“That was an agonizingly slow match.” Kyris groaned, as he watched Kaos turn to sand.

  “We came to watch for our friends, not for the flavor.” Sepra glanced back somewhat sternly.

  Kyris held up his hands in surrender, “I got nothing against friends, but if he doesn’t figure something out soon, that’s as far as he’s ever going to get.”

  Sepra kept her eyes fixed on the arena and just nodded as the dueling ring shifted once again.

  They had been watching the first two team matches, and she had to say that she was impressed with how well Kaos’s team had been performing. This was the first time she was really getting a chance to watch Kaos and his team fight to this extent.

  While they were still leagues below the Dek class, they had all seemingly gotten strong enough to be somewhere in the top half of the Sen class.

  The problem wasn’t with Kaos’s current strength though, it was with his potential. He was only doing this well because of Mallyjax’s crossbow, and while he had a knack for combat, it wasn’t good enough to keep up with actual power.

  “There’s the last one!” Gilt said, pointing towards a newly arisen dueling ring which had just flung Nolly up out of the sand. “If she wins this one then everybody except Kaos goes to round 4.”

  While Sepra had been excited when Gilt and Vasai both won their matches, she was a little nervous now that if Nolly won, Kaos was going to be the only one of his team that lost in round 3.

  “He’ll figure it out” she mumbled under her breath, deciding to end the line of thought there.

  Nolly didn’t exactly land on her feet, but she did manage to land on one knee, getting up quickly, and readying her shield as she surveyed the dueling ring.

  This ring was completely empty, just a floor of lumpy sand and her opponent.

  While the floor would make it slightly more difficult to run, her opponent didn’t look very physically strong. But she knew well enough to not underestimate someone whose team made it through the first two rounds.

  Based on his lone dagger he was wielding, she figured he was some sort of agility type like Gilt.

  She was about to charge at him, but decided to not rush it until she knew a little more about her opponent. She eased forward, slowly walking with her shield readied in front of her.

  If it came to it, she could probably swing her halberd with one hand, but it was still a lot harder, and trickier to recover from a wild swing with it.

  She left her halberd on her back, and decided to focus on defending. Her opponent had been attempting to circle her and maintain some distance, but her continuous slow advance had put him in the spot of either committing to a confrontation, or being backed up against a wall.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Her opponent finally began to realize his position wasn’t going to get any better, and slowly began to approach as well.

  Suddenly he pushed forward his empty hand, with his palm outstretched, causing a cloud of black gas to obscure the short distance between him and Nolly.

  She instinctively jumped backwards, and caught a whiff of the black cloud, noticing it smelled something like a campfire.

  “So, probably not poisonous.” She mumbled to herself, eyes darting back and forth between both sides of the cloud.

  Suddenly, her opponent burst through the cloud, perhaps a stupid decision, but one she hadn’t expected. She didn’t have time to react to his swing, but he seemed just as blinded by the smoke as she was because his dagger glanced off her raised shield.

  He tumbled to the ground, but managed to roll to his feet and emit another black cloud, this time completely covering Nolly’s area.

  She started to cough from the smoke and realized that this was worse than she thought. She hadn’t been worried about him firing out more smoke, because he would also be blind in it. Her eyes and lungs were stinging, but she fought the urge to cough as she stumbled backwards through the smoke.

  As she broke out of the fog, she misplaced her footing on one of the small mounds of sand, and slipped backwards.

  Her opponent hadn’t made perfect use of the opportunity, but had almost reached her, with his dagger outstretched. She could use her wish, but she had no momentum, it seemed like there was no way out of this until she remembered something that made her panic seem quite silly.

  “I’m a lot bigger than this guy” she grunted to herself, swinging her shield in the path of the knife.

  The impact not only made her opponent lose his grip on the knife, it made him spiral to the ground.

  His wish had definitely caught her off guard, and almost cost her the match, but he made a major mistake getting too cautious and not going for the kill while she was surprised.

  She rolled onto her hands and knees and then sprung to her feet while her opponent was still reeling from the impact. He didn’t even seem to notice her presence until she brought her kite shield down on his skull, instantly turning him to sand.

  While to Nolly this seemed like a hard and well fought battle, from the stands where Kyris and Sepra had been sitting, it looked a lot more like a match full of a comical amount of blunders on both sides, eventually boiling down to Nolly being much stronger than her opponent.

  “I mean that was definitely the weakest person any of their team faced,” Kyris shrugged, “but still three out of four is a pretty good success rate for their team in round three.”

  Sepra didn’t immediately respond as she thought about how Kaos would probably feel once he found out he did the worst on his team.

  “They all did pretty good, but I doubt they will make it through the next round” she finally replied with an almost hopeful tone.

  “I mean Vasai has a shot, but I agree that the other two aren’t going through the next round.” Kyris paused for a moment, and then continued, seeming to not pick up the slightest inkling of Sepra's mood, “But let’s be honest here, if you had to rank their team, how would you do it?”

  “I don’t know how I feel about ranking my friends.” Sepra replied, attempting to dodge the question.

  “Yeah, whatever.” Kyris chuckled, rolling his eyes, “If there’s anybody that can separate a fight and a friendship, it's you.”

  “Sure.” She responded, not really agreeing with him, but not completely disagreeing either.

  “Well,” He began again unprompted, “I’d personally say that Vasai is the best on the team, then Gilt, Nolly, and then your buddy Kaos. That sound about right to you?”

  She thought for a moment about changing up her rankings for the sake of Kaos, but then remembered her fight with him in the arena. It was worse for her to pretend he wasn’t weak.

  “Yeah,” she responded, “that ranking sounds about right to me.”