With the sensation of her entire body taking an exhilarating cold breath. Divine aether flowed in and through Alia’s body. Power. Since Lunaria had been so kind as to blast Alia away with her invocation of Igni, Alia thought it was fair that she returned the favour.
She didn’t quite know exactly how strong the surrounding Writing-enforced walls were. Still, her intuition told her that if she maximised the amount of atmospheric aether to be expelled by the incoming god-given aether, the resulting explosion would cause the newly ford House Thornheart to be given a devastatingly expensive repair bill.
So she made sure to cycle the aether and expel it beforehand. Well, most of it. She left a fraction in as a tentative test of her aether capacity and to repay Lunaria’s bold opening move. Hopefully, with even such a small amount of her monstrous aether reserves, the effect would still be magnificent.
Alia wasn’t disappointed.
The explosion of aether-infused lightning flooded the room with cracking energy, smashing apart the hellfire Lunaria was already sending her way and deafening Alia with the noise of a thousand lightning bolts that outdid any barrage of shellfire landing near her.
It wasn’t just a thousand bolts of destruction; every streak of lightning gave Alia tactile feedback of their surroundings and what they slamd into. All at once, she could feel the excitent of the air as it humd with energy. She could feel through a thousand arms the spongy - now charred - material that lined the room. She could feel the odd sensation of her aether colliding with Lunaria’s wards. From the perspective of her energetic children, punching through the instructor’s wards was like trying to push through an ever-thickening invisible wall. The weaker barrier collapsed imdiately, but the stronger ones felt like a mountain of thick, oozing mud that sought to envelop and suffocate any attacking aether.
Other than that, Alia felt fundantally changed. When Serena Spoke Narean, her horns beca wreathed in hellfire, and she gained a tail of the sa magical elent. Alia had been hopeful for a majestic transformation, and she wasn’t let down!
Horns.
Alia had horns. Not of the physical variety, of course. They were made from the sa aether-infused lightning that was Taranis's calling card. Unlike the bolts that whipped out to strike like a venomous snake, her horns were dense and maintained their form. Tightly wrapped and glowing blue, they protruded from her head, curving to form a set of very familiar horns.
Serena wouldn’t mind, would she?
Sparks of energy snapped between their tips, reminding Alia of two tesla towers. Just like her lightning bolts, Alia’s horns were more than just aesthetic. They were a new set of sensory organs, attuning her closer than she ever had been - apart from her Asclepius transformation - to the aetherfield.
Her resplendent set of horns wasn’t the only change. Layered over her fingers were two sets of ghostly claws that crackled with energy. They weren’t extruding from her fingertips or knuckles but sat about an inch above her digits. Moving her hands experintally, she noted that the two lightning claws moved perfectly in sync with her actual body. Strange. Taranis was not a lee-orientated Word. Why had her invocation given her a set of claws?
“If you’re quite done examining your own body…” A voice heavy with fiery power interrupted Alia’s self-reflection.
A beam of superheated lava rocketed towards her, catching her off guard, slamming into her side and spinning her around. If it weren’t for her heightened sense of the surrounding space and her position within it, Alia would have been wholly disorientated. The white-hot beam curved, giving chase. Alia cycled her aether, sending a compressed bolt to destroy it, only for the beam to split into a dozen smaller attacks that attempted to strike her from all angles.
As a precaution, she wrapped her lightning around herself, forming the powerful fifth circle ward, Taranis’s Cloudguard. From the feeling of the aetherfield, Lunaria had wrapped herself with the equally strong protection, Igni’s Hellshield.
At least, it was equally as strong as long as Alia kept limiting herself to a small fraction of the titanic amount of aether she could potentially channel. This duel was a perfect opportunity for her to explore what was an appropriate amount of power to show. She wanted to show off, to an extent, to ward away potential enemies of herself and Serena. Still, she didn’t want to display capabilities that would terrify people and cause her to withdraw from society.
Lunaria’s attacks continued in a frenzy. Alia tried her hand at dodging. She flared her aether repeatedly, propelling herself around the room while her lightning struck out at the instructor who also did her best to avoid the incoming attacks. Lunaria seed to move in a far more experienced manner, her invocation of Igni had provided the instructor wings of hellfire. Alia wasn't sure whether these burning wings helped the instructor move around the room or if they were just aesthetic.
“Such power!” Lunaria exclaid. “Such talent!” The aged woman grinned as if she’d discovered a new favourite toy. “I feel like I’m fighting Lei Gong, the Stormlord himself! Tell …” Lunaria paused her speech to form another spell. A dozen balls of hellfire manifested next to her and launched themselves one by one at Alia, each one causing a trendous explosion that sent the room shuddering as they impacted Alia’s wards or the surrounding walls. “...You cannot truly be twenty-five, can you? Such power is impossible for a human so young! Unless… no… could it be?”
“Not a blessing, and I’m not a darkblade!” Alia said cheerfully, dodging another round of fireballs and superheated beams. “I’m just , Alia!” As soon as she said it, she regretted getting caught up in the mont. Perhaps it would be best to hint that she did possess a blessing. She didn’t want to draw too much attention to herself, but then again, given the journalists she’d already encountered, she figured the cat was out of the bag and she’d do better to try and adapt to her new celebrity status.
The back and forth continued as godly amounts of aether saturated the room's atmosphere. Lunaria launched beam after beam at Alia, who responded in kind with her own compressed bolts of lightning. Larger and larger fireballs manifested as Lunaria spooled up greater and greater amounts of aether.
Alia took the opportunity to explore the variety of spellwork she rembered from the ga. She was delighted to discover she could manifest Taranis’s Cloudburst, a devastating fourth circle chain-reacting area-of-effect attack that was her bread and butter for grinding countless achievents in the ga. Seven enormous ball-lightnings sprung from her, darting to random locations before each exploding into seven more balls, which each then detonated into even more balls. This process repeated until the room was thick with lethal lightning, charring the last bit of wall and ceiling that had escaped the combat so far. Lunaria was forced to focus on her defense, ceasing her attacks and flaring her aether to reinforce Igni’s Hellshield.
The attack ripped into the ward, tearing away chunks as it sought to breach the fifth circle defense. For a mont, Alia feared she would break through, although such concerns were not shared by her opponent.
“Invigorating!” The instructor exclaid. “More! Finally, soone who can match my aether!” Lunaria’s brow creased in concentration and even more aether was funnelled through her body, distorting the aetherfield as she ford and cast her next spell.
Instantly, a thousand threads of razor-thin hellfire spawned in the room. Alia halted her movent lest she slam into the unfamiliar spell. A thousand threads intersected the three-dinsional space in every direction, crossing and crisscrossing each other to form a chaotic wall of tripwires. Each one was ford from more aether than the largest fireballs Lunaria had launched.
“What spell is this!?” Alia shouted, feeling herself becoming a little lost in the excitent. This was new. Not everything about the magic of this world was reflected in the ga she’d played.
“Ha…” Lunaria breathed heavily, her breath misting with raw aether. It seed the casting of this new spell took a toll on the academy’s fad Aether Addict. “I suppose you might not recognise… you are human after all…” She turned to look directly at Alia, her eyes glowing with power. “It is the pinnacle of Igni, a sixth circle spell first communed by the desert Greatlords centuries ago! Now, let’s see how you handle it!” Lunaria roared, flexing her aether as three dense beams of superheated lava erupted from her, homing in on Alia’s position.
Alia took a breath, flaring her aether to reinforce not only Taranis’s Cloudwall, but also digging into her reserves to shore up her other heavily cloaked wards from a multitude of branches. She managed to avoid the beams but found herself heading straight for a tripwire. Seeing the collision was unavoidable, Alia twisted her body to slash at the hellfire beam with her lightning claws.
It didn’t help much, and the wire detonated with trendous force. Alia was engulfed in white-hot hellfire that dissolved through one entire third circle ward before being stopped by her more robust defenses. She was thrown through the room, triggering tripwire after tripwire, cascading into a devastating amount of demonic energy assaulting her tumbling form. Alia cried out, not in pain but surprise, as the thunderous noise briefly paralysed her until she was able to channel her aether into her ears to protect them.
At this point, the spongy material that lined the rooms had all but lted, falling to the floor and bubbling into a tar-like consistency. The actual walls of the room were revealed, and Alia was surprised to see that they were wooden. It looked like ironwood, but she couldn’t be sure. Runic patterns were etched into the surface. This Writing, which Alia had no analogous concept from the ga to compare it to, sohow interacted with the surrounding aetherfield to form a surprisingly resilient defensive structure. Turning her focus away from the walls, Alia gazed upon her opponent.
Lunaria hovered a little above the ground, panting heavily, struggling to catch her breath.
“Ha… ha… Still standing, are you? This is…” The instructor swallowed heavily. “... Excellent training…” Alia waited until the demon recovered before circling her own aether, forming it into the complex shape required for her next attack. Since Lunaria had taken things to the sixth circle, and the surrounding walls had withstood that level of attack, Alia felt it only fair she conducted her own magnificent finale!
“Brace yourself,” Alia warned.
She ford the sixth circle spell Taranis’s Downpour, the most powerful area-of-effect attack in that demonic branch. She poured her aether into the spell's construction, feeling it greedily suck more and more of the ethereal substance up. Alia couldn’t help but giggle, feeling almost high on the sensation of such a powerful spell forming within her body. It was similar to how she felt constantly when she Spoke Asclepius.
Drunk on power.
“Try this for size!” Alia called out, spinning the formation within her and activating the spell.
“W-wait!” Lunaria called out, her voice suddenly stricken with panic. “Stop it! That’s a seventh circle-”
The bit of Alia’s brain that wasn’t lost in the thrill of spellwork flashed a warning, and she instinctively tried to reclaim the invoked formation. It was only slightly effective, and as the spell manifested the rest of Alia’s brain kicked into gear and she realised the scale of attack she’d just launched.
Panicking, she frantically ford another invocation of Taranis’s Cloudwall, barely waiting for it to complete its structure before launching it with all her might at Lunaria. The ward raced towards its target, reaching the instructor as the spell hit, painting the room in white as the aetherfield twisted from the density of attack that sought to destroy everything it touched.
The Writing on the walls only just managed to not shatter under Alia’s spell. Unfortunately, the ceiling couldn’t boast the sa level of resilience and enormous cracks ford across its length, breaking the runic patterns and dissolving the defensive ward they sohow manifested.
If Alia’s spell had continued for a fraction of a second longer, she would have blown the ceiling to kingdom co. Her frantic, last-minute attempt to reabsorb as much aether as possible was just enough to prevent the worst from happening.
As her spell faded, Alia threw out a healing spell towards Lunaria, only to find it blocked by her wards. Huh, that was new. “Hey,” Alia said in an apologetic tone. She floated down to the instructor, who was on all fours, gripping the tar-like substance of the floor, now beginning to cool. “Are you okay? I can heal you if you release your wards.”
“Just a mont,” Lunaria mumbled. The instructor was still for a minute before turning to sit on her knees, facing Alia. “Fifty-five years I’ve been alive, and I’ve never seen that!” She stared at Alia earnestly. The woman was frazzled but otherwise seed unhard. Alia’s hastily thrown ward had blocked most of her attack, and what little hit seed to have been stopped by Lunaria’s own Igni’s Hellshield.
“Seen what?” Alia asked.
“That!” Lunaria waved her hands, getting more excited by the mont. “You! Casting a seventh circle spell while only Speaking a First Word! I know Taranis is powerful, but his Word isn’t that powerful! It shouldn’t be possible! The aether requirents should be…” Lunaria trailed off before raising a suspicious eyebrow at Alia. “You were holding back, weren’t you?”
Alia scratched her chin awkwardly. How should she answer? Her attempt to present herself as a talented - but not norm-shattering - Speaker had once again failed. How was she to know the spell that was sixth circle in the ga was actually seventh circle in reality!? To be fair, she should have figured it out when she felt the formation sucking away far more aether than it should have, but she’d been caught up in the mont and hadn’t been thinking.
“If you don’t want to answer, you don’t need to,” Lunaria said. The instructor took a deep breath before letting out a long, deliberate sigh. “Well, you pass. I’m going to have great fun looking at the faces of my students trying to crack your wards.” She looked up, her face contorting into a look of sorrow. “That old man’s going to take all my funding to repair that ceiling! Ah!” Lunaria bent forward, clutching her horns in a very Serena-like fashion. “He’s going to yell at for hours! So unfair…”
The instructor sobbed quietly for a few minutes before collecting herself. Lunaria raised her head with a smile and asked, “Would you mind healing ? I fear I’ll fall asleep for a week without Aseco’s golden grace.”
Alia obliged, casting a modestly powerful healing spell, wrapping the instructor with a golden warmth dotted with blue specks. “Ah…” Lunaria muttered, a distant look in her eyes. “To think I would feel this golden grace once again.”
Alia’s eyes widened with surprise. “You’ve been healed before? By a human healer?”
“I’ve been around,” Lunaria replied nonchalantly. “It would be before your ti, well, that is if you’re telling the truth about your age.” She sniffed. “A story for another ti. One day, perhaps I’ll tell you.” The woman slowly climbed to her feet, and Alia followed suit. They both took a mont to observe the destruction. The room was almost pitch-black, with only the glow from Alia’s horns and Lunaria’s wings lighting the room. The aetherlights had long since been destroyed by their battle.
The glow of Lunaria’s wings soon faded as the woman released her Word. Alia followed suit. As she released Taranis, the door to the room was flung open, and a demon with auburn hair and purple eyes strode through, carrying a presence of confidence reminiscent of how Serena strutted around the ship.
“Everything alright, yes?” asked the demon in an unfamiliar accent. “Lots of noise.”
Perhaps it was due to the monstrous amount of aether that still saturated the atmosphere, as well as Alia’s now-fading horns of aether-infused lightning that acted as attuned sensory organs. For a mont, as she set her perception upon the beautiful demon, Alia caught a glimpse of sothing within her that straightened the hairs on the back of her neck.
Now, that was interesting.
Very interesting indeed.
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