A muscular player in black, violet, and gold leathers and wearing a gold mask, dropped in a sudden, hard dive. He gripped his bow in his left hand, and yanked back the string, shooting at a player wearing a forest green uniform as he plummeted past.
He managed to get the other player, a witch, square in the back, and I saw the hit player curse as her uniform lit up in pink, red, and orange sparks.
“Oh-ho!” Draken crowed. “That’s two!”
“See that?” Miranda pointed at the witch who got hit. “She’s technically ‘dead’ now, and has to leave the field. They’re already two down. That’s ten points for our side. Five each death. Two for every wounding that doesn’t pull them out of the game.”
“Is that the goal?” I asked. “To knock everyone out on the other team?”
“Not exactly.” Draken glanced at me from behind his glass. Thinking, he amended, “Well, it’sonegoal. It’s more complicated than that?”
“There’s an offensive team, and a defensive team,” Miranda explained, her eyes still following the players. “For university level, they only play one round each. The pros get three rounds, and sometimes the matches go on for days?”
I felt very glad this wasn’t a professional match.
“There’re twenty players per team,” Draken added, tag-teaming with Miranda. “In the first part of every round, you canonlyuse bows and arrows, like you just saw. As soon as one team is down seven players, they can switch to magic. You can use offensiveordefensive magic at that point. Arrows are more reliable at the beginning, when everyone’s moving this fast, but it also levels the playing field a bit?”
“One team protects this magical animal?” Miranda continued.
“An arakkus,” Nyx supplied, biting off a piece of a pink, candy wing on a stick. “They’re bred especially for it. The defensive team defends them… see, over there?” She waved her pink wing in the direction of The Eyrie. “That’s why The Eyrie’s shaped like that. There’s only one way in and out. It makes it harder for the offensive team?”
“The offensive team has to get past the defenders,” Luc continued, motioning towards the Malcroix Bones flyers. “While the defensive team…” He motioned at the Bavarians. “Tries to neutralize them. The team with the most points at the end wins.”
“The tally of points is up there,” Jolie added, motioning at lit numbers that floated in the sky. “We’ve got offense to start. Which is good and bad. There’s more opportunity for points onoffense, but that cuts both ways. We don’t know how high we have to go to beat them. And you can lose a ton of points as the offensive team, too. But if you start off as offense, you can drag things out, and exhaust the other team.”
I frowned, trying to take that all in. “So the first half of the game ends when the offensive team captures the dragon thing?”
“Arakkus,” Nyx corrected.
“?Or someone runs out of players?” I guessed.
Draven shook his head, but not exactly in a no.
“That’s two ways it can end,” he corrected. “Technically, a round ends when one of the following happens: the arakkus is captured, killed, or fatally wounded, any of which earns the offensive team thirty-six points. Or, after three solid, non-fatal woundings of the beast, which is worth twenty-eight points.Or,if the offensive team runs out of players. If the defense runs out, the offense has to keep going after the arakkus until they catch, kill, fatally wound it, or non-fatally wound it three times.”
“There’s also a thing where they can capture the beast withnoplayer deaths, and without killing the arakkus,” Miranda added. “But that’s a total unicorn play. It almost never happens. They call it a ‘bloodless catch,’ and it wins the team that pulls it off ninety-three points. I can’t remember the last time it’s happened, though.”
“There are point awards for other things, too,” Jolie added, grabbing a handful of chocolate bats when Luc offered his bag to her. “A completely bolloxed attempt to wound or kill or capture the arakkus is negative ten points for the offense?”
“And if the offensive team fails to neutralize the beast before they run out of players, or if they take too long after all the defensive team is knocked out,” Draken chimed in. “It’s considered a lost round and they loseanothertwenty-eightpoints, in addition to whatever the other team earned by killing and wounding their players.”
I frowned.
“No wonder it goes on for so long,” I commented finally.
Draken laughed. “Well, it can go either way. I’ve seen a few tournaments that were over shockingly fast. If the teams are really unbalanced, it can be a bloodbath. That’s another reason they divvy up the university teams the way they do. We’re pretty lucky right now, in that all eight of the top schools are shockingly good.”
I smiled, a little bemused by all of their enthusiasm.
Even Luc was the most animated I’d ever seen him outside of school.
“Do we have a rival?” I asked next, quirking an eyebrow.
Miranda grinned and exchanged looks with Draken.
“Depends on who you ask,” Jolie said, from Miranda’s other side. “Just about everyone hates the Russian team… there’s a whole history there,” she added, waving off my questioning look. “But we’re pretty competitive with Tokyo, and that’s been true for a while.”
“And California,” Miranda added, nudging Draken.
