Chapter 14. Ambush

I had not meant to walk this far from the others.

That was the first thing my body pointed out to me as the terrain began flattening under my boots and the trees thinned and my legs started to cover real distance. I had walked for almost ten furious minutes in a direction I hadn’t checked, and now I had to undo it in the opposite direction with a flag in my hands and the entire forest watching my number on their maps.

Because that was the other thing.

Ding!

[Quest Issued]

Objective: Return to your team within 30 minutes.

Reward: Staff (Grade E), +15 Mana Pool, Mana Elixir (Grade C), Level up

Failure: No reward.

Thirty minutes? That was doable. I pulled mana into my legs and let it go.

Reinforcement came up clean. My calves hardened, my ankles braced, the next step I took covered twice the ground the last one had, and then the one after that covered more. The forest blurred at the edges. The flag was folded against my chest under the front of my tunic, held there by the pressure of my forearm, and I was already calculating the route back in my head when I heard the first shout.

It came from the southeast, some distance behind me. A single voice calling out a number.

“Twenty-eight! Twenty-eight, there!“

Another voice, further right, answered, then another behind that one, further still.

They weren’t close yet. They were orienting on the map, running the same math everyone in the grounds was running, triangulating the number on the parchment against their own positions and deciding whether I was worth chasing. Apparently some of them had decided yes. The sounds of their feet were already moving through the underbrush somewhere out of sight, and the sounds were not staying in one place.

I accelerated.

The trees opened into a longer stretch of low ferns and I lengthened my stride through them, one hand clamped over the flag under my tunic, the other free for casting, and for about fifteen seconds I had the entire forest to myself in the way that only happens right before it stops being true.

A fireball came out of the tree line ahead of me, and it was coming at my chest fast enough that ducking was not an option and turning was going to cost me my forward momentum, which I wasn’t prepared to lose.

So I went up.

I dropped into an open wind stance mid-stride, planted my back foot, and pushed. A column of compressed air bloomed under my boots and detonated downward. The fireball went under my feet so close I felt the heat of it on the soles of my boots, hit a tree behind me, and burst with a dull roar and a scatter of burning bark.

Were they trying to kill me?!

I was about to voice my indignation when I realized there were two candidates in the air with me.

They’d come up from two different patches of cover, one ahead of me in the ferns and one behind, and I understood the shape of it the instant I saw the second one. A sandwich. I was supposed to be the filling.

A girl with a braid in front, a boy behind me, both of them already casting as they rose, and I had about a second and a half to do something about it before they closed from both sides.

I pulled the wind current I’d ridden up and collapsed the whole thing into my right palm. It compressed into a dense round weight in the space of a breath, and I shot it at the girl in one straight line.

The blast hit her across the shoulder and hip. She cartwheeled sideways out of the air with her cast collapsing around her hand, and the recoil of the shot kicked me backward through the air in a straight clean line, right at the boy who had been rising up behind me.

He seemed quite surprised from the gasp he let out.

He’d been angling to catch me from behind while his friend took me from the front. Now I was coming at him in reverse, shoulder-first, fast, and his own spell was still half-formed in the hand he’d been raising for my back.

His eyes went wide as I closed my free hand into a fist and swung as I passed.

The punch landed on the hinge of his jaw.

There was a sound, a very short wet sound, and his head snapped sideways so hard his whole body rotated in the air around the point of contact, and something small and white came out of his mouth and spun away in a slow arc. It was a tooth. He went limp before he’d finished turning. The spell dissolved while his arms dropped and he fell into the ferns like a sack of grain.

I landed a beat behind him, knees bent, hand still on the flag under my tunic.

Oh no.

I stared at the place in the ferns where he’d come down. I could see one of his legs from where I stood. The leg was not moving. Despite the momentum, I had not meant to hit him that hard. I had been planning to shove him with wind on the way past, and my fist had gone instead, and my strength had gone with it, and—

My strength!

Eighty-one, now. That was the part I’d forgotten to factor in. The girl was already pushing herself up in the ferns about ten paces to my left.

“Hey, are you alright?”

I shouted it at the boy who groaned: “…my jaw…”

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“I am so sorry!”

I meant it, but he didn’t have the range to hear how much I meant it, and the girl with the braid was getting her legs under her, and I was already half-turned to deal with her when a shadow moved across the ground in front of me.

It wasn’t a cloud, but something person-shaped, falling fast.

I threw myself sideways on reflex, and a boot came down exactly where my head had been, hard enough to leave a small crater in the leaf litter and a spray of wet earth up around it.

“Hey! We are not allowed to kill each other!”

I felt it was important to remind them, in case they may have forgotten.

The crater’s owner landed in a low crouch and came up in one clean motion with her hair in the air around her shoulders.

Red hair. I’d seen her leaning out of a carriage window in the valley this morning while an older woman fussed over her collar, and I’d seen her again later among the candidates in the plaza. I’d never learned her name. She was tall, taller than me by half a head, and she was looking at me now like I was a door she was about to kick open.

“Give me the flag.”