run into the group and towards the corner where our attackers were currently standing.

That was about when they noticed it too, and I felt the two fourth years that had been slinging spells towards us turn to face the new threat. “Go,” I barked, “here’s our chance!” I dropped the shield I was holding, ectoplasm collapsing into a puddle of rapidly evaporating mana, and fired an overpowered force lance down the hallway.

It slammed into the third-year’s primary shield and the barrier shattered into a dazzling cloud of glittering sparks. A moment later, Miranda’s follow up attack caught him in the center of his chest, the heat ray completely ignoring his secondary force shield and instantly turning his heart into so much burnt meat. He collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut

Camille looked confused for a moment, but followed our lead, aggressively firing off a volley of her electric darts. They were all sucked into a glowing orb that had been periodically absorbing energy-based attacks and didn’t accomplish much, but it was at least something of a distraction.

With the third-year dead and his two companions dealing with the pillar of fire Briella had conjured at their backs, the second dedicated defender was momentarily left facing down the three of us all on his own.

She barely lasted a few seconds. Earlier in the fight I had noticed that, when pressed, she tended to default to a classic half-aegis that Professor Shrike had shown us in class. It was a good all purpose defense and she could cast the third-circle spell with impressive speed, but predictability was a death sentence in combat.

As I’d expected, under Miranda and Camille’s onslaught she once again attempted to bring up her usual shield. This time however, my counterspell shattered it before it could form and Miranda’s water whip split her from shoulder to hip.

From there, things did not take much longer. The last two remaining fourth-years managed to deal with the firestorm bearing down on them in time to defend themselves, but had to focus entirely on defense and were completely unable to fight back as we slowly but surely beat them into submission.

To my surprise, it was actually Camille who landed the final blow. The bolt of lightning she used tore cleanly through a hastily erected force barrier and fried the duo in an instant.

I took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly. My mana reserves were down to a tiny fraction of what I would like and my mind and limbs felt wooden from the strain of casting so many spells over such a short period of time.

Turning to Miranda and Camille, I smiled tightly, “So ah, lunch? I have another class this afternoon but maybe we can talk after?”