Chapter 2065: Sinking

A boy holding the flat paddle swung it at one ball and was struck in the back by another. One of the girls with the magnetic boots was caught while trying to push off a wall, and a cadet with the small shield blocked three throws in a row only to be hit by a fourth that rebounded from behind him.

One by one, they drifted down to the floor of the chamber and made their way to the side.

By the time eight of the students had been eliminated, not a single instructor had been touched, and the mood among the remaining cadets had started to sour.

Then two of the students tried the instructors’ own trick against them.

They had drifted into positions on either side of one of the younger instructors without seeming to coordinate it, though Ning suspected they had exchanged a glance at some point, and they both threw at him at almost the same moment. The instructor saw the first ball coming and twisted cleanly out of its path, moving exactly as he had been doing all game.

He did not see the second one until it struck him squarely in the side.

For a moment, the chamber went still, as though everyone needed time to understand what had happened.

Then the instructor began to sink, the fields releasing him slowly toward the floor, and the students burst into cheers.

The cadets who had already been eliminated shouted loudest of all from the side of the chamber, and the two who had thrown the balls looked at each other in disbelief before grinning widely.

More importantly, it told every remaining student that the instructors could be beaten after all, and the effect was immediate.

The game grew louder and more chaotic. Every time a student threw a ball toward the instructors, the others cheered, regardless of whether the throw came anywhere close.

Balls flew in every direction at once, rebounding from the walls, striking one another in midair, and tumbling through the chamber in unpredictable spirals, while students and instructors alike dodged and twisted and threw in the middle of it all.

For the next several minutes, it was complete chaos.

Within ten minutes of the game’s beginning, a good number of the students had been hit, and the side of the chamber had filled with cadets standing in a loose crowd on the padded floor, craning their necks to watch the ones still floating above.

None of them seemed to mind very much.

They cheered for their classmates, groaned loudly whenever someone they liked was struck, and laughed at every particularly clumsy dodge or wild throw, and Ning could hear more genuine enjoyment in their voices than he had heard at any point during his time at the academy.

They might have been military cadets, trained every day in combat and tactics and the realities of a war that had lasted four thousand years, but they were still young, and for the length of a single game in a zero-gravity chamber on a dead planet, they seemed to have forgotten all of that entirely.

Ning was hardly trying at all, yet he was still doing well.

He kept his rope moving in lazy arcs around him and snapped it forward whenever a ball came within reach, and between those strikes, he drifted from one part of the chamber to another with small, efficient pushes off the walls that kept him away from the worst of the crossfire. More than one instructor had thrown at him by now, and none of them had come close.

When roughly ten students and six instructors remained, Jason was hit.

It was a shame, in Ning’s opinion, because the air cannon was arguably the best item anyone had drawn. In the right hands, it could have knocked aside incoming balls from a distance, launched its user across the chamber in an instant, and possibly even been used to fire balls back at the instructors with far more force than anyone could throw.

Unfortunately, Jason simply was not dexterous enough to use it properly.

He fired the cannon to push himself away from one incoming ball and sent himself drifting directly into the path of another, and before he could turn the cannon around to correct himself, the second ball struck him in the shoulder.

He let out a resigned sigh as the fields released him and began lowering him toward the floor, the air cannon still clutched in his hands.

Under the rules of the game, an item could not be passed on to another student once its owner had been eliminated, so the air cannon went down with Jason.

A few of the remaining students looked after it with obvious longing as he carried it to the side of the chamber.

Liam, meanwhile, was still punching every ball that came near him.

He had settled into a defensive rhythm, keeping his back close to one of the walls so that nothing could reach him from behind, and whenever a ball flew toward him, he struck it away with a quick jab of his gloves.

He was not throwing much anymore, but he was making very certain that nothing touched him, and Ning had to admit that it was working.

Naysha was doing something similar with her staff, though she moved around the chamber far more than Liam did, batting balls away from herself and occasionally redirecting them toward the instructors when she saw an opening.

The instructors, however, were growing more aggressive.

With fewer students left to divide their attention between, they began concentrating their throws on whoever seemed most vulnerable, and the remaining cadets started falling faster than before.

A boy who had survived nearly the entire game with nothing but quick reflexes was caught by three balls thrown almost simultaneously, and a girl who had been hiding near the ceiling was struck when a ball came at her from an angle she never saw.

One by one, they sank toward the floor until only a handful of students were still in the air.