Reborn as the Archmage's Rival
Chapter 38: Weight and Tide

Chapter 38: Weight and Tide

The arena had seen wildness. Brilliance. Battles that scorched the stone and bent the air. But what settled into the ring now was something else—heavier. Quieter. As if the very earth itself recognized what was coming and leaned in to listen.

Kai stepped forward first.

He didn’t bounce or pace. He didn’t roll his shoulders or throw a grin to the crowd. He walked slowly, deliberately, and stopped with his feet shoulder-width apart, toes angled just slightly outward.

Grounded.

His arms hung loose at his sides, his fists lightly curled, and the faintest shimmer of force spread beneath his boots. The stone beneath him cracked, barely perceptible, like hairline fractures forming under the pressure of a presence that refused to budge but Darius felt it in the stands.

Kai had always been loud. Sharp with his humor, broad in his casting. A storm of earth and will.

But this?

This was something new.

Still.

Composed.

A pressure like deep stone sitting just beneath the surface, waiting.

Nerys entered opposite him, barely making a sound.

She moved like breath across glass, every step light and effortless. Her posture remained elegant, her arms relaxed by her sides, her eyes fixed straight ahead. Her cloak barely shifted, even in the current that carried across the ring.

Where Kai’s presence was crushing, dense, hers was elusive.

Not small. Not weak.

Contained.

The sort of stillness that came before a storm.

They said nothing to each other. Didn’t nod. Didn’t blink.

Just waited.

The crystal above the ring chimed once.

The field lit up beneath their feet—brilliant veins of pale white energy tracing out the circular border. The ground between them shimmered for a moment before settling.

The match had begun.

Kai struck first.

No spell. No build-up. Just motion.

He slammed one foot into the ground—and the ring responded.

A thunderclap of force cracked beneath him, and a pillar of stone erupted in a direct line toward Nerys, tall as a warhorse and wide enough to shatter a wall. The crowd gasped at the speed of it.

Nerys was already moving.

She didn’t run. She flowed.

One foot angled back, hands flicked outward—and a slice of water snapped from her fingers. Not thrown. Not waved. Controlled. Shaped like a scythe, thin and sharp.

The water met the stone—

—and sliced through it.

Not in a burst of force. Not a dramatic shatter.

The top half of the pillar simply slid off.

A clean cut.

The broken top half tumbled past her and hit the ground with a muted crash.

Kai didn’t slow.

The moment the pillar fell, he leapt forward and slammed both fists into the ground again. The floor rippled outward—not up this time, but down.

A localized collapse.

Nerys’s footing dropped beneath her like a rug yanked away. She kicked back midair and formed a disk of spinning water beneath her—skimming its surface as the depression fell inward.

She landed on the edge, then dashed forward, hands forming tight motions.

Water snapped up from the air itself—thin streams spiraling into twin arcs that curved above her like spinning crescent blades.

Kai saw the angle, narrowed his stance, and pulled both arms in.

Two walls of stone shot upward in an ’X’ formation, bracing in front of him like shields.

The water hit.

It didn’t explode.

It hissed—boring through.

Not erosion. Not acid. Just the will of water: to keep pushing, keep breaking.

Tiny streams snuck between the plates and struck Kai’s shoulder and thigh. He grunted, stepping back, his footing briefly unstable.

Nerys pressed in.

She flicked both hands to her sides, and the streams widened—flooding outward in a low, curling surge that spread like a living creature, tracing the cracks in the earth.

Wherever water touched weakened stone, it crumbled.

Kai felt his weight shift as the very edges of the arena began to betray him. His earlier tremors had left cracks—small, but there. Nerys had found them.

And she was using them.

He growled—not angry. Focused.

This wasn’t just a duel of power.

It was a war of intention.

He shifted his center of gravity, slid back one step, and threw a sharp punch toward the ground.

A fist-shaped burst erupted from his knuckle impact—not magic, not raw stone—force.

Compressed impact sent a shockwave through the unstable stone. Water trembled. Stone slabs beneath the surface jolted upward.

The water near him froze in motion—not with ice, but with resistance.

He surged forward, left arm curled, and brought a massive slab of stone up into a guard position as he charged.

Nerys responded instantly—raising both hands, then clapping.

The air around her twisted—and a tight spiral of water erupted straight up from the ground, twisting like a rope toward the sky.

Kai’s charge slowed—feet sliding slightly as the moisture in the air around him dragged against his speed.

She stepped back, pulled the spiral sideways—and it snapped down, a liquid whip sharpened with precision.

It caught Kai’s stone slab at the edge—ripping it away from his arm like it weighed nothing.

His guard broken, Nerys slid left and launched another strike—flat and wide this time, meant to knock him fully off balance.

Kai ducked low, slammed a palm into the floor, and rose with it.

The stone beneath his feet launched upward, carrying him with it like a rising boulder. He rotated mid-air, arm cocked back.

The crowd rose.

Nerys raised her own defense—a fast wall of rotating water between her and the incoming strike.

Kai landed with his fist down, and the impact was like a cannon.

Stone cracked.

Water scattered.

But Nerys was gone.

She had flowed away—around the edges, crouched low and sliding across a thin stream beneath her feet. She used his own momentum to disengage—and reposition.

She fired a sharp burst upward.

It clipped Kai’s ribs.

He grunted, twisted, hit the ground with one hand bracing the fall.

The arena went still for half a second.

Both mages stood on opposite ends of the circle.

Steam rising.

Water pooling.

Dust falling.

And neither of them looked even close to finished.

Darius leaned forward, jaw tight.

He’s keeping up.

No—he’s adjusting.

Kai cracked his knuckles, rolled his shoulder once, and took a slow breath.

Then he smiled.

Not wide.

But real.

The kind of smile that says: I’ve figured something out.

He reached down and pressed his palm flat against the arena floor—not slamming, not punching. Just... grounding.

The reaction was subtle at first.

The stone beneath him vibrated softly. Tiny fractures spread in a perfect circle outward from his position. The arena didn’t shake. It hummed, as if Kai had tuned the field into a single, resonant note.

And then the dust rose.

Darius blinked. At first, it looked like nothing more than a thin cloud forming at Kai’s feet—a simple tremor casting up powder from old cracks.

But it spread. Fast.

From dust to grit. From grit to a haze.

Within seconds, a thick storm of fine, dancing particles filled the entire dueling ring, rising like smoke in a sealed chamber. The audience murmured—confused. The arena’s lighting flickered faintly as the visibility dropped.

A soft grinding sound filled the space. The sound of sand moving where stone had once been.

"Wait," Darius whispered, eyes narrowing.

From within his mind, Ethan’s voice echoed low and sharp.

"That’s... not in the script."

Kai wasn’t supposed to use sand magic. He had always been defined by impact, density, mass. Earth molded through weight and will. He didn’t deviate. He never deviated.

And yet here it was—a dust storm, dense enough to cloud the audience’s view.

Risen from within the cracks of the ring, from the fine-grain beneath the solid surface. Earth broken down, thinned, scattered, repurposed.

Not just stone.

Earth.

The crystal lights above the arena pulsed once.

The barrier shimmered, recognizing the visual disruption, and adjusted. A subtle shift of enchantments pulled the inner air taut, giving the crowd a refracted view—like looking through a lens of shimmering glass. They could now see shapes, motion, but not detail. The fight was still going.

And at the heart of it, two silhouettes danced through the shifting dust.

Nerys hadn’t stood still.

As soon as the storm began, she’d pulled water to her—siphoned moisture from the air, her cloak, even the tears she’d carved into the arena earlier. With precise movements, she shaped it into a shimmering orb around her body, layered and rotating, like a globe of rippling crystal.

The sand struck it from every angle—rattling, scraping, grinding.

But it didn’t break.

She crouched inside it, hands pressed outward, maintaining pressure in all directions.

She couldn’t see Kai. But she could feel him—his weight, the tremors of his steps in the arena floor, even through the storm.

She responded.

A burst of water exploded upward from her globe—an erratic pillar with jagged edges that tore through the dust. Another followed to her right. Then left. Each blast was a probe, meant to knock him back, reveal his position, even draw a cry or a reaction.

Nothing.

The sand kept swirling. Her blasts went unanswered.

She narrowed her eyes and dropped to one knee inside the orb.

Then she expanded it.

What had been a protective bubble suddenly pushed outward—growing in size and clarity. The water thinned as it spread, becoming a fine mist that pulled in the particles around it. The swirling dust began to cling, to melt into the mist, to vanish.

It was a filtration tactic. Water as a purifier.

Within seconds, the storm began to die.

The haze thinned.

The dust settled.

The arena returned to view.

Stone scuffed, stained, spotted with cracks and damp circles—but visible again.

And at the center of it all stood Nerys.

Alone.

Her bubble had collapsed around her into rippling pools of water, spinning low around her feet. Her breathing was heavy. Her arms shook. Her boots slid faintly on the soaked floor.

But there was no sign of Kai.

Nowhere.

The stands were hushed.

No gasp. No cheer. Just silence.

Had she knocked him out?

Had he been swept away, too close to the arena’s edge during the storm?

Even the referee squinted into the dust-cleared ring, lifting a hand slowly, uncertain.

Nerys straightened, trying to calm her breath.

Then something changed.

The stone beneath her feet shifted.

Not cracked.

Not exploded.

Softened.

At first, it felt like her footing had merely sunk a little. A moment’s instability from the wet floor.

But then her left boot dipped again. Lower. Faster.

She looked down.

The water around her feet was... changing.

Becoming mud.

No. Not mud.

A pull.

The boundary between her water and the stone beneath had melted into something new. The surface below was sinking, absorbing, like quicksand formed beneath the thinnest crust of battle-worn rock.

She reacted instantly—hands spreading, pulling water upward in a rush to form lift beneath her.

But the water hissed as it sank into the ground.

Her spell resisted her.

Melded with something else.

Something stronger.

She blinked.

Then her feet dropped another inch.

The water orb tried to form again—and again the earth consumed it, not with violence, but with grip.

Controlled grip.

It wasn’t erosion. Not a trap.

It was Kai.

A realization hit her a second too late: the storm wasn’t just cover.

It had been prep.

He had softened the ring’s foundation, sifted the top layer of stone into fine dust, manipulated the battlefield into something malleable.

He wasn’t gone.

He was waiting.

Beneath her.

A ripple of laughter rolled through the stands—uneasy, almost awed.

Nerys tried one last burst—an upward jet meant to launch her free.

But it stalled, losing pressure before it reached her shoulders.

She was already too far in.

Already too deep.

Already caught.

And from beneath the softening arena stone, a pulse of force echoed once—low, deep, and unmistakably deliberate.

Darius stood from his seat, breath caught in his throat.