Chapter 16: Noble Lineage
It was odd, Marcus would later reflect, but having a fireball suddenly thrown directly at you wasn’t nearly as shocking as he would have guessed. For a while now, Marcus had been trying to operate in unfamiliar waters… but fighting? If there was anything Marcus was really good at, it was fighting. The feeling of slipping into a combat-ready mindset was familiar and reassuring, and he didn’t hesitate for even a moment.
He acted wordlessly and immediately, turning to his side in a single step and thrusting both of his hands away from him. One, holding his staff, was thrust towards the incoming fireball, creating a concave shield of force in the path of the fiery projectile. The other, holding nothing, was thrust towards his students behind them. Young and inexperienced as they were, they were still frozen in shock, struggling to process what had happened.
Two things happened simultaneously. The fireball hit the concave shield and exploded, but the shield redirected the blast right back at the spirit mage who cast it. Secondly, a wave of force hit Marcus’s students from his outstretched hands, lifting them up in the air and carrying them off into the distance, away from the fighting.
The girl with blood red eyes reacted faster than Marcus’s own students, perhaps because she had already expected something like this, and ran off the moment her companion threw the fireball at Marcus. When the redirected fireball blast washed over the area where the man stood, she was already gone and wasn’t caught in it alongside him.
The gathered crowd, previously happy enough to stand on the sidelines and commentate on the public dispute, immediately fled the scene amid screams and shouted curses. Some reacted faster than others, but nobody wanted to get caught in the crossfire. Adria was full of mages, and this wasn’t the first time a dispute between them erupted into an actual spell exchange.
The flames washed over the gaudily-dressed man, who did not attempt to dodge them in any way. Unsurprisingly, when the spell faded, he was unharmed.
This wasn’t too much of a surprise. The signature ability of a spirit mage was that they had the ability to inject traces of their spirit into their spells, allowing their magic to have a certain measure of life and conscious intent. Obviously, the flames created in such a fashion would not harm their creator, even if they were somehow redirected back at them.
Marcus didn’t pause. Before the fires had even fully cleared, he was already casting an offensive earth magic spell. Spears of stone erupted from the road stones the strange mage was standing on, attempting to spear him through. The man flew up in the air to avoid them, and simultaneously swung his staff towards Marcus again. Four blazing whips shot out from the staff towards him, causing him to launch himself into the air as well. The whips carved deep groves into the road where he once stood, the edges glowing with heat.
Marcus snapped his fingers and the stone spikes he had created earlier detonated into a cloud of needle-like stone shards. The needles showered the entire area, burying themselves deep into the road stones and the walls of nearby buildings, but most importantly… they shot upwards towards Marcus’s enemy, who had only flown a little bit to avoid his spikes and was directly above them.