I leaned against the wall, looking down at the students fighting below. Clearly few of them actually knew how to fight, let alone how to fight effectively with their powers. Students would flail about (it looked like two boys with ranged powers actually got into a slap fight of all things) and throw kicks and punches so sloppy that it hurt. I’ve never picked up much by way of a coherent fighting style personally, but I’ve trained and practiced long enough to have decent form when throwing a punch.

  Trevor slid up to me. “Hey Camila, how did your fight go?”

  “Pretty well, which you’d know if you had been watching.”

  “Hey, I was watching... I just got a little distracted by some of the other matches when you got turned into a doll.”

  A flash of fire rose up from one of the quadrants, distracting everyone as the flames licked up to near the surface of the ledges many students stood on. Like that’s any excuse; you should have more than watched, you should have had faith I’d win against such a novice brat! You should be eagerly dissecting my fight for any hint of a weakness in the hopes that maybe it would give you a chance! I didn’t voice any of that, though, and just said, “I suppose that’s fair. There’s a lot going on, and we only meet up in the finals if we both make it there.”

  Trevor looked up at the board and saw I was correct. “Whoa, you’re really thinking ahead in this, aren’t you?”

  I gave him a shark-like grin (aided slightly by my power). “I aim to win. Though it looks like I’ll have some competition in that.”

  Trevor glanced at the board and then at the matches and saw my next potential fighters. “Oh yeah, look at those two go!” A dark-haired, scruffy guy named Kadir and a ridiculously large boy called Maximus (a name that really had me wondering if he had his legal name changed after getting his powers). Maximus looked like he was bursting at the seams; even with the flexible uniform, his muscles were so large. Particularly in his arms and shoulders, making muscle builders on steroids look tame, Maximus’ strikes would shake the ground wherever he hit and leave small dents in the floor. As strong as he was, however, he didn’t manage to land a hit on the lanky Kadir, who dodged around swiftly and, at times, would disappear and reappear behind his opponent's back.

  “Kadir’s going to win this,” I declared.

  “Oh? I don’t know; Maximus only needs to land a single shot to win, and he looks pretty good at boxing.”

  “He’s not bad,” I said, the emphasis indicating it wasn’t really a compliment I was paying him. “But he’s not great either. And Kadir...” I watched the dark-haired boy step into a punch, slipping just around it and sending a jab of his own at a weak point in the front of the shoulder joint. The bigger boy flinched from it, trying to counter, but Kadir vanished to appear behind him, kicking his knee in. Hard to say where his fighting skill comes from, but his form might be better than my own.

  “Right, I guess invisibility is hard to beat. Can’t hit what you can’t see after all.”

  I shook my head. “It’s too fast for invisibility... I think. Probably teleportation. He actually knows how to fight and can be downright dirty too, which all helps, but the biggest thing that will let him win is the fact that Maximus is running out of steam.” The muscled-out Maximus swung around wildly to hit Kadir but missed by a mile, his foe not even bothering to ‘disappear’ away, simply leaning away from the blow before rocking back in. Maximus let out a yell of frustration and punched several more times, but Kadir dodged them all, leaving him gasping for breath.

  “Huh. Do you think you’ll be ready for a teleporter then?”

  The two students down in Arena 2 might be the best of the bunch currently fighting, but they aren’t the ones that make me think of ‘competition. Skill can only take you so far, and the strongest students will quickly learn to pair skill with incredible powers.’ “I’m fairly sure I can handle it, but I was thinking more about her,” I said, pointing over to Alexandra, landing down in the first arena, having forgone the stairs and just jumping down to it when she got called.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  When her opponent arrived, a mousy, spectacled boy, the way too energetic and colorful teacher called out, “Alexandra Herron vs. Dryden Vor, begin!”

  Alexandra, who had been bouncing up and down on her feet, rushed forward as soon as the word ‘begin’ left the teacher's mouth, jumping up, trying to rise over the obstacles to close the distance between them, only to misjudge the height needed. Her foot caught on the edge of one block, denting it and sending her tumbling in the air, though the deformed edge quickly shifted back to its undamaged state. Yet another sign of the technological advancement of Seltron.

  Alex spread her wings out, trying to arrest her fall through the air, but only spun her further off course. The wind reached Dryden, however, and it buffeted him around, causing both of them to take a moment as they recovered and got up.

  Alex rushed ahead, undaunted by her previous fumble, and readied her fist to punch him. Dryden held a hand up, and a wave spread out through the air from his hand. What was being sent out wasn’t clear, but Dryden seemed to have confidence in its ability to stop Alex... right up until she burst through it without slowing down one bit. She threw a punch, but something odd happened at the last second, a weird twitch as she pulled her strike.

  The punch was awkward and didn’t land well, but that didn’t stop her from sending him careening across the arena, smashing his back into the opposite wall.

  “Whoa,” Trevor breathed out. “I mean, that was cool and all, but is she really that strong? She didn’t seem stronger than Maximus or anything.”

  “Far stronger, if that punch was anything to go by. I think she was holding back there.” Not to mention how her endurance seems to be greater given how easily she carried the bags up.

  “Youch, at least I don’t have her till... oh, the finals.”

  “That’s only she beats me,” I haughtily added. Admittedly, even I can see how she might win against me, but still, gotta exude confidence.

  “Right, well-” Whatever Trevor was going to say was interrupted by a teacher calling ‘Mister Hawthorn’ over for his first match. “All right then, wish me luck,” he called out as he hopped on over to his fight against a girl called Stacey. I didn’t, but he was too busy and far away to notice.

  It was an interesting fight, to say the least, though they both looked somewhat ridiculous during it. Trevor had a translucent sphere spread out from him, noticeable by a faint shimmering light on its outside edge. The sphere covered most of the arena as he went to engage Stacey. Stacey quickly made duplicates of herself and started darting all over the place, but it soon became apparent what Trevor’s power was: blindness, though through an unusual means. Such a thing might be expected to be a sphere of pure darkness, but this lets people outside see through. A lot of different tactical approaches there. At least it lets the teachers see and grade this match better.

  Stacey was the girl who had questioned and been castigated by our headmaster for doing so, so I didn’t have high hopes for her composure even before the fight began, but her performance there was pretty pathetic, bumbling around with her sight deprived from her, falling over an obstacle, and not even managing to get back on her feet.

  Trevor, for his part, wasn’t terrible, clearly in control of the fight from the beginning, but he also struck out randomly at the duplicates, not realizing at first how her powers worked and going after the duplicates rather than the real girl, even as his fists passed through the illusory copies. He hit one of them twice and flailed after some of the others before getting the real one in a chokehold, politely drawing back his weird blindness field before giving her a chance to surrender.

  Crying out a forfeit, he let the girl go, and she whimpered away, scurrying out of the arena as Trevor released her. I didn’t get what her problem was - he had barely been squeezing on her windpipes.

  Trevor got back to the top and asked, “So, what did you think?”

  Your punches were sloppy, you were easily tricked, there was no sense of tactics or learning from you, and only her own ineptitude allowed you to win that fight. I gave him a thumbs up and said, “You dominated that fight! Good job.”

  He rubbed the top of his nose. “Hehe, thanks.”

  Looking over at the loser of his fight, I saw Stacey was going over to the opposite corner of the room where a new person had arrived, a woman in a flowery dress. Janet Fontaine, ‘Nursegirl.’ Janet wasn’t someone I had a particular problem with, but she had saved Gunther’s life at least once (along with several other heroes over the course of her career), which made me less inclined to think well of her.

  Still, she seemed to be quickly and efficiently healing any of the students hurt in the matches, her glowing hands waving over their wounds. I resolved to try to think better of the hero, especially since now she would be my ally (and teacher, as weird as it was to think that).

  There wasn’t much more time for me to watch Janet or any more fights as my own match in the second round with Kadir was called up.