Chapter 109: Emily’s Needles
Emily gripped the silver-inlaid wood of her staff, her fingers working the intricate clasp at its crest. With a sharp twist, she detached the large, teardrop-shaped focus crystal and slipped it into her pocket.
It felt inherently wrong to step into a duel without it. The crystal was a Frost family standard, designed to amplify and sustain large-scale barrier constructs. Every member of the main family was trained to rely on it from an early age. But Alex had bluntly told her during their courtyard training that the heavy crystal created a half-second delay in her initial mana flow, slowing her first cast. She had argued with him at the time, insisting that the crystal gave her more control. Alex had simply told her that control meant nothing if her opponent reached her before she could use it. Today, half a second meant the difference between standing her ground and getting crushed into the sand.
The midday sun beat down on Tournament Arena One. Across the ring stood Knight Doran Hale, a towering student equipped with reinforced iron-plated boots and a massive two-handed hammer resting easily over his shoulder. The spectators in the stands were already murmuring, expecting the classic, drawn-out matchup: the immovable heavy Knight relentlessly battering against the Frost family’s impenetrable glaciers.
The starting bell chimed.
Doran roared and launched himself forward. He lowered his shoulder, accelerating into a heavy charge, entirely prepared to shatter whatever massive wall of ice she intended to raise.
Emily didn’t raise a wall. She didn’t even step back to cast.
Instead, she tapped the bare tip of her staff against the stone floor, channeling a fraction of her usual mana output into speed and precision rather than scale. Dozens of thumb-sized needles of condensed ice materialized in the air and shot forward like a swarm of wasps. They didn’t target his thick chest plates or his heavy shield arm. They drove directly into the narrow leather gaps of his knee joints, the hinges of his reinforced boots, and the spaces between his gauntlet fingers wrapped tightly around the hammer grip.
The tiny spikes shattered and melted almost instantly against his body heat and Aura, but the sudden, biting cold forced involuntary twitches across his muscles. Doran’s charging rhythm stuttered. His grip on the heavy weapon slipped a fraction of an inch, and his next step landed slightly wider than the one before it.
It was a minuscule delay, but Emily was already moving to exploit it.
Doran recovered with a frustrated grunt, swinging his massive hammer down in a brutal overhead arc meant to crush her guard before she could cast again. Instead of trying to block the tremendous force, Emily swept her staff horizontally, manifesting a perfectly angled, sloped plate of dense ice directly in the weapon’s path. She didn’t need to stop the hammer. She only needed to make sure it didn’t hit where Doran intended.
The heavy iron head struck the slick slope, lost its downward momentum, and violently redirected off-target, smashing into the arena floor with a deafening crack.
The momentum yanked Doran forward. Before he could wrench the weapon free from the stone, Emily flooded the impact zone with frost, instantly freezing the hammer head firmly to the arena floor. Doran yanked hard on the handle, planting his back foot for leverage. His shoulders strained as he tried to pull the massive weapon loose, but Emily had already anticipated the movement.
Emily flicked her wrist, raising a narrow, sharp ridge of ice directly beneath his planted heel.
Doran’s boot caught the slick ridge. His legs flew out from under him, and he crashed onto his back with a heavy, ringing thud. Before the dust could even settle, the tip of Emily’s staff was resting inches from his throat, a jagged spear of frost hovering perfectly still above his chest plate, pinning him without causing a single serious injury.
The referee threw down the flag. "Ring out! Victory to Emily Frost!"
The applause from the crowd was loud, though mixed with visible confusion from those who had expected a grand spectacle of magic rather than such a precise, tactical dismantling. Several students who had been waiting for Emily to create one of her enormous ice barriers stared at the empty space where the expected wall should have been. Instead, she had defeated a heavily armored Knight with a handful of tiny spells and careful timing. Emily calmly dispelled the ice, offered Doran a polite nod of acknowledgment, and walked out of the ring, her posture perfectly straight.
She didn’t return to the VIP box where the rest of the Frost delegation was seated. Instead, she climbed the stone steps to the student benches, heading straight for the research seats where Alex, Elara, and Emma were watching the matches.
Emily stopped in front of Alex, crossing her arms over her pristine uniform. She looked down at him, her expression carefully guarded, though her breathing was still slightly elevated from the adrenaline of the duel. There was a faint flush across her cheeks, but whether it came from the exertion or the attention of the crowd was impossible to tell.
"Well?" she asked, her tone carrying a faint edge of challenge. "Was the performance charming?"
Alex didn’t immediately answer. He looked down at the arena, then back up at her. "It was efficient," he said evenly. "And inventive. Which matters a lot more."
Emily let out a small, dismissive huff, pretending the compliment wasn’t exactly what she had been looking for. "I suppose that will have to do," she muttered. But instead of walking away to join her family, she took the empty seat directly beside him, leaning slightly closer to his space as the next match was announced.
From Alex’s other side, Elara leaned forward, keeping her voice low to avoid the surrounding noise of the crowd. She slid a folded piece of parchment onto Alex’s lap—a copied maintenance map she had been studying during the fights.
"Look at this," Elara whispered, tracing a faded line of ink with her finger. "The old western dormitory... it’s connected directly to the southern arena by an old service tunnel."