Domination

 

"Originally," Marco sneered, sword swinging by his side. "You're pretty face was your only saving grace. That was all Gilsend was worth, pretty much. Did your father really send you out here? Was he that desperate for entertainment? Or maybe it was because you were a, ah, 'Financial Burden'?"

Alicia swallowed and Marco cackled, along with several sniggers in the crowd.

"I won't lose," she said.

Marco's sneer turned into a scowl.

"Then die, shitty slut!"

Alicia's hands glowed faintly with frost, her breath misting despite the hot summer sun beating down on the arena.

"You can win," Jack Keynes had said. "And you know it in your heart too."

…right. I think… living constantly in Ruxlyn and Marco's shadows, bound by their chains, I lost sight of myself. I am Alicia Gilsend.

"A mage? Against a peak five-star swordsman? This is already over," the crowd was murmuring. "Serves her right…"

 

Marco charged instantly, his sword glowing red. Jax's eyebrow raised.

"Red Sword Aura?" he mumbled.

"It's mere flailing compared to our Union Members' sword aura back in the day," Jack scoffed.

"Yeah, I can tell," Jax replied. "It may be red but it's the most basic form. He probably got it from an elixir or something."

Sword Aura. The reason swordsmen can stand toe to toe and overpower a mages supreme firepower. Using the Ena in one's Ena Core to coat oneself and one's sword in Ena. The most basic form was blue coloured, and simply strengthened your attacks and defence. Red sword aura enabled you to cut through the air and channel Ena outwardly to create ranged attacks. And finally, purple sword aura, which only a handful of people in the world had achieved - which was a whole other plane of strength.

…we do say it's flailing, but to achieve red sword aura at Marco's age does point fingers to his talent.

Jax scoffed.

But back in the Union, even Purple Sword Aura was mediocre at best.

 

Marco's sword sliced a line in the arena as he closed the gap rapidly.

"I'll make this quick!!" he was yelling.

In a split second, Alicia snapped her fingers and a wall of jagged ice erupted between them. Marco cleaved through it in one slash, shattering it into shards, and grinned arrogantly, followed by a laugh floating up from the crowd, thinking he was unstoppable. A couple people noticed otherwise.

 

Henrick Ruxlyn suddenly sat forwards.

That Gilsend bitch… did she just cast without chanting? No, am I seeing things?

Jack Keynes and Jax Zhang threw sideways glances at each other, grinning from the corners of their mouths. Cedric Gilsend, too, leaned forwards, eyes wide with anticipation and forcing his face to remain calm. Marco, on the other hand, had his brain too full of shit to notice.

"Is that all?" he laughed. "Pathetic."

He was about to continue his charge, but suddenly the shards of ice around him froze mid-air and launched back towards him like a storm of icy daggers. He parried them all, cutting them apart and swatting them aside with pinpoint accuracy, but Alicia was chaining her spells unnaturally fast, layering another one right after.

The ground beneath Marco suddenly iced over, forcing him to slip and jam his sword in into the sheet of ice to stay on his feet.

"Pointless tricks!" he laughed, but a hint of uncertainty was appearing in his voice.

Roaring, he activated more Red Aura around his sword, and launched a bright red flying slash at her, cleaving through the ground.

Sloppy, Jax thought, rolling his eyes. Slow, sloppy, and pathetically weak. And that swordsmanship - those who didn't know would think he picked it up from watching anime or something.

The slash tore through the arena, a deadly wave of super-charged, Ena-filled compressed air. Alicia didn't even move from her spot in the arena - she hadn't done so for the whole fight so far. She didn't even raise her arms, she just stared at the slash and a couple metres away from her she froze the slash midair into a large, curved, ice sculpture.

 

The crowd gasped. Freezing a moving, supercharged flying slash of red sword aura from a swordsman two levels higher than her, seemed like utter bullshit. Yet the proof was right before their eyes. Jack was saying something else though.

"Something's not right," he was saying.

Marco was zooming across the arena, slashing wildly with a huge trail of red sword aura behind him, while Alica poured spells on him, keeping him on the defensive.

"He's moving a hell of a lot faster than he should be," Jack said. "And I'm pretty sure it's not because he's just better."
"He's just pay to win," Jax snickered. "Look at him. He's dancing around. I would call him a clown but at this rate he'll end up the whole circus on his own."

Faint runes lined his suit - pulsating Ena conduits, amplifying his speed and sword aura output. It was obviously stupidly expensive and rare, but since the Ruxlyns were filthy rich it wasn't really surprising.

 

Marco's blows were amplified, each one smashing Alicia's ice spells to pieces, and he was pouring red aura out continuously without tiring. Obviously, he was just relying on his artefact's overclock, but the crowd thought it was just his raw skill. His boots flared with more runes, granting him a stabilizing grip on the icy floor. He smirks, mocking her for even trying, but his eyes widened as a sudden huge lance of ice shot towards him like a missile. A ring on his finger suddenly activated, forming a translucent golden barrier around him that shattered the spell without touching him.

"This dirty piece of-" Trillian was saying somewhere to Jax's left.

He'd been ranting since the start of the fight and was still going.

"Look at him smiling," Jax said. "I'm betting he actually believes that's his own skill."

The crowd was going wild, saying things like,

"What is that technique?"

"Never seen that before!"
"Pure talent."
"As expected of the rising star of Ruxlyn!"

They actually think he summoned that barrier with his own skills?

Jax glanced over at Jack who told him to not even say anything. Seeing Ena barriers used like this was an insult to Jack himself, who's main technique lay in his supreme barrier skills.

 

Marco was loaded with all kinds of artefacts despite being stronger than her in every way. But the problem was that Alicia was too fast. She was layering spells on after the other, her lips not even moving to chant, freezing, shattering, reforming - pressuring him in ways no artefact could compensate for. The air was turning into a fine blue mist, and the temperature was dropping rapidly - which was ridiculously considering the huge sun glaring down at them from right above. The battlefield was slowly turning into her icy domain. He lunged with all buffs active - boots glowing, armour flaring red, barrier ring pulsing - but Alicia simply made a small hand gesture and the ice on the ground suddenly spiked upwards, shattering his momentum.

 

His barrier ring triggered early, wasting itself on harmless shards of ice that would've just bounced off his armour, instead of her real attack. The crowd caught their breath as he stumbled, wide-eyed and teeth clenched. He was seriously starting to get pissed off.

This was supposed to be a quick win! Why is it that… she hasn't even budged? This low-down, shitty, weak, bitch that was supposed to be a mere tool for us to swallow the dying House Gilsend!?!?!?"

He went for a desperate overhead strike, his armour sparking as he poured all his aura into one blow. Before he could even move it a huge ice spike erupted out of the ground, colliding with his blade and stopping it dead in its tracks. His sword arm froze over instantly, and the frost hanging on the air started gathering on his armour, his face, hair, eyebrows and skin, freezing not just his movements but also the very Ena conduits in his armour themselves. Instantly, his aura snapped shut.

 

The temperature was plummeting ridiculously fast. If not for the Ena running through them, Jax, Jack and Trillian who were standing closest to the arena would've frozen solid. Spectators in the stands were clutching themselves at the sudden frost, shivering and teeth chattering. Alicia's Ena was surging unnaturally fast.

"You-" Marco tried to say, his teeth chattering as ice climbed up his body.

"Sssh," Alicia said softly. "Don’t speak. I've heard enough."

 

"Six Star Spell. Absolute Zero: Frozen Domain"

 

A huge pale blue magic circle expanded across the length of the arena, pulsing glowing runes. A slashing, freezing wind rushed through the air, and the whole battlefield was turning into a crystal-blue wasteland. Marco was trapped, his fake aura snuffed out like a candle, gasping for breath and eyes wide with panic. And then, a colossal pillar of ice erupted out beneath him, smashing him directly in the stomach and shattering his frozen armour to pieces, launching him skyward. As he was airborne, blood trailing from his lips, six massive, icy chains snaked up after him, wrapping themselves around Marco Ruxlyn, and slammed him back down into the arena. The frozen ground splintered and tore into a spiderweb of cracks. And Marco himself was encased in a cathedral of ice that spanned the whole arena, frozen mid scream.

 

The crowd was dead silent. Cedric leapt to his feet, followed by Hemia. Jax, Jack, Lloyd and Edith erupted into applause, Trillian was struggling to say something but it was being drowned beneath his giant smile. The ice melted quickly under the sun, and was left with a spluttering, drenched Marco Ruxlyn coughing up water in the centre of a destroyed arena.

"She- cough - she cheated!" he spluttered. "She used artefacts-"

But he was cut off by a huge hand closing around his head.

"Enough," Jonas Ruxlyn said, face a mask of outrage and fury. "Don't humiliate the Ruxlyn name any further, you worthless garbage."

And he dragged the fallen 'Golden Boy' of Ruxlyn off the arena in a defeated, pathetic state. Alicia herself stepped down, and was smothered in a hug by her mother, Hemia Gilsend, and younger sister.

"I told you," Jack grinned. "You could do it. House Gilsend's 'Blizzard Queen'."

Alicia blushed.

"That's my nickname in Holy Oak," she said. "How did you…?"

Then she caught the mischievous glint in Trillian's eye.

"Why you little-"

Jax smiled to himself.

And so, overwhelming victory indeed.

 

It was quite the opening. It took over three hours for the arena to be repaired, with over a hundred mages working on it, and the crowd was murmuring with apprehension and shock.

"Six star spell… at raw five star…"

"Impossible…"
"Ruxlyn's Golden Boy… smothered…"

The Rising Star of Ruxlyn, using three high-tier artefacts and two levels higher, was overwhelmingly defeated by Alicia Gilsend, of a falling house, with only her own monstrous talent.