The girl, a dragon demi-human, stood with her arms apart, her white shirt drenched in a tomato-like sauce.
Her nerves short-circuited before exploding, anger washing over her like a wave of red paste.
But Julius was already gone...
He placed a palm on the edge of the metal, leaping forward and effortlessly carrying himself over in a graceful, practised movement.
He landed weightlessly, like a gymnast planting themselves in the centre of attention.
The dolls whipped around, arms clawing through the air to catch Julius.
He exploded six inches forward, spinning with movement like a dancing typhoon, the wooden arms clasping empty air where he previously stood.
His eyes were unmoving, too still, like a statue in a town centre while people busily passed.
Twin autumn meteors, with colour like rich mud, stared observantly as if taking measurements.
Before the puppets could continue toward Julius, a fierce voice roared out.
"YOU BASTARRRRD!"
The girl leapt over, her beautiful scales humiliated by delicious colours.
As soon as she passed, the puppets took to her, hands reaching for her like worshippers nearing a messiah.
Her bared teeth faced Julius, her eyes swelling open wide with anger, like ink spilling on a blank page.
Just for her to catch Julius's disinterested gaze, not a hint of amusement.
She paused for a fraction of a second, something clawing at her that she couldn't quite understand, but it only made her angrier as she stared into those dead eyes.
If this wasn't for his fun, to ridicule for a practical joke, if he wasn't even getting a single laugh out of it...
Then why was he doing it?
Her lack of understanding scraped the parameters of her psyche.
A N G E R
She immediately threw an arm out, her claws piercing the air to reach Julius Sparrow's throat-
Only for a collection of arms to ensnare her like a trap, their movements holding the same sound as door hinges, their hold tangling around her like unsettling woodwork.
CRRK!
All while Julius stood without a single twitch of movement, so close, her fingers grazing against his lifeless breath.
Then Julius stepped aside, slinking away from her to grab a handful of golden biscuits from a discarded metal tray.
He pocketed three pieces, his gaze facing away from her without a flicker of concern, attention already discarded from her.
Then, slipping over the servery again to leave whilst she continued to curse him.
The small number of students in the cafeteria snickered at the girl's humiliation, the commotion waking up a certain snow-haired boy from where he slept with his head on his arms at a grey octagon table.
"RRRRR YOU BASTARD! I'LL HANG YOU FOR THIS!" She yelled without thinking, her anger restraining her in ways she wouldn't understand.
The irony was that her own strength, which made Julius resort to these tricks, caused the puppets to hold her tighter in an attempt to restrain her struggle.
In fact, if she hadn't chased Julius in the first place, the puppets would have never gone for her and instead taken Julius.
So as the wooden arms folded over her, Julius carried himself like a shadow through the cafeteria.
Only to stop suddenly at the centre-
"Commmmmmmmmmmeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-..."
"BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK..."
"HHHEERRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!"
Julius swept a glance over his shoulder, watching from where he paused in the middle of the room.
He watched as the girl struggled in a bundle of wood like a bird's nest, each limb fixed around her, her voice growing progressively louder with anger.
The puppets wound around her, smothering her to restrain her disruptive outburst.
Though her outburst would continue, seconds away from strengthening, as suddenly a dark midnight mist gathered inside her body.
Mana
Unbeknownst to Julius, the mist swelled abruptly, starting from a curtain of black in her core, before moving outward to expel from her body.
BANG!
Like a water balloon the size of an elephant exploding, water exploded from the girl, the force knocking back all the puppets in an instant.
She spun in an instant, her uniform soaked with a watery red sauce, the previous food slurring a red stain that thankfully obscured her shining scales underneath.
She threw a palm up, Julius's pupils narrowing instantly into the size of needles.
Julius reached out.
Water surged.
BANG!
Julius flew straight across the room, forced off his feet, before catapulting into the wall.
The moment he met with the hard wall, his lungs gushed out for air, his jaw clenching tightly as he endured the pain so well that one may have thought he absorbed it.
His hands grazed the metal tray he took to shield himself at the last second.
The tray's shape was now deformed at the centre, denting where the water had caved it in because of its high pressure.
He quickly recovered, rising to his feet with tampered breath.
"Water, rank one magic...I'm still alive, a second year and yet she's that bad?" Julius thought to himself so fast that most people would've misheard him, had his thoughts been audible.
His other hand reached into his blazer pocket.
"No more glowbugs, one more explosive caltrop." He internally took inventory.
Then his fingers brushed the star-shaped token, and he hesitated.
"No...I can't risk killing her. I'd rather no one knew about that anyway." He reaffirmed to himself.
Then his eyes widened at the sight of another ball of water forming in the girl's hand, just barely diving to the side to avoid it.
BANG!
The ball shot out like a bullet, the wall exploding into minor pieces upon impact like shrapnel.
"Power, but no form." Julius studied internally as he ducked behind a grey octagon table, another water ball smashing past him into the wall.
He sat peacefully, as if his legs swung over a river dock at night instead of bundling calmly against his chest.
His gaze streamed down, dispersing against the linoleum, lost to his thoughts.
"COME OUT, YOU SPINELESS BRAT!" The girl roared while remaining behind the metal servery.
"If you're gonna get in my way..." Julius thought to himself.
Then suddenly...
"Aren't you hiding too..." A voice grumbled casually, smoothly pointing out hypocrisy with an uninhibited tone, their voice like someone chewing cereal in the early morning.
The person slowly rose from where they sat at the table toward the side of the room, revealing themselves to be Gyasi.
Gyasi ruffled his snow-white hair with his black fingerless-gloved hand, speaking loosely in a voice like sunrise.
"Can you guys keep it down? I'm tryna-" He paused suddenly, his bright, tired eyes narrowing on a dark-haired figure suddenly climbing to stand on one of the tables at the end of the room.
"Wait...isn't that Thurid's friend?" He mumbled to himself with half-awakened awareness.
His eyes followed in a line, starting from the boy's amber-tinted gaze all the way back across to the servery at the other side of the cafeteria.
Gyasi saw water swirling around to slowly form a ball in front of a red and turquoise-scaled palm.
His eyes drifted back to Julius on top of the table, something metal and square in one hand, whilst his other held something metal and spiked, with something lit between two of the many spikes.
Gyasi felt this weird, nonexistent nagging in his mind, imagining Thurid badgering him for not helping.
Gyasi slowly put two and two together, his dark eyes widening with realisation, he snapped his foot under him, instantly lifting a black board to his hand.
The board was shaped like a popsicle stick, as dark as charcoal, with four wheels on each side.
Surprisingly, the board wasn't made out of wood...
Gyasi lurched his weight forward, mana welling up from his aperture and into his hand, just as he released the board, seemingly endless slices of wind circulated the board to form a miniature cyclone.
WHOOSH!
The board shot forward, just as Julius threw his explosive caltrops, and the girl's water ball exploded forward out of her hands.
The three projectiles raced across the room, all soaring forward, the board wrapped in wind, intervening just in time between the other two, all finally meeting together in the centre of the room.
BANG!
The caltrops detonated as soon as the spikes felt impact from the devastating winds.
Julius's fuze was useless against the unprecedented impact of the skateboard's protective cyclone.
The pressure of the girl's water ball against the cyclone made it burst immediately.
Meanwhile, the cyclone itself?
Caught between both miniature explosions, the tiny cyclone dispersed, like dry meat losing flavour by the nanosecond.
Its diminishing wind, combined with the force of impact, caused the skateboard to spiral out of control, spinning like a frisbee from the centre of the room all the way back to Gyasi's gloved hand.
Julius's eyes, like two caves of some sacred, rich ore, snapped to Gyasi instantly, silently assessing the threat.
"Form, but no power...I didn't expect him to be here; he ruined my plan. I aimed for the kitchen to start a fire so the water sprinklers would go on, hoping it would disturb the girl's magic control. Climbing to his table was to prevent the girl from shooting my caltrop out of the sky by baiting myself as a target, I planned on using the trey to take another hit..."
His dark eyes watched, silently following Gyasi, who approached the centre of the room.
The girl watched with shock that polarised the calm expression on Julius's face.
"Argh, you, first years are so jarring!" She snapped, teeth clenching together like she wanted to clench them around his arm instead.
Then the demi-human's eyes absorbed Gyasi's frame, a distant memory lurking somewhere in her mind that she subconsciously attempted to dig up.
"You-" but before she could utter another insult, she remembered.
This kid, he'd seen him before with that girl! Thurid Odinson!
Then the scales on her face immediately paled, remembering the thrashing she got from Thurid for messing with one of the students in front of her.
She was like a demon with insurmountable strength!
"You're..." Gyasi began, pressing a finger to his chin as he hummed slowly with thought.
"-Alyssa? Right? A second year?" He asked casually, his voice smooth and effortless like the natural stride of a horse.
Her teeth scraped together, her scales seemed darker now, holding back words she knew she probably wouldn't say.
Julius reflected, his eyes narrowing as he watched Gyasi's exchange from afar.
"So I was right, I thought I remembered seeing something in those files he gave me about a first-year dragon demi-human...I do vaguely remember he was a water-type dragon too..."
"At least I don't have to worry about soaking my biscuits..." Julius thought to himself before stepping down from the table.
"So, what if I am?" Alyssa snarled, teeth like a shark's bared toward Gyasi.
"Well, Alyssa, just now I saved your life...This Julius guy..." He began casually, his voice like a gentle wind blowing through wheat fields.
He feigned a sigh of exasperation before continuing, throwing a lazy thumb behind him to point to the boy.
"...Don't you know he kicked Adrian Zephyr's ass?" He lied smoothly, though to be fair, even he didn't see everything that happened, so in his mind, he thought he was probably telling the truth.
"So it was true-" Alyssa's eyes widened, like two deep bowls of squid ink, her breath suddenly faint like foggy air blown visibly in winter.
Meanwhile, Julius stood silently, his muddy, amber gaze weightless, missing any sense of presence, barely detectable from where he stood a few tables away from Gyasi.
Though Alyssa, in her newfound fear, couldn't help but imagine a sudden pressure aimed toward her, like heat lining toward her in the form of two lasers.
Her teeth found themselves gritting together to endure the pressure, her head hanging with a mix of shame and fear.
She figured she was seconds away from a beating.
She wanted to make them both pay, but how? One was a friend of Thurid Odinson, the other was the one who defeated Adrian Zephyr.
"We're done here." Julius suddenly spoke, turning away.
Alyssa's hidden eyes widened as she obscured her face by looking down.
"Oh heavens! I'm saved," She thought to herself.
This was the least embarrassing way of ending this; now she wouldn't even have to beg for forgiveness or apologise.
"Huh?" Gyasi's dark brows dropped with confusion, his head spinning over his shoulder as he found the spot empty where Julius had stood beforehand.
Though he didn't completely agree with it, upon waking up, he assumed Julius had some score to settle.
Otherwise, what point did he have in fighting?
It wasn't as if anyone could be so weak in the academy that a scuffle like that would make them fight purely for survival.
Right?
end of chapter 26