Foxtails and Fairytales: Facades and Fables of the Phantom Prince

[Arc 9] Ch. 5 Warlock's Tricks

Shannon

What...

What just happened? What did I just see?

Hyde had somehow managed to read my every move. Everything! It was like he was playing with me and just when I though I had him THAT happened.

I looked down at my hand where my sword had been a moment before. My loyal sword that could pierce anything. The one that I had spent all this time honing. It was my spell. Mine! A blade of ice that could slice through and freeze anything it touched. I had boosted my resistances to the max so that I could hold it without it freezing my hand. My resistance was my pride and joy.

Building up your resistance was a side-effect of your mastery. The better I was at the ice part of water magic the less it would hurt if used against me. On top of that, I had trained my speed and swordsmanship so that I could end a match in seconds since the spell to maintain my sword was so costly.

But at this moment, my heartbeat was drowning out the crowd's cheers for me. Hyde had been sent tumbling behind me, but my sword hadn't pierced him. It was only a moment and I'm sure if it hadn't been for luck, I never would have noticed exactly what had happened. The moment my sword should have pierced his outstretched hand, his eyes...

... by the spirits his EYES! HYDE HAD DEMON EYES! And they weren't like anything I'd ever seen or experienced before. Most demon eyes were fairly simple in design even if they had a complex purpose. But Hyde's were unsettlingly complex. Red magic circles spun, grew, and shrunk. They were layered so thickly there must have been hundreds, no thousands of them since they filled up the whites of his eyes. They looked like they stretched beyond that covering his entire eyeball with a sea of swirling blood red circles and symbols.

He only showed them for a moment. The moment right before his hand touched my sword. I replayed the moment in my head of my sword disintegrating before him. Hyde even had the presence of mind to roll in the air so that he wouldn't crash into me. The audience had completely misread the situation. I'd been outplayed, outsmarted, and outmatched.

I... I couldn't touch him with my magic, I couldn't freeze him with my spells, and I couldn't cut him with my sword. His resistance must have been far greater than mine... which could only mean that he was truly the better mage. The moment he had shattered my ice lance with his own I had completely misread the situation.

I had thought he had simply smashed it with his fist... but when he had cast that spell, he was testing our resistances. His spell hadn't shattered it, it had stolen the magic that created it. For someone with a lower resistance than mine it would have never worked so I had brushed it off. But he had wasted nothing. And when I was about to stab him, he had cast my spell and had stolen my sword via the magic that created and maintained it.

I felt my vision blur a little at the fringes as I stared at my empty hand. My heart thundered in my ears and my world spun. Those eyes, that magic, his skill. He... he was a monster... is this what it was like to fight a Warlock? This... fear.

He... he could kill me.

Am I going to die?

Could I even hope to survive this match?

By sheer force of will I turned around to see him stand up. He didn't have a sword in his hand... he had a wand. An ice wand that looked exactly like mine.

No...

He had done everything up to this point without a focus. He had done this much with his bare hands and now he had a wand. My wand, made with my magic. He held it above his head and his sharpened teeth sent shivers through me as he grinned.