Chapter 60.3- Doom Days

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I noticed Volkov off to the side of the room, With only two of us in here, it was a much larger room than it had been in the beginning. But in this case, it served the prurpose of not forcing m into close proximity with the person I was going to be dueling in a matter of minutes. I took my seat and watched the wheel spin. Sandstorm. The sandstorm formed faster than it ever had, and as it did so, displays all over the stadium came to life, broadcasting the duel for those who didn’t want to strain their eyes trying to stare through the sandstorm.

Just as we had gotten better at adapting to the environments over time, the organisers had also gotten better at creating them. Cece stood in an alert stance, facing her opponent, knees bent to allow her move with a second’s notice and body bent in such a way as to make her as small a target as possible.

From a purely technical perspective, Cece and Angel were probably the two best here (not including me of course) and it showed in how solid her stance was. Okonkwo on the other hand stood still, facing her. She didn’t bother with any sort of stance, just waiting for the duel to begin. At this point, I doubted that she actually knew any and I would have thought her the lesser threat for it if I hadn’t seen what she could do to the careless and overeager.

The referee started the duel and Cece struck first, two piercing curses. Okonkwo’s backhand lashed out, slapping both spells to the side quite literally as she snapped the fingers on her other hand. Vines tore from the ground, reaching for Cece’s feet. With a twist of her wand, she set them on fire, and then jumped to the side once it became clear that they were gong to keep coming.

Okonkwo’s fingers snapped and even more vines shot from the ground. Cece moved faster than I’d ever seen her, using cutting curses to good effect. I didn’t know the specific curse she was using. It left her wand as an arc of black magic that both cut and eroded the vines from where they shot out of the ground. Well, it was clearly a cutting curse, just a darker variation than usual. Probably something native to Asia.

Okonkwo was nonplussed. She wriggled her fingers and sang something in Igbo. The ground beneath Cece’s feet seemed to begin to shake. She was quick to roll to the side and it was good that she did so as two ends of a giant Venus flytrap looking plant closed around the space she had been. Okonkwo snapped her fingers, vines shooting from the ground to catch the spells Cece tried to pin her down with, on their surfaces.

The Venus flytrap thing turned on its own, the vine that produced it coming further out of the ground before it turned in Cece’s direction. Too busy trying to bypass Okonkwo’s unorthodox defence, she was barely able to shield in time as the flytrap opened up and belched out a torrent of purple flames.