Ultimate Dragon System: Grinding my way to the Top-Chapter 217: Tessa vs Nyra
The third call landed differently than the first two.
Not because Olmo said it with any different weight—he didn’t. Same flat delivery, same unhurried pace. But something in the room had shifted over the course of the previous two matches. The students who remained had watched Ken dismantle Plistus through adaptability, had watched Joan dismantle Riven through patience and precision. They had seen what the floor looked like when two people who trained together stopped pulling punches. The air in the room had changed. It carried more information now. More weight.
"Tessa. Nyra."
The reaction was immediate—not loud, not dramatic, but present. A ripple of attention that moved through the remaining students faster than the previous two calls had managed. Because everyone in the room knew what this match meant. Both of them used abilities. Real ones. Not the kind of ability that augmented a punch or sharpened a reflex, but the kind that changed what the arena itself looked like once it was active.
Tessa stood.
She was calm in the way that came from a particular kind of confidence—not arrogance, not performance, but the settled certainty of someone who had spent enough time with their ability that they no longer thought about it separately from themselves. Tessa was a mage. Had been since she was nine years old, when the first construct appeared unbidden above her palm during a thunderstorm and her mother had called three different people before finding one who could explain what it meant. She had spent the years since then learning. Not just what she could do, but the architecture behind it—the logic of how magical constructs behaved, how they failed, what made them stable under pressure and what made them brittle. Her previous master, an older woman named Cael who operated a small instruction house two districts over, had told her once that most mages spent their entire careers learning to do more. The better investment was learning to do less, with more precision.
Tessa had spent the last three years proving Cael right. 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺
She could project force constructs—shaped fields of magical energy that took and held form until she released them or they were disrupted. Walls. Barriers. Compressed bolts of force that hit like a closed fist. She could layer them, stack them, run multiple constructs simultaneously if the situation required it. The limitation was concentration. Each active construct demanded a portion of her attention to maintain. Too many at once and the oldest ones began to degrade. She had learned to treat her constructs like a hand of cards—knowing which ones to hold, which ones to spend, and exactly when to play what she was holding.
Nyra rose on the other side of the room.
She moved without hurry, which was almost a statement in itself. Nyra’s ability was absorption and conversion—she could take incoming energy directed at her body and convert it into raw physical output, channeling it back through her limbs as enhanced strikes. The more energy she absorbed, the harder she hit. The limitation was saturation—her body had a threshold, and if she absorbed too much too fast without discharging it, the excess became unstable and painful to hold. She had found that threshold the hard way once. She had not found it again since.
What made Nyra genuinely dangerous against most opponents was the feedback loop her ability created. Attack her and she became stronger. The instinct most fighters had—to press an advantage, to follow up a hit with another hit—worked directly against them when she was the one absorbing it. She had beaten two students in group sparring who were objectively more skilled than her simply because they hadn’t understood soon enough that landing strikes was making their own situation worse.
She had thought about Tessa’s magic for a long time.
The question wasn’t whether she could absorb a magical force construct—she had tested that in drills and it worked. The question was whether she could absorb enough, fast enough, before Tessa adjusted.
Tessa had asked herself the exact same question from the other side, and she had arrived at a different answer.
She had watched Nyra in drills. Had catalogued the ability carefully, the way she catalogued most things—methodically, without emotion, breaking it into components and examining each one. Absorption and conversion. Energy in, physical force out. The saturation limit. That last part was the most important. Every ability had a ceiling somewhere. She intended to find Nyra’s. The ceiling was the fight.
They entered the arena.
Tessa felt the floor under her feet and the open space around her and immediately began calculating geometry. The arena was wide. Wide enough to work with. Distance was her first tool—she could project constructs at range, which meant she didn’t need to be close to Nyra to engage her. But close range meant Nyra could absorb more directly, which was the opposite of what Tessa wanted.
She would keep the distance.
For as long as she could.
Nyra stepped to the center of the floor and stopped. She wasn’t rushing. She had already made her calculation—get close, absorb as much as possible as fast as possible, discharge before the saturation limit arrived. She needed Tessa within reach. Everything she did from the opening signal would be in service of closing that gap.
The signal came.
Tessa moved first—not forward, sideways, repositioning along the edge of the arena before Nyra could establish a line toward her. Her right hand came up and the first construct materialized in front of her—a flat compressed bolt of force, dense and fast, released immediately toward Nyra’s midsection.
Nyra raised her arm and absorbed it.
The impact traveled through her forearm and she felt it convert—a warm surge that moved up through her shoulder and settled in her chest, ready. She was already moving. Closing distance. Tessa released a second bolt—lower this time, at the legs. Nyra sidestepped partially, took the edge of it on her hip, absorbed that too. Two conversions. She felt the charge building in both arms now.
Tessa saw it.
Saw the way Nyra moved after each absorption—the subtle straightening of the spine, the slight increase in aggression, the arms coming up higher and tighter. She was getting stronger with every construct Tessa sent at her. Which was exactly what Tessa had expected, and exactly why the first three bolts had not been her real constructs at all.
They had been measurement.
She now knew how fast Nyra absorbed, how quickly she converted, how the charge manifested in her body language. She had three data points. She had what she needed.
Nyra closed the last of the distance and swung.
The strike was heavy—heavier than her frame suggested, the absorbed energy converting cleanly into the output. It caught the edge of a barrier Tessa raised at the last second—a flat wall construct that shuddered under the impact and cracked along one edge before Tessa released it deliberately, letting it dissolve rather than break. She stepped back. Reset.
The charge in Nyra’s arms hadn’t discharged fully. She still carried the converted energy from two and a half absorbed constructs.
Tessa noted that.
Then she stopped sending constructs entirely.
She waited.
