Of course! Even if the rock disintegrated, the inertia was still preserved. Zasia began throwing stone after stone at the assassin. All of them fell to dust against the shield, but were enough to force her opponent to plant themselves in place and block her spells. She’d solved her immediate problem of gaining space, but she couldn’t take him down this way.

It was then that she noticed the shield was continuously glowing. In fact, it looked to be getting steadily brighter the more she hit it with magically conjured rocks. All at once, she suddenly remembered its critical flaw.

Zasia channeled mana through the ground, tearing up the surrounding earth to buy a little more time. She couldn’t afford to make any more boulders. This was going to take everything she had.

While her opponent was busy hacking through the jagged rocks with their mace, Zasia reached in deep and yanked hard on her mana pool. Doing her best to ignore the vertigo the strain caused her, she called on the secret fifth element even she had difficulty controlling.

She hated using this element. Not only was it dangerous, but it usually wiped out her mana supply in one go. She also hated that it had originally been Aldric’s idea to try it. A damned sorcerer had designed the envy of conjurers everywhere. He would never let her live that down.

Wind stirred up to blinding speeds, fire to super-heat the air, earth to control the polarity, and water to stop herself from being fried. With a skill and power that only a quadra elemental conjurer could muster, Zasia screamed in exertion as she cast the biggest spell she could.

A raging, screeching torrent of lightning shot out of Zasia’s body and made a beeline for the assassin. Just the sound alone tore at the air with the roar of a dragon, threatening to rupture her ears. The assassin instinctively raised his shield again, but it absorbed only a trickle of lightning before the shield’s runes lit up like the sun and started smoking. With the rune array overwhelmed, the only thing left for the runes to do was to fail completely.

And fail they did. Rather spectacularly. The shield broke out into a spiderweb of cracks before detonating with enough force to throw Zasia clean off her feet. She barely had time to realize she had no mana left to escape before her vision was completely whited out.

~~~

WHEN ZASIA CAME TO, she was staring at the starry sky above the academy. She tried to sit up, then immediately decided against it. The incessant ringing in her ears and the instant feeling of nausea told her the explosion had done more than just addle her.