Young Writers Society

Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening/Night(whichever one it is in your part of the world),

Hi! I'm here to leave a quick review!!

First Impression: Alright...I think this is a nice little end her to this piece. You've really gone in nicely to establish the situation around Haka very clearly. I thought it'd be more shrouded in mystery but I like that the characters figured this out quickly and now we end with a fight that could decided a lot of things just getting underway. Its a great moment here.

Anyway let's get right to it,

Ilami huffed. Hard. She was barely standing. Seya laid in front of her, beaten, but still conscious. After counting to ten, Mr. Haifei announced ‘And the victor goes to Ilami’ with a dead voice, underwhelming her win as if it wasn’t something to be proud of.

Ilami thought she had every reason to boast her win. Seya was a tough opponent. Her speed, imbued with Wermin spells, would definitely seal Ilami’s fate. It was thanks to to Mr. Haifei’s classes that she was able to barely avoid her attacks. She had to make sure she didn’t stay still even for one second, because Seya didn’t spare each one from launching an attack on her. It wasn’t surprising, though. Of course Felaris’s friend would be just as formidable as she was. Veris excluded.

Well...this is off to a slightly disappointing start...xD I can see that maybe putting both smaller fights, especially when in this fight there shouldn't be anything special like Haka's changes to highlight isn't required, but I was kind of hoping to see more of this fight..well I guess now we can go right to the finals here.

‘You – you did… well,’ Seya said, breathing hard. She opened her eyes and smiled. ‘Felaris is going to have a hard time -’

‘The victor goes to Haka!’

The crowd roared upon the announcement. Ilami blinked. Haka won, at the end. From what she had seen of him, it wasn’t really surprising. But she had seen Felaris fight too, and there were times when she thought Felaris was better than her. Maybe both of them were above her level. As determined as she could be, she didn’t look forward fighting either of them.

‘No...’ Seya whispered. ‘Felaris’s the top of the class -’

Oh well...that's a good moment here. They definitely have no idea what's actually happened, and just assume Haka happened to be better on the day. I like how you manage to portray the obvious exhaustion from Seya as well and them acting nicely towards after this whole fight is over. Its a good moment, but I have the feeling that is all soon going to be forgotten with what they'll find out about Haka.

Seya saw it too. ‘No...’ She tried to get up, but her back fell to the ground again. Looking at Ilami, she said, ‘Go check on her.’ She was frowning with worry.

Ilami didn’t have to be told that. She jogged to Felaris, the muffled voice of the teachers growing stronger. When she arrived, she had to crane her neck to see Felaris’s state. Her body had bruises on them. It was expected, but her face – it was too pale. It was as if her blood was drained. Ilami didn’t know what Haka had done to her, but she did know it was too much. The sight of Aleveri’s pale face while healing Haka went to her mind. Both images were too similar, it was terrifying.

‘What happened to her?’

Oh..this is not a good sign at all. Haka being restrained is problematic and out of character but not that big of deal, Felaris' current condition however, especially on top of that earlier cliffhanger is a powerful moment that really nails home how much this horrible thing inside Haka has managed to do.

Seya held Ilami’s hand and led her to a nearby tent. The smell of food wafted through the air, spicy and sweet. Seya bought grilled steak, put into a paper bag. They sat at the wooden chairs provided.

‘I think something bad happened to Felaris,’ Ilami said with a low voice. ‘Haka must’ve done something to her.’

‘You think so?’ Seya whispered between bites. ‘She looks that bad?’

Ilami nodded. ‘Whatever Haka did to her, she wasn’t expecting it.’ She stopped there, leaving Seya to catch the underlying meaning of her words.

Seya’s eyes widened. ‘He was experimented, wasn’t he? It’s for real then? He becomes something else?’

‘I’m not sure… Both of us didn’t see how their match went. Maybe –’

Hmm, well it seems these two don't take long to come to the right conclusions and that's not surprising considering the things that they already know...hopefully whenever Ilami ends up having to fight Haka things aren't going to turn out nearly as badly. Also I love seeing how Ilami and Seya's friendship seems to have slowly developed here.

‘We suspected that much,’ Ilami said, nodding to Seya. ‘We didn’t see the match though –’

‘We did, and – he wasn’t like himself,’ Gael said, talking rapidly as if he couldn’t bear keeping the words any longer. ‘I saw him fight many times. One thing I know for certain about his fighting style is that its careful and precise. When he stopped Felaris’s sword with bare hands, I knew something changed. Something happened to him.’

The sight of Gael pained Ilami. His words poured out like a Scholar he was, but there was a tremor in his voice. His hands were shaking. He was talking about his best friend turning into something he couldn’t recognize, and it was clear he was struggling inside.

Well, there's definitely no denying the massive emotional impact a moment like this would happen on Gael and honestly probably even the others. Haka was a friend after all and to see him be someone entirely different and so violent has to be a scarring experience...eeesh, well its all now fully confirmed, hopefully they fix it before its too late. And also now I'm really starting to wonder what Serra's comments might be on this whole thing.

‘This isn’t the time to be emotional,’ she finally said, though the words tasted bitter. ‘What happened after he made the heart stopper?’ Heart stopper was the term for Haka’s action of stopping Felaris’s sword with his hands.

‘They both stayed still for a while, before Haka, inexplicably, managed to kick Felaris a few meters away. She fainted right after. That was the end,’ Aleveri said.

Seya didn’t say anything about this for a few seconds before she frowned. ‘That’s weird. Felaris can easily endure a few kicks.’ She hesitated. ‘But then again, no normal Fighter can kick someone away that far.’

Huh...fainting is definitely an odd way to end a fight when she's just been kicked. I would expect more like being knocked unconscious...I wonder if Felaris purposely did something so that she wasn't going to get any more injured...its hard to say I suppose...well, this is really taking off into some dangerous territories here.

Ilami remembered when she checked on Felaris. ‘Her face was pale, I saw it. It was like her blood was all drained.’

Gael blinked. ‘Drained?’

Ilami nodded.

He frowned, deep in thought. ‘Maybe...’ He shook his head. ‘When you fight him, Ilami, force him to go into that – that enhanced state as soon as possible. And don’t let him beat you once he assumes that mode.’

Well...that's just...yeah no...these are some scary descriptions here, all of which seem to suggest that poor Felaris herself might be in a medical situation bad enough for her to also get dragged into this experiment, that could well have been the plan for these people running all these things behind the scenes. That teacher shooing away Ilami and rushing to get Felaris is definitely a red flag.

‘Why?’

All eyes turned to him. He bit his lip. ‘I have… a suspicion. But I’m not sure about it yet. Just – prolong the fight as much as possible. It’s okay if you lose.’

‘No,’ Ilami said immediately.

‘Why not?’ Aleveri asked.

Seya raised her eyebrow as if she was asking, ‘You haven’t told them yet, have you?’

Aleveri would get mad if she knew Ilami was hoping her victory would gain her an answer on where the experimentation was held. She would certainly do anything she could to prevent Ilami from getting there. She’d put herself in trouble. Ilami didn’t have much time to think about it, so she just gave them the answer they would be satisfied with.

Well...now that's quite something....it sees she hasn't told Aleveri or Gael anything about that particular part of her plan for this test and only told Felaris, I suppose that isn't exactly surprising considering what we were told about her behavior prior to all of this. And well...I guess know she's going to lie to them and then risk her life for all this anyway.

‘Mother said I’d put the XieZhi family into shame if I lose,’ she said, the words coming out as natural as if Mother actually said that. She didn’t, but Ilami suspected the family would be put into shame if she lost.

‘I see,’ Seya said, wearing a poker face that would earn her an award for acting. ‘Well, you have about half an hour left to rest. I think you should prepare for him.

Wel...half an hour doesn't seem enough there, if Seya was looking as injured as she did there, Ilami is probably only marginally better off so if she's going to go up against Haka who can do all of that, she's going to need a few hours of rest at least...oh well, hopefully Ilami can survive whatever will happen. I also love this excuse, its technically not even a lie, her mother didn't mention those exact words, but she did tell her to do well on the test.l

Mr. Haifei repeated the words he had memorized. ‘The rules are simple. You may use magic, but only Natural magic. Your challenge is to beat your opponent; any attempt to achieve result beyond that will disqualify you automatically. You may use weapons, but only those that you learn in the class. If neither one of you concedes after half an hour, the judges -’ he nodded to Venaria, Kestari and Mrs. Reva – another teacher specialized in combat – sitting among the audience ‘- will choose the winner.’ He nodded and announced, ‘You may start.’

Before Haka uttered his spell, Ilami finished hers first. Fire spiraled around her on the floor, growing and growing until it consumed their entire battlefield. Haka was forced to put a wall of earth around him to protect himself. The flame grew bigger, ravishing the grass and creating smoke. Haka couldn’t manipulate the ground to favour him, as he deserved.

Ilami’s heart was on fire, and she would give her all to kill whatever monster residing inside Haka.

Well...the fight is on....I really love this choice of ending here. Its a lovely little cliffhanger and now we really must know more here. A powerful moment in the story and I love it. I only hope that its whatever horror inside Haka that ends up damaged and not Ilami herself or even just the not so violent Haka that's probably trapped within whatever they've done to him.

Aaaaand that's it for this one.

Overall: Overall, I think we're off to a great start here. I can't wait to see what will happen next. This was such a cliffhanger. Its a great setup. And oooh, I also see that I'm now getting so close to catching upto the present finally. Got to chapter 20, just six more to catch up properly

As always remember to take what you think was helpful and forget the rest.

Stay Safe
Harry

Hey Light! I thought since it's review day, I might as well go ahead and get around to reviewing this. That being said, i'm having a hard time putting on my review game today, so sorry if this review isn't that great.

So wow. I can really feel that this is a turning point in the novel, and I can't wait to see what comes out of it. I'm really hoping that from here, you'll just ratchet up the stakes higher and higher, rather than bringing them back down after the fight. I hope that everything's going to start to feel bigger and more immediate and important. I think it would even be cool if this started to cause people outside of just their little group to suspect that something weird is going on because of how Haka acts. Basically - consequences. I'm starting to want them to have some serious consequences for what happens, stuff that radically changes the direction of the story and really hits the characters hard.

I agree with DarkPan about the way Seya and Ilami come to the conclusion that Haka's been experimented on. You do a pretty good job with the reveal other than that, because suddenly I'm realizing that it makes what happened in the last chapter make a lot more sense, and that was a great "OH" moment. But I think you could use the last chapter to highlight that more - to emphasize through Felaris' internal dialogue that what Haka is doing and the way he's fighting isn't at all like the Haka she knows.

Her heart ached. Why did it hurt so much?

Wait, so what? I hadn't quite really realized that she has a crush on either Gael or Haka (not sure which, but I think Haka) but it doesn't surprise me. At the same time, though, it did surprise me that she was so obviously coming close to figuring it out - I kind of feel like she's the kind of person who wouldn't even really realize that she was more upset than normal, not at first.

. ‘Gael – they did something to her.’

Since Gael is saying this, I'm pretty sure you meant to put a different name there.

Your last line is good emotionally, but doesn't make a lot of sense to me. How exactly is she planning to "kill" the "monster" in Haka? When did she decide on a plan, or that she was going to try it? It's not at all what Gael was saying she should do. And all she knows is he was experimented on - how is she supposed to kill a "monster" inside him in a fight where they're explicitly not supposed to use lethal force, and when she has no idea if there is a monster inside him or any way to change him back to how he was before? I'm just really not following her thought process there, other than that she's generally angry and hurt.

And I think that's about all I've got! This was definitely an exciting chapter - can't wait for the next.

Hi, Lightsong! Dropping in for another review. Small corrections in blue, like always.

Small Comments

Mr. Haifei announced ‘And the victory goes to Ilami’ with a dead voice, underwhelming her win as if it wasn’t something to be proud of.

The semantics of 'underwhelming her win' are odd, because 'underwhelm' as a verb usually only takes a person or a group of people as its object (as in 'it underwhelmed me' or 'the play underwhelmed the audience'); I think 'downplaying' would make a better substitute. That said, the phrase is unnecessary anyway - by saying 'dead voice' and 'as if it wasn't something to be proud of', you make Mr Haifei's intentions quite clear as it is.

She had to make sure she didn’t stay still even for one second, because Seya didn’t spare each one from launching an attack on her.

Odd expression. Maybe go for something like:

She couldn't have stayed still for a single second - Seya was relentless, ready to take advantage of the slightest hesitation.

He couldn’t have beatened her too much… could he?

'Beatened' isn't a word, as 'beaten' is already a past participle. That aside, I'm not sure about this sentence as a whole. I think ending the paragraph with 'what had Haka done to her?' would be more effective.

Ilami nodded. ‘Whatever Haka did to her, she wasn’t expecting it.’ She stopped there, leaving Seya to catch the underlying meaning of her words.

Seya’s eyes widened. ‘He was experimented, wasn’t he? It’s for real then? He becomes something else?’

I don't see why Felaris lying pale-faced on the grass would lead either of the girls to this conclusion - especially not Seya, considering that she didn't see Felaris herself. I also don't see how she could glean this suspicion from Ilami's dialogue. It's not improbable that Haka would be able to take Felaris by surprise in his normal state, given that he's a very good fighter. It doesn't mean he's been experimented on.

If you want Ilami to form her suspicions, I'd have her focus on Haka's behaviour after the match. She says he's laid back, and I'd guess that he's usually a fair fighter as well. The fact that he's caused Felaris so much damage and had to be restrained in the aftermath, coupled with his long disappearance, is much more conclusive evidence for him having been altered. Felaris could've been taken by surprise for any number of reasons.

‘I’m not sure… Both of us didn’t see how their match went. Maybe –’

As I believe I mentioned once before, when you're forming a negative in constructions like these, it should look like this:

Neither of us saw how their match went.

'Both of us didn't' sounds weird, even though on the surface it doesn't appear to violate any grammar rules. It's just one of those things.

Gael ignored her. ‘Gael – they did something to her.’

This dialogue confused me. Gael is saying it, isn't he? So why does he use his own name? Did you mean 'He did something to her' as in Haka did something to Felaris, or did you mean 'They did something to him' as in the academy did something to Haka? Personally, I think you'd be better off going for the second one. It seems more aligned with Gael's emotions to focus on what's happened to Haka.

The sight of Gael pained Ilami. His words poured out like a Scholar he was, but there was a tremor in his voice. His hands were shaking. He was talking about his best friend turning into something he couldn’t recognize, and it was clear he was struggling inside.

This should be obvious without you needing to say it.

‘What have they done to him? Why did he look so – so cold?’

‘This isn’t the time to be emotional,’ she finally said, though the words tasted bitter. ‘What happened after he made the heart stopper?’ Heart stopper was the term for Haka’s action of stopping Felaris’s sword with his hands.

It seems oddly redundant to use a particular term only to have to explain its meaning immediately after. It reminds me of the 'all according to keikaku (keikaku means plan)' meme. I feel like you'd be better off just saying 'What happened after he stopped the sword?' If you really want to keep the term, I'd try and integrate it earlier in the story.

‘Even if Felaris couldn’t deal with his kick, she couldn’t go subconscious that easy. If I’m not mistaken, it was usually a hit on the head that could cause it.’

This whole sentence is weird - I get what you're trying to say, but the connotations of certain words just lead me down the wrong meanings. Maybe go for something like:

"Even if he kicked Felaris that hard, she shouldn't have fallen unconscious. It's not like he hit her on the head."

That said, his logic isn't great here. A blow to the head isn't the only thing that makes a person pass out - any kind of sudden pain can cause that. My sister smacked her elbow on something not long ago and fainted soon after because it hurt so much. Getting kicked hard meters across a battle ground would easily be painful and shocking enough to make somebody pass out. Gael might not know that, but I'd expect Aleveri to, given that she's such a proficient healer.

Ilami’s heart was on fire, and she would give her all to kill whatever monster residing inside Haka.

This moment would be much more hard-hitting if Ilami and Haka had developed a friendship of their own at some point. Given that they don't really know each other that well, I don't feel that personal motivation.

Overall Thoughts

So, this is a pretty exciting chapter. It looks like my suspicions were right about Haka having been experimented on, though I'll admit that I was never in any doubt about that. How do I feel about all of their reactions? I'm not sure. I almost think this chapter would've been better from Gael's perspective, given that he's the only character with a major personal connection to Haka. Had we watched the tail end of the fight through Gael's eyes, I think the oddness of Haka's behaviour would've been starker, and it makes more sense for him to form suspicions than Ilami, who didn't see the fight.

On a similar note, I'd have liked to registered Haka's out-of-character behaviour more as a reader. This comes down to the same thing I've been banging on about for ages, which is characterising your characters more thoroughly. While it's always been pretty clear to me that Haka has been altered, that's not really due to changes in his personality. I don't know enough about his personality to notice the difference. Sure, I am aware that he's a bit more casual than the other characters, but I've never really seen him acting that way. I wish I knew him better. If I knew him better, his behaviour in this chapter and the previous chapter would strike me as well as the characters. I want to feel the wrongness of how he's acting.

The part of the chapter that needs the most work is the middle section, the part where they're discussing Haka's behaviour and what it means. As I've said, Ilami's reasons for thinking that Haka has been experimented on are fairly thin on the ground. Why does she make such a big deal of Felaris being pale, especially given that the girl just fainted? Why, similarly, does Gael assume that a kick to the stomach wouldn't be enough to make Felaris pass out? It just seems like you're trying to pigeonhole the characters towards the right conclusion, even though their evidence doesn't make much sense.

But it's got me thinking about something. I think your characters need to disagree more. I've been rereading the Harry Potter books this summer, and one thing that JK Rowling is excellent at is having the characters disagree about one another's conclusions. In the sixth book, Harry is absolutely certain that Malfoy is behind the two near-killings that take place during the year, and it turns out he's right in the end. But Ron and Hermione are still there to cast (completely reasonable) doubt on his suspicions, because some of Harry's evidence is beyond far-fetched. The same thing happens in the last book, when Harry is convinced that Voldemort has hidden a Horcrux in Hogwarts, but Hermione keeps arguing that he would've had no time to do so. Her point is valid, but Harry's instincts are still correct.

My point? It's good to have your characters challenge and argue with each other, and it would've been welcome in a chapter like this. Maybe Seya or Aleveri could take up a more uncertain stance about whether Haka had been experimented on, and they dispute some of Gael and Ilami's arguments. It just gives everything a bit more realism, and it allows you to get away with some of the thinner bits of evidence if you use other characters to call them out. Take Gael's comment about Felaris having passed out due to a kick - perhaps Aleveri could correct him on that, tell him that it's perfectly possible for someone to faint due to any kind of sudden pain. But Gael could still be insistent that there's something more to the fight. You can have characters leap to unlikely conclusions as long as it's clear in the text that they're unlikely. Plus, it gives you way more opportunity to characterise people if you show how they disagree on certain issues. The different stances that Harry, Ron and Hermione take on the existence of the Deathly Hallows, for instance, is completely in keeping with their characters. When characters are of one mind all the time, they start to feel far too similar.

Anything else to say? I did think that your grammar and expression were a little shakier than usual - you missed some plurals. Still, let's turn our attention to the positives. I'm glad the action has stepped up again and I'm looking forward to seeing Ilami fight Haka. I wonder what Gael's suspicion is about Felaris being drained, and why he wants Ilami to draw the fight out. I also wonder if there's anything that can actually be done to reverse what's happened to Haka. We don't actually know how this enhancement takes place, so I wonder if it's a spell or something more scientific based. I imagine we'll find out soon!

Keep writing!
~Pan