The battle waits on the music, and I feel ashamed at being surprised.

The first round of drumbeats comes from seemingly nowhere, a running rhythm, quiet and building, starting to build as the ten contestants start walking onto the field of battle. It’s syncopated oddly and the time it’s keeping is unfamiliar, but something about it grips me under the sternum and won’t let go from the first thudding beats.

About eight seconds into the drumming, there’s a feeling like a veil being ripped aside, and the field expands under the feet of the two teams. They’re making their way through thickly-wooded hills, picking up the pace as the spatial expansion takes hold, kicking off the ground to swing on branches and vines too thin to seem like they would hold their weight, rocketing forward on a variety of different elemental bursts, and in general just looking like they’re having an absolute blast.

Over their heads, spread more or less evenly across the stadium at the level of the extending spikes that are the hells, there are seventeen drummers. Each of them’s facing outwards, standing in what looks like a po-faced parody of a combat pose on top of solid air or an invisible platform, holding two long drumsticks. They’re moving in deliberate, exaggerated, whole-body bursts, alternating heartbeats and bursts of frenetic drumming, and my body is moving in time with the beat, my body and everyone else’s.

The two teams below us are moving with the beat, too, moving in an unpolished, earnest display of athleticism and magic, but I’m having trouble watching them; my eyes blur, and I close them, just listening to the hammering of the drums.

I hadn’t listened to music since we’d taken the early dive that had wound up with me falling through to Cador, to the Temple.

The moment eventually passes. The music ends eventually, too, after three changes in style; they mix up the drums they’re using, the kinds of rhythms they’re using, the time the rhythms fit into, and once, memorably, the people doing the drumming, in the middle of a song, without dropping a single beat.

In the end, there’s a susurrus, an indrawn breath in the world. It pulls in the air from my lungs, gently but inexorably, and when I breathe in again the drummers are gone and there’s a number blazing in the air.

Ninety seconds. Eighty-nine until battle, eighty-eight, and the commentariat jumps in to fill the silence, as though from just outside our viewing box.

“Denizens, derogatory and delightful alike! It is such a pleasure to be here today.”

“Folks, welcome. Whatever ilk of kith or kin you count yourselves as, let us join together in the glory of this moment.”

The voices are smooth and rich. One of them drawls his vowels with elongated diphthongs and snaps his consonants, and the other rolls her consonants and lingers on deep, narrow vowels.

I hate both of them immediately, with a passion that’s totally irrational and unreasonable.

“We’ve got an absolute treat here for you. Ghosts Numbering Five has made it this far, but can they go the distance? Varad’s been optimistic, and he and his team have certainly delivered on their talk, but they’re up against Sages, who have an amount of experience that simply cannot be set aside.”

“Absolutely. And Sages has been looking incredibly sharp. Their performance in the qualifiers was occasionally rough, but they’ve all made it to these quarterfinals, and their utter domination of their previous round’s opponents was simply remarkable.”

“Remarkable is right! Their control of the battlefield was superb, and their ability to burst down a target was unexpected. Will Ghosts be able to crack their shell and dispatch them to join their previous conquests?”

“Overwrought, my friend, overwrought. Here to bring you the plays, we have the absolute pleasure to be your analysis team; and we are, indeed, Owain…”

“... and Yon.”

I finally find what I’m looking for. If the sound of these two celebrants in this orgy of violence is so near-seeming to me, it’s a very personal kind of magic. Under the same fundamental rules of human-system design, possibly assisted by or possibly solely because of my use and abuse of Interface, I can interact with a personal set of customizations, and halfway through the countdown I tap two-thirds of the way down my arm-rest, draw a two-thirds circle with my forefinger, and then make a slashing motion.

The two voices cut out, replaced by a quiet countdown in Lily’s own voice, picking up at the thirty-second mark. Minimalistic/Dampened, the option reads, and that sounds like exactly what I’m looking for.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

Thirty seconds for us is a whole lot shorter for them, maybe as little as three seconds. My attention is mostly on Sages, to start with; I have better information on Ghosts Numbering Five, and I’m fairly confident what their strategy is going to be, but unless their opponents are going to do the same thing they did last time…

Sages have the high ground, or something like it, and are somewhat closer to the river. I know that was probably because of how they did in the preliminary rounds of one-on-one, playing Downbeat or whatever other challenges they’ve pulled out of the challenge grids. I can’t place why, but I think they went four for five in the challenges, which is in line with their historical placements. Win or lose the fight itself, they hardly ever came at it from a position of disadvantage.

That is not, come to think of it, the greatest of compliments, all things considered.

Unlike Ghosts, they aren’t there under any particular name. Individually, that is. Sure, I could look up with some effort what name Old Gunner goes by outside of the field of battle, or Stormlord, but that seems unnecessary. Instead, I focus on questions of tactics, trying to get into their heads.

It’s going to be the same strategy, I’m fairly confident. It’s their best bet; if they can disrupt their opponents’ charge…

The horn sounds, and both sides are in motion.

Ghosts move like poetry. Sun’s Glory spreads her wings, sending off crackling geysers of ice, and something like an ethereal wind picks up that starts to slowly accelerate everyone, as Peacebringer starts emanating shadows which wrap around everyone; that has to be Wing We to Battle and No Obstacles Bar Our Path, given the way that they start sort of phasing through the small branches and bushes they can’t avoid at their full-on run. Sages, on the other hand, moves like a polished physical comedy routine; the Old Gunner in his cobbled-together boost-suit with its attached oversized gun and something else I can’t catch, Minelayer with their three bodies and their oversized wheeled buckets-by-any-other-name that they half-push, half-ride, and Grapple festooned with bits of machinery and weaponry as though they’re armor. Stormlord and Glacial Soul are more elegant, and not just by comparison; the latter outright glides, a frozen core with the vague suggestion of arms and a face that sort of grow out of it, and Stormlord charges through the forest with grace and verve, crackling with lightning and somehow seeming to dance between the trees as though they politely decline to bar his path.

The clowns get to the river first. They set up on a cliff; they’ve run hard through thick, wooded hills to find it, but it’s a good position, covering the only reasonably shallow ford for a while around and with decent sight-lines, especially given the sandy wasteland that’s to one side of them. They start, or rather, continue… bickering, with their actual words not making it through but their tones of voice clear, but it’s bickering in good fun, and Minelayer starts throwing down three different kinds of emplacements as Stormlord pulls a spark out of the electrical charge surrounding him and shapes it into a smirking face, tossing it just short of the ford and starting to make another.

It’s… remarkably dull, frankly, for the moments between when they get to the river and when Ghosts do. Judging by their speech and their breathing, it’s maybe ten seconds for them, but there’s a tenfold time dilation going on, and my attention drifts to the other team just in time to catch the flare of their Skills as everything goes to full power, just before they break the treeline and come into view of their opponents.

[Soar]. [Wing We to Battle]. [No Obstacles Bar Our Path]. Wings of ice—well, not exactly ice, more like a breeze of frozen ejecta, like a freezer unit got cored by debris—form around each of the five of them, and they outright run through the last sets of trees in their way, picking up speed all the while. They hit the end of the cliff on their side, a hundred meters away from their opponents, and they leap into the air, and those wings extend out to their sides in translucent decameters.

[Into the Fray]. [Ancestral Form]. They all speed up as Varad howls something, growing in the blink of an eye into what is recognizably a demonic figure out of the imagery I’ve seen of the Great War, skin becoming inky-black carapace and wings of rime turning black touched with red. His long, wickedly curved horns glow, and orbs of power start to gather in his hands.

[Blink]. [We Are Unstoppable]. Raoul howls back at Varad, and suddenly he’s fifty and then a hundred meters higher, going into something of a dive and picking up ever more speed. He picks his timing perfectly; his Blink dodges a series of projectiles, ice and bullets and alchemical fire, and by the time they retarget he’s visibly unbothered by any of it, or by the crackling, gripping conduits of electricity that envelop him momentarily from a grenade that Minelayer throws.

Raoul is gigantic. Built more along the body plan of an ox than a human, he looks to weigh somewhere in the thousands of kilograms. Low thousands, but thousands nonetheless.

There’s ice on the ground, and ice in the air. There’s electricity and frost reinforcing Grapple’s armor, and a barrage of micro-missiles in flight from the Old Gunner. There’s another one of those electrical-conduit root grenades, a flare that goes off right in Raoul’s face, and at the last moment a vicious barrage of sparks and magic from Grapple’s armor proper.

The activation of [Grappling Charge] ripples across the Coliseum, and the battle seems to hang in the balance.