eyes go wide as she flings out a hand, sending her web of blue magic toward the threat. “Cristina, no!”
Too late.
The dark-haired girl sends a blast of magic at me just before Tamlin’s magic wraps around her wrists. It erupts from her hand as a sort of transparent ball of red-orange light, and I know exactly what’ll happen if it touches me. I’ve been in class with Cristina for two and a half semesters; I’ve seen her use her disintegration power plenty of times.
I instinctively fire off a sonic boom toward her, leaping up onto the wall in a spider climb to dodge the ball of magic, which tears past the spot where I was standing just seconds earlier and hits the wall. Because this room is primarily used for combat training, the walls are enchanted to be resistant to damage, but her disintegration spell still makes bits of dust crumble from the gray stone.
Fuck. That means the blast she threw was strong enough to have done some serious damage if it’d hit me.
“You’re insane!” I shoot back.
“No, you are!” Alyssa’s practically shrieking by now, and the other students are following her lead. My sonic boom bowled a few people over, but they leap back to their feet quickly, and then a dozen different kinds of magic are thrown at me at once. I scramble up the wall, half sprinting, half crawling, trying to evade the mass of spells.
My heart’s pounding, blood is rushing in my ears, but the thing is—I don’t want to harm anyone. I don’t. If I use my sonic boom to its full extent, it’ll send all of them flying dangerously. They could get concussions. Break limbs. They could die. And my spider climb is only so good for evasion.
But—I used Tandy’s levitation powers a few minutes ago. I didn’t take them from her like Alyssa’s accusing me of at the top of her lungs. But I borrowed them, somehow. And I used Daria’s lightning power in Perkins’ class, and she didn’t lose her magic. So…
We learned this in one of our theory classes: if you want to cancel out someone else’s magic, you either have to use a spell that’s completely opposite—like fire and water—or you have to use the exact same spell. My innate powers aren’t exactly the opposite of anyone’s in this class. I don’t know what a sonic boom would be the opposite of anyway.
But… I can mimic their powers. Fight them off that way.
I don’t want to hurt anyone, and this could be the solution. I’ve never actually tried to mimic someone’s powers before. Or maybe mirror would be a better term. After all, mimicking is an imitation, and this is the real deal. It’s like I’m just suddenly able to do what they can do, at least temporarily.
I take a deep breath. Okay, Elliot, you can do this.
Another student steps forward to attack, and I focus on her, letting my body relax, remembering that odd feeling I got right before the lightning strike and the other blips of magic. She’s a first-year named Phoebe, and she can generate and manipulate light.
Okay, it’s on.
She summons a burst of light that’s nearly blinding and so hot it raises the temperature in the room several degrees. I reach out with my senses desperately, feeling the light power, trying to draw it into myself. Then I send a beam of light right back at her, making the two bright flashes flare in the air between us. They collide and seem to swell, pulsing like a single dying star before winking out.
Holy fuck. I did it.
I can’t help but grin a little in triumph. I can do this!
…maybe.
It’s still two dozen to one, and Tamlin’s yelling for people to stop, using her magic web to restrain a few students, but she’s also got poor Tandy writhing on the floor in front of her, screaming like her soul is on fire. Her focus is split, and she’s only one person.
Tristan, a guy with gravity manipulating power, uses it to force me down the wall—it’s a good thing I’m only about ten feet up, but it still hurts like a bitch when I land.
After the initial onslaught, my classmates took turns for a little while, but now everyone seems to realize that going after me one at a time is just ridiculous when there are far more of them than there are of me, and they all attack at once.