Mage Knights: Summer's Beginning

Ambush

“Myrrdin!” Crowlin gasped as a prism of air began forming above him, bending and focusing the sunlight and beaming it down intensely on him. He raised his hands, trying to form a counterspell, but the magic fizzled before it left the tips of his fingers. Likewise, when he drew his sword the runes on the blade would fail to ignite, stifled by the spell circle. Everyone caught within a spell circle was helpless to fight their way out, their magic canceled out by the spells woven into the circles.

Still outside the circle, Myrrdin braced his paws on the platform, his fur fluffing out as his eyes glowed. A wave of yellow light shattered a section of the red cylinder penning Crowlin in; Crowlin tumbled out, his thick black robes smoldering from the heat of the concentrated sunlight. Gasping, he loosened the neck of his robes as he caught his breath.

In the ranks of the senior students, gruesome deaths by magic were taking place for those caught within the spell circles. In one spell circle, the temperature plummeted, while in another, all the air was drawn out till suffocation occurred. In still another, the heat was raised till the victim combusted, while the ground beneath another student turned to thin mud and he was sucked under, drowning in the watery dirt. No one spell circle was the same as the other, which kept the unbound students from coming up with any one spell that would counteract all the circles.

Steadily working their way through the ranks of their peers, Kashé and Sage broke open as many spell circles as they could, opting for pure magical power over the finesse of trying to find a counterspell for each circle. Both of them were tiring, however, and most of the spells circles had by this time done their work. Breaking yet another spell circle, Sage senses pricked and he whirled, barely dodging the arrow that had come from the roofs around the Courtyard. Glaring up, Sage saw masked figures, roughly half a dozen of them, around the roofs on the perimeter of the courtyard, all of them with bows and quivers. 

“Now they show their faces.” Sage snarled.