I do not, in fact, solve the entire problem that Vonne and I are grappling with in the couple of hours before the fighting starts. Given that identifying what someone’s Skills are from a recording of their magical resonances is isomorphic to divining the structure of someone’s soul from looking at their footprints, I shouldn’t be particularly surprised, but it’s still annoying to me how little I can pull out of the pictures.

I do get one word, though. One word, distilled from a burgeoning model of a world in three ecosystems, a model that’s starting to come together in vast and incomprehensible complexity. It’s a word that has facets of meaning, and I’m pretty sure that’s the key to Ben’s flexibility; as the horseman it’s an outpouring of light, as the elemental it’s a spatial rift, and as the log-carrier it’s a fissure in the ground.

Rive.

It’s a fun word, and Vonne is delighted and I think a little astonished that I got even that much out of the pictures. It’s not, she explains, the name of the Skills that Ben is using in the pictures themselves. Instead, it’s something more akin to the far more flexible and dynamic Skill that he bears when he’s not downranked into his third Tier, and when he is downranked, he gets reflections and shadows of what he is at his peak.

I can’t get any of those downshifted words. Every cycle’s pictures of him are too different, and I can’t get a firm enough or detailed enough look at what’s going on for any given cycle.

I don’t, initially, see how that’s going to change when we see the fights, especially since we’re not seeing them in person. It’s going to be a few seconds of looking at a picture, right?

Wrong.

When I use Mana Manipulation directly on the intake glyph of the wall-mounted viewing screen, at Vonne’s instruction, it sort of reaches out and takes over my entire sensorium. Just how it does that is wildly beyond me, and Vonne hasn’t the faintest idea either, or so she says when I ask; but she and I are seated together on the very tip of one of the spikes on the lowest viewing levels of the stadium. Amber’s lounging next to me, and Zidanya next to Vonne, and there’s a sense of solidness from them that I don’t get from my fellow remote-viewer.

“They can’t perceive us,” Vonne says to me. “Lily keeps hinting that someone should fix that, but it’s not that easy! I mean, not that easy to do in a way that doesn’t need to be fed by the scenario. It’s cause they’re real firmly rooted in where they are and in the moment, and we can look into that, but intruding is expensive. I dunno if that makes sense!”

“It… kinda does, yeah.” It very much kind of does. I’d gotten used to working with magic in discrete forms, whether it was in runic diagrams powered by glyphs that were more electrical engineering than an art form or in System-powered Skills that had quantifiable and likewise discrete effects. Sure, there were a few exceptions, like my mana-vortex that I’d used a few times, but what Lily’s scenario was doing with magic was on a whole nother level, something like a full-on multi-path parallel computation engine to the earlier floors’ finite-state automata.

It’s aspirational, really. I don’t understand it, and I want to.

“Is this the expected amount of crowd noise?”

“No! I mean, yes, when you’re in the Hells. I almost never am, so it’s weird to me too!”

“Yeah. It’s… pretty packed out there.” It really is; the stadium is full to capacity with a milling, teeming mass of, well, not humanity. A mass of sophonce, a chaotic melange of every ilk of folk I’ve seen in the last weeks. “

“Oh, it’s selective. It’ll let through the—”

“Kith! Kin! Monsters and the mad!” The voice cuts her off, booming across the arena as the lights in the seating dim just slightly and four spotlights turn on, all focused on one spot in the middle of the pitch, or whatever the playing field is called when it’s murder instead of sports.

There’s a human there. He’s probably big, seems proportioned for it, and despite the fact that he’s gotta be at least a hundred meters away, the moment my eyes are trying to focus on him it’s like there’s a tiny spot of magnification and I can see him with perfect clarity. Nicely dressed, probably; well-fitted clothes in good repair, and the greys and blacks work well with his square jaw and the salt-and-pepper beard that softens the severity of it all.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

“You have seen one battle already today. One glorious contest of skill and violence!” His voice isn’t quite as booming, now that he has everyone’s attention. “Five bodies lay dead on the sands, Flashfreeze’s hopes and dreams for this contest crushed by Flight. Here’s the moment where it all came crashing down; the moment where, Bo’s attempt to interdict notwithstanding, Naivite brings the pain… and spills first blood onto the sands!”

Despite myself, I lean forwards as everything on the field changes. There are figures on the field, now; five on each side, and eight of them are sort of fuzzed out. The two remaining are a humanoid scorpion and a broad-shouldered spirit of earth, glowing green through cracks in his skin. “This is… a replay?” Vonne nods at me, short and excited, but her focus is obviously on the field, and I pay attention myself.

“—and the wall is holding, but nobody is quite sure what the plan is. Penumbra isn’t being his usual slippery self, he’s dancing in blade range. Blink and you’ll miss it, but Flashfreeze has gotten five, make that SIX hits, and it’s starting to mount, but Naivite has been focusing on something and he’s starting to move—”

The fight is in slow motion, or at least slower than it otherwise would be. I’m fairly confident that gravity is the same in the replay as it is otherwise, which means this is maybe going at one-tenth speed. The people are still moving fast, but I can follow them, follow each of the masterful sword strokes, hammer swings, shield bashes, and spells.

“—Gods and demons, he’s going for the channel—”

“—Bo goes for the rock to interrupt but Torch burns it out of the air, and if Torch is playing defense we are about to see something huge—”

It’s almost, but not entirely, unlike a mana vortex. The scorpion—Naivite—created a localized sandstorm and compacted it, pulling in more and more sand, until my Visor has to switch from visualization to straight up math in order to make sense of it, and then he moves. He dashes forwards, going incorporeal through a boulder that Bo kicks at railgun speeds. There’s a definite sonic boom, and Bo hurls himself sideways, trying to position himself between the end of Naivite’s charge and the rest of the party, and then turns, leaving a tall plume of sand as the other gladiator teleports somehow past him.

“—I don’t think we’ve seen a sandquake this dense, this is going to be nasty!”

The vortex explodes. Bo slams into him with an audible crunch of broken bones, but it’s too late; the sands rip the rune-engraved armor pieces off of his body and the glow winks out, and then the sands overtake the squat, fat mage in his armor-plated robes, and the replay fades out.

“Nasty indeed, viewers honored and honorless alike! Nasty that was, and despite everything the Geode put in his path, the Lord of the Wastes pulls off an astonishing reversal of everyone’s expectations. Anyone who thought that Naivite’s flexibility was limited only to the supportive schools of magic, well, you’ve been shown otherwise, haven’t you!”

“Supportive schools?” I glance over at Vonne. “What does that even mean?”

“It’s kinda complicated. Um. Boons, maluses, spatial magic that doesn’t target people directly, area control? You almost always have a defender, a front-line damage dealer, a killmage, and a support. Fifth is more flexible, but usually teams go for more control.”

The announcer is talking about insider stuff, bets and prizes and history between the various teams. It’s interesting, but not as relevant to me as team compositions and tactics. “So the surprising thing there was that this guy was supposed to be some sort of control type, and he instead turned out to be their flip-the-table, wipe-the-floor guy?”

“Not even control. I mean, he has a little of that usually, but usually he’s more the save-your-life type with healing and malus-purging to keep his team going longer. But it’s Flight. I mean, Flight!” She waves her hands in the air excitedly. “They’re so unpredictable!”

“I guess you’re a fan?”

“No. I mean, maybe. I mean.” She clears her throat awkwardly, and I laugh, as her embarrassment shows itself in her voice so clearly even I can tell it’s there. “Look, that was the replay for Flight taking down Angelus. We’re getting Order against Epiphany next, and I know you’re not going to fight them, but you’re really gonna want to pay attention for this one.”

“Oh?” The teams are starting to head out onto the battlefield, to the beat of pounding drums and the cheers of the crowd. I understand now what she meant by selective about the sound filtering; I can hear the crowd’s roar as the favorites take the stage, a mooing sound as a sed with white-and-brown leathery skin and a pair of curved, upwards-pointing horns, a chant of chop! chop! chop! directed at hulking figure with two machetes.

“Yeah. Eternal, that’s the human with the mustache? They call him the Evoker.” I raise an eyebrow at her, then turn to look at the guy. Ah. “Yeah, yeah! You see it too! I mean, probably with your Visor, since they’re under his shirt? They forgot to pulse a dispel when the countdown starts once and he’s been doing this ever since.

“He’s got the same Skill that I’ve seen you use. Not the orbs, obviously; he’s got Conjure Mote.”