Duel!

Jerod made his way to the dueling grounds. The first duel would be against the person from the 7th ranked spot. He seemed quite sure of himself with his bet of 50 rank points. Jerod didn't have any idea on how to gauge the other students strength. His rank points were likely given to him from his submission of the Frost Lance so he didn't know if the challenger would be stronger or more skilled in a fight.

Jerod had so far only dealt with small animals and the one fight with the panther. Fighting against a human would obviously be much different.

Arriving at the ring constructed for duels Jerod stepped up to find his homeroom teacher waiting for him. He motioned for Jerod to come close and indicated where he should stand. Once he got there his challenger arrived and also made his way to stand before Taric. Once both were in place Taric then motioned for them both to turn to face their audience and told them to listen to the rules of the duel which would be provided by the headmaster.

Headmaster Brian then made a motion for all students in the venue to be quiet and made a small speech.

"Students, this is a momentous occasion. Duels are a standard practice in our academy to allow for students to practice everything they have learned. It is not often that we have a duel scheduled for the first official day of classes and it is a first to have five duels scheduled on the first day for one student. Behind me you will see this classes number one ranked student Jerod, challenged by this classes number seven ranked student Bart Ferris. Jerod has also accepted the duels from 25th ranked student Zachary, 30th ranked student Tina, 17th ranked student Harold, and 50th ranked student Mark. The duels will proceed in that order.

The rules of the duel are simple. Each student will have a defensive spell cast on them from the duel administrator. This defensive spell will block up to three hits from tier one spells. Once this limit has been reached the barrier will disappear and the protected student will be then teleported from the ring. The administrator will be keeping an eye on the duel and should anyone sustain an injury they will be teleported to the infirmary."

The headmaster then turned and nodded to Taric. Taric then advised the two students to shake hands and to move to opposite sides of the arena. He then cast a defensive spell on each before shouting begin!

Jerod made a note of the spell used by Taric for the defensive barrier for future study before observing his opponent.

Bart Ferris was slightly over weight with a perpetual look of disdain painted on his face. Since Jerod didn't have a last name Bart knew that he was a commoner. He felt that there was no way a commoner would have better magic ability than a noble and couldn't reason how Jerod had gotten so many points during his entrance examination. He knew there had to be some special circumstance which is why he was confident that Jerod couldn't have very high combat abilities.

Once the signal for the match to begin was made Bart immediately gathered fire elements to launch a fireball at Jerod. He wanted to end this quickly to show his superiority.

Jerod wanting to learn more about the limits of his peers decided he would observe and counter before making any moves to defeat his opponents. As he watched the fire magicles gather to Bart he decided he would use water shot to counter.

"Have a taste of my fireball!"

Bart threw the fireball at Jerod with a smug look on his face. However this soon turned into a look of annoyance. As soon as his fireball was halfway to his opponent it was doused with a water shot. He was aggravated that Jerod was able to counter his move so quickly. He immediately decided to switch elements to the wind element. Since Jerod was able to use water elements then he would use a spell that would make the water spells useless.

"Eat a Windblade!"

Jerod was slightly surprised at this new spell and made sure to take note of its magicle arrangement. To counter Jerod simply brought up an earth spike in its path. The damage of the Windblade was pretty high and it left a gouge on the rock before it dissipated.

Bart was even more infuriated at this point. What were the chances he would come across someone that could use the exact counter elements to his spells. Not only that but he was adept at casting them even in a battle situation. Being annoyed that he had underestimated his opponent Bart just started to continuously cast Windblade at Jerod.

Jerod seeing that he wasn't going to get any more data from Bart decided to go ahead and finish the duel. He gathered the water magicles around him and proceeded to turn them into ice magicles.

"Frost Lance!"

Jerod timed the spell just right that it collided with a Windblade directly in the middle of the lance. This caused the frost lance to split into two while causing the wind to disperse. While the Windblade took some of the momentum from the Frostlance it still had enough force to collide with the defensive magic surrounding Bart. He then followed up with a Fireball using the fire magicles he had pulled out of the water magicles to form the ice magicles. The Fireball hit the shield a moment after the split Frost Lance and caused it to shatter teleporting Bart from the ring.

The students in the arena were silent. So silent you could almost hear the echo from Jerod yelling "Frost Lance". Before long there were whispers and confusion moving through the crowd. What was that spell? No one had ever seen a spell made out of ice before. Soon the whole place was in an uproar, including Bart who was standing outside of the arena.

"What was that spell?!? You must have cheated! You must have used an enchanted item or something!"

Headmaster Brian waited a few moments before waving his hands and beckoning the students in the arena to quiet down.

"Cough.. Jerod is the winner! We will continue with the duels for this evening. Once they are completed I will be making an announcement, and this concerns the Frost Lance spell you have all just witnessed. Now, let us continue with the remainder of the duels."

The students in the following duels were somewhat despondent after witnessing how easily Jerod had taken down his first opponent. However, they still felt they had some hope considering he would run out of mana eventually. Unfortunately for them each of them had less spells to cast than Bart had and were dealt with quite quickly. Jerod used the same tactic to observe their spells and counter them. When he realized they didn't have any other spells to cast he would cast spells in quick succession to end the duel.

Many students that had enough of a mind after the shock of the new spell were stunned yet again to find out that Jerod was able to use water, fire, earth, wind, ice, and dark magic spells. They had never seen someone that was so talented with the elements.

The final student to duel Jerod had let him know that he just wanted to see the difference in the power of rank 1 against rank 50 and didn't want there to be any bad feelings once the duel was over. He was the only other student to show Jerod a spell he hadn't seen and that was a defensive darkness spell that was able to hold up against two of his attacks. Jerod made note of the magicle arrangement and thanked him for the duel afterwards.

"Jerod is the winner! This concludes the duels for today. As many of you have noticed Jerod is ranked number 1 with a large amount of rank points. The primary reasoning behind his rank points is Jerod shared with us the secret behind this sub set for the water school of spells. With his sharing of knowledge I am pleased to announce that we will be incorporating the method of using Ice magicles into our curriculum."

With that many students were surprised and gave a round of applause for Jerod. Sharing spell knowledge was already something that many magicians were unwilling to do. However Jerod shared a secret method that would change the face of magic as they knew it.