TWO HUNDRED SEVEN: Hit Me With It
207
******
Alden’s fingers sank into cool, dark mud that hadn’t been here the last time he’d fallen in this spot on the forest floor. He was breathing hard, face hot, and he felt another bead of sweat sliding down the bridge of his nose to drip onto the ground between his splayed hands.
One end of the thin gray cord he’d been using as his tripwire was still wrapped around the leather cuff on his wrist. He could feel his auriad there, hidden underneath, loosening as his adrenaline from the last attack faded.
The “hazard mimic” that Stuart had taken from the school for them to use as their pretend demon had gone down. But so did I.
The wedge-shaped shield he’d been holding as his second line of defense had blown a short distance away. It was made of an ultralight foam that caught the slightest of air currents when Alden wasn’t preserving it. Stuart was planning to let his ryeh-b’t play with it after they were through.
“Ow,” said Alden. “Wasn’t that one unfair?”
An invisible blow had struck him hard enough to send him flying. After the hazard mimic had fallen and from behind.
“That one is why you should listen to me and fight from inside the car.” Stuart’s footsteps approached, and Alden looked up to see a hand being offered. It was covered in the rings Stuart had selected from a supply the school kept in a room full of magical teaching tools. They were dueling rings that had been made to introduce random flaws into the effects Stuart created when he activated them. So sometimes the ring that was supposed to make the soil shift under Alden’s feet created a large mud patch, and the one that hit him with nasty invisible blows could miss.