Even if I had been full of ironclad determination to abandon everyone behind me and run through the graduation gates at the first chance, it would still have been stupid to let my teammates get picked off in the gym during practices.
So no one batted an eye when I stopped at the doors on Wednesday and Friday and turned round to disintegrate the entire forest of vines even as they came whipping out. We didn’t even discuss strategy or anything; there wasn’t any strategy to discuss, except to agree after the Wednesday run that Nkoyo and Khamis should just take Friday off and build mana while they healed up. That wasn’t even a nice break for them; it was making the best of a bad situation. None of us wanted a break. What we wanted was more of the practice that we desperately needed to get out alive. Personally, I wanted it even more than I had before.
I tried going round the school hunting with Orion to make up for it, but that was even more useless. Nothing whatsoever attacked us, and if there was ever a faint scritching noise somewhere, he’d instantly abandon me and take off at top speed to go and get it. At best I’d catch up and there he’d be satisfied with himself standing over some dead thing. At worst, I’d have to spend half an hour wandering around the seminar-room labyrinth trying to find him again. Wait, no, sorry. At worst, I spent half an hour wandering around trying to find him, slipped in a giant puddle of goo that was the solitary remnant of whatever thing he’d killed, and then gave up and found him in the cafeteria eating lunch, still satisfied with himself. He didn’t say outright that I’d asked to be covered in goo, but his expression was perfectly explicit. At that point I realized the only thing I was going to kill was him, so I gave it up.
Then the next week rolled round, the course changed again, and the school made clear it was more than ready to make up for the slow week. We couldn’t cover ten meters of ground before yet another thing came at our heads. To fully convey the experience, on Friday the previous course had taken us a grand total of three minutes start-to-finish, including the time it took for me to wither all the vines into dust. Even on a more typical course, the average run only takes ten minutes. When a real graduation run takes more than fifteen minutes, it normally means you aren’t getting out at all.
On Monday, I didn’t come out until the twenty-seven-minute mark, into a crowd: we’d taken so long that there were about eight other alliances already downstairs and waiting outside the doors for their turn. None of them looked very enthusiastic. Usually you avoid finding out what’s in the obstacle course so you can have a blind first run, but this time the waiting teams were all busily interrogating everyone in our group who’d come out, and going into huddled negotiations with other alliances to run it together.
I don’t think my appearance was reassuring. I emerged trailing clouds of dark-green smoke flickering phosphorescent with crackles of lightning, the dwindling remnants of the hurricane I’d whipped up to dissolve the shambling army of frozen-mud-things. There was also the large ring of glowing orange-purple balefire spheres orbiting round my waist. The workings all fizzled out as I came through the doors, but they hung in the air just long enough to make a fashion statement of the behold your dark goddess variety, and anyway I’d been standing there just short of the threshold for five minutes, siccing spheres and thunderbolts on strategic targets to clear a way to the doors. Everyone else on our three teams was staggering. Nkoyo even sat down in the corridor right there and shut her eyes and leaned her head on Khamis’s shoulder when he sat down next to her. The worst of the gouged marks around her throat were barely healed and some of the scabs had cracked and bled again.
“Righty-o, who wants a rundown?” I said, waving away the last trailers of smoke in as prosaic a way as I could manage. Which wasn’t very, but desperation still drove people to talk to me, or at least to creep close enough to overhear what I said to the braver ones. I stayed there in the corridor for the next ten minutes, answering questions to help everyone work out their strategy for running the course. Then the four alliances who’d been lined up to go after us gave it a go, together. They made it about ten meters from the door and then gave up and ran back out. At that point, everyone else just left. The new course was useless in the opposite way: it was too hard for anyone to get through. Except for me.
On Wednesday morning, we came out of our run after only fourteen minutes; we’d thought up loads of better ways for me to take out everything in our path. There was nobody outside waiting at all. We had to patch ourselves up, which went slowly; everyone in our group was exhausted. Except for me. I felt energized and extremely ready for lunch.