32: Unga Bunga Big Dragon

The group duels, though less in number, each took longer. Each time, more than four people would go up at a time. Sometimes it was five, sometimes seven, and sometimes it was seventeen. Sure, each group was still dismantled due to the coordination between Slade and his four guildmates, but it just... took a while.

Nyssa just felt it was a little unfair to gang up on the heroes. She couldn’t say much though, considering she was in a group of seven about to gang up on them in just a couple rounds.

A bit of an important fight for her in all honesty. In a way, it was her debut to the rest of the school. As much as she wanted to push it back a little, her awkward ass wasn’t going to just opt out of a group activity like this duel with Class One...

She didn’t want to seem uncool! She just became friends with these people! It’d... It’d be weird to hide away now.

“Slow down...” Nyssa murmured to herself while trying to banish the unending stream of thoughts marching through her mind. Leaning back in her seat, she sighed while staring up into the sky. The afternoon’s breeze brushed against her neck and wove its way through her hair while the crowd’s cheering filled her ears.

She wasn’t sleepy. What a miracle in its own right. Lunch had done its job for once and, instead of putting her into a food-coma, it had woken her up.

“Are you thinking about something?” Celeste leaned over and whispered as her eyes stayed glued to the showmatch down below. “Overwhelmed?”

“A little,” Nyssa confessed while taking advantage of the situation to brush up against Celeste. “Just nervous I guess? Not even because I’m afraid of the worst. Like, sure, it’d suck, but... but I think I’m more afraid of the uncertainty.”

“That’s understandable,” Celeste smiled while sliding a hair closer. Her hand, while sliding forward, brushed up against Nyssa’s. Pausing for a half-second, her smile faltered for a moment as she looked down. “Don’t worry, we... we all get those types of nerves. I can say now that I’m past it that it’ll be fine. But I understand, it sucks. There’s... not quite any advice I can offer except to push through it though.”

Nyssa, unaware of anxiety about her was tearing its way through Celeste’s heart, just felt the contact on her hand disappear after a moment of contact. A faint half-glance downward revealed Celeste had pulled her hand back to leave a faint crack of separation between them two.

Glum towards Celeste’s hesitation, Nyssa kept it in her heart and kept a poker face. Making a business decision to not ‘risk it for the biscuit,’ she kept her hand in place and looked back towards the pitch. “Yeah, I think I’ve kinda recognized that. I’ll... I’ll push through, don't worry too much about me. We have a plan and I’ll follow it. It’s the least I can do.”

Their cooperative battle plan as a class was simple, and, to an extent, heartwarming.

In an effort to make Nyssa’s debut as smooth as possible, they decided on a plan where she was the center. She was the youngest, not even close to the most powerful at this point, so the fact they did it to help her... warmed her heart. As a whole, the plan could be summed up in one easy phrase:

Unga bunga big dragon hard to beat. RAR!

She’d transform into a dragon, let everyone get onto her back, and just fly around in the air. It wasn’t just because dragons were cool, there was actual thought behind it! Dragons, as is well-known, have the ability to fly! As is also well-known, earthquakes... do not fly.

Slade, the guildmaster, was the centerpiece of his team’s offensive output. Whether it was because he was the most powerful, or because he was the star of the day’s show, Nyssa wasn’t sure. His resonance-based shockwaves, however, didn't fare too great against flying animals. She knew this from past experience, but it was still quite the obvious conclusion to come to after a bit of logical thinking.

Therefore, they’d force him to either hand off the reins to someone else in the team more equipped to handle this type of situation—any of the others bar Accelerator—or they’d force him to expend energy in trying to bend the ground upward to get to them.

It wasn’t anything Slade couldn’t do, he’d done it against Accelerator, but it was an inefficient use of energy. Thus, either option would force the hero team into a less than ideal situation. For their side, after transforming, she could do the classic dive bomb or breath attack, or she could sit back and let the rest of her teammates do their work.

The main limitation, though, fell down to the powers everyone had. Most people didn’t do so great from a range. Conrad’s bread and butter was a classic duel, Ryker’s specialty was running up and battle of attritioning it out, and Albion’s ice infection powers were limited to traditional cryokinesis if he couldn’t make actual contact with anything.

Well, they’d figure it out.

For now, they just needed to figure out what they were up against.

Nyssa, at this point, reengaged with the show matches at hand, not because they were any more or less interesting, but because the stakes were now affecting her on a more personal level—it was Class One’s turn.

The stomping of feet against the bleachers, the bated breath, and the subsequent roar of cheers. With an entrance befitting a professional sports team, the top seven students from Class One’s fourth year strode their way out to the training field. Nicknamed the ‘seven heavenly stars’ for this event, they were even greeted by a flurry of applause from the hero team—though, their applause was probably more out of politeness rather than anything special considering they clapped for everyone.

Squinting while shading her eyes, Nyssa spotted a certain familiar face down below standing at the edge of the supposed ‘seven stars’: Troy! He had lost in close fashion to Titus just a bit ago, so she was a little surprised to see him there...

From her understanding, weren’t the seven stars all stronger than everyone but Ryker and Electra? Maybe he was the last minute addition though? The seventh ‘star’ to match the member counts between the two teams?

In the end, Nyssa didn’t care. She was more interested in seeing him fight as part of a team. Though his confidence was perhaps... a notch or two lower than it was in his duel against Titus, he still looked as comfortable as a fish in water. Still there were the crowds, the opponents, and the pressure! So, accounting for those factors, he was pretty much unaffected!

They didn’t have all day though. With another match lined up after this one, the hero team and the challenger team both moved into position to get the fight on its way.

Once in position, a hush fell over the training field—or, more fittingly, the arena. Judges checked their pens and their clipboards one last time, combatants did their last stretches, and Kaiser, serving as the unofficial referee, raised a starter pistol towards the sky.