Unexpected Rivals

When I closed my eyes and was about to put my power into action, suddenly everything dissolved. The humanoid creatures that had been smothering me were gone. Noticing this, I knew it would be easier to appear outside the elevator — and sure enough, it was. I stepped out with ease, feeling the arena sand under my feet and the deafening roar of the crowd of upperclassmen thundering in every direction.

When I opened my eyes to see what I was up against, I came face to face with my rival — the full-sized version of the tiny humanoid creatures that had attacked me. We locked eyes. She was, admittedly, far too attractive to have been launching those hideous little things at me. When she saw me, she said:

"So you're Julen, right? I was expecting you to be a little taller."

I froze. My family isn't exactly wealthy or famous for any great feats — we're a pretty ordinary family that barely scrapes by at the end of the month. And my parents were never superheroes or anything like that. Their powers never allowed for it. While I tried to think of a response that would make me look as unsurprised as possible, I watched her pull out her miniature humanoid versions at tremendous speed from what looked like an old, beat-up magic bag. She did it so fast I barely registered it, and already she had an entire army of miniature humanoids lined up and ready to attack.

I couldn't let them swarm me again, so I tried to teleport as quickly as possible to destroy the mannequins. There was one right between the two of us, so I figured it would be easy to reach it and destroy it in under half a second. I went for it, thinking it wouldn't be difficult — but when I got there I realized that a dozen of my rival's humanoids were clinging to my right leg. I had no idea if they'd always been there or if they'd latched on right before I left. Either way, because of them I didn't teleport completely. I lost a toenail somewhere along the way — I'm not sure where it ended up, but it happened so fast I didn't even get to say goodbye. Now my big toe is going to look like a pale wooden stick.

I thought I was winning — after all, I had destroyed the one visible mannequin. But when I glanced at the scoreboard I saw I was losing 3-1. When did she save 3 mannequins? While I'd been busy thinking about what to say and figuring out how to destroy the first mannequin, I had forgotten to think about the most important thing: where had all those humanoids that swarmed me at the beginning gone? I had assumed she just wanted to intimidate me for an epic entrance worthy of a memorable character, but then I understood — she had pulled them back. She sent them to find the mannequins. She never wanted to take me out. It was all a distraction, to keep producing more and more of them and send them out to search every section of the arena for the mannequins to save them.

And just as I finished working out my theory, the scoreboard flipped to 4-1.

I was completely screwed. It was me, not knowing where to teleport and overthinking absolutely every single move, against a thousand humanoids searching the arena at mind-blowing speed to save the mannequins. I was very screwed.