Luke tuned in to the fraxion arena just in time to see the previous fraxion, already impaled by long, metallic spikes, die. It was on screen long enough to register it was transitioning to a new fraxion, but short enough that he didn't actually see the kill shot itself.
As he began to head out of Laura's office and back to his setup at Rhonda's potion shop, he heard a voice that caused him to turn back into the office. Laura's voice said, "Luke. It seems I've been transported to my death. Break open my desk. You will find a book with descriptions of various spells tailored to your mind. They will not be perfect. Adjustments in evocative imagery had to be made many times for you. They will work, even if it takes you an extra month to learn through the pages than my voice."
The voice wasted no time in repeating itself. No sound was transmitted through the arena screen, so Luke assumed she must have set up something to press play on a looped audio recording of herself should she disappear. He wasn't certain exactly what she'd done, but the message was clear. He crushed the table telekinetically, which caused the repeating voice line to stop.
A book fell out from the underside of it, where no drawer or compartment could be accessed. Laura had fully wrapped it in wood identical to that which made up her desk before smoothening out the bottom of her desk. Something she must have done today, if the book was updated enough for her to be that confident in his ability to learn from it.
Before it even reached the ground, Luke grabbed it out of the air and flew off to his gym in Rhonda's shop, watching Laura as he did.
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Laura swept her hand out, removing the shield she constantly kept around her body, allowing her numerous enchantments to interact with the underlying magic of the world. As they moved, they changed the flow of magic, automatically sending out fire balls and ice spikes, which would combine a set distance away from her to enhance the fireball's explosive force with that of a steam eruption. She then put the shield back in place, so her enchantments could not activate from just moving around.
The degree to which Laura enchanted herself had never been done before, and offensive enchantments were always a risk, as they required constant motionless of the nearby magic to keep from being activated. Something she could manage as long as she lived, but would lead to a powerful surprise for the fraxion that manages to end her.
Another upside to the enchantments is that magic overdraw was spread throughout her whole body, rather than starting at the hands like it usually does. If she fully unwrapped herself, this would be a major detriment, as her whole body would rapidly decay while she lived through it. The passive draw from natural magic currents would be enough to fry her in just under a minute. Not an issue when she could freeze them in place relative to her body.
The fireball was intercepted by a vine her current, fresh opponent sent out from its feet and the brittleness of the ice meant that, alone, it was useless against the armor plating of the fraxions. Weaker than any metal, but stronger than bones, the platings were a constant, biological defense that prevented any weaker blows from dealing true damage. They may have gotten a bruise or two from the impact force upon their body, but it was spread out over a significantly larger area than the point of the ice spears.
The fraxion retaliated by attempting to break Laura's neck, twisting off her head with telekinesis as it ran in. Unlike the majority of humans it had watched in the arena, this one seemed to have a realistic chance of fighting back. It couldn't afford to stick to standard tactics that save magic capacity, it would need to engage in real combat.
Laura's head moved very slightly before she reacted with proper counter-telekinesis, though it was less than an inch of movement. Laura briefly considered attempting the same back at the fraxion, but telekinesis, while the cheapest form of magic she knew, was significantly less efficient than many other forms of magic in a combat setting. The damage it could inflict per magic spent would only be worth it if she was already nearing the end of her ropes, as a last ditch effort to kill one more fraxion before her final contingency went off.
She responded by flying up into the air, making the fraxion's charge useless. As she rose, she let magic flow through an enchantment on one of her shoulders, sending a spray of hydrochloric acid out, like a misting attachment for a garden hose, falling down to the ground as she rose. The chemical simplicity made it the most efficient acid to make, that Laura knew of at the time she made that enchantment.
The fraxion stopped its charge in exactly the wrong spot. The cloud of hydrochloric acid rapidly entered its eyes, mouth, and ears as it attempted to back up. It created water to attempt to flush the acid out of its orifices and from under its armor plating, but the time that took was too much. Before it could regain what would remain of its eye sight, its spine was severed by a metal blade Laura conjured and flew between the fraxion's back armor.
Screaming in pain, not fully dead, and unable to see its opponent, the fraxion exploded itself into a ball of fire, using up its entire magic capacity to attempt to take out this superior specimen of humanity.
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Its suicide attack for for naught, as Laura's skin had too many defensive enchantment carved into it. The fire simply surrounded Laura without so much as singing her clothes before burning out, the oxygen having been rapidly used up.
After a couple milliseconds of the fire going out, she was returned to the neutral starting position every combat started with, the dead fraxion's body remaining behind as a spoil of her victory, or maybe as a way for one side to potentially build up resources over multiple deaths to attempt to take down a strong foe. No one knew why the gods did what they did with the arena, but Laura had planned to take advantage of it.
While the flesh of the fraxion she had just forced to suicide bomb her was decayed and useless, the armor plating, like bones, would not decay in death, only weather. She tore the plates off the dead body of the fraxion and began enchanting them as her new opponent attempted to strap her down, trapping her with metallic wires, not yet knowing the beast it fought against.
Laura took control of the wires, wasting the magic of her fraxion opponent as it attempted to wrest control back to itself.
As Laura won this power struggle seemingly with no effort on her part, at least displaying none, the fraxion charged her. It might not be able to win a contest of direct magical force, but fraxions were significantly stronger, physically, than almost any human. She would stand no chance in direct, melee combat.
But it never got the chance, as Laura began weaving the wires the fraxion donated to her into various, nonsensical shapes with untold bends, curves, and corners. Before the fraxion could even get half way to her, the first of these was completed, turning into a palm-sized weapon.
From the floating metallic wire, bent to its breaking point in many locations, erupted a ray of concentrated ultraviolet light the size of Laura's thumb. The invisible laser was given every kind of power boost she could weave in the couple seconds it took her fraxion opponent to reach her.
The power of it immediately made a point on its head begin to smoke, unnoticed by the fraxion due to the point of impact being an unfeeling armor plate. It noticed, however, when Laura rotated the near-cube slightly, causing the beam to enter the fraxion's eye. It was fully destroyed almost instantly, the flesh around the socket bubbling from the heat imparted upon the blood inside, bursting into red steam right as the fraxion began reacting.
It conjured a rock wall between itself and Laura. While not immediately deadly, the wound would be a major detriment to the fraxion, and would keep it thinking long enough for Laura to fully enchant one armor plate from her previous kill. She floated it to just out of the fraxion's vision behind the shield it made and placed it on the ground before working on the next plate.
The fraxion, not knowing exactly what hit it, decided to play it cautiously, and conjured rock spikes below where it knew Laura had been. One impacted her foot and shattered, her many enchantments making her almost immune to attacks of the caliber this fraxion was capable of without magic overdraw. Many others missed or made similarly useless impacts upon her body, tearing her pants in a few placed.
The spikes grew high enough that the fraxion could see them from behind its shield. It wasn't certain it had gotten her, since there should have been more spikes than it saw, so it turned them to sharp disks before sending them flying away from itself. Laura had not become visible to it from behind the shield, so it figured she must be further away.
Which was incorrect, Laura had not moved at all. During this brief time of her opponent being distracted, she finished enchanting another armor plate, which she placed at the same point on the opposite side of the stone shield as the first. Simultaneously, she finished bending the remaining wire into a more powerful version of the laser enchantment, given significantly more time to complete than the first.
The new foot-diameter gamma ray laser already had significantly more energy in it than her ultraviolet one, so she unraveled the first wire and added it to the new one, enhancing it further. This new laser began slowly boring a hole through the rock shield, melting it down into lava. The process was slow, however, and would take around a minute to fully pierce the defenses.
Time which would be irrelevant as the fraxion began to come around the shield, holding out a transparent shield like the one she'd began teaching Luke before being rudely taken away. It didn't matter, however, as it wasn't watching where it was going and stepped on one of the enchanted armor plates.
It never knew what hit it as a metal spike was sent flying directly into the chin of the fraxion before exploding into small needles. The force of the conjuration shattered the plate after creating an indent of it in grassy ground. After piercing into the bottom of the fraxion's head, the spike's needle explosion ripped its brain to shreds, piercing straight through bone.
It was like someone had shoved a frag grenade with hundreds of needles strapped to its side into its mouth and pulled the trigger.
Upon that fraxion's death, the arena returned to a neutral state. Laura did not require movement, but the spikes-turned-disks disappeared, the indent in the ground returned to normal, and the rock shield and debris disappeared. All that remained was the wire she'd taken control of, now in the form of a deadly laser; the corpses of three fraxions; and laura.
Her new opponent seemed to not get the memo that strap and decap strategy would be useless against its opponent, as it tried to trap her in a tomb of stone, only to have its face blasted by the gamma ray laser. It was rapidly incapable of survival thanks to the blast. Its corpse was moved to the side as the next fraxion was teleported directly into the laser.
The continuous flow of magic would eventually wear down the metallic wire that made up the laser, but Laura didn't care. She kept enchanting the plates of the increasingly large pile of fraxion bodies into more land mines. For every fraxion that took at most 2 seconds to die, she was able to enchant another plate and got around a hundred more blank ones to work with.