Chapter 31: A Test Of Mettle

Abigail had expected the fight to begin with an explosive burst of speed from both Elaine and Jeanne but it didn't. Instead, for the first several minutes of the fight they merely faced each other, their eyes flicking back and forth rapidly and their hands twitching at their sides.

To onlookers it would have seemed ridiculous but Abigail had spent enough time around powerful people to know that the two of them were locked in a desperate struggle. Each of them was analyzing the most minute movements of both their opponent and the Winds of Magic curling around them, trying to ascertain when and how they would begin their attack. Each little draw of magic was immediately recognized and zeroed in on.

And it took Abigail almost half of that time to realize that this was a stalemate she needed to break. She had to give Elaine the edge, either disrupting the web of spells Jeanne was attempting to weave or strengthening Elaine in such a way that Jeanne couldn't immediately counter. Or she could go for a much less subtle attack.

Abigail had whiled away many an hour practicing with her bow and she had found a great many useful ways to use it. The arrows it fired were powerful projectiles, yes, but most of their effectiveness came from the fact that they were made of condensed light magic. And that meant Abigail could manipulate these arrows at will. She'd found success creating fragmenting projectiles, flashbangs and what amounted to super-heated laser blasts but there were other applications as well. And so she nocked an arrow and waited for an opening.

Something in the fluctuations of magic must have tipped Elaine off that Abigail was trying to do something so she escalated her mindgame with Jeanne, drawing on the Winds with a conspicuous hand motion that made Jeanne twitch and reach for her weapon. It was exactly the kind of opening Abigail had needed and she fired the arrow straight at Jeanne.

The angel jumped back and summoned a pair of pure white wings that she curled around herself protectively. Angel wings were notoriously durable, to the point where nothing but Darklight could put much of a dent in them, but Abigail had anticipated this.

Instead of uselessly striking the angel wings the arrow burst into motes of light three feet away from Jeanne. Jeanne held her protective stance a moment longer, not knowing when the hit would come, and Elaine used the momentary distraction to jab two crystal swords at Jeanne's sides. But Jeanne's reaction times were excellent and she managed to block the swords with her forearms, summoning steel plates over them in an instant.

Elaine's sword ricocheted away after striking the hardened metal and Jeanne opened her wings, grabbing her Trumpet off her back to go on the offensive, and that's when a dozen thin beams of light slammed into her back, knocking her forward and forcing her to throw her body into a forward roll.

Abigail's arrow hadn't simply vanished. It had been made to explode into motes of light that would then strike the opponent's back the moment it wasn't guarded. It had been a fairly complicated piece of spellwork and she wasn't sure she could have pulled it off before her last round of leveling.

However, it wasn't anywhere near as effective as Abigail had built it to be. Against Outsiders and cultists that spell would have burned clean through their bodies in a dozen places but Jeanne, in her full Yesod pattern armor, only had a few scorch marks to show for the attack. But even that Abigail had anticipated. She knew their armor was tough so long as it wasn't hit with Darklight and so she had created the spell to carry more of a physical element than sheer heat, which was why Jeanne had been knocked forward as if she'd been kicked by a mule. Getting through that armor would be difficult but in the end this was only a sparring match and there was no point in needlessly inflicting damage upon each other, so the armor was a welcome addition.

Similarly, in a proper fight Elaine would have likely jumped on her opponent after such an opening but in a sparring match like this she just let Jeanne get back up.

“Good job,” the angel said. “I didn't expect that.”

Her eyes hadn't left Elaine throughout the comment but Abigail knew the praise had been aimed at her. And she felt elated. Maybe she actually was strong enough to be useful after all.

This time Jeanne was the one to go on the offensive, charging at Elaine, dragging her Trumpet behind her. It was such an obvious and telegraphed attack that Abigail wasn't shocked in the slightest when she noticed that it had been meant as a distraction.

It was an obvious and telegraphed attack, yes, but it was dangerous enough that Elaine couldn't ignore it but at the same time Jeanne had summoned up metal magic, creating thin ribbons of steel that she sent at both Elaine and Abigail as if they were throwing knives. It was a brutally effective attack. Either the opponent neglected defending against one of the two attacks or they had to drop everything and focus on defending, thereby leaving themselves open to an even more devastating attack. Or at least that's what it was meant to be.

Instead Elaine focused purely on dealing with Jeanne's Trumpet, trusting Abigail to take care of the spell. And she did. Abigail didn't want to rely on fire magic, not wanting to upset Jeanne with the sight, but fire magic didn't necessarily have to produce flame.

And so Abigail created an area of super-heated air between Jeanne and them. The metal ribbons hit that area and melted down in a flash. The now oddly shaped chunks of metal slag began to tumble and veered off course. There was still a chance the projectiles would find their mark after all and so Abigail added a touch of space magic, repelling the objects so that they would swerve around the two of them.

The end result was that the metal ribbons came nowhere close to them, splattering against the force wall surrounding their arena, sizzling against the energy barriers, while Elaine locked blades with Jeanne, catching the blade of the Trumpet in a cross made of two crystal blades.

Jeanne strained against Elaine, trying to overpower her, but before the two women could truly test out which of them was stronger Abigail cast a gravity spell. Unlike the one she'd cast to deal with the soldiers affected by the red haze this one didn't increase gravity. Rather, it completely turned gravity off in a tiny little area around Jeanne. It wasn't even large enough to affect her entire body but that made the spell even more effective as the angel found her center of gravity light as a feather while her arms and head were still just as heavy as before.

She strained with all her might against Elaine's swords, though this time it wasn't to overpower her. Instead she shoved herself off the brunette, launching herself several steps away in order to regain her balance.

Elaine charged after Jeanne and Abigail let the area of gravity wink out so as not to affect her partner and Elaine began a flurry of attacks that Jeanne had to scramble to dodge. Between her wings and her Trumpet the angel was able to dodge attacks from three directions but Elaine was never attacking her from less than four, catching her in a flurry of dancing blades that curved and circled and swung with perfect coordination that surely looked like utter chaos to someone caught in the attack.

**

I can't beat them both, Jeanne thought, pride and worry twisting in her mind.

On the one hand knowing that her charges were not merely growing stronger but were growing strong enough to threaten her was elating, letting her believe that their desperate struggle for survival wasn't doomed after all. But on the other hand they were surrounded by the entirety of Project Divinity and she couldn't afford to look weak in front of all of them. Her pride wouldn't allow it. Granted, her pride had taken a couple of big hits considering the kinds of things she had allowed Rachel to do to her but she preferred to shed her pride only in bed with her.

But be that as it may, Jeanne wouldn't simply hand these two their victory. She wanted to fight properly, to know that if she lost it wouldn't be because she had yielded but because they had genuinely bested her. However, the only chance she saw of evening the odds and giving her a chance to win was to even the numbers.

Taking Elaine out was not going to happen with Abigail supporting her but maybe taking out Abigail would give her the upper hand against Elaine. She really didn't want to go for that kind of attack, didn't want to focus on the weaker member of the opposing team, but she was certain that if she didn't do her best to beat them that it would upset them, to know that their opponent had been going easy on them from the start.

And so Jeanne cast a time spell. She sent out a burst of slowed-down time and the swords harrying her began to move at a crawl. Elaine was also affected though Jeanne knew that wouldn't last. The more powerful a slowing effect the more its effect deteriorated when cast on powerful individuals. Stop spells were all but useless unless the caster was vastly stronger than the target. This was because a person's aura did its best to destroy hostile hexes like this and the stronger a person was the more effective someone's aura was at doing so.

The reason that spell Prudence had salvaged had worked so well had been because of how gradual it had been. Each individual burst of the slow spell had been fairly weak on its own, giving the target's aura little to fight against. Each subsequent pulse had interlinked with what was there, creating a matrix of slowing spells that became harder to dispel as time went on. Of course, it had also helped that the spell had used a frankly obscene amount of power. The only way to dispel it would have been to notice the problem and manually unravel it, not relying on one's aura to stop it, but it had been designed to be gradual enough as not to be noticed until it was too late to fight back.

But Jeanne just used a single pulse of slowed-down time in order to escape Elaine's onslaught, beating her wings to escape the situation. From midair she honed in on Abigail, intending to knock her out as quickly and painlessly as possible. She summoned a layer of dull metal plating over the blade of her Trumpet and rushed at the singer, intending to smash the side of her head with the blunted head of her weapon, knocking her out cold.

Abigail's eyes went wide in terror and she began humming under her breath, so quiet that Jeanne barely heard it over the rushing of air as she shot towards the girl. Her body twisted through a spin and with all the centrifugal force behind it her Trumpet swung towards Abigail... and bounced off a translucent barrier.

Jeanne was stunned for a moment until she remembered that Abigail could summon barriers simply by singing. Jeanne was impressed. It wasn't mere cleverness that had made this possible. The girl must have also trained herself, conditioned herself to the unusual act of reacting to incoming danger by humming.

Before she could spend too long being impressed by the reaction she felt two armored hands grabbing hold of her shoulders and Elaine growled: “Hands off the songbird,” before tossing Jeanne through the air to land in a heap against the force wall of the arena.

As Jeanne got up she reflected on the way Abigail's barrier had stopped her strike. Apparently she could actually hit that thing full force without seriously endangering Abigail's life.

When she was standing firm once more she considered a new strategy. Attacking Abigail had clearly rattled Elaine. If she could make use of that, she would find a crack in their defense.

Once again she dashed at the two of them, once again focusing on Abigail. She dispelled the metal sheet from her Trumpet, allowing it to cut rather than bash once more, and gathered behind her a working of force and air, enough to carve through the barrier in a single strike. As expected, Elaine stepped in to try and stop her attack but at the very last moment Jeanne switched targets and aimed the devastating swing at Elaine's barely protected side.

Elaine's superhuman speed allowed her to react in time, too late to avoid the attack entirely but enough to intercept Jeanne's strike with four of her crystal swords. A horrid tinging sound echoed through the training hall as Jeanne's Trumpet shattered the swords and sent Elaine flying.

“Elaine!” someone in the crowd of spectators, presumably Alexis, cried out.

Abigail's eyes had gone wide but, clever girl that she was, she didn't interrupt her humming for even a moment.

**

This is all my fault, Abigail thought. The reason Elaine got hurt is because she had to protect me, because I can't protect myself after all.

She used her bow to send an arrow at Jeanne, hoping to distract her away from Elaine, but Jeanne's wing flicked up and smacked the projectile off course before it could explode the way Abigail had intended it.

The momentary distraction had given Elaine enough time to right herself but Jeanne was on her again in a flash and unleashed a series of swings that Elaine had to direct all her swords to block.

Abigail fired another arrow but Jeanne's wings once again intercepted it. She didn't know whether Jeanne was hearing the sound of her bowstring or feeling the fluctuations in the Winds of Magic, so she couldn't figure out how to sneak an attack past her defenses. She was about to once again resort to a massive swathe of fire, even knowing it might traumatize Jeanne, when she witnessed something horrifying. With a mighty swing Jeanne had managed to send all of Elaine's swords flying at once and then followed up with a mighty thrust, running Elaine through with the entire head of the Trumpet. Blood splattered everywhere and Elaine stood still, impaled on the weapon.

Abigail was horrified at the sight. This was a practice battle, for crying out loud! Shit like this wasn't supposed to happen. And so, even knowing it was a bad idea to stop humming she couldn't stop herself and, in shock and anguish, she screamed:

“ELAINE!”

**

Jeanne felt bad about the subterfuge but there was no way she could win by playing fair. She had in fact managed to send all of Elaine's swords flying with a perfectly timed swing of her sword but she hadn't actually run Elaine through. She wanted to win this fight but she didn't want to hurt anyone. Instead, the moment after breaking Elaine's guard she had created an elaborate illusion with light magic, powered it with a massive amount of magic and then sent it blasting out at everyone in the training hall.

Light bent and twisted, showing everyone exactly what Jeanne had wanted them to see: Elaine getting run through with the Trumpet, blood splattering everywhere.

The illusion did not hold up under any amount of scrutiny. The blood splatter had made no sound and Elaine hadn't let out even a whimper of pain. But it had succeeded in the one thing it had been meant to: Making Abigail drop her guard.

The other issue with using an illusion to show a devastating attack that hadn't actually happened was that the target of the attack hadn't actually been devastated. Elaine was still on her feet, still hale and healthy, and about to retaliate.

And so Jeanne unleashed a second massive burst of magic, this time sending a stop spell at Elaine. Not a slowing spell but a total dead stop. People at her level would only be stunned by full stop spells for a fraction of a second but operating at their level a fraction of a second was all Jeanne needed.

She froze Elaine in time and then used force and air magic to dash off, only barely not breaking the sound barrier. She had aimed herself at Abigail and came rushing at the girl. With the enormous momentum still behind her she slammed her fist into Abigail's armored gut.

“I'm sorry, you're too good to fight fair,” Jeanne whispered as Abigail crumpled.

**

The last thing Abigail saw before unconsciousness claimed her was Elaine, hale and healthy and horrified at having failed to keep her safe.