The Curse of the beauty

Little fish, even bigger pond

The crowd stared, dead silence reigning over the stands as they looked upon what Emma had wrought. A literal mountain of ice lay in the arena, dominating the battlefield, disrupting the video stream they had been watching.

In one corner sat Emma, ass on the ground and panting, drawing in as much Sol as she humanely could without self-immolating. She had dealt a harsh blow to her opponent, but had no delusions about having won the battle. Main Characters always had fucking cheats shoved up their asses till they burped, or had somehow survived with only minor wounds. She gripped the sand beneath her hands, the pain of pulling and expanding so much Sol at once wanting to make her curl up and cry.

She could still sense him, below the ice. Where he touched the ground, her control died. He was moving slowly, faltering as he slowly advanced out from beneath a mountain that would have crushed anyone else. Part of her wanted to scream at the unfairness, but only a small part.

The rest of her, now cold and calculating, told that part to go shut up and sit in the corner, or else. This was one fight she couldn't afford to lose, at any costs. If she was ever dragged into a Main Character's personal circle, she would never be her own woman again. She would either slowly come to worship him, die in one of his battles, or die betraying him. So, her only option remained, to crush him completely. She wasn't allowed to kill, but she would break him, here and now.

By focusing on the ground and ice, she could feel what he was doing. He was focusing his power in a directional sphere, dissipating the ice in front of him. No, wait, he was shifting it upwards. No, that wasn't right either, it wasn't impacting the ice above, it was melting with it, then moving further up.

....Was the motherfucker TURNING BACK TIME?

The more she looked at it, the more the horrible realization struck her. Yes, he was. She was playing out a classic story right now. Uber powerful, overconfident foreign mage defeated by a handsome warrior through the clever use of an exotic power.

Fuck that. She was going to fight hard if the little bitch wanted it. She could run rings around him in versatility and deceit.

Gritting her teeth, she drove her power beneath the ground, under his feet and sphere of influence, diving into the soil itself. She hit twenty feet, then spread out, taking control of the tightly condensed earth.

At the same time, she seized the iceberg and began returning the ice to water, letting it flood the arena, turning sand to mud. With a vicious twist, she broke the crown of it into gigantic, bus sized slivers of ice, humongous daggers that she guided to the ground, positioning them to face where she estimated he would emerge.

"And the Demon is preparing yet another vicious attack on the Young Dragon, intent on striking him as soon as he emerges. Truly, such a cowardly tactic. Does her mind know no shame as to stoop this far?"

As the crowd booed, her fingers itched, just WANTING to throw an ice boulder at wherever the voice was coming from, but she wasn't going to waste precious time and energy on that asshat's opinion.

Almost to the surface of the iceberg, Lyssen's pace had slowed to a crawl, becoming slower and slower with each passing moment. So, the more time had elapsed, the harder it was to turn back? A ray of hope shone through her mind, letting her know that his powers weren't completely broken after all.

Her power went deeper and deeper. Deeper. Farther into the dark, cold earth. She hit fifty feet, then sixty. Slowly, straining, she formed an area, twenty feet in diameter around where she guessed he would emerge, and began compacting the dirt outwards, hollowing it away.

She knelt down, closing her eyes and bracing herself. Even if it worked, the backlash from this would be tremendous, almost knocking her unconscious.

He burst from the ice, flourishing his sword in a grand sweep as shards of ice rained down around him. Robes untouched, not a scratch on him. Hell, he didn't even look tired from all the Sol he had just spent.