Spycraft Academy by B. Miles (little readers .txt) 📕

Sam, who dove to the side. The larger man stumbled toward the group and they scuttled out of his way.

Sam planted his palms in the sand and left his axes buried beneath the grain, they would only take up his palms when he needed them to maneuver on the ground. He threw his foot into the side of Delcan's knee. The larger man shouted and stumbled back, his eyes round and wild.

If somebody talking badly about his dead mother was all it took to make Delcan's training melt away, he would have a very hard time in this profession. Sam was used to it. If he had to guess, nobody dared insult the other man's mother before now.

"That's the spirit, Ivrer!" Hilda shouted.

Delcan came at Sam again, both hands on the hilt of his sword as he swung in a wide arc. Sam rolled underneath the blade and it almost clipped his ear, the metal singing death through his ears. The other man was really going for it, then. If Sam's head would have been a few inches higher, it would have been shorn clean from his shoulders.

Maybe he'd tire the blonde out if Hilda didn't call time first. Sam may not know how to go toe-to-toe with a swordsman trained by masters, but he could evade one. After all, he'd been doing it all his life.

Sam kept dodging Delcan's punishing blows, dancing aside when the blade hammered down, ducking low as it cut to the side. When he rolled between Delcan's legs, the other boy let out a mighty shout that sounded more beast than man.

A sudden blistering heat was at Sam's back and he dropped to the ground on instinct. He was just in time for a thick arc of fire to fly right above him, singeing the flyways on his head.

Sam rolled away. He didn't even bother looking over his shoulder. When he was on his feet, Delcan was halfway across the arena and the other students were scrambling up the walls to the bleachers.

Hilda stood near with her arms crossed, her eyes narrowed and calculating. Sam looked at her, but if he expected her to enforce the rule she already set about magic, he would be sorely disappointed because she didn't stop Delcan.

The blonde tossed his sword aside and raised his hands to the sun, heat waves snaking from the flesh of his palms. Flames appeared out of thin air. They cradled in his fingers and rolled like twin snowballs until they were great masses of fire. He swept his arms forward and the balls of fire roared toward Sam. It was all he could do to get away from them.

Delcan chased him around the arena, throwing whips of fire and hurtling boulders of heat. If Sam wasn't so quick on his feet, he'd have been burned alive by now, and the instructor would have let it happen.

Maybe Sam's assumptions had been right, maybe they let the nobles chew on the lower castes here, just like in the city.

Well, this wasn't the city. And this time, he wasn't going to let a high born hurt him without giving some pain in return.

He waited until he was directly across from where he'd placed his axes, and then he suddenly stopped running and faced Delcan. The other man's face was no longer wild and wrathful, but focused and mean as a bull. Sam breathed in the shadows, cast to the northwest thanks to the sun and Delcan's personal handfuls of fire.

He inhaled and the shadows moved. They thinned out and away from Delcan until there was nothing but a thin black line connecting him to Sam. They filled his mouth and when he grinned, black tendrils danced between his teeth like smoke.

Delcan held his fireball high, watching Sam with narrowed eyes.

Sam spit the blackness into his palm, holding its form over his head in a rolling round mass, mirroring his opponent. Delcan growled and launched the blazing ball toward Sam's head, and Sam moved just as he did.

The shadow passed through the fire unharmed. The fire soared toward Sam's head. He ducked and the flames splashed on the wall behind him. Delcan yelled a string of curses and Sam didn't have to look up to see what was happening. Looking wasted seconds, and seconds were sometimes all that separated life from death.

He ducked as he ran toward his opponent, who was covered in a sarcophagus of undulating blackness. The other man was howling in anger, random fireballs hurtling from the shadows. He probably hoped one got in a lucky strike.

It was the work of a split second. Sam bowled into the withering mass of shadows and grabbed Delcan about the waist, tackling him to the ground precicely where he laid his axes. Delcan got his hands in front of his face and the heat was building up quick, but Sam knocked his hands aside with one arm and grabbed the axe buried in the sand beside Delcan's head with his free hand. He snapped the blade to the blonde's throat.

Delcan froze. Sam pressed the blade of the axe hard into his throat, dimpling the skin and coaxing the flesh to stretch taught, ready to split at the flick of his wrist.

Sam could hear Hilda's excited voice shouting behind him but it was drowned out by the sound of Delcan's ragged breathing. His fire spells had taken a lot out of him, as did swinging his heavy sword and chasing Sam down. His eyes were half-lidded, his mouth pulled down into a heavy scowl, the pupils set in his blue eyes as small as pinpricks. He wouldn't soon forget this, Sam knew that, but it was better to have one true enemy than two dozen.

"Are you going to yield or what?"

Delcan's lip curled. "You're a nasty piece of work, you know that?"

Sam snorted but didn't reply. He knew this trick; it had worked on him a long time ago and he learned from that mistake—he would never let an