[@KuramaaaZ]

"I'm not gonna back down, Vlad." Gus mumbled.

Putting his foot beneath him the boy rose back to his full height and kept a close eye as his opponent kept himself in the water to conceal his true intentions. Lot of swimming, lots of cursing Gus assumed, and the boy finally emerged after putting some distance between the two of them. The bigger of the two, Gus let Vlad scrounge for his next tactical idea instead of simply running over and crushing the boy into the dirt. Lot of power but the upstairs department on his opponent was lacking in a big way.
Having finally found a suitable stick he liked, Vlad turned and began to shake as he held it firmly. After a short time it began to vibrate and not just shake, and Gus knew the ploy. He'd seen it occur more than once and heard stories from his father of fire elementalists super charging something with their energy only to have it explode. Vlad tossed the stick like a Javelin and Gus crossed both his arms, focusing on both of them with the full force of energy he could muster to harden the tissue as much as possible. The moment the stick exploded, Gus was forced to take several steps back to avoid falling onto his back. Both arms blackened and now bleeding, Gus continued to smile. 

"Gonna be a wuss and throw more sticks or do you feel like settling this like a man?" 

A rhetorical question, really. Gus took off in a charge, ignoring his stomach and the pain in his arms as he focused more adrenaline to block out the hurt and bring back fighting function. Already he was well past his experience but the idea of a fight was to always push yourself over your limit and achieve new heights of prowess. As he closed the distance with thunderous foot falls, Gus grabbed a rock half the size of Vlad and hoisted in it one hand over his head and let fly. The red hue still in his arms he raced forward and threw another heavy punch, following it with another, and another, a barrage of heavy punches. His blood was boiling now. The pain, the pleasure, the adrenaline, it made the boy drunk on his own potential as he swung like an animal. One such attack connected solidly with a boulder as he wildly swung at his opponent, shattering it into broken chunks of stone without sign of slowing down.


???

The man under the mountain watched the fight impassively, only wincing when the larger student came close to destroying something in the grove by accident. What monstrous power that frame held as he watched the hurl a boulder one handed. It's trajectory would send it into a tree trunk with enough force to shatter it, which would not do, but rather than interfere as he had done to the fire student, the man simply walked into the fight. The world slowed down to a crawl, as it had so many times before, as he approached the fighting boys now locked in place for a mere instant of time, for them, but what could be an eternity for himself. The boulder was large, a stunning throw, but one of senseless destruction. 
The man touched the boulder as it sat in the air and gently pushed it ever so slightly to alter the aim to land in the dirt near the tree it would have crashed into otherwise. Satisfied, he returned to the here and now and felt the air of the boulder pass and smash into the ground as he intended. Sitting atop the fallen rock, the man waited with anticipation to see how the fight would end. The boy called Vlad with the fiery temper was going to run out of energy soon. Recklessly using his stored energy without ever trying to charge himself up. But Gus had not bothered to make an attempt to dodge the explosions or fists of his opponent, relying on his resilience and bulk to keep him in the fight. 

Youths always surprised him with how stubborn they could be.