Pechus was the first to make a move, using the momentum he'd been building up with his whip to snap it with lightning speed at Ruzovi, who just about managed to dodge it by bending to the side and hence leaving a resounding crack noise as the whip hit nothing. Vertiya tried to counter with a yellow card, but Emba chucked her disc at it, causing the card to get stopped in mid-air and affect nothing. Before she even caught the disc again, Emba had started running towards Ruzovi and Vertiya and had launched herself with a jumping, two footed kick, but Ruzovi caught her feet with her bo and sent her backwards, Emba doing a backflip in order to land comfortably. Vertiya, grimacing, chucked another yellow card, but threw a red card at it as well, before covering her eyes. As the two cards met, they created a flashbang effect, blinding and deafening Emba and Pechus temporarily. Once they could see again, Ruzovi and Vertiya had vanished.
"We need to think up something better than this, we won't win out a straight two versus two," Vertiya muttered, hidden behind an ice sculpture.
"Well, what about trying some of those combos you came up with? If we can regroup with the others, we could bring those into play," Ruzovi suggested.
"Good idea. We need to get these two off our tails first, though. Get your bow ready, they won't expect a charged arrow," Vertiya suggested, and with a nod from Ruzovi, she got a red card ready. Ruzovi curved her staff into a bow, and pulled out an arrow from her quiver, before pushing off the floor, launching herself gracefully into the air. Almost simultaneously, Vertiya carefully took aim, perfectly aiming the card so Ruzovi could shoot through it towards where Emba and Pechus were. The arrow landed between the pair of them, but as soon as it made contact with the floor it exploded, blasting both Emba and Pechus away from each other. Emba smashed through an ice spike and was temporarily dazed, but Pechus, after seeing Emba on the floor, looked back to Ruzovi and Vertiya who were both now no longer behind their cover, and his pale orange eyes went crimson red, accompanied by a sly grin curling his lips.
Everything that was in Vertiya's mind disappeared, and instead she was left with nothing but an uncontrollable anger towards Pechus. Ruzovi was the same, and had leapt towards Pechus with her bow changed back to her staff, aiming a two-handed strike towards his head. Pechus, with a nimble move, caught the strike within the coils of his whip and controlled the momentum well enough to send Ruzovi flying backwards, her staff still caught within Pechus' weapon. Directly after this, xthough, Pechus had to roll to the side in order to avoid a barrage of cards that were thrown by Vertiya.
Vertiya didn't stop there, though, and sure enough, similar to fighting against the Nevermore, Vertiya's eyes had started to go completely green. She didn't quite get completely off the ground, however, because in from the side came a large ball of fire that crashed into Vertiya, knocking her out of the way and causing her to slide across the ice. The ball of fire stopped spinning, and Vertiya, still injured on the ground, realised it was Emba who had just crashed straight into her.
"I hope you hadn't forgotten that everyone here has a semblance as well," Emba taunted, chucking her disc again at Vertiya who narrowly managed to roll out of its path. "See, unlike you, I like to only have to reveal things when I need to and therefore get the surprise factor out of them. You don't have any tricks you can pull on me anymore that I don't already know, I've seen all of what you can do."
"Oh, if you think you've already seen everything I can do you must either be painfully unobservant, or just downright unintelligent," Vertiya replied, slapping a pink card on her side and pushing herself back to her feet. "There's always a card I can play," she continued, before throwing a red and a brown card at them, which collided to envelop Pechus and Emba in smoke. With a viable enough distraction, Vertiya glanced towards Ruzovi, who nodded, and the pair of girls took off towards where the boys were.
Vertiya and Ruzovi made it to Yimesz first, who was still going at it against Hylliang, although both of them looked battered. Yimesz did have his semblance as a back-up, but Vertiya knew he was vulnerable whilst casting it, and he often didn't use it unless he knew he couldn't get jumped. However, once he saw the girls running over to him, he swapped his knuckledusters to revolvers, giving himself covering fire as he disengaged himself from the fight, grouping up with the two girls.
"DO YOU THINK YOU CAN BEAT ME IN THE SEA?"
The three of them stopped upon hearing this bellow, and turned to the water, to see Pluto and Peter still battling it out on the ice, but by the looks of it, Pluto had actually sobered up. One of the things that Vertiya noted over the last two days is that Pluto tended to fight in a similar manner to the fighting style 'drunken fist' as she had thought first time she saw him, where he managed to, as Vertiya put it, 'deliberately accident' his way to a victory. However, she had never seen him fight sober, and seeing it now, it looked terrifying.
It sounded as though depth charges were going off under the water, and water started spouting upwards in time with the muffled booms with hard bursts, causing the ice block Pluto and Peter were stood on to start tossing violently. Pluto was steady as a rock amidst the chaos, but Peter, who did not quite have the sort of experience Pluto did in this matter, and it was only a matter of time before he started to lose his footing. Pluto, seeing this, started spinning his hammer around him, before with a full spin he struck the hammer into Peter with such force that he got knocked out of the arena altogether. Looking up to the screens, Vertiya could see Peter's aura drop down to below fifteen, and if that happened, they were eliminated from the battle for safety reasons. With his hammer changing back to a flask, Pluto took a long swig before spotting the rest of his team, and with a huge leap, he jumped straight from the block of ice to the main glacier where the other three were stood.
"There I was, about to say we should probably group in order to start knocking them out, and you went and did it yourself," Vertiya said with a small smile. "That being said, we should probably try and stick together and press the advantage we now have, because they don't seem to have anything that's effective against a group."
"Sounds good to me," Pluto replied, a lot calmer now than he had just appeared, but Vertiya reminded herself that Pluto had just had a drink and so was not quite as sober as he just was. "Time to pull out some of the combos we've been practising, hmm?"
"That's what I was thinking," Vertiya responded, before getting a pink card in one hand and a green in the other, following up by slamming her hands together. The two cards combined to let out a pink-ish aura, that did a little patchwork to the injuries that the four of them were showing – not enough to completely heal them, but enough so that the wounds weren't as damaging. "Let's get rid of these guys."
The three remaining members of the other team – Emba, Pechus and Hylliang – had also grouped together by this point, but they weren't able to see where Vertiya, Yimesz, Pluto and Ruzovi had moved to. They also didn't see Vertiya throwing a red and a blue card through a brown card. What they did see, however, was Pluto coming out into the open and batting a giant boulder of ice towards them. Hylliang had nothing to counter it, and it was too big for Pechus to try and redirect it with his whip, so Emba attempted to fireball it, and although it shattered when Emba crashed into it, ice exploded out from the impact which caught both Pechus and Hylliang, and Emba was stunned herself from crashing into the boulder. Pluto swapped his hammer to cannon form and let off another barrage, carefully aiming them to force Emba, Pechus and Hylliang closer together to dodge the cannonball fire.
Whilst this was going on, Yimesz had taken a hold of the end of Ruzovi's staff, and with careful use of her semblance and general skill, Ruzovi had manipulated her bo in such a way that it had flung Yimesz towards the trio left. Vertiya, who had prepped before, threw a red and a brown card towards the path of Yimesz's flight. Yimesz, seeing this, managed to punch through the two cards before bringing the same fist to the ground in the middle of Emba, Pechus and Hylliang, and the resulting explosion from the punch was so powerful it blasted all three of them out of the arena as well, knocking all of their auras out.
"Well, that worked better than expected," Vertiya said, thinking out loud. Vertiya had only formulated that exact move as a concept, and for obvious reasons had not been able to practice it with the others. But that one combo was enough to knock out the other team, and hence get them into Atlas.
After the battle, the four of them had been taken through to another room where twelve of the other initiates were sat around waiting. Vertiya spotted Fen and her team were amongst them, and Fen, who perked up when seeing the final team come through the door, pushed herself off her seat and headed over to Vertiya.
"Congratulations on making it through as well, although I don't exactly think that was unexpected," Fen said to her, with the tiniest hint of a smile on her lips. "I see you ended up with our drunk friend?"
"Oh, Pluto? Yeah, although surprisingly he's a lot more tolerable than I had originally given him credit for," Vertiya admitted. Both him and Ruzovi were far easier to work with than she had previously anticipated. The hardest member to deal with, although not entirely to Vertiya's surprise, was Yimesz, but she'd been dealing with him since they were born so she was well accustomed to it. "What are your team like?"
Fen made a rather prominent sound of exasperation at this, looking back at her team with a shake of her head before turning to Vertiya. "Tristov, the one you've met, he's reasonable enough. The other two… Emeric is just a pain, and Karmin is like what a Grimm disguised as a human would act like. I don't think I could have found more uncooperative people if I tried."
Vertiya guessed that the one with the arm blades was Karmin, but she hadn't really seen anything of Emeric. Looking past Fen to see the rest of her team, Vertiya spotted the other boy alongside Karmin and Tristov, with what appeared to be a puppet resting on his shoulder. Vertiya could not think in any way of how you were meant to fight with a puppet, but before she could ask, General Ironwood appeared in the room, and the conversations between everyone drew to a swift close.
"Congratulations to you all. Everyone standing here is now officially a student at Atlas Academy," Ironwood said to the sixteen kids dotted around the smaller room. "You have now each been assigned a dorm where you will be living whilst you are here, and you will be directed to them in due course. Before that happens, however, there is one last thing I have to do, which is finalise your teams and make them official," he explained, before moving over to the team sat down closest to him.
"Derek Bisque, Lissandre Fandango, Techta Wayve and Aurolia Zenyff, you will from here on be known as Team TDAL, led by Techta Wayve," Ironwood said to them, one of the three girls in the group going wide eyed when Ironwood said the leader. Vertiya realised the girl probably didn't expect to end up the leader, and was starting to wonder about her own team. She imagined Pluto would probably end up leader – sure he had a love of his 'alcohol aura', but he was the oldest after all – but she wasn't too fussed about that. Both her aunt and father weren't the leaders of their respective teams either.
"Melody Allegro, Nickel Bitra, Nave Plié, and Copper Tenebris, your team name is going to be Team CNMN, and you'll be led by Copper Tenebris," Ironwood said, having moved over to the next group and shaking the hand of the boy who was still standing, who Vertiya assumed to be Copper. Ironwood had moved over to Fen's team, and Vertiya, although not expecting to be named the leader, was still a little apprehensive. What if Yimesz ended up the leader of their team? That would be a disaster.
"Karmin Farkas, Tristov Icus, Emeric Marion and Fen Yīnghuā, your group will be called Team FEKT, and your leader is going to be Fen Yīnghuā," Ironwood said to them, getting a small smile out of Vertiya. She knew full well that Fen was most likely going to end up leader of that team, judging by how she seemed to hold herself in comparison to the rest of them. However, Ironwood had moved over to her group now, and Vertiya didn't exactly have time to congratulate Fen.
"And finally, Plutonine Hawkrest, Vertiya and Yimesz Hylae, and Ruzovi Saffyer, the team name you will don is Team VYPR, and you will be led by Vertiya Hylae."
Vertiya was stunned. Even with Pluto clapping her on the back, saying, "Well, guess we all saw that one coming," she hadn't expected it. She'd only really given the training ideas as advice really, rather than something to try and prove her leadership.
"Wait, me? But… why?" Vertiya said, shock evident in her tone and expression, which coaxed a warm smile out of General Ironwood.
"You've shown the best leadership traits throughout these trials amongst your team, and don't think I didn't hear of you getting the rest of your team to prepare for the final test," Ironwood explained to her. "However, I can imagine you'll want to get some rest following your fight, so if you follow the update to your scrolls, you'll be directed to your new dorm."
Vertiya nodded in thanks, turning to the others who all had a smile or grin on their faces, before rolling her eyes and pushing them in the direction her scroll was telling them to go. She could afford a bit of a break now. She'd made it into Atlas.
(Just a note: TDAL is pronounced Tidal, CNMN is Cinnamon, FEKT is Effect, and VYPR is Viper)