The third round was a magic demonstration contest. Here the chosen participants would cast magic spells and a panel of 5 judges would rate them and give them a score between 1 to 100.

But this round was actually not so straight forward. There would not only be a single round of spell demonstration but actually three rounds of them. For each round, the mages who ranked in the last 100 would be eliminated and at the end of the third round, the tournament would be left with only 60 remaining talented mages.

So only being good at casting a single type of spell was not going to be enough to clear this round. Everyone needed to have at least three decent spells ready to clear this stage. But that was not all. There was another restriction on the participants. They were not allowed to use generic spells and the spell they would demonstrate should have something unique that belonged to them and only them.

This was a very common thing for older and more experienced mages. Even if two mages were casting the same spells, there would be obvious differences between them. But the people participating in the tournament were young mages who had not gotten enough time to understand magic deeply to create their own version of the spells. So even casting three such spells was going to be extremely difficult for them.

For Mekina though, it was not a problem at all. That was mostly because of a hobby she had. Even when she was still studying in the academy, she had always liked to modify spells to suit her taste. It was one of her favourite pastimes and in her years in the academy she had modified almost all of her spells. Even in the current situation, except for the spells she used in her job, most of the other spells she could use were heavily modified ones.

Now she just needed to properly think about the best ones among those spells as she could only show off three among her thousands of spells. It was a little arrogant type of trouble to have and Mekina was happy about it.

...

The third round started after about 2 hours. This extra time was given to all the qualified participants to think carefully about what type of spell they were going to demonstrate and if these spells were truly mixed with their unique touch or not.

After the end of the third magic demonstration, the participants scores from all the previous rounds would be added to decide on the overall ranking for the third stage of the tournament. These rankings were going to be very important in the later part of the tournament, so it was best to give their all in all the rounds.

The spell Mekina decided to use for her first round of magic demonstration was a variant of a very common spell called the "light flash". It was an extremely common spell that almost any novice mage was able to use. This was also the spell that Mekina had modified the most as it was the very first spell she had ever managed to cast. That was the reason why this spell had a special place in her heart.

Light flash was a simple spell to just create light and it did not have any offensive or defensive utility. But Mekina's light flash concentrated a large amount of light on a very short space which in turn generated a huge amount of heat. This was a simple modification but it immediately turned light flash into a powerful offensive spell. And it might look simple but concentrating so much light into such a small spell needed a very high degree of control on one magic power.

The judges were expert mages and they understood that what Mekina did was not an easy thing to do. It was actually quite impressive and her willingness to work on even such a low level spell showed her love for magic. So she was given a decent score of 85, 90, 82, 84 and 90. In total 431 with the average of each judge giving 86.2 to her. This was a good and respectable score but was definitely not the best she could offer.

But even then she ended up in the seventh position in the rankings. The judges were really tough with the scores and only 3 people were able to score an average above 90 points. The first ranker was Dorothy with her demonstration of water magic that created various kinds of animals and they all looked almost alive. It was truly a demonstration of excellent magic control and top tier spell designing. She got a total point of 473, an average of 94.6.

The person who ranked second also showed an extremely powerful spell and several fire wheels rotating around him. It was also an extremely good spell and he got a score of 460 for his performance. All in all, the first round of the third stage did live up to its name and excitement.

...

For the second round, Mekina went all out and used one of her most beautiful spells. It was a combination spell of ground, water, light and plant elements, that created a beautiful miniature scenery of a mountain, waterfall and rainbow. This was truly an extremely beautiful looking spell and it immediately took Mekina's popularity among the audience to the peak.

Unsurprisingly, she was also the top scorer of the second round with a total score of 480. Dorothy came in the second place with a score of 453 with her fire spell that created fires of multiple colours which floated around her in a very steady manner and it looked really beautiful.

But the biggest surprise of the second round was the elimination of the boy who was the second ranker of the previous round. It turned out that he was very good with the first spell that he used but other than that, he did not have any more original spells. It was truly an astonishing upset that the audience watched today.

...

Then soon the final round started. For this round, Dorothy tried to demonstrate a spell that she was still working on and was not very confident about. It was a combination spell of light and dark elements that created realistic illusions, combining two elements of different nature was truly extremely hard.

She was not able to maintain the spell for long, so it was not a complete success. But still this spell was so good that even after that little failure, she was still able to score a total of 460 points. But with this the audience realised that Mekina had a chance to surpass Dorothy if she could score over 475. So when she went to give her demonstration, everyone was looking at her while holding their breath.

Mekina was also very nervous after realising this. But then she thought about Elena and her training. She was trained by a S ranker so it would be very disrespectful if she could not even top a single round. So she calmed herself down and cast a spell.

First a ball of fire appeared and then a ball of water. Then the fire turned into a bird and the water into a dragon. So with her control over simple fire and water spells, she showed the whole audience a mythical battle between a dragon and a phoenix. And the score she got for this performance was 475, which made her to tie for the first place with Dorothy.

But then a tie breaker was announced and Mekina was able to become the top as she was the top ranker of two rounds while Dorothy managed to rank first in only a single round. And that was how, the third round came to an end with a cheering crowd.

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