5-2

Carmina dashed forward—jarringly, Clover did too. When the manticore leaped, it bounded for Clover, but she immediately juked back. Still, its paw passed terrifyingly close to her head, and magic couldn’t put an eye back in a face.

The shorter girl was thankful for that maneuver. Shocked that she’d do it, but thankful. She ducked low and reached the manticore’s stomach, then anchored herself as well as she could in a split second and pushed. But a single push was not enough, even when the manticore’s focus was elsewhere. When that ripple of aura faded out, Carmina added power, first squatting as it pooled in her legs, arms, and core.

Expending so much wasn’t just painful; it was profoundly draining, as if her cells themselves began to disintegrate. Even an amateur mage with just a dash of training could bring their strength back in a matter of weeks—and someone like Carmina, who’d scarcely set foot in a gym but had long known the way to cycle her breath, could do a sight better. Any mage knew their cells could recover. Carved-up faces and shattered limbs never came back; good mages only made calculated risks.

With a searing burst of red light, with her palms and fingers spread as wide as they could go, with all of her power behind it, Carmina hit the underside of the manticore again. Now the site of impact was a flat, raw wound. The beast snarled, began to topple, but in the end, it was merely shaken. The two paws that had left the ground were falling back to earth.

Z-zip—a well-aimed bolt slid into its throat.

An instant moan and a gush of blood. The manticore wailed with fury, a fury on another level. It pounced on Carmina, the nearest foe. She crouched and balled up. Having expected a fresh attack, she had kept her full aura up, no matter how tiring. When it landed, she didn’t lash out, just allowed the magic itself to do its casual burning. The manticore was on her like a cat on a mouse, all claws and widening mouth.

The jaws clamped down, but by then the manticore was losing strength. It had already taken the fatal wound. While Clover had never stopped hammering away at its side, this was more for show. It guaranteed that when the beast finally did collapse, the burnt craters down its back could be seen for miles. The manticore’s husk fell simmering and reeking to the sand.

Carmina stayed curled up for a few seconds. It wasn’t until the big paw was kicked away from her back that she dared to look around. The announcer was raving, the endless crowd above was screeching, and Clover was standing in the light, not too much in shadow to hide her smile.

Clover held out a hand. “I knew you’d be amazing!”

Blinking at the offer, Carmina picked herself up instead. A new awareness of her sweat cascading through the leather armor came to her. Maybe it was not the manticore that reeked. “You were also good,” she said.

“Let’s do a victory pose,” Clover said.

…Carmina knew there was a looming mass of people all around them, but she kept forgetting that a looming mass of people has eyes, ears, and expectations. Sometimes she felt perfectly fine punting them aside, but right now, she would hate for them to say she “didn’t win right.”

“Uh...what do you recommend?”

“You can just copy me!”

Clover beamed and held two peace signs high. Though she wasn’t sure it’d have the same effect, Carmina did the same, slow, strained smile and all. The sketches produced by the artists in the first row would be spread far and wide through the Academy newspaper, preserved in its archives forevermore.

“This dust is getting in my teeth,” Clover muttered through her smile. “Let’s get out of here.”

Once the manticore body was taken away, they moved through the open gates, breaking their pose only to look up and wave.

In the desolate locker room, they went through the motions of removing their armor in silence. Carmina knew this was her chance to leave Clover, but didn’t.

She didn’t allow the magnitude of what she’d done in that arena fall on her. Dozens of deaths at her hands and an entire manticore down. If she’d been in a different headspace, she would have roared with triumph—or, on the flip side, sobbed. But there was too much noise whirling around her, and she was too good at compartmentalizing.

As they changed, there was the constant rumble of an eager crowd outside. When they left the locker room, the claustrophobic stands of the Coliseum were behind them, but in their place was a cluster of gawking people.

Several ran to Clover personally, crying out with surprise and amusement much the same way Clover had cried out at the bank to Carmina. Her rough exterior seemed to melt—every time she shook hands with someone, they became one, personality and all.

They gave Carmina some token acknowledgement too, and polite smiles.

When they finally began moving again, it was with a whole entourage. Clover seemed to be glowing: “Yeah, those wolves were tough! …Yeah, right? Too fucking many!” Carmina heard something about a grand prize. That only made her wonder if it came with money.

The late afternoon sun…Carmina began to get anxious, and hungry. But the people around them were dropping off one by one, to their own errands and dorms, or out of their own boredom.

“Hey.” Something in this young woman’s tone caught Carmina’s attention. She knew fewer words and cultural details than most, but she could smell a put-on. “That was amazing, what you did back there. I couldn’t see it, but I heard everything.”

Clover matched her tone perfectly. A little too perfectly. Peering through one layer of crowd, Carmina watched her body language and listened in keenly. She was even matching the lie in her voice. “Aw, thank you so much! I bet you were great too. I wanna hear all about it.”

“Sure you do. We only had our own skill. I didn’t have a little kid to throw around.”

“You know,” Clover said, her tone the same yet turning icy, “everyone around us is equipped with a weapon, a wand, or both. And you’re speaking to someone who just won an athletic competition. Who do you think is coming out on top?”

Everyone had stopped walking. They had already begun to back away. Carmina moved with them, but not just to save herself. She trusted Clover could deal with it.

The girl she was speaking to had both hands behind her back. Hm, wonder why. It was clear from Carmina’s perspective that beneath her waterfall of hair, she was holding not one but two wands—and fresh ones. They were new, and could make up for the magic she’d just lost fighting.

“I think you’re suggesting a fight,” she said in a mock gasp. “That’s against the rules!”

“No, I’m posing a hypothetical.”

Clover turned around and moved her hands in a peculiar way. Only by locking onto the movement could Carmina see her sleight-of-hand. Some handful was tossed out of her lab coat pocket.

Then she began walking away, at a pace just one notch above casual. Carmina hurried to join her.

Yelps and the crackle of tiny explosions followed. Clover sped up, saying, “Wow! It sounds like someone just threw bombs. We really left just in time.”

Carmina trotted with her. The pain throbbed in her legs, but she didn’t mind sleeping it off. “The bombs that you—uh, someone’s thrown, you think they hit everybody?”

“No, I’m a very good shot. And that is why I know precision when I see it.” Clover smiled, but Carmina didn’t laugh.

Instead, she locked eyes very seriously for a moment. “You are a good shot. You just need to hold back a little less.”

“When did I hold back?”

“When we were fighting the wolves. Your shots were so fluid when you killed the slimes, and you were brilliant against the manticore. But in the middle, you hesitated, and I don’t think it was fear.”

Right as they looked away from each other, the corner of Clover’s mouth twitched. “That’s true,” she said sullenly. “I’m sorry, that could’ve been really bad for you.”

“I’m not concerned about that.” In fact, Carmina felt an astounding swell of trust. She would leap right back into the fray with her.

“Wanna know why I did it? I was afraid of doing too well.”

“What? But…oh.” She remembered the jealous girl in the crowd. “Who was she?”

“That was just Sana. Popular girl. I’m surprised you don’t know her, but…not shocked.” She scanned Carmina up and down, as if divining the secrets of her limited gaze. “Anyway, she’s from my old school. It’s like she followed me here. She was pretty consistently second in every class…”

“You were first,” Carmina murmured.

“Huh, I was going to leave that part unsaid. You’re very blunt.”

“…Thank you?”

They had slowed to a walk by now. The cries far behind them had definitely died down, replaced by the general commotion of students that wouldn’t leave completely until long beyond midnight. “I could tell you more,” Clover said, renewing her attention on the landmarks around them, “but that would require you following me to my dorm. Are you prepared to do that?”

Carmina flinched at the thought, less because of intimacy and more because of the possibility that she was entering the territory of a formidable combatant. It was instinct, and she was sure it would become increasingly wrong the longer she stayed outside of the woods. “Just finish giving me the short version,” she said.

Clover whistled out a sigh. “Your loss!” She cleared her throat. “As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, not all attention is good attention. I try to curate it. But it’s just not possible when you’re followed around by…someone who’s been obsessed with dethroning you for fifteen years.”

“I can see that.”

“So I would rather not earn too many first-place trophies, going forward. But you”—she patted Carmina on the shoulder, with just enough panache to keep it from being awkward—“you could probably stand to earn a little more.”

“Uh, no.”

“Why not? Aren’t you the hero of the bank?”

Carmina thought back to the professors who thronged around her when she first came back to the department. “Actually, I think I’m ‘the nasty girl who bit someone’s arm.’”

“You bit someone too?!” Clover fangirled.

Carmina gave her a withering look that told her to drop it.

Clover pivoted. “Okay, but before I go home, one last question. Can we be battle partners again? The next time we get a chance? Even if I might not try as hard and we might not win?”

The “wild” girl winced in thought. “Don’t call on me again unless you’re really trying.” It actually stung to think Clover was stifling her true potential just because of some jealous student with no ounce of cunning, who could be shoved aside with a few choice words and enchanted burrs. It stung because in another life, a Clover who didn’t try could be dead.

Carmina relaxed a bit when she saw the gravity in Clover’s eyes. Even a lot of the teachers in Combat Magic wouldn’t have taken Carmina as seriously as this. Nobody at Melo Academy understood battle as a way of life the way she had; there was even a gulf between her and soldiers. It wasn’t that fighting was a neighbor to love—it was simply that both were as essential to life as food and drink. She might need a comrade.

“…But yes. We can fight again.”

Clover leaped in the air and cheered. Before now, Carmina thought “jumping for joy” was a figure of speech.