Linnie ducked and dodged, and the strikes he couldn't avoid left small cuts and gashes on his skin. Thankfully, none had been much worse than that.
"Marielle, calm down! You're actually going to kill him at this rate!" The Prince shouted.
She didn't react to his words.
"Maybe you should listen to him," Linnie suggested, out of breath.
She turned her head to The Prince.
"I'm carrying out an execution. Don't interrupt me, Sylven!"
In the small moment that her eyes were off of Linnie, he lunged forwards to place his hand on her face.
"FIREBALL!"
A small explosion enveloped the lady's head, leaving a ball of smoke. Linnie frowned for a second, wondering why his hand felt so strange.
The smoke cleared, revealing that she had effortlessely intercepted the attack with her sword. She was looking down at him from behind her sword as if he were nothing but a bug.
'No way I'm about to lose to this annoying girl! Damn it, not me! I don't lose like this!'
Going against his pride, he followed his instincts and jumped back. The two of them stared at each other, when, finally, something finally broke through her expressionless face.
An entitled, smug, disgusting sneer.
"You know, I haven't actually attacked you once. If I really wanted you dead, you wouldn't have survived the first strike."
He instinctively knew it was true. But she wasn't stupid. She wouldn't kill him for something so trivial. She just wanted to teach him a lesson. Well so did he!
Hearing that, he was enraged. He knew right then that he would never forgive himself if he lost this. He wouldn't let himself lose this childish fight that Alwyn had told him not to get into in the first place.
'Sorry Alwyn, this is all I'm good for, after all!'
In his rage, he found his hand in his pocket. For some reason, he had the urge to stick his hand inside. He furrowed his brow as his fingers came across a cool, mysterious object.
'The conduit? I thought I put it inside my hat... wait, this is it! What better time to try it out than now!?'
He pulled it out from his pocket, and Marielle looked at him with a confused glance.
"You think the same can't be said for me?" he said, raising the conduit out in front of him.
He stirred the mana within his core, bringing it to his hand. He wasn't sure if he would be able to figure out how to use the conduit, but, curiously, it seemed to use itself.
The mana was pulled from his hand without his own effort, causing him to smile devilishly. And then frown.
At first, it was simply an interesting feeling—then, the mana started feeling less like the flow of a river, and more like a pulling. It started off soft, then it became rough and almost... scratchy.
And, before long, he felt a flood of mana being violently ripped from his body and into the stone, without any say from him. Linnie realized something was awfully wrong, and tried to stop it. But there was nothing he could do.
The conduit started glowing orange, and bits of rock and unrefined material chipped off of it. Sitting in his palm, then, was a perfectly spherical orange orb.
In only a few seconds, Linnie felt every drop of mana in his body disappear. It was all within the conduit, preparing a spell he no longer wanted to cast.
Marielle continued to look confused—the other two to the side, too.
Linnie, who was the attacker, was the only one that was distraught.
'You idiots! Run! This thing's totally gonna—'
The magic made a harsh tearing sound as it escaped from the orb, as if it were ripping out from inside of a steel cage.
There was no real warning. One heartbeat, he was standing there, wide-eyed and still angry from the fight. The next, it seemed as if the world itself was shivering.
His vision went white as the spell released, completely removing any sense of direction or space.
A column of fire detonated outward from his hand. There was no careful shaping of the flame into a ball or any shape at all. It was raw and primal, like the eruption of a volcano. Yes, because, just like a volcano's flame, it didn't bloom.
The eruption sent a tidal wave of burning gold and orange that swallowed the street in an instant. The stone cracked beneath his feet, bursting with steam as the heat boiled the moisture out of them.
The air screamed in pain, drying out and combusting.
It wasn't a normal fireball. He recognized his mana, but there were traces of... something else, interlocked with each and every particle of his own.
An inferno exploded out from him, magnified far beyond anything even his body should've been able to produce. Because it wasn't just his body, but the conduit, too. Even though he was empty, he felt the orb continue to scrape his empty soul for everything it had.
He tried desperately to shut it down. he fought it, and clawed at his own wrist, trying to wrench his hand away. But it didn't matter, and his magic wasn't listening. If it was possible to stop such a thing in the first place, Linnie was far too inexperienced to do so.
And, on the other end was the lady. The other two were certainly doomed, too. Liora, The Prince, Marielle... would they all die?
Perhaps Liora would survive, thanks to her unique constitution. But that wasn't the point.
His heart sunk, and it was a scene all too familiar. He had experienced something similar—different, but too similar—in the alley that day. It was his own magic that left shadows of ash of his only friends, and his enemies alike.
He tried to shout, but there was no oxygen left for him to breathe. Even if he could speak, the roar of the blaze was sure to drown him out.
The wave of flame stretched down the narrow street, lighting up the stone walls and melting anything that was in its way. His own hands blistered from the fire's radiance—not that he could feel it.
It was the kind of spell that not even Alwyn would expect from him, much less Marielle. The poor girl hadn't expected this. No one could. This was power you'd expect from a seasoned battle-mage, not from a small kid who knew only a single spell.
And just when he thought it might actually kill him, too, the inferno snapped off, leaving the air shaking and the cobblestone glowing hot.
The entire street was covered in a thick steam, and Linnie fell to his knees from mana exhaustion.