Ch 99: Fight

"Why did you just stutter?" Mark grabbed Judy by the shoulder, shaking her out of her daze. She had stopped so abruptly that her apology had come out less like words and more like a broken, clipped sound.

"Do you know why Lucien is in the training ground?" Judy asked, her eyes still fixed on Lucien, who suddenly turned his head away the moment he seemed to realize he had been caught staring.

"Huh, where is Lucie..." Mark's voice trailed off as he finally spotted Lucien sitting inconspicuously on the bench at the far end of the ground. He was failing miserably at it. So much so that as Judy swept her gaze around she quickly noticed that many of the other students had already found him out as well. Their heads were turning toward Lucien and then quickly away again. Some were openly watching him and others stealing sideways glances when they thought no one would notice.

"Why is he here?" Mark echoed her question, and Judy wanted to seize his ear between her fingers and remind him that she had asked that very same question not three seconds ago. Was he even listening to her?

"You know, I just asked you the same thing," Judy replied flatly. Mark had a habit of drifting into his own world, and she knew it came from worry, from the weight of everything pressing down on him. So she swallowed her irritation and let it pass.

"Sorry," Mark muttered, then added one more question to the already puzzling situation. "Is he here to train?"

Why am I so interested in why he's here? Judy thought bitterly as she had no answer to Mark’s question, and made a firm decision to stop thinking about Lucien entirely. Still, the fact that he had been watching them when she first spotted him nagged at her. He had been staring at the two of them as if he wanted to bore a hole straight through their skulls.

"Let's train, Mark," Judy said, turning on her heel. She pushed all thoughts of Lucien aside and began walking toward an open stretch of ground where they could properly duel. There was nothing like a good fight to clear the head.

But she heard no footsteps behind her. Judy spun sharply around. "Mark, hurry up. We are already late," she called out, louder than she intended as she glanced upward at the sun, which had already climbed well above the horizon. Not early morning anymore, then.

Also, she did not enjoy raising her voice at him, but if he had arrived on time as they had agreed, none of this would have happened. And to make everything worse, the students nearby turned at the sound of her voice, and some of them wore knowing, mocking little smiles, the sort that seemed to say, a commoner and a fallen noble, how perfectly matched they are.

This is exactly why I wanted to come early. Judy's irritation flared hot at the sight of those faces. She wanted to put her fist through every single one of their smug expressions. But thankfully, Mark broke into a jog and reached her quickly, and soon the two of them had taken their positions on the ground, unclasped their mana-restricting bracelets because she needed full use of her spells. They drew their weapons out and quickly fell into the rhythm of their duel as they directed one attack after another at each other.

They moved back and forth across the ground with practiced ease. Tree roots erupted around Mark, thick coiling things that twisted and reached for his limbs, and he blasted them apart with bursts of fire, his sword cutting clean through every brown tangle that crawled toward his feet.

"You need to do better than that, Judy," Mark remarked as he finished scorching the last root clinging to his shoe.

"Is that so?" Judy smiled and broke into a run.

"Close combat, are you that confident today?" Mark's smile matched hers as he ran to meet her, his sword angled diagonally for a clean sweep.

She tightened her grip on her wooden wand, dropped beneath the arc of his swing before the blade could find her, and smirked. "Slow." The crystal globe at the tip of her wand pulsed with a soft glow, and branches erupted from it, snapping around Mark's ankles and lashing his legs together. He went down hard, face first into the dirt.

Judy stepped neatly to the side, circled behind him, and pressed the base of her wand firmly between his shoulder blades. "How is that?" She laughed. "Don't get too comfortable, Mark."

"You fell for it," Mark chuckled. The branches around his legs blackened and burned away, leaving dark scorch marks across his skin, but he did not scream out. In one smooth motion he rolled, grabbed her wand with his free hand, and shoved it aside. "You know my rank, right?" He looked up at her with a wide grin on his face, his grip on the wand iron-tight.

Judy pulled, but he held firm. She tried hard to pull her wand away, her temples formed tight lines.

Suddenly, a smile bloomed on her face as she finally finished her spell that she had been secretly casting. The branches came all at once, spiraling out of the air from every direction, wrapping around Mark in a tight, closing weave until he was sealed inside a complete sphere of knotted wood.

Judy laughed at the muffled sounds coming from within. She only released the spell when a small, smothered voice forced its way through the gaps. "I forfeit. You win."

The branches fell away, and Mark dropped to the ground with a heavy thud. Rather than lying there in defeat, he propped himself up almost immediately and looked over at her with a grin. "You know I was not using my full strength, right?"

"Yes, yes, I know how great and mighty my dear frien-," Judy began, her voice warm with amusement. But the words quickly died in her throat as she caught something unbelievable. She felt the ground beneath her feet was splitting apart in two.

How could it be? Judy exclaimed and closed and opened her eyes multiple times to see if she was seeing correctly or not.

***

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