Chương 58: The Water Mage

Liam had been driven to the back of the field on purpose, and it took him longer than he'd have liked to notice it was happening. The tidekin fought like water finds low ground, always pushing him one direction, and by the time Liam caught the pattern he was well away from the others, in an open stretch where the only two things that mattered were his sand and the three-meter blue horror raising a trident against him.

Streams of high-pressure water crossed the space between them, and Liam threw up sand to break them, and the sand held, and the fight found its shape. It was a bad shape for him, and he knew it in the first thirty seconds. The water was fast, faster than his sand, and there was a lot of it, and every stream that hit his walls left them wet, and wet sand was heavy sand, sluggish and hard to move, the exact material his whole style depended on turning traitor in his hands.

He blocked and blocked and felt his control thicken with each block, and across the field the tidekin didn't even look strained, water beading off its skin, trident lazy in its grip.

"I will be killing you today." The thing's voice was flat and formal and certain.

"As sad as it is. Be grateful I'm the one to do it. I'll make it quick." Liam, who had never in his life let a threat go unanswered, called back across the water, "Is that really how you talk? And honestly, you're extremely ugly. Also why are you so tall? What is wrong with you?" The tidekin stopped.

For a full second the water pressure dropped, the thing genuinely thrown, and Liam noted the reaction with interest, because a monster that could be rattled by being called ugly was a monster with an ego, and an ego was a weakness he could reach even when he couldn't reach the body. He didn't know the half of it.

He couldn't have known that the thing across from him had spent decades as an assistant at a mage tower on a drowning world, mid water affinity and hopeless at mana manipulation, watching younger students master in months what took him a lifetime, never good enough to be more than help.

He couldn't know that he was, to this creature, the exact shape of every genius who'd passed him by, a boy who'd learned mana manipulation in weeks and thrown it around like it was easy, and that the tidekin hated him with a specific personal fury that had nothing to do with the abyss. Liam just knew he'd gotten under its skin, and that was enough to work with. They settled into a long-range exchange, and it did not go well for Liam.

The tidekin was a real mage, a genuinely skilled one, decades of water manipulation behind every attack even with the system holding its old mastery down, and it out-ranged him and out-volumed him and made him spend sand faster than he could shape it. Liam gave ground. He blocked, he dodged, he threw the occasional sand spear that the water swatted aside, and he felt himself being slowly, competently dismantled by something that had been doing this since before he was born. This text was taken from Royal Road.

Help the author by reading the original version there. But Liam had two things the tidekin didn't. He had a genius for mana manipulation that the creature would have killed for. And he grew, in the fight, at a speed that would have made the tidekin weep if it had understood what it was watching. He started slow and got faster.

His sand control tightened under pressure, his casting cheapened, his reads on the water sharpened, and somewhere in the exchange his mana manipulation itself crossed a threshold he'd been grinding toward for weeks and clicked over into Apprentice, and everything got easier at once. The gap between them, a canyon at the start, narrowed by the minute, and the tidekin felt it and did not understand it and started, for the first time, to press harder. Liam stopped playing defense and started building.

He raised a dome. Not a wall, a dome, sand curving up and over the whole battlefield around them, blotting out the sky, and inside it he went to work in the dark while the tidekin thrashed at the walls with water. He set a sand hand loose to grab at the thing's legs and keep it busy. He used the new depth of his manipulation to make the whole floor of the dome unstable, quicksand pulling at the creature's feet, forcing it to burn mana just to stay upright and dry.

And then, while it was distracted clearing the dome and freeing its legs, Liam did the thing he'd been setting up the whole time. He went underground. Sand Submerge, a skill he'd barely tested, let him sink into his own sand and breathe there and move through it, and his natural affinity for the material let him sense everything inside the dome the way the tidekin sensed water, a full map of the enemy's position painted in grains. He vanished from the surface entirely.

The tidekin, blind in the dark dome, water attacks splashing at shadows, could not find him. It panicked, the way a creature panics when its whole advantage evaporates, and it reached for the attack it was proudest of. Water Whirlpool, its signature, decades of practice poured into one move, a roaring tornado of water that it unleashed at full strength to blast the dome apart. It worked. It tore a huge hole in Liam's sand and cleared half the battlefield and would have killed Liam if Liam had been on the surface.

Liam was not on the surface. He was under it, sensing the tidekin's exact position through the sand, waiting for the thing to spend its biggest move on empty air, and he'd emptied his mana storage and most of his pool building to this, one shot, no second chance. A hand of sand erupted from the ground and seized the tidekin's leg, and before it could burn the water to escape, Liam brought down the thing he'd been saving all his remaining mana for.

A spear of sand, enormous, driven down from above with everything he had left. The tidekin threw up a water shield. It wasn't enough. The sand spear went through the shield and through the tidekin and into the ground, and the three-meter water mage that had been so certain it would make this quick died pinned to the earth of a field on a world it had come to conquer, killed by the exact kind of genius it had spent a lifetime resenting.

Liam surfaced, gray and shaking and completely empty, and sat down hard in his own ruined sand. He'd won on the last of everything. Mana storage gone, pool gone, running on the mana potions Mia had pressed on all of them before they left, and even those nearly dry. If the fight had gone thirty seconds longer he'd have had nothing left to fight it with.

It had been the closest thing to a real duel he'd ever had, against something with decades of skill he'd matched with weeks of talent and one desperate plan, and he'd come out the other side a better mage than he'd gone in, his manipulation a full rank higher, his understanding of his own affinity deeper for having been pushed to its edge.

"Ugly and tall," he said to the corpse, because he couldn't quite help it, and then he made himself get up, because his mana was crawling back and his family was still fighting and Liam Morningstar had never once known how to stay down.