Lewd System: Every Scream and Moan is EXP-Chapter 264 : Stubborn Astrid

As soon as the bell rang, before Karina could even process the sound, Astrid had already made her move.

Well, not the kind of move anyone expected.

Mana started accumulating behind Astrid’s back. She didn’t charge. Didn’t draw a weapon. She simply sat down. And as she lowered herself, the mana beneath her solidified into something visible. Purple. Solid. Taking shape.

A throne.

Those who knew Astrid’s creation magic recognized it immediately. She had built herself a seat in the middle of a battlefield. Arms resting on the armrests. One leg crossed over the other. Looking at her opponent the way a queen looks at a peasant who just walked into the wrong court.

She was farming aura. Despite looking like she could collapse any second. The scars across her body, the clotting wounds, all of it clearly visible on the broadcasting screens across the arena.

And after all of that, she spoke. "Senior. Don’t disappoint me now."

Karina didn’t wait. A fireball started condensing ahead of her palm. But it wasn’t the fire burning brighter. It was Karina’s eyes. Every ounce of fury she had been building since Astrid opened her mouth was packed into that single sphere of destruction.

She released it.

The fireball tore across the arena toward Astrid who just sat there on her throne, focusing her mana and watching it come.

A wall materialized in its path. Not like Seris’s technique where the earth erupts from below. This one gathered mana from the surrounding air first and then compressed it into a purple solid barrier. Massive. Thick. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

The fireball hit it and shattered it completely.

Karina grinned. But then noticed a second wall had formed right behind the first. Her fireball pierced through that one too without slowing. Then it met a third. And this time the fireball started losing its shape.

It punched through the wall yes, but the structure consumed enough of its energy that by the time it reached the other side, the flames were dissolving. Fading. Dying just meters away from Astrid’s face.

And as the last embers vaporized in front of her, Astrid dramatically blew a puff of air at them. As if extinguishing a candle on a birthday cake.

"Senior, I remember playing with these kinds of fireworks during my sixth birthday. Thank you for recalling such sweet memories."

She stood up from the throne.

The crowd erupted. Not because of her beauty. Not because of some fan crush or blind loyalty. It was because of how impossibly cool she looked right now.

A first-year sitting on a self-made throne, tanking the strongest student’s fireball with walls she conjured casually, and then blowing the remnants away like it was a party trick.

Many in the stands genuinely started believing she could win this against the academy’s strongest.

But only Astrid knew the truth.

She didn’t get up from the throne to mock Karina or look cool. She got up because she realized it would be suicidal to not take this seriously from here on.

The act she was putting on to get inside Karina’s head and let the rage consume her would have been a complete disaster a moment ago.

Because that fireball told Astrid exactly why the Mage Tower chose this girl. She was this close to getting humiliated in front of the entire world. Her heart had been roaring so loud from panic that she was amazed these fools in the crowd couldn’t hear it.

Even Karina took the blown air as an insult. Her hands moved and hundreds of fire lances materialized beside her. Lined up in an arc. All pointed at one target.

She shot them all at once.

"Survive this, you brat!"

Astrid faked a grin while her insides screamed and then summoned dozens of statues in the path of those life-ending projectiles. Stone figures erupting from purple mana, each one placing itself between her and the barrage.

The lances tore through them. One by one. Statue after statue getting impaled and destroyed. Explosions of purple mana and orange fire mixing in the air. The arena filled with smoke and dust and the sounds of burning and hissing and cracking.

Then silence.

When the smoke cleared and the dust wore off, there stood Astrid. Trembling. Not from confidence. From the insane amount of mana she had just burned in a single moment. Her nose was bleeding again. Her body was screaming at her to stop.

But as her vision cleared she wiped the blood with the back of her hand and stood tall.

Then she did something nobody expected. She started walking. Teasingly. Casually. Completely ignoring Karina as if the girl who had just unleashed a hundred fire lances didn’t exist.

Her eyes were on something else.

She walked over to one of the destroyed statues and grabbed its snapped-off head from the ground. Held it up and looked at the face she had sculpted.

It resembled a human. An ugly one. Not exactly Jax but clearly intended to be.

She showed it to Karina without looking at her. "Senior, you shouldn’t have disrespected my professor."

She turned the head in her hands, examining her own work.

"I’ll admit, at first the sole purpose of this creation was to lower my own anger by doing the same thing you did to him." She tossed the head aside. "But now that he’s admitted his mistake, I won’t let this slide. What did he even do to you people? He was just protecting me. Which is what I want. Which is what I fantasize about."

Karina was caught between confusion and anger. "You brat, what nonsense are you spouting?! Have you gone completely insane?!"

Astrid smiled back at her. "I guess I have."

Karina was cursing under her breath. Then she straightened and said with conviction. "Fine then. It’s my duty as an adult to put you back to your senses."

Her hand rose above her head. Mana started leaking out of her in massive quantities, all of it accumulating in the thickening air above her palm. Her hand was trembling from the concentration required.

Then she was done.

She released it with a shout. "Lightning Dragon!"

The attack came alive. A construct of pure electrical fury shaped like a serpentine dragon, crackling with enough voltage to split stone. And it was doing exactly that. The ground between them cracked and ruptured as the dragon traveled along its path toward Astrid.

Karina was a dual affinity user. Fire and lightning. The rarest combination in recorded history. And that’s what set her apart from every other student in this academy. Right now Astrid was seeing that gap between them firsthand.

She was panicking. Genuinely panicking about whether she could take this or not.

She took a deep breath. Wrapped herself in layers of mana-created shields. Sphere upon sphere. Wall upon wall. She dumped everything into defense knowing this single attack could decide the entire match.

The dragon devoured everything in its path. Every layer. Every shield. Swallowing each one like they were made of paper. It broke through the first. Then the second. Then the third with a bit more struggle. But it kept coming.

And then it broke through the main barrier. The one Astrid was hiding behind.

On instinct she spawned one final mana shield directly in front of her body. It wasn’t enough. The burst damage sent her flying backward across the arena floor.

Her vision blurred. Her wounds reopened, bloody pores leaking across her skin. She didn’t have the strength to stand let alone continue fighting.

Karina laughed from across the arena. "Is that it? Where’s that arrogance now? Or have you come back to your senses and realized crawling in that dirt is where you belong?"

She walked closer.

"You haven’t managed to land a single hit yet. And yet you were acting that mighty."

Astrid was struggling. Pouring everything left in her body into the simple act of standing. But her face said something different from what her body was going through.

"One hit is all it will take. So I don’t want to end our lovely battle that easily."

She spat blood sideways.

"And besides, why are you all of a sudden so confident? Did you think that pathetic attack shook my resolve? Oh dear senior, I’ve felt a much better spark than that rubbing my socks on the carpet."

Karina’s eye twitched. "You... you absolute psycho. What is going on with you? What’s wrong with—"

She hissed. Cut herself off. Then said through gritted teeth. "Let’s end this absurdity."

Lightning bolts launched from her hands.

And then the fight continued for more than ten minutes of continuous assault.

Well, it was only from Karina’s side. Astrid concentrated entirely on defense. She pushed her body far past its limits. Way past what any sane person would allow.

Lightning bolts. Fire spears. Plasma beams. Attack after attack rained down on Astrid who did her best to either block with magic or dodge with her broken body. Rolling. Ducking. Stumbling. Barely surviving each one by margins that got thinner and thinner.

But she refused to show a single trace of pain. Even when her body was burning both from hitting its absolute wall and from the lingering heat of recent fire attacks that left her skin searing.

She still stood tall after a rolling dodge, faked a deeper breath into something fun and said. "Senior, I’m loving this cardio. But unfortunately it’s nowhere near what that bastard professor of mine put me through."

Karina snapped. She threw everything she had left. Every spell. Every technique. Every reserve of mana she had been holding back.

And Astrid dodged it all. Like a fly that had learned to dance between raindrops.

Karina was beyond furious now. She raised both hands to the sky and screamed. "Lightning Dragon!"

The energy started building again. That massive mana signature gathering in the atmosphere above her palms, crackling and sparking as the dragon began to take form.

But before it could fully materialize, the energy flickered. Sputtered. And vanished into thin air.

Karina’s hands dropped. Her eyes went wide. She knew exactly what had happened to her attack. And to her body.

Astrid just looked at the empty sky where the dragon should have been and grinned.

"Looks like you ran out of gas."

-x-X-x-

[A/N: Thanks Mario_1359, Avengedfall, Ordici_T, Martijn_Wiersma, tony_adams_4787 and Hugo_Pizza for the golden tickets

(づ*ᴗ͈ˬᴗ͈)づ♡]