The spikes pierced the student's thighs and shins, nailing him to the floor with horrifying force. The boy's legs gave out with a scream of pure agony, and as he fell forward, his own weight slammed him directly onto the jagged, razor-sharp edges of the freshly frozen wave in front of him. The ice impaled his side and shoulder. The floor immediately began to stain dark red as a frantic amount of blood gushed from him.
Seconds later, a massive, impenetrable palisade of razor-sharp spikes erupted around Ema in multiple overlapping tiers—a terrifying cage of ice that sealed her off completely from the rest of the hall.
Panic broke out. The less experienced students started leaping backward, screaming, scrambling as far away from the center of the action as possible. Even they understood that this was vastly beyond their level, and that a single hit meant death. Some of their golems, stripped of their creators' control and possessing low autonomy, began crashing aimlessly into walls or simply crumbled back into dust and dirt.
"Get back! Everyone, away from Volná immediately!" Vector Šimr roared. His voice carried such resonance that the students' ears popped. While bracing his stance, he raised his left hand and traced two quick, fluid circles in the air. The air in the hall thickened instantly, and beneath the feet of those who had tripped in shock and panic or frozen in place, miniature, rotating vortexes of compressed wind formed. The invisible force grabbed them and, with incredible speed, swept them dozens of meters away to the safety of the stadium's edge.
In that exact same second, Šimr thrust his right arm forward in an offensive stance. From his palm, driven by absolute control over energy, a blazing wall of white fire lashed out, instantly forming into a pack of burning dolphins mid-air. The flames leaped through the space with a loud hiss, ready to melt the ice barricade to dust.
But the statue acted like a thinking entity. It raised both arms, pulled all the moisture from the surrounding air, flash-froze it, and then whipped it around itself using a swirling wind. A literal, miniature ice tornado was born. Šimr's pupils dilated. She combined water, temperature manipulation, and wind kinetics, flashed through his mind. For a first attempt, that was absolutely unthinkable.
The burning dolphins smashed into the ice vortex. A deafening explosion shook the hall, and the entire Department was instantly flooded with blinding, thick steam. The temperature in the hall spiked by ten degrees in a second, the air grew heavy with unbearable humidity, and visibility dropped to zero through the white fog.
Šimr immediately capitalized on the chaos. With a short, sharply aimed gesture of his left hand, he sent an invisible blade of compressed air toward the fallen student. With surgical precision, it severed the ice spikes right at the boy's skin—Šimr knew he couldn't pull the ice out of the wounds; it had to stay there as a plug against bleeding out. A second later, he formed a resilient cushion of wind beneath the student and, with a lightning-fast motion, slid him to the edge of the stadium.
Beata was already waiting there. With her face drawn tight in absolute concentration and her hands covered in blood, she dropped to her knees beside the boy. Her floral fairy dissolved into a swarm of luminescent pollen that immediately soaked into the boy's open wounds. Along with two other upperclassmen, she began aggressively intervening in his torn bodily structure.
Beata looked up from the wound for a split second, aimed her left palm at the boy's legs, and with a deep breath, channeled a piece of her power into the ground beneath him. "Bind!" she growled. In that same moment, thick, unyielding vines of thorny creepers and ivy surged from the cracks in the concrete, fueled by her will and the remaining floral energy of the fairy. With a loud crackling, they wrapped around the boy's ankles and calves, pinning him to the floor with lightning-fast, inhuman strength. The boy screamed in inhuman agony as their power forcefully knitted his muscles together and crushed the tissue back into its original shape, uncompromisingly pushing the shards of ice out.
While the healers fought for the boy's life, Vector Šimr finally had his hands free for an offensive. But he wasn't alone. Tomáš and Libor surged forward. They were experienced. For them, this was no longer just a magic shootout; it was a battle to rewrite the laws of physics on the field.
The ice construct reacted immediately, launching a lightning-fast volley of massive, deadly ice spears. Tomáš didn't even break his stride. His steel knight stepped forward, moving with fluid, practiced precision that contrasted sharply with its heavy armor. When the first spear shot toward it, the knight perfectly angled its heavy shield. The projectile glanced harmlessly off the steel and shattered against a distant wall. But the second spear struck with far greater brutality. The impact caused the reinforced shield to buckle under the pressure, crack, and then explode into a thousand shards. Tomáš's golem didn't hesitate for a second. As the third spear hurtled toward it, the knight shot its arm out and caught the two-meter weapon mid-flight, right by its icy shaft. With a mighty, grinding rotation of its entire torso, the steel knight spun, using the spear's momentum, and hurled it back at the ice monster with murderous accuracy. The golem then lowered its stance slightly, locked its gaze on the ice statue, and with clear, almost cheeky autonomy, raised its heavy steel hand to flip it a massive middle finger.
Libor stopped. He took a deep breath, placed his fingers to his lips, and condensed sound with the force of his will. What came out of his mouth wasn't a whistle, but a crushing, high-frequency resonance. The sound waves took on the visible form of pulsating notes that slammed directly into the structure of the ice like projectiles. It was smart—he wasn't trying to smash the ice with brute force; he was trying to vibrate it apart from the inside.
The floor around the statue began to crack with thunderous snaps as the concrete failed to withstand the frequency. The ice palisade started to crumble. But then something happened that no one expected. Instead of attacking Libor, the statue turned and covered Ema's limp body with its own. Coarse chunks of cracking concrete and falling ice rained down on its back, but it didn't budge. That trace of love, that tiny spark Ema had put into it at the very beginning, was still there. It was protecting its creator.
"Libor, hold up! You're aiming too close to her!" Tomáš roared over the noise of the destruction. He stopped, clasped his hands together, and closed his eyes. The air around the ice statue rippled. Tomáš wasn't attacking the matter; he was attacking its timeline. He attempted to rewrite reality by reversing the entropy of the statue itself, forcing it back into a state where it was just a formless block of ice. Golden sparks arced over the ice woman. Overcoming the foreign will that Ema had imbued it with was immensely difficult, but he partially succeeded. The perfect, smooth features of the woman began to deform. She lost her razor-sharp elegance; her form collapsed back into a crude, blunt mass of ice that was clumsy and slow.
Vector Šimr seized that exact moment. "Out of the way!" he bellowed at the students and looked straight up at the gigantic artificial sun suspended beneath the vaulted ceiling of the Department. He thrust both hands toward the floor and, with a terrifying jerk of his entire body, localized and reversed gravity in a three-meter radius. The crude, clumsy block of ice tore away from the ground with a deafening crack and shot straight up, vertically, right toward the blazing light source.
Šimr left nothing to chance. He jerked his right palm sharply toward himself, literally ripping a column of concentrated fire down from the artificial sun to meet the flying statue, intending to incinerate it mid-air.
But the ice golem, driven by a primal instinct for self-preservation, demonstrated terrifying spatial logic. While still in flight, it reached out a crude arm and, using its power, ripped a massive chunk of concrete lintel from the ceiling. It didn't throw it at Šimr, though. It hurled the one-ton block at a sharp angle directly beneath itself. A split second later, it pushed off against it at full speed. The kinetic force of the impact acted as a perfect springboard. While the concrete block instantly vanished into the column of falling fire, melting into dust, the ice statue rebounded off it with a crushing crack and took a sharp, opposing trajectory. It narrowly escaped the fiery doom and crashed back down onto the stadium floor with a massive thud.
The impact and the omnipresent heat from the previous attacks took their toll. Its perfect structure was melting massively. Thick streams of water, resembling tears, flowed down its cracked, deformed face, as if the deep, bottomless sorrow of its creator had fully and nakedly imprinted itself upon it in the last seconds of its existence. Yet it refused to give up. Its alien pride, born of the darkest hatred, wouldn't allow it to accept defeat and let its enemies win.
Instead of surrendering, the golem spun violently. In a final, suicidal act of destruction, the statue drew in all its residual energy and let its own source explode. Its mass blew apart in a flash, transforming into thousands of miniature, razor-sharp icicles that shot out from the spinning center like all-destroying shrapnel, straight into the crowd of onlookers.
But the more experienced students didn't wait for the steam to settle. They reacted in a flash. With a massive roar, hastily formed physical and energetic barriers erupted around them and the paralyzed freshmen. Tomáš's battered steel knight lunged forward, spreading its massive arms, catching the densest wave of ice needles on its armor. Kryštof's battered wooden horse served as a massive living barricade, the spikes mercilessly sinking into it. The icicles drummed against the shields like sharp machine-gun fire, ricocheted off the concrete, and shattered to dust until the very last one dropped harmlessly away. Then there was nothing left. Only a spilled puddle of water and shattered ice.
A deathly, heavy-breathing silence fell over the room. A battle had just taken place here that absolutely did not belong in a beginner's training session. Those students who still had their wits about them after the massacre, and possessed healing abilities, immediately rushed to the others and began mending the bleeding wounds.
Šimr walked briskly over to Ema. Her uniform was torn in several places, and she was bleeding from minor scrapes on her hands caused by flying shards of ice. He knelt beside her, pressing two fingers to the artery in her neck, which was pulsing wildly. The teacher let out a long, heavy exhale and wiped the sweat from his forehead.