“There they are,” Marcus shouted, and sure enough, behind the phalanx of soldiers, the Red Team stood five strong—three guys and two girls, dressed in their Mage Trials gear, so similar to our own. Short capes, long tunics and tights, boots. All five of them wore the identical dark crimson attire, while my team and the teams that were coming into the games this year varied in colors. The guys on the Mage Runners all wore black tunics and tights with short capes, whereas my outfit was bright red. Kind of made me stand out in a crowd, and sure enough, as we hit the edge of the battle, the Red Team turned our way, one of them gesturing more defiantly.
Chaos reigned. Instantly, the battle changed from a swarm of soldiers attacking the Twyst Academy students to creatures that looked like fire-breathing lizards. Not dragons, not exactly, because they didn’t possess wings. Instead, the lizards leapt and scurried, jumped and twisted all around. They still bore the trademark deep-red skin that marked them as creations of the Red Team, and I shouted both in my head and aloud, not sure which communication would reach the guys faster.
“Angie is an illusionist, right?” I asked, referring to one of the girls on the Red Team, arguably one of their strongest mages. “These are all different constructs of the same magic?”
“Bingo,” Luke shouted back, and we surged forward and into the battle.
Illusions or not, the lizards were effectively getting the job done, particularly against the Dream Spinners. I didn’t know their team very well, but the four guys and one girl who made up their number had gotten split off from the Scorpions and Spell Seers, and one was being dragged away by one of the creatures as the others battled valiantly to reach him. Luke, Connor, Rafe, Marcus, and I rushed toward the group and their fallen comrade, but the other creatures, sensing a successful attack, split off from the main battle and joined the fray.
We were still more than twenty feet away when the first of the Dream Spinners disappeared, a development that stopped the others cold.
“No!” screamed the girl in horror and rage, honestly far more of the latter than I would’ve expected with the collapse of one of her teammates. She whirled on the nearest creature, shoving one of her other teammates in front of her to shield her as she lifted her hands to create more magic. That proved to be a bad move, as a creature attacked her teammate. He stumbled and dropped to one knee. I expected him to disappear as well, but to my surprise, he lashed out not at the creature, but at the girl. I watched in shock as the two started fighting each other, not the creatures at all, and then, just as quickly, disappeared from view.
“The others—get them—” Connor called, but it was no use. The remaining teammates of the Dream Spinners disappeared a second later.
“What the hell was that?” I demanded in my outside voice, but the guys were already turning, their faces grim as they launched themselves toward the main battle again. Rafe, closest to me, grabbed my hand when I instinctively moved forward to where the last of the fallen Dream Spinners had dropped in the center of a scrum of lizards.
“He’s gone,” Rafe shouted as he caught my other hand and pulled me around. The shock of his touch ripped through me, the pain almost comforting now.
“What do you mean he’s gone? How can he be gone?”
“I mean he’s out of the game,” Rafe said, shaking me a little. “That leaves only the Spell Seers, Scorpions, and us, and we’ve got to get rid of these fucking Red Team assholes. I never pegged the Dream Spinners to get this far anyway. They sucked as a team, held together more by spite than power, but they didn’t deserve that.”
He yanked me toward the battle, and this time, I went. As I did, I thought about how the two teammates had gone after each other, with hate in their eyes. How was that possible if they’d bonded? It never even occurred to me that the connection between team members could be compromised in such a way. Rafe broke away from me as we hit the battlefront, and Marcus spoke into my head.
“There are all sorts of reasons why teams bond together to win the Mage Trials. The Dream Spinners wouldn’t be the first to do so for practical ambition. Those teams can win as easily as the ones that have the stronger emotional connection. Sometimes more easily, because they don’t give each other any slack. It can be an effective strategy. But not if things go south.”
“No kidding,” I muttered, but I didn’t have any more time to think about it—not with all the firepower we were shoving down the throats of the lizard crew. When I looked up again, above the fray of attacking creatures, the Red Team was nowhere in sight. We battled on until the line of lizards diminished, fell back, and finally disappeared.
We all stopped the moment the last of them were gone, staggering a little to the side, blowing and heaving. I didn’t miss how Rafe immediately approached the blonde leader of the Scorpions, doubled over in a deep-blue tunic and tights, her short cape wrenched askew. Rafe straightened it and bent toward her, and my hands flexed.
Marcus had moved beside me, his chuckle low but distinct. “Cynthia’s no threat to you,” he said softly. “You have to know that.”
“Nobody’s a threat to me,” I snapped, and the words carried far more resonance than I expected them to, as if the very ground took notice and shivered in response. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Marcus smile his odd half smile.
“That’s my girl,” he murmured.
By now, Rafe had turned back to us, and the five of us met in the center of the battlefield, several yards away from the other two teams.
“They’re not surprised the Dream Spinners dropped either,” Rafe reported. “Probably just as well. They would’ve been a liability going forward.”
“Still, bodies are bodies,” I pointed out. “If we have to face the final challenge on our own, that’s one thing, but if we’re all together when the Big Bad Evil attacks…”
“There’s no way of knowing what that Evil is, though,” Marcus countered, straightening his own clothes. “Sometimes in the Trials, all competing teams are pitted against a common evil, sometimes the challenges seek out the teams individually. Of course, this year, everything is standing on its head, so it’s even harder to say what to expect.”
I still didn’t like it. The Red Team had become more than a nuisance. With one well-positioned attack, they’d literally cut down our chances of surviving the fourth level by a quarter. I didn’t know what our final challenge would be in the Mage Trials, but this didn’t feel good.
“So what’s next?” I grumbled.
A new voice broke across our group. “What’s next is that we all band together as one large team.” To my surprise, it was Cynthia who spoke. I turned to her, startled. She lifted her chin as our gazes met. We weren’t friends by any stretch, but we’d certainly moved toward greater civility with each other in the weeks I’d been at Twyst Academy as a student and not a janitor. Now, however, she looked at me as if I wasn’t fit to polish her shoes.
“There’s far too much at stake here with the Mage Trials and Twyst Academy as a whole,” she stated emphatically. “You wouldn’t understand. You’re not a competitor whose families have all gone here, but we are.”
She gestured around to the other competing teams, though her wave didn’t include Luke. My lip curled. Luke wasn’t one of them, and neither was I. Resentment simmered as I thought of that, even as Rafe shook his head.