My Frunza charm had stopped the bullet, but it still felt like I’d gotten a chipping hammer embedded in my lungs. As I crawled toward better cover, half my chest filled with wheezing, throbbing fire.
I could barely hear Rade’s shout over the booing crowd. “I tried to warn you!”
I lay there in the block’s shadow, hurting. All my naïve thoughts about honorable fairness and the traditional rules about not hitting women went straight out the window, because that deadland bitchjust shot me.I drew Gax’s pistol.
Oh, we’re doing this now.
Risking a peek around the side of the block, Dathka was moving my way, pistol still raised. She fired the instant she spotted my head, and stone chipped in front of me. With an empty gun in each hand, now it was her turn to take cover as I leaned farther out to take a shot at her. By the time I got the sights aligned, she was behind another block.
I jumped up and started running for a better position. Instinct told me as soon as she was reloaded, she’d be doing the same, trying to get an angle on me. Only, I intended to get there first.
Except then, somehow, she was rightbehind me. Which I didn’t realize until she shot me right between the shoulder blades.
The Frunza protection hadn’t had time to recharge, but thankfully, Bruxt—or maybe it was Blork—had done his job, and the goblin enchantment stopped the bullet. I landed on my face, skidding across the stone, and it felt like I’d had my spine shattered. A goblin charm will save you, but those little bastards make it hurt extra bad on purpose.
Temporarily losing all the strength in my limbs as if paralyzed had also caused me to drop my gun. It went sliding across the stones to stop a few feet from my clumsy, nerve-deadened fingers.
“One down!” the announcer shouted with his artificially loudened voice. “One to go.”
How had she gotten all the way over here? When I rolled over, Dathka was standing in the shadow of the block I’d taken cover behind, calmly breaking open her pistol. She dumped the smoking brass case and pulled a fresh cartridge from her belt. “I told you you’d never even get close.”
I’d practiced going for my enchantments so many times that I could use them even with tingling hands. I tugged anObscuraball from my vest, concentrated on the simple spell embedded in the clay, and let it roll away. When it hit the ground, it burst into a black shadow cloud.
Dathka fired blind through the magical smoke, but I was already moving. The bullet whizzed past my head. Remembering where Gax’s pistol had fallen, I ran my hand along the stone until I hit something metal and scooped it up, then kept running.
“You dare use a shadow spell onme?”
“I’ve got more where that came from.” The artificial spine shot pain had faded enough that I’d gotten a bit of dexterity back, so I grabbed a handful of screws. A second of concentration activated the Red bound to the steel, then I tossed them under hand through the smoke. “I call this oneScrews of Chaos.”
This was one of first formula I’d come up with myself, and it was still one of the nastiest. The Red heated the metal molten hot, super quick, and when the screws hit the ground and scattered, they began their out-of-control dance, bouncing, shrieking, popping, and sticking to anything that might burn.
From Dathka’s enraged shout, one of them must have caught her.
TheObscuracloud only lasted about seven or eight seconds, just enough time for me to blindly stumble my way to a better position.
And somehow Dathka was nowaheadof me.
It was a surprise when she appeared around the side of the white stone block I was heading toward. She was limping, and the bottom of her cloak was on fire from the screws, but she was already swinging her pistol my way.
Rather than freeze and marvel how she was getting around so impossibly fast, I dove headfirst into a trench.
It was about a seven-foot drop into the perfectly rectangular hole. I didn’t even have time to activate aDescend;that landing really hurt. Joints popped, but thankfully, it wasn’t enough damage to activate the goblin charge, because that would be a sad way to end the match!
Over the roaring of the crowd, I could barely hear her boots crunching across the gravel as she rushed me, hoping for a final shot. I threw a pinch of Red dust up out of the hole.
She walked straight into aShroud of Fire.
That was the only invoked spell I knew, and creating a magical effect directly from an element with no other ingredients could be rather potent. The size and intensity of the fire this spell created was proportional to the amount of Red I used, and I’d not had time to grab much.
Though, in this case, it was still enough to set her hair aflame.
She was distracted, probably blinded by the flashing fire, and vulnerable, but I didn’t have a shot because of the edge of the pit. With cocked pistol in my right, I raised my left hand and made a fist. “Ascend!”
The air solidified and curled around my arm, hoisting me violently upward. I flew out of the hole, pointed the gun at Dathka as I passed ground level, and yanked the trigger. There’d been no time to aim. It was purely by instinct, like pointing a finger. Yet by some miracle, I actually hit her.
There was a magical flash as my bullet knocked her off her feet.
The crowdlovedthat.
