[X] Try to intervene somehow.
-[X] The two fighters appear to be closely matched. The Captain probably only needs a moment to win, so you'll give it to her.
-[X] Open a portal above the revolutionary's head, and dump water and ash over his face. Try to be subtle. You don't want to be noticed.
-[X] Immediately leave, whatever the result is.
Your first instinct is to run away and not look back. It's your second instinct that you follow, the one that says that however awful Diadem is, people calling themselves revolutionaries and murdering lawkeepers by the dozen are going to cause a whole lot of bloodshed before the city council crushes them. Bloodshed that might spill back to your parents, who didn't have the protection of the college to rely on.
So instead of running, you back away slowly, keeping your eyes fixated on the fight as you begin casting your spell. Nothing fancy, just something to distract him, give the captain an opportunity to take him out. The four seconds it takes for you to open a small portal seem like an agonizing eternity in the face of the duel between the two of them. The captain has been backed almost all the way to a storefront by now, and from her expression you think she knows it. Her eyes never leave her opponent though, and her feet never stutter as she falls back under the hail of blows.
Just before another step would leave her with her back to a wall your spell completes, and a portal opens up above the revolutionary and pours out gallons of water mixed with soot and ash before you snap it shut and immediately flee.
You feel a stinging pain in your right arm and hear a meaty thunk behind you, but you don't stop for anything. You just keep fleeing. As you go, you hear that the tenor of the battle behind you has drastically changed. Rather than a constant ring of steel on steel that seemed to become one great rumbling of thunder, now it's a whistling in the air and the sharp patter of feet tapping frantically across stone. Another moment later and you're around a corner. You don't stop running, but you do take half a second to glance down at your arm. There's a shallow cut there, where one of the revolutionary's daggers must have just grazed you. You pale a bit, and can only fervently send thanks to the one god that you're at least pretty sure is listening that he missed as you tear off a bit of one of your sleeves and clumsily tie it over the small wound as a makeshift bandage.
---
You're about two thirds of the way back to the college when it happens. One second you're, well not sprinting at this point. You aren't in very good shape if you're being honest with yourself. Jogging is probably more accurate. The next the world has become light and sound. An indeterminate amount of time later, you stagger back to your feet and desperately try to get your bearings. You blink, hard and shake your head as your surroundings seem to be blurry. You look around. In front of you, some building seems to have exploded. There's chunks of wood, glass, and stone littering the street all around you. You're lucky you weren't any closer or you doubt you would be- you look down at yourself to check- only kinda badly scraped up. Still, you can keep going.
Except as you stumble your way to the next street corner and look around to try and figure out where you should be going, you see that all along the main street of this district there are bombed out storefronts and- you start at the realization. The corpses of lawkeepers. Nearly three times as many dead as the muster you saw in the square, and among them you see more than a couple higher ranked officers. Whatever happened here, it was a massacre. Why didn't the city council stop this? That was what they were supposed to do, wasn't it? For the first time in... ever, you're starting to wonder if the city council is really all it's cracked up to be. If one day some revolutionaries can just cause all of this death and destruction then... And it's not even like this is one of the parts of Diadem where the city council would just shrug and not care if every single person who lived in it died. This was a market where minor nobles and wealthy merchants regularly shopped and did business. The moderately rich and powerful being were supposed to be safe from this kind of thing in Diadem and-
You shake you head firmly. There would be time to process this all later. Right now you had to get back to the safety of the college. Once you were inside it's gates you; the gates! You want to scream in frustrated realization. There was no way the gates would be open with everything that was going on in the city. How were you going to get back inside once you got there? If you couldn't get in, going up to the gates would just be huge danger for no reward. The entrance was hugely exposed; there was a large open stretch leading up to them. And the gates themselves were a danger. You weren't sure how trigger happy the defenses were. No, you shake your head one more time to clear the frantic thoughts away and clench your fists in determination. You couldn't think about any of this here out in the open. You needed to plan. With a firm nod to yourself, you duck into a not completely destroyed store and take a minute to decide on your next move.
[] Chance making the rest of the trek to the College's gates. It's a long way to go and you might run into danger along the way, but once you're there maybe the TA will know you're trapped outside somehow and let you in? It's thin and you're relying on hope but it's better than being stuck out here in the middle of this chaos.
[] Hole up right where you are. The revolutionaries already attacked this area and killed all the lawkeepers, and whatever those explosions are have already happened. You don't think anyone will really come through again until everything is finished. Well. You hope.
[] Hole up Somewhere for a couple of hours. Hopefully things will have blown over by then and you can just walk back to the college. Of course, there's the danger that something important will happen and you'll miss it, or the revolutionaries take control of this portion of the city and you won't know about it until you stick your head out. Still, wait long enough and things will probably work themselves out.
[] You think you hear singing off in the distance. You're not sure, but you think it might be Addy. Sure, you might not be best friends, but while her goodbye was kind of weird you think things ended on a positive note? Regardless two people would be more likely to come out of this than one. On the other hand, she is singing, so she's probably attracting attention to herself somehow.
Ironically, it was running away that made the revolutionary attack you. He made the connection between 'person in robes running' and 'mage who probably just got me killed' pretty easily, whereas he wouldn't have made the connection between 'random bystander I should be careful of still bystanding' and 'mage who probably just got me killed'.
