The Thunder Witch Pt. 2

Dozens of golden swords of light ran through Yssa’s body, pinning her in place in the air where Lady Venna had been floating. Each remained for several seconds, their light pulsing like a heartbeat before they dissipated one after another until her mutilated body dropped to the floor with a gut wrenching plop.

She had tried to warn her, calling her name before the magical blades had been released, but it had been a breath too late. Yssa was a mangled heap on the ground while the headmistress yawned absently in the spot the blond had been standing moments ago. In the air above Alva continued to struggle with her hair, kicking like a man swinging from the gallows, her face slowly turning blue from asphyxiation.

Cursing Yssa’s carelessness under her breath, Remmi kicked herself off from one of the bloody magical barriers on the wall to relaunch herself at Lady Venna. With the Aethik Slime under her control Remmi’s physical abilities had tripled… and that was the problem.

Of the trio, Remmi had always been the best at the martial classes. The former top had been Yssa, but after her first month of lessons Remmi had eclipsed her. While her stances had needed improvement, Remmi’s raw talent and athleticism had been too much for the now former top of class to keep up. From there Remmi’s prowess had only grown until six months into classes she was able to even best some of the royal guards tasked with protecting the king and his family.

Now she was faltering, attacking more like an animal than a trained swordsman. Like a baby learning to walk, it was hard to control her movements and all she could do not to run face first into the walls. She had no doubt that a single strike would be more than even the legendary Thunder Witch to walk away from unscathed, yet, from her casual demeanor, it was clear that Lady Venna knew such a strike would take a miracle to find its mark.

With her new speed, Remmi was capable of attacking roughly three times a second and she had hoped that the sheer volume of attacks would make her victorious. It was reckless and naive, sacrificing accuracy for dumb luck. Luck she lacked.

Instead, she was doing nothing but bouncing around the room while the Headmistress simply shifted herself half an inch this way and that to dodge.

“Come on, Remmi. Focus. I need to end this before Yssa bleeds out and Alva suffocates. GAH! This is impossible! She dodges every attack I throw at her and if I use magic I might end up like Yssa. Maybe...”

Landing herself on the giant mahogany desk and crouching low, Remmi held her hand back to give her slime room to transform. The feeling of the cold mucusy tentacles winding around her hand and wrist sent a cold shiver across her skin that made her want to gag, but the feeling subsided once the transformation was complete.

Halberds, like other long weapons, are a terrible choice of weapon indoors. Losing their ability to swing due to tight spaces, the versatile weapon often became nothing more than an unwieldy spear with a heavy point. But in Lady Venna’s spacious office and the capability to change her weapon at will, all of the disadvantages no longer mattered. She could swing freely and if the weapon was too long, she could shorten it in an instant. It was only her movement that held her back.

“Get off of there.”

The Headmistress appeared an inch in front of Remmi’s face before she could blink, pulled together in a tight lipped scowl. Her bident gleamed behind her and Remmi hopped backward onto the floor as a bolt of white lightning singed the parts of her hair that still lagged in the air. She swung her gleaming black halberd as she dropped, hoping her counter attack would catch the old woman off guard.

The blade sang as it sliced through the air at Lady Venna’s short neck. Remmi’s heart pounded in her chest in anticipation with every millimeter closer it got until it finally grazed the tiniest edge of the Headmistress’s skin.

Or at least it would have. As with Yssa, Lady Venna had swapped herself, this time with Alva’s now limp body. Strands of brown hair drifted down onto the desk as Remmi managed to shorten her weapon at the last moment, barely avoiding decapitating her best friend.

Though her counter was a failure, Remmi took advantage of the situation and grabbed a handful of the hair wrapped around Alva’s throat with each hand and pulled. Alva would be furious later, but at least she would be alive.

Remmi’s muscled strained against Alva’s magicked hair. What had felt like normal hair when she cut it with her halberd now felt like indestructible adamantine wire, refusing to give no matter how much Remmi pulled. Spitting expletives, she tried to cut it with her hatchet sized halberd, but it failed just as spectacularly.

Enraged by the dishonorable tactics of the Headmistress and her own inadequacies, Remmi set Alva down on the desk and rushed forward again, her mind going blank as a slurry of incoherent thoughts and plans ran through her brain. It was a game of cat and mouse again with Remmi playing the role of the feral cat.

Thirty seconds had passed since Alva had last taken a breath and Yssa had fallen. In that thirty seconds, Remmi had achieved nothing other than wearing herself out. Kneeling next to Yssa’s body, panting, Remmi glared up at the Headmistress who had taken to pulling a thick tome from one of her shelves and reading it.

“Why are you doing this?!” Remmi yelled, tears dripping down her cheeks. “What did we do to deserve this?!”

The book in Lady Venna’s hand clapped shut and floated back to its home on the shelf before another flew into her hands. Then she went back to reading, ignoring Remmi’s outburst.

“Fine. If you want to play games…” Brushing hair that had stuck to her tears off of her face, Remmi took a deep breath and raised her hands in front of her. The slime weapon she had been holding melted and gathered in front of her palms and the temperature of the room plummeted the more Aethik energy Remmi focused in front of her. Frost built up around the room, climbing up the furniture and up Remmi’s body. Her long black hair rose behind her and tiny ice crystals clung to her lashes and lips.

“You know what I always hated growing up?” Remmi asked, puffs of winter air forming in the air with each word. “I hated how Alva would always make a mess of our room. I would make sure everything was organized and put away in its place and the next day it would be chaos again.”

A devious grin pulled at the corner of Remmi’s lips and an arctic wind swirled around her, blowing the bottom of her robes up like a dress. “Let me show you.” Leather bound books and glass bottles shook on the magically protected shelves around the room and for the first time, Lady Venna gave Remmi her full attention.

“So that’s your plan, is it?” Lady Venna asked, glaring at Remmi with her beady black eyes. “Destroy my office in a childish tantrum to get back at me?”

Remmi shrugged, keeping her attention on the three marble-sized slime orbs spinning in front of her so fast they looked like a solid circle. Each was imbued with enough Aethik to blow the entirety of the faculty building up ten times over, though Remmi had imbued them with ice magic to prevent that. Blowing up the room would be pointless. No, instead she would confine her spell to the office and freeze everything in front of her until it was so brittle its own weight would destroy it. If she was lucky, it would get the old woman, too.

***

“Do you think it will work?”

“Not a chance. There’s no way the Headmistress would let Remmi destroy her office. Did you see how annoyed she got when Remmi was on her desk?”

“It's her own fault for taking this too far! Look at our doppelgangers out there! Yours looks like the leftover of a butcher shop and mine looks like a fish out of water.”

Yssa shrugged. “It’s not like I’m enjoying this. But what else can we do? At least we get to see that slime you gave her in action.”

“That’s true,” I nodded, locking my eyes on the black circle spinning in front of Remmi. With each rotation they had accelerated and spread apart. Now the diameter of the circle was as wide as Remmi herself. “It does give me a fuzzy feeling in my chest seeing her so compatible with it. It would have never worked with you.”

“There’s nothing that black haired witch can do that I can’t.”

“Except not get stabbed by her own magic.”

Yssa’s cheeks flushed red and she turned away from me. Being the first to ‘die’, she’d been in the pocket dimension since the beginning of the fight. I had only entered after Lady Venna had swapped herself with ‘me’ on her desk.

“It looks like Remmi finally caught the Headmistress’s attention.”

“No one likes their belongings destroyed,” I said, sitting back into the plush red armchair behind me and picking up my cup of tea. “Though it's a bit embarrassing having her use me as an example like that.”

Yssa chuckled and sat back in her matching chair. “Were you really that bad?”

“Maybe. Even as a child, Remmi was rather stoic, so I didn’t always know what she was thinking.”

“You do now. Make sure to get her an apology present when we’re done.”

I rolled my eyes and took a sip of my tea to warm me up. Even though Remmi’s spell couldn’t reach us, I still felt a chill on my skin. Had I been that awful when we were younger? I couldn’t remember, but I could believe it. I was still messy even as an adult so a child Alva was probably a hundred times worse.

“Oh, I think they’re wrapping up.”

After finishing my sip, I could tell Yssa was right. Though the office was still frozen, Lady Venna had knocked Remmi to the floor and had her head pinned under her foot. My stomach churned as I watched Remmi struggle with tears, snot, and hair plastered on her face. It made me sick to see someone normally so in control of her emotions looking so broken and it was only made worse by the fact Remmi had been pinned face to face with Yssa’s dead copy.

“If this isn’t the thing of nightmares. At least it wasn’t my copy. Maybe the Headmistress knew that would be taking it too far. Then again, the entire situation is rather grotesque. She has to watch her friends die for seemingly no reason, killed by someone she trusted and could never dream of defeating. I would have already given up.”

My shoulders sagged and I slumped back in my chair. I would have given up; without a doubt. It had been bad enough thinking Remmi had been eaten in front of me, but to have to stare at her corpse while someone had their foot on my head… I swallowed the tea-infused bile that rose in my throat. I didn’t want to think about it.

I turned my attention back to the office, keeping my eyes locked on the Headmistress. Her tiny hunched back was turned from me and she was saying something, though I couldn’t hear it.

“Can you hear her?”

Yssa shook her head. “Nope, but either way we should get ready. Her office is already tidying itself up and the doppelgangers look like they’re starting to fade.”

“I guess that’s our cue.”