Elsie went again. She had nothing left worth spending and she went anyway, compressing at both soles and cutting hard across the marked ground toward a girl who had, four seconds earlier, been kneeling. Yseult caught her. Not blocked. Caught. Her hand closed around Elsie's forearm mid-strike and simply held it, and Elsie, who had been operating for eleven minutes on the understanding that she was faster, discovered that this had stopped being true while she wasn't looking.
YSE: You should yield.
ELS: No.
YSE: I'd rather you did.
ELS: I know.
She compressed the wind at her own trapped wrist and blew the grip apart, and got clear, and her hands were shaking. The next ninety seconds were not a fight. Elsie understood this while it was happening, which was the worst part. She threw everything she had left in whatever order it arrived, pellets and footwork and one genuinely inspired attempt to compress the air inside Yseult's own lungs that would have ended it if it had landed, and none of it landed, and Yseult did not appear to be working particularly hard. She was, Elsie realized, being allowed to continue.
Not out of cruelty. Yseult was simply not finishing it, because finishing it would require doing something she had not yet decided to do.
BRR: She should stop.
MRA: She won't.
BRR: She's going to get hurt.
Yseult stopped moving. She stood in the marked ground's center with her hands loose at her sides and let Elsie come at her, and took a pellet across the shoulder rather than avoiding it, and did not react to it at all.
YSE: Can I tell you something?
ELS: I'm in the middle of something.
YSE: I'm going to be the best Alchemist the world has ever seen.
Elsie stopped. It was not a boast. That was what stopped her. Yseult had said it the way a person states the weather, flat and unremarkable and entirely without performance, and she was looking at Elsie with an expression that had nothing triumphant in it whatsoever.
YSE: Humans aren't built for it. Everyone knows that. Our souls are too dense, we're made for soulcraft, and every single instructor in this academy has told me at some point that I'd get further specializing in something I was actually suited for.
ELS: Yseult-
YSE: I've spent a year in that workshop finding out what happens if I refuse.
She raised her hands.
YSE: I'd like you to see it. You specifically. You're the only person who's made me work all year.
She brought fire and water together. They met in the air between her palms and became neither, the whole volume flashing instantly into a dense white column of steam that rolled outward across the marked ground in a wall Elsie could not see through and could not go around, and within two seconds the entire arena had vanished behind it. Elsie fired blind.
She compressed and released, compressed and released, sending pellets through the smoke along every angle she could estimate, and heard two of them strike something solid and neither of them strike anything that mattered. Somewhere inside the white, a light came on.
It was not fire. Elsie had been looking at fire all morning and this was not that, this was something hotter and considerably more violent, a small dense point of blue-white that hurt to look at directly even through the steam, and she understood distantly that Yseult had done something to fire that fire was not supposed to permit. Compressed it. Fire on fire, folded into itself until it stopped being flame at all.
The plasma held there, spitting.
Elsie fired four more pellets at it and every single one of them went wide, because the light was distorting the air around it and her estimates were built on air behaving normally. Then the plasma met the wind.
The crack of it arrived before the light did. Lightning bloomed inside the steam wall in a single branching flash, and it did not disperse the way real lightning disperses, it stayed, coiled and writhing around Yseult's raised left hand like something being held rather than something being cast. Elsie stopped firing.
ELS: What is that.
The steam began to thin. Through it, she saw Yseult settle into a stance she had never seen her use, both feet planted, left hand raised with the lightning still coiling in it, right arm drawn back and bent, the whole posture unmistakably that of an archer at full draw. In her right hand, something dark and glistening had gathered. Earth and water, mixed thick.
YSE: Sorry.
She fired. It was not a killing shot. Elsie registered that even as it crossed the distance, because it was too slow and too heavy and too obviously wrong for a strike meant to end her. It hit the ground four feet in front of her and burst. Water and mud went everywhere. It soaked her legs to the knee, splashed across her chest and arms, spread outward across the packed earth in a wide dark slick that reached her boots and kept going, and Elsie stood in the middle of a spreading puddle with her sleeve still smoking and her hands still raised and understood exactly what was about to happen approximately half a second before it did. She tried to move.
The compression at her soles fired. It was not enough, and it was not fast enough, and she got perhaps two feet before Yseult brought the lightning down. It came off her left hand in a single directed arc, struck the water, and stopped being an arc at all. Elsie felt the ground light up beneath her. Every muscle in her body seized at once, her legs going out from under her, her hands locking rigid mid-gesture, and she went down hard into the mud and stayed there with the current still crawling across the surface of the water around her and her whole body refusing, comprehensively, to answer anything she asked of it. She could see. She could hear the arena. She could not move at all. Yseult crossed the marked ground unhurried, the lightning gone from her hand, the steam thinning into nothing around them, and stopped a few feet away and looked down at her.
YSE: Yield.
Elsie's jaw would not work properly. She managed it anyway, barely, the word arriving as something closer to a breath than a sound.
ELS: ...no.
Yseult crouched down beside her in the mud.
YSE: Elsie. You cannot move.
ELS: ...I know.
YSE: Then yield, or they'll call it for you, and I would genuinely rather it came from you.
Elsie lay in the water with the current gone and her whole body ringing and the arena making a noise she could not properly hear. Then she closed her eyes.
ELS: ...I yield.
PROC: Match to Marchant!