Will straightens himself. If that attack had gone on any longer he would have been launched backward. He barely held on.

  He couldn’t be too mad about his defeat though. He knew that handicapping himself like he was would likely to lead to defeat eventually.

  It might sound pathetic, and maybe it was, but he was proud of how far he was able to go in the tournament.

  And like master Amos said, this is just training. If anything, it shows how far Will still has to go and that sets a goal in his mind. He’s also very grateful for finally having the ability to compare himself to other cultivators in his own tier. After the few he’s fought and the many he’s seen fight, he thinks he’s near the top, but honestly it’s hard to say.

  He’s pretty sure the Sigzil had been holding back during their fight. And he knows that the first cultivator he fought definitely had a lot more to give. Will taking him down quickly wasn’t a result of him being that much more powerful, he was just quicker on the strike. With more time to prepare, Will’s not sure if he could have won his first match.

  All in all he’s happy for this experience. It’s set a goal to strive for and he’s found that having that goal makes the effort and training easier to handle.

  He walks up to Sigzil and holds out his hand. “Good fight.” He says as he walks up.

  Sigzil looks at the proffered hand and back at Will with a raised silver eyebrow.

  “I guess it was.” He says as he shakes Will’s hand.

  “Hope to fight with you again someday. And next time, I’ll win.” Will says.

  “Ha! Keep dreaming.”

  Will watches Sigzil walk away with a grin on his face. He really does hope he gets to face him again, this time with both of them going all out.

  Will walks back to the booth to find Alea sitting with her legs crossed in the second seat and snacking on some fruit. Her vivid green eyes are trained on him as he enters but she doesn’t say anything. She lets him deal with his loss and just sits there giving silent support, which honestly is better than some consolation that Will already knows.

  He knows a loss was bound to happen eventually. He knows he may have won if he could have used his lightning. He knows this is just training and shouldn’t take it too hard. He knows all this.

  Losing still sucks.

  She tosses him a piece of bread and they munch together silently for a little while.

  After fifteen or so minutes Will finally speaks up. “Excited for your match?”

  A fiery grin stretches across her face. “I am. I won’t lie, facing cultivators a realm above me is fun, and it pushes me in ways I didn’t realize I could be. Facing our masters helps, but I know I can’t win so it’s not the same. Here, I know with a combination of power and ingenuity I have a chance. It makes my mind and my muscles work that much harder for some reason.”

  “I think I can understand that.”

  They spend the rest of the remaining Spirit Realm fights strategizing about new ways Alea can use her fire and how far along she is with the new techniques she’s still currently developing.

  When the Mind Realm fights begin, they check the board to look for her name; she’s not there.

  The second round comes and goes without her name being called either. Finally the third round gets posted, and it seems her fight will be the one on the main fighting ring!

  Her opponent is someone named Ronin.

  “Good luck! You got this!”

  She smiles back at him and makes her way to the main fighting stage. When she’s halfway there Will finally gets a look at her opponent, and his smile drops.

  It’s the man from the day before. The pompous idiot who tried to pick up Alea.

  Will isn’t one for conspiracy theories, but he would bet a lot of money that this is no coincidence.

  The scum bag must of pulled some strings.

  The two competitors faced off with one another while the ref went over the rules.

  Will can’t contain his nervousness. He can’t wait for this guy to get a thrashing for how he acted, but something just feels off to him.

  He steps outside to stand in front of the booth, arms crossed and eyes trained on the fighter Ronin.

  The ref finishes his recitation, leaps back and yells “Begin!”

  The two explode into motion, both propelling themselves toward each other. Alea with her orange fire and Ronin with…it’s not gravity. It has a different look to it than the gravity user did.

  Once again Will curses his inability to use his aura to get a read on someone. It’s turning into a big disadvantage.

  The two move around the fighting stage, exchanging blows back and forth. Ronin doesn’t seem to have an advantage of speed on her, but the force behind his blows seems to be more powerful.

  Each time he throws a punch or a kick, it seems to Will like a mini shock wave ignites with the impact.

  Could this be force magic?

  It makes sense to him, but then again he doesn’t know a whole lot. His experience is severely lacking and it shows in situations like these.

  With an opponent this powerful Alea doesn’t have the ability to slowly feel them out, but Will’s not worried. That’s never been her style anyway.

  The problem is that to bring enough power to bear to actually hurt an opponent an entire realm above her takes her time. Time Ronin isn’t giving her.

  Their fight continues to zigzag around the square ring, but Will’s fingers grip his arm in concern. As the fight continues it becomes clear that Alea is putting her all into this, but Ronin has a confident sneer on his face and doesn’t seem to be straining himself that hard.

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  Will wonders if Alea has picked up on it as well. She dashes back from Ronin and he predictably follows. As she touches back she immediately goes into a high velocity spin. This is one of the moves her and Taleya have been working on. She uses her fire to make her spin, and the same velocity forces out her fire into a tight cyclone of extreme power. It’s a good attack if she’s being hounded by a lot of enemies..or if she needs space from a single persistent attacker.

  His own momentum sends him into the tornado of flame and it blasts him around it’s axis. For a second Will thought that would be the fight. Ronin comes within inches of being sent out of the ring but sends a blast of force behind himself to stop the momentum cold.

  He braces and then sends himself back at Alea.

  She only has seconds, but she doesn’t waste them. By the time Ronin is hurtling back towards her, she has prepared the one other attack she had been working on. It wasn’t perfect yet. Will had given her the idea and hoped she could use it. The imperfection was that a portion of the attack impacted her as well. But luckily her control is so high that she was still able to make the attack useable, if not as strong as she would have liked.

  The second Ronin was pivoted away from her Alea stoped her rotation, facing the direction Ronin was sent, and began forming as much elemental energy in her hands as she could. By the time Ronin was just about to reach her, with a huge grin on her face, she slaps her hands together and ignites as small and condensed of an explosion as she can.

  The result is an extremely powerful and targeted shock wave that is sent mostly right into Ronin.

  The attack sends her skidding and tumbling backwards, eventually landing her on her back.

  Will’s eyes widen and shock courses through him. “Alea!” He screams, trying to warn her.

  …Ronin had been holding back.

  Upon impact from Alea’s blast wave, the man responded with a blast of force of his own, impeccably timed and almost completely canceling out Alea’s attack. It looked to Will like he allowed some of the force to send him backwards, and then he used more of his power to send him up into the air. By the time Alea slides and then tumbles once before she is able to finally stop her momentum backward, Ronin is barreling down through the air towards her.

  She looks up in surprise and Ronin sends a fist of force directly into her midsection.

  The force is so strong her head and lower body are brought upward as the attack actually cracks the stone and pushes her a few inches into the arena. She coughs up blood as Ronin springs up from the attack and then spins and sends a kick into Alea’s side.

  She grunts loudly in pain as she’s launched away. Right before she’s sent off the side of the arena a sudden blast of fire keeps her inbounds.

  Will watches all of this and his shock turns to frustration as he watches Ronin’s face turn into smug satisfaction as his attacks connect.

  “Come on, you can do this!” He yells to her. But a part of him wishes she would have let herself fall off the fighting area.

  She slowly climbs back to her feet and faces Ronin. She blasts sideways and starts sending fireballs at him. She throws them haphazardly and seemingly erratically.

  He dodges a few, knocks a few others off to the side, and lets a force shield tank a couple more. He seems content to let Alea wear herself out at she continues her relentless attack.

  About thirty seconds later she finally stops and stands still, no longer firing off fireballs. She stands there panting heavily, a grim look on her face.

  “Finally finished with that pathetic display?”

  Alea doesn’t say anything, she lets her sudden smile answer for her. She raises her hands and surprise flits across Ronin’s face as he jerks his head up to look above him. All of those fireballs weren’t random, they were intentional.

  Over a hundred fireballs were hanging suspended in the air above him.

  Alea yells and brings her hands down, sending all of the fireballs speeding towards Ronin. They scream through the air with the velocity they’ve been sent and bombard Ronin all at once. A massive explosion sets off and Alea braces herself against the slight shockwave that comes off of it.

  She’s left panting, sweat poring down her face, her arms hanging by her sides, the strength gone out of them.

  Before the literal smoke even clears, which Will thought only happens in movies, Ronin bursts forward and comes through with a low punch right to Alea’s center. She gets sent backwards toward the edge of the arena again. Will breathes easier. At least it’s over.

  A sudden burst of force blasts behind Alea and sends her back into the ring right before she is about to be blown out of it.

  Will’s eyes widen in anger. He uncrosses his arms and clenches his fists, his entire body taught with rage he can do nothing with.

  The scum bag had kept her in bounds to continue the fight..and the beating.

  Alea lands on her side and before she can so much as react, Ronin appears and kicks her in the side again.

  Will grits his teeth, his anger building and building.

  “I’m going to kill him!” He says to himself.

  Will keeps waiting for the refs to stop the fight. But as Ronin kicks and punches Alea with force enhanced attacks around the ring, each time stopping her from going over the side, he realizes that they aren’t going to.

  At this realization his anger reaches new heights.

  He paid them off, he must have. Between his family’s influence and their deep pockets, he got to the refs. Either him or his family. Either way it comes to the same thing; Alea is in danger.

  He can feel the air being electrically charged around him as his anger and his fury grows. With each kick, with every punch, Will feels himself coming closer and closer to the edge.

  His entire body is on the razor edge, all of his muscles tensed and straining to be released.

  He can’t hold back any longer.

  The energy around him becomes so charged that tiny arcs of lightning come off his skin and form in the air around him.

  A part of him, deep inside, tries to remember that he’s supposed to keep his power a secret. That he’s supposed to keep his lightning concealed, but he cares less and less as the fight goes on. Before long, he forgets about it entirely. Alea’s pain and suffering are the only thing his mind has room for.

  Suddenly Ronin stops the abuse. He stands over an unconscious Alea, a smug and cruel smile on his face. For a second Will thinks that it’s over, that he got his imagined revenge. But then Ronin raises his fist in front of himself, condensing so much force magic in his fist that it seems to warp space around it.

  Will’s eyes widen and his fury erupts as one fact becomes crystal clear in his mind; the refs aren’t going to stop this.

  Somehow, someway, they’ll say they weren’t able to bring her out of harms way in time and it was a horrible accident.

  Will has dealt with bullies his whole life. He’s seen this before. This unending cruelty. Where nothing is too far to sate their twisted pride and anger. Nothing is too much, no cost too high to get a laugh and do what they want because they think they should be able to.

  Will watches Ronin raise his fist. The millisecond it moves a millimeter everything becomes too much.

  Will yells, his anger and his fear becoming too much. Gold lightning forms completely around him, all his hard work paying off. The ground explodes from beneath him as he propels himself forward. In the time it takes Ronin to move his fist another millimeter, Will is already on him.

  He comes in low and fast, too fast for even Ronin to catch the movement in time. Not with the element of surprise on his side.

  Will gets inside his guard, body low, arm cocked back. It feels like slow motion as Will’s head comes alongside Ronin’s chest and his fist connects with his midsection. Every ounce of power and momentum Will get can get goes into the punch and launches a doubled over Ronin across the ring and into the far wall; narrowly missing an observation booth.

  Will held back slightly on the amount of lightning he put into the attack. His anger wasn’t so all consuming that he didn’t remember to not kill the idiot.

  Will stands up from the hit and goes right to Alea. He pulls her into his arms and checks on her.

  She’s breathing, just extremely injured and very unconscious. She needs help.

  It was only just then that he realizes the entire arena is silent. A hush had fallen over the entire place, and everyone was staring at him. The two refs stood stunned, eyes wide and stances stiff as if they didn’t know what to do.

  The moment passed, a roar filled the crowd, mostly boos, which Will thought was unfair.

  The refs moved a second later and before Will even knew what was happening he was pinned face down to the stone, his arms pinned roughly behind his back, a knee pressing his face painfully against the white stone.

  His anger hasn’t subsided, he still feels the heat of it pumping through his veins at Alea coming so close to being callously killed. Will readies his lightning to blast the refs, when suddenly a pair of boots comes into his vision. He recognizes those boots.

  Through the haze of his anger he tries to focus.

  Master!

  The half star’s dropped me back pretty far and because of that I have a lot of ground to make up.