Chapter 240: Love Race - Downforce
"Dodge left!"
Rain heard Cassiel call out and immediately reacted, pulling in his wings as he rolled as hard to the left as he could.
He was barely in time to escape the giant maw of a dragon as it tried to grab him.
For a moment as he spread his wings out, he thought he heard a disappointed "Tsk" from the rider. The dragons were all "bite safe" in the sense that each had something Cassie called "gum guards" installed over their finger-length teeth, but Rainier wasn’t about to go testing that safety.
Having missed his mark, the dragon rider continued on his path, trying to intercept some other hapless squad as Rain, Ozzy, and Cassie regrouped.
"Still think the obstacle course was harder?" Ozzy quipped with a smile.
"Tsk." Rain scoffed. The obstacle course had started off fairly conventional. Physical objects. Lots of rope. Enchanted logs that spun around in the air. Then things got weird. Illusions, subtle ones, had tripped up Rain. Walls that didn’t actually exist, invisible nets, winds that came from seemingly nowhere.
"I can’t see a way through," Cassie said, taking them in a zig-zagging pattern that was largely keeping them in the same place as she tried to find a way to break through.
But the worst thing had been the fact that there was no speedy way through it without leaving the course, it was a great-measures long chokepoint. This meant teams trying to both dodge the obstacles and each other as spells flew and tempers flared. But on the bright side, team Tenebris had used enough dirty tricks to let Team Roc finally catch up to the front four.
With how badly Rain had fared, Ozzy had performed frontrunner duties, often by blinding people with his flaring spells. This had severely annoyed the angels following their performance from the outside of the course, and more than once Rain had seen angry angels fiddling with their halos after Ozzy’s disruptions passed.
Ozzy had spent so much mana, however, that for this section, he’d largely relegated himself to purely physical flight techniques in order to conserve for the deep dive ahead.