Reborn as the Archmage's Rival
Chapter 35: Eye of Dominion

Chapter 35: Eye of Dominion

The duel circle pulsed once with white light, then settled into a deep amber glow beneath their feet.

Lucien Ashford stepped forward into the ring, eyes half-lidded, posture relaxed. Not out of arrogance—but focus. His hands hung loosely by his sides, fingers uncurled, shoulders balanced. If he felt pressure, he didn’t show it. If he was excited, he kept it buried.

Across from him, Arin Valis moved like a flicker of candlelight. Her footsteps made no sound, but the static in the air thickened with each pace. Her silver-white hair had been pulled into a high braid, strands threaded with filament-thin lightning arcs that danced lazily across her shoulders and down her gloves. She was every bit the prodigy her reputation promised—refined, fluid, dangerous.

They stopped ten paces apart.

The surrounding arena had quieted. A low thrumming hum settled around them as the spell-circle completed its cycle, inscribing the boundary—no escape, no interference.

Arin offered a formal bow, precise and low, without lowering her gaze.

Lucien mirrored it, slightly shallower.

Then they rose.

Darius leaned forward from the student seats, elbows on knees, eyes sharp. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. He knew this fight intimately. He’d written it. He’d imagined it as a crucible—a test meant to force Lucien out of a period of quiet frustration. He remembered how hard it had been to write Lucien’s internal stagnation after all his early triumphs. A wall the boy couldn’t name, only feel. This duel was meant to burn that wall down.

But now, watching it with his own eyes, in the body of someone who would’ve died long before this Chapter unfolded—he realized something else.

This wasn’t a story anymore.

This was real.

A soft chime echoed across the arena.

The duel had begun.

Lucien moved first.

No chant. No posture. No dramatic gesture.

He simply flicked his right wrist, and three bursts of flame bloomed in the air around him, arranged in a tight triangle. They shot forward with a high whine, curving toward Arin in elegant spirals—precise, targeted, and fast.

Arin didn’t flinch.

She raised her palm and angled two fingers toward the floor. From the ground surged a thin barrier of crackling energy, translucent and pale-blue, rippling like water disturbed by thunder. The fireballs didn’t crash—they skimmed the surface, redirected upward in a graceful arc. One exploded harmlessly into the sky, the other two streaked past her shoulders and vanished.

Even before the last ember faded, Arin’s other hand had already drawn a cutting arc through the air. A line of white electricity snaked forward—razor-thin, aimed to slice Lucien’s leg out from under him.

Lucien stepped aside as if he’d seen it before she cast it.

The bolt grazed past his ankle, striking the dueling ring’s edge with a sharp hiss, and vanished.

Darius blinked.

No wasted movement. He’s not rushing to dominate. He’s watching her work. Letting her show her rhythm.

Lucien responded with a pressure burst—a condensed ring of force that exploded outward from his body in a sphere. It wasn’t meant to injure—it was a probe, a push, to force Arin back, to break her stance.

But Arin flowed with it.

She turned with the force, lifted by her own lightning, allowing the concussive pulse to carry her into a mid-air spin. Mid-twist, she lashed out with a javelin of compressed current. Not a bolt—solid. Dense. Sharpened with electric torque.

Lucien ducked low, the crackling weapon whistling past his head. His foot tapped the floor twice, and a gust of cutting air spiraled up beneath Arin’s arc.

She countered instantly, tucking her knees and pulling lightning around herself like a cocoon. The gust folded around her, unable to penetrate.

She landed, graceful as ever, knees slightly bent, aura singing.

Cheers erupted from the student stands, then quieted again.

This wasn’t a slugfest. It wasn’t wild.

It was a chess match played with spells.

Lucien stepped again—barefooted now, shoes discarded in the pre-fight preparation. He moved quieter that way. His next spell came without any outward motion. A cluster of obsidian-like shards blinked into being around him—raw arcane constructs shaped into daggers, humming softly.

He sent them forward—silent, precise, one after the other.

Arin saw the trick immediately.

They were decoys. Not meant to hit—but to make her focus forward.

She did the opposite.

Instead of redirecting them, she let them pass, eyes locked on Lucien’s feet.

And then she struck the floor.

Electric veins rippled outward from her strike point, seeking Lucien’s exact footing.

He recognized the attack just as it reached him.

His counter came with an elegant twist of his wrist. The floor beneath him rippled—not from wind or water, but from spatial compression. The lightning strike passed through where he’d been, now replaced by displaced air.

He reappeared behind her, just outside striking distance.

Arin turned sharply, bringing both hands forward in a wide arc. Lightning rippled from her gloves like dancing serpents, converging into a pronged assault from either side. She wasn’t waiting anymore. Her tempo was rising.

Lucien met it.

He stepped forward—through the arcs of lightning.

And cast a dampening spell, not in front of him, but around him—a soft, muting field that dissolved the charge before it touched skin. Not perfect. A few arcs snapped across his coat, burning lines into the fabric.

But he pushed through, bringing his hand low and then up—ice forming in a spiraling ribbon from palm to wrist. A thin, curved blade of cold.

He slashed forward.

Arin met it with a rotating bolt, spinning around her wrist like a staff.

The two collided in a spray of frost and static.

The force of the clash threw them both back—Lucien sliding half a step, Arin flipping mid-air and landing in a crouch. Her boots skidded against the stone.

They stared at each other.

Neither breathing heavily. Yet.

Still conserving, Darius thought, fists clenched. Still reading. Still measuring.

Lucien blinked slowly. Then flicked his fingers again—this time conjuring a cascade of illusory reflections, ripples of himself all around Arin, like ghosts walking through fog.

Arin’s eyes narrowed. She reached into the air and pulled—not at mana, but the charge in the air itself. The static built in a spiral, and then discharged.

The blast of sound and light was enough to erase the illusions instantly. Not even Lucien’s decoys could mimic real pressure.

She surged forward immediately.

Lightning gathered around her limbs like armor—crackling bracers of pale blue light forming at wrist and ankle.

She spun mid-run and launched a precise roundhouse kick aimed at Lucien’s ribs—not a spell, but a raw strike, enhanced by her magic.

Lucien brought both hands up—his left caught the blow, his right flared with a gravity burst that redirected her force downward. She flipped back from the rebound and launched a lightning hook-shot in mid-air, nearly catching his shoulder.

Darius couldn’t help but whisper, "She’s not just a prodigy—she’s an artist."

Lucien exhaled slowly. The first real breath of effort he’d shown.

He swept his hand out wide, and suddenly the arena’s shadows deepened—cast not by light, but by force. A pressure zone. A null field, designed to weaken electric charge and isolate the caster from ambient energy.

Arin immediately dropped to one knee, grounded her hand, and snapped her fingers once.

The energy she called didn’t come from the air—but from herself.

A focused burst of pure voltage expanded in a perfect sphere around her body, shielding her from the null zone’s effects.

Lucien watched.

And smiled—just barely.

The first movement of genuine respect.

She’s forcing him to play, Darius thought, eyes narrowing. She’s not losing. Not yet.

The duel continued.

And neither had truly begun.

Arin didn’t give him time to breathe.

The moment her lightning sphere stabilized, she broke forward in a blur—feet striking the ground like thunderclaps, the very air around her beginning to buzz with kinetic pressure. She carved a sharp path through the ring, feet leaving streaks of scorched stone in her wake. Her arms moved in sweeping arcs, electricity trailing each gesture like the brushstrokes of a calligrapher painting in thunder.

Lucien raised a wall of hardened air, pressure-forged and woven like glass.

She didn’t bother to break it.

She phased through it.

Darius blinked.

No displacement. No shattering. Just clean, silent passage.

She’d slipped a burst of electrical current through the wall a fraction of a second before her body arrived, destabilizing the binding frequencies of the air wall. A surgical override of a stable force construct.

She didn’t punch through, Darius realized. She rewrote the shape before she reached it.

Arin’s elbow came within inches of Lucien’s face.

He dodged—barely.

A cascade of sparks burst across his cheek as she passed. Not a glancing blow. A warning.

Lucien stumbled back two steps, footing briefly compromised.

She didn’t let up.

Her next attack came from above—she launched herself into a flip, dragging electricity behind her like a tether. Halfway through, she hurled it downward—a jagged lasso of crackling energy, meant to trap and detonate on contact.

Lucien flattened his body, rolled to the side, and raised a kinetic push. The tether coiled, redirected, and exploded in a spiral of radiant charge—but he was already moving.

He sent a counter: needles of pure wind pressure shot from his palm, invisible to the eye, compressed enough to pierce stone. Arin pivoted mid-step and spun sideways, her arms forming a guard position as she coated her limbs in a dense charge field. The needles struck—and vanished against the electric veil.

Another flick of her fingers—lightning surged across the floor, fast and branching like tree roots.

Lucien leapt.

She was already in the air.

Mid-flight, she clapped her hands once, sending out a percussion burst—sound and charge merging in a wave that cracked the arena floor below them.

Lucien tried to redirect the shockwave using pressure layering.

It folded his spell mid-air.

He twisted mid-fall, creating a displacement field to land without impact—but the moment his boots touched stone, another crackling surge met him head-on.

He grunted.

His coat tore at the shoulder, a black line of char marring the cloth.

Still not injured.

But he was late.

A half-second behind now.

Arin landed twenty feet away, her hand raised, eyes glowing faintly with the afterburn of her spellwork. She wasn’t smiling. She wasn’t taunting. She wasn’t even breathing heavily.

She simply raised her left hand again and cast five bolts at once—short, fast, staggered, skipping like thrown stones toward Lucien’s knees and chest.

He moved.

He dipped beneath the first, swept away the second with a precise elemental vacuum burst. The third grazed past his ribs, arcing over his back. The fourth and fifth came from opposite angles—clever, chained with polarity shifts. He had to redirect his field entirely to avoid being pinned.

By the time he looked up, Arin had already changed terrain.

She stomped her foot once—static erupted from the contact point in symmetrical lines.

Not just for damage. It wasn’t a blast.

It was architecture.

The ring was reshaping beneath her control.

Lightning tendrils extended from her position, forming narrow arcs that rose like curved latticework—arches of living current reaching high above the dueling floor. A dome. A cage. Controlled and alive.

Lucien recognized it a second too late.

The arcs collapsed.

Not inward. Down.

He snapped up a barrier—pressure-hardened, reinforced with rotational push. It held—but it cost him. His field flickered at the edges. The strain was stacking.

Darius’s breath caught in his throat.

She’s not just fast. She’s using the arena itself as her canvas.

Lucien cast a quick displacement again, jumping to the edge of the circle—but Arin was waiting for it.

She surged forward, riding a thin lightning thread like a rail of glowing silver. She skated across it in one smooth movement, arriving behind him mid-spin.

Her knee struck his lower back.

He staggered forward—caught himself just before crashing into the edge of the dueling field.

Now there was blood on his lip.

The crowd began murmuring. A few cheers. A few stunned silences.

Lucien turned back toward her, wiping the blood with a thumb, eye still calm.

Arin didn’t press the moment. She simply rolled her shoulder once, flexed her fingers, and began charging again.

Faster this time.

More erratic.

Spikes of raw current burst around her legs—short arcs, staggered rhythm.

She launched twin spheres of spiraling storm charge—one high, one low.

Lucien ducked beneath the first, but the second hit the floor behind him and ruptured upward, catching his coat and tossing him forward in a ragged stumble.

Arin cast a follow-up—thin threads of lightning, seeking his pulse, his breath, his movements. They struck the air like harp strings—music built of charge.

Lucien stilled.

There, Darius thought. This is where the tempo breaks.

Lucien didn’t counter. He watched.

He watched everything.

The arc of her shoulder. The tension in her ankles. The flow of her energy—where it built, where it twisted, where it turned back on itself.

His eye was fully active now. No longer passive tracking. Not just recognition. Interpretation.

But it hadn’t awakened yet. Not truly.

Not yet.

Arin’s spell changed again.

She condensed a lightning whip from the air and cracked it forward, the arc splitting into four separate strands, each with a slightly altered oscillation.

Lucien dropped to his knees, sliding across the stone, the whips crashing behind him in a geyser of light. He rose mid-slide, casting a gravity inversion to slow his body, then threw a wide arc of condensed mist—not water, but cooled air, meant to disrupt her charge flow.

Arin pierced through it with a spiral drill of lightning—jagged, unstable, flickering between control and chaos.

Lucien met it with a surge of force from both palms. The drill met the wall—and shattered.

But Arin was already moving.

She hadn’t meant to hit him.

She meant to test the force.

She wanted to see the strength he used.

The broken shards of her spell scattered around them, then floated midair, caught in the lift of residual energy.

And Lucien stood in the center of it all, panting lightly now.

His eye flared once—then dimmed.

Still not enough.

Arin stood thirty feet away, hands glowing with more power than before. She looked... curious. Not arrogant. Not surprised.

She knew how far she’d pushed him.

And she was wondering just how much more he could take.

Darius whispered under his breath, "Push him further. Come on."

She did.

Arin clapped her hands once, then brought them apart, palms up. Between them, a slow spiral of charged rings began to rotate—electric threads woven with exacting precision.

The rings expanded, stacked, and then compressed—layered kinetic loops surrounding a central pulse point.

Her final spell.

Not a grand explosion.

Not some unrestrained fury.

It was art.

It was calculated destruction.

She sent it forward with a whisper.

Lucien braced.

Not to defend.

But to see.