“The wonderful thing about rules is that they are meant to be broken. Not directly of course, blindly stumbling through things does little more than invite others to wrap you up in the rules and hang you from them. 

Understanding what the rules say, and more importantly what they don’t say though? Those can be sharper tools than any enchanted sword.”

– Xindir Harshek Doxel of the First Flame teaching his first and only Imperial Kinder Class.

Reldin came away from the silver flames with a roar of metal tearing through metal. He swung his blade at the spot where Idrina had been standing so quickly that I only saw the end of his moment when the blade was buried in the ground.

Happily, it was not buried in Idrina. Reldin had struck quickly, but not quickly enough. With her golden spear Idrina had turned the blow aside by a few inches and sidestepped the rest.

From the ripping metal sounds when Reldin moved, my instincts told me that she needed to run, or at least make distance between them. Whatever magic was working on Reldin had to be costly. Forcing him to close a gap every time he tried to attack would show what kind of stamina he had and how long you’d have to hold out before he exhausted the power that was keeping him functional.

That was not what Idrina did.

Reldin started to advanced, apparently thinking like I had that he would need to chase his quarry down.

Idrina stepped in close to him though stabbing him through both arms and legs simultaneously as she kicked him in the center of the chest.

Reldin spasmed at the wounds and flew back into the flames.

This time Idrina didn’t let up. Reldin’s armor began to glow red hot from the flames but his movements didn’t slow at all.

Idrina’s attacks washed over him like a thunderstorm, steel crashing on steel as her spear shattered into metal dust and his armor was crumpled and torn by her unending assault.

He tried to gain distance from her, but where he was burning in the silver fire, Idrina was surrounded by a thin golden glow and advanced at a slow but inescapable pace thanks to the fact that the spears she summoned seemed to be however long was required, changing shape on the fly as Reldin backed further away.

With no other choice, Reldin threw himself into the path of a half dozen spears in order to escape from the silver flames.

His move spared him from his back armor melting off entirely, but two of the spear stabbed through the armor on his right arm, two others through the armor on his left leg, one through his left arm, and one through his abdomen.

That should have been the end of the fight. The limb wounds had to have shattered the bones. I could see where they went in and Reldin wasn’t shape shifting so he hadn’t moved his bones somewhere else (not that shapeshifters could normally do that). 

But he kept moving!

I almost jumped into the arena then. It’s one thing to cheat at a game, but Reldin was breaking basic rules of anatomy and that was just intolerable.

Sure he was probably patching up the injuries with magic, maybe regrowing the bones instantly or attaching his muscles to the armor directly so it could serve as an exo-skeleton, but it was the principal of the thing. Idrina had hit him with at least twenty hits which should have ended the fight. The contest should have been over already.

Reldin disagreed though. He took three more spear thrusts through the torso in order to surge forward and grab Idrina by the throat.

Metal screamed against metal as he closed his hand to tear her head off but she didn’t flinch. With a sweep of a blinding spear Idrina freed herself and took Reldin’s arm off jet below the elbow.

And then she buried the spear through his throat and pinned him to the ground with it.

That was the end of the fight.

No matter how he’d magicked things up, Reldin was still human at his core and humans do not survive beheadings. 

Idrina inhaled and then hurled six more spear into Reldin’s chest piercing, unless I was mistaken, his heart, liver, both lungs, and his spine in two places.

It was unnecessarily brutal and I could not have been happier that she’d made sure he wouldn’t be getting back up, ever. The smell of heart’s blood wafted through the air like a balm to my nerves, confirming that my faith hadn’t been misplaced and the danger was passed.

And then he got back up.

With a horrible grinding of gears and the squelch of what could only be formerly vital organs, he got back up.

He wasn’t slow either.

Idrina turned, a golden spear forming in her hand the moment she heard the first gear turn. The barrage of attacks she’d unleashed had cost her though and Reldin caught her with a straight punch that knocked her across the arena and into the silver flames on the far side.

Idrina bounced off the invisible barrier the flames created but not before her back was scorched by the flames and her body rendered as limp as her right arm had been.

Reldin’s movements came with the sound of breaking gears and tearing flesh. The fantastic burst of speed had been a one time thing it seemed as he dragged himself slowly over to Idrina’s prone form.

She wasn’t unconscious, just paralyzed and as it turned out her looks could kill. Shadow spears erupted from the ground and descended from the heavens like the wrath of a god. Bits of Reldin’s armor evaporated but he dodged worst of the hits.

It wasn’t until he stretched his arm out and called his sword back to his hand that I finally recognized the magic he was using.

The moment he was reunited with his sword, it began to change, transforming in exactly the same manner as the Imperial Cadet’s had.

I watched him raise it over his head.

Exactly as the Imperial Cadet had when he fought Kelthas.

I watched the sword fall.

Exactly as it had when the Cadet had killed Kelthas.

I hadn’t been fast enough then.

This time I was.

I didn’t growl.

Growls are a warning.

You don’t give warnings for murder.

I didn’t think about transforming.

Thoughts are for when you need to plan.

Before the sword could fall, I was there, and I was not a human girl anymore.

With teeth the size of short swords, I bit through my enemy’s arm.

With jaw muscles strong enough to run rend enchanted steel, I tore through platemail and removed the hateful sword by virtue of tearing his arm off completely.

Next was his head and then I was going to scattered all of the rest of him across the entire arena.

Except for the part where I was frozen in place.

By a spell.

I followed the magic back to the Imperial Knight Casden Lightstone, Reldin’s second-in-command. My eyes blazed with the a hellish red light that made it clear he was not going to survive this offense anymore than Reldin was.

His magic held me fast, bound me from doing any further damage to my prey, but it couldn’t hold me forever. In fact it couldn’t hold me for very long. He hadn’t suppressed my magics, only locked my form in place.

I’d felt the effect before.

Long ago.

That memory was not one he wanted to have triggered.

That memory was not one I was capable of being forgiving about.

Rage and anger and sorrow and long buried loss swirled up and took my vision away as I descended deeper into my magics once more, not caring what the cost was if only I could finish destroying the ones who were…

I felt a hand on my side and from an impossible distance heard a familiar voice speaking.

“Don’t hurt her,” Idrina said. “She hasn’t done anything wrong.”

I blinked. She was okay? 

And Reldin wasn’t attacking anymore?

With ragged breathing, I swam up towards the light that was still burning within me. I hadn’t exhausted myself this time, so I still had the strength to claw myself back to myself.

In doing so I let the Dire Wolf shrink away until I was back to being the girl I’d been a few moments earlier. It was hard to catch my breath, and I definitely didn’t feel all too great but I was stable and my magics were mine again, not the other way round.

“She has done quite a number of things wrong,” Knight Casden said. “Not the least of which was to interrupt a Imperial Trial by Combat.”

I shook my head and coughed out a short laugh.

“No I didn’t,” I said.

“Child, all here will bear witness to the fact and I dare say even your vaunted patron will not being able to protect you from the ramifications of interfering with an official trial.”

“I didn’t interrupt it,” I said. “It was already over.”

“She’s right,” Idrina said.

“Knight Reldin did not yield, and as we see his magics were more the sufficient to withstand the accused attacks,” Casden said.

“No they weren’t,” I said.

“He was still moving up until you entered the ring,” Casden said. “And, by the way, how did you do that?”

I threw a glance behind me towards where I’d been standing. The crowd was looking at me with what I assumed to be abject terror, though that would have suggested they should be running about now too. So not terror? Well, it was something unsettling.

Also, and this took an extra moment or two to register, the silver flames had gone out.

Completely.

There was a bit of evidence that they’d once been in place from the charred ring that was left on the ground. The charred ring which was significantly thicker than the wall of flames had been. The charred ring with the rather large, some might call it Dire Wolf sized, blast mark in one side.

I glanced around at the ring again and tried to think what I’d done to get through the otherwise solid barrier it created. I couldn’t really think of anything except that I been unwilling to tolerate anything stopping me from tearing Reldin’s arm off.

Had I just smashed through it by sheer brute force? I didn’t think I was that strong, but I honestly couldn’t say I’d ever tested myself like that before.

Also I’d turned into a really big Dire Wolf.

Reldin had come up to the first joini on my leg if my memories weren’t terribly scrambled.

That was a lot bigger than I usually chose to be, and I’d been moving a lot faster too.

“It was inconvenient,” I said, opting for as basic a version of the truth as I could manage. “As for him,” I gestured to Reldin (either Casden had dropped his restraint spell or shifting back into human form had thrown it off), “he died well before I jumped into the arena. The trial was over. Idrina won.”

“She’s right. It’s why I turned my back on my foe,” Idrina said. “I know he was dead then.”

“He is wearing armor with capabilities you are unaware of,” Casden said. “It allows the Imperial Knights to survive many injuries which would destroy a lesser fighter.”

“He didn’t survive them,” I said. “In fact he was dead before Idrina even put a spear through his throat. I think the first time she knocked him into the flames, he perished.”

“That’s not possible. He continued fighting well after that. He was alive then and he was alive when you attacked him,” Casden said.

“And is he alive now?” I asked.

“He…?” Casden started to say and trailed off, unsure as Reldin, or rather Reldin’s corpse, continued to stand there, unmoving and unspeaking in what remained of his armor.

“Unless Knight Reldin can testify that his wounds were not as severe as they appeared, we must conclude that the accused has proven her innocence,” Jalaren said, speaking up in his role as the one rational voice in the entire Academy.

“He is enspelled by this abomination,” Casden said, whirling to point an accusing finger at me.

It wasn’t all that bright of a move given that I had just ripped someone’s arm off, but I was pretty sure I knew how to prove my point.

“I haven’t cast any spells on him. That’s all his armor’s doing. So let’s see what happens when we take that off and get a good look at the man inside.”

Full of clever self assurance, I reached over and tore Reldin’s helmet off of his head.

No one, as it turned out, was ready for what lay underneath it.