Every rib in the crown prince's torso broke at the same moment, a symphony of cracks, and Leo's eyes went wide and blind, and blood left his mouth in a rope, and the blow carried him off his feet and threw him twenty meters through the air onto the central platform, where he landed in a spreading crumple of white and red.
The students were already screaming when the four magic circles appeared.
They stacked themselves above the prince's body in layers, one over another over another over another, each ring larger than the last, turning in the dusk like the gears of some celestial machine, and the crowd's screaming changed pitch as everyone with any magical education understood, in one collective cold moment, exactly what a four layered siege array was built to do.
Leo's regeneration kicked in. The royal bloodline's famous healing. His crushed ribs were already shifting, knitting, the body dragging itself back from the edge by its ancestral bootstraps.
It did not matter.
