A cute green mushroom pops out of the sand. It releases a puff of bright green spores. The small orb-shaped cloud blows up with a jerk, covering the arena in diffused spores. The outside world blinks away. There’s nothing but darkness outside the enclosing barrier.

  Yilivin doesn’t make any other moves. Instead, she says, “The others spoke with you and came to a... resolution for themselves. How about we do too.” I nod. “You know about my past.” I affirm. “Would you like to learn what now only I know? ...I killed my family. Bided my time until I was strong enough—so many painful years—and slaughtered them. Thousands of years later, I can still recall their lifeless faces perfectly. And yet, our victims always remain faceless in my dreams. Is it better? To know them all like you do?”

  “Their. Their victims.”

  “Even to your enemies, you try to bring comfort... The first king. I... convinced him, begged him to take the credit. And to kill me too. As you can see, he did agree to the former, at least. I may be one of the few, if not the only person that understands what you have suffered. Chasing redemption.”

  “Have you caught it?”

  Yilivin laughs softly. “Every time, out of reach it seems. Did I make a mistake, Lucius? Was it a mistake to kill my own blood?”

  “I can’t give you an answer to that question. But... your actions saved a lot of people.”

  “And was it a mistake to attribute my actions to another?”

  “You chose the optimal outcome.”

  “I chose what I thought was best. An outcome stained by my own life. Just as yours is. There is no true optimal through the lens of a person. Even for you.” She sighs. “Control. That is what I have exerted upon those I love. Same as you.”

  “There is a difference between control and... nudging in the right direction.”

  “A single degree of separation. You are mapping lives yet to be lived. Can you call that living? Following an already written script. How can we believe that you haven’t taken it beyond reason? How can we believe that you won’t?”

  “Easy. You can’t. Elisa’s mother—Alcia—the first time I met her, I told her that not even my actions can prove my true intent. She promptly called me an idiot. In a nicer way, of course. Elisa was there too.”

  “Seeing you smiling like that... Cassmus... and everyone else. It makes me want to believe you. But I only see myself, staring back with the same cold eyes I see in the mirror.” She asks, more herself, “What am I to do?”

  “Carry out your duty. As you always have.”

  Yilivin takes in a deep breath and exhales. “Whenever you are ready, then.”

  A needle passes through her chest. Yilivin pops like a balloon, releasing a cloud of bright green spores.

  More mushrooms pop out of the ground, adding their own puffs to the lingering bright green specks.

  As I take a breath in, focusing on pinpointing where my opponent is hiding, my lungs refuse to expand any more. Hm? They also refuse to contract. While examining my perfectly healthy diaphragm, my heart stops. What? The mechanical part of my biology tries to simulate electrical activity and restart the organ, more to see what will happen than for any other pertinent reason. No response. Tingling starts propagating from the tips of my extremities to the center of my torso. It would appear that my muscles are going on strike.

  I focus my mana senses to their limit, letting all other sensations fade away. They fade a bit too much. I can no longer feel fabric against my skin, nor the touch of warm air. The arena darkens, not due to an obscuring spell, but from my eyes gradually failing. Sensors fail to supply the information I am now lacking. My ears start ringing, drowning out the low sounds around. The ringing too wanes, until there is nothing but silence.

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  My world inverts, like I am falling into oblivion. It spins again, churning me left and right, as if I am a particularly dirty piece of garment. But soon, motion seizes too, my body foreign, not even floating through the void I am in. Absent from reality.

  Finally, I feel nothing. My shell, my core—gone. Only my mind remains, suspended in a space that does not exist.

  Looks like I’m not the only one hiding surprises.

  Now, what do I do? Maybe... It isn’t at an acceptable state yet, but what better place is there to evolve than the battlefield.

  A digital inhale brings with it a slight scent. Not volatile compounds being picked up by biological olfactory receptors or their technological equivalent, but a sensation that manifests itself directly in my mind. A hear faint crackles. Not vibrations propagating through a medium, but the world whispering its form. Shapes start revealing themselves to me. Not light reflecting, but electromagnetic fields reacting with each other, with everything else. Not data collected by my sensors, but a new layer of perception gleaned by my magic.

  The stadium is empty space suspending chaos, a storm of complexity. For most others. Each person is picked up perfectly. My missing gaze moves to a spot, locking onto the only other disruption standing upon the unseen sand of the arena.

  Nothing but thought conjures an invisible needle. Lightning arcs from the projectile, making it visible. Fading disruptions trace its path, hitting the Yilivin-shaped field.

  Long nanoseconds later, I realize that the needle is untypically motionless. Did Yilivin catch my spell with her hand? Crunching some numbers places the possibility of that in the high nineties.

  Nothing but thought starts conjuring an invisible dart, electricity running along its surface.

  The Yilivin-shaped field changes. The Lucius-shaped field changes too. I’m just going to assume she refrained from using a lightning spell.

  Passive worked fine. Surpassing my humble expectations, actually. Let’s see if active will work nearly as well.

  A pulse leaves my body. As it moves through space, I see every grain of sand it passes, every particle suspended in the air, every atom that is within its domain. Another pulse follows closely behind. And another. And another. Steady pulses show me snapshots of reality, the resolution so fine, it’s technically realtime.

  I release the dart. The Yilivin-shaped field changes again. And so does the Lucius-shaped one. Almost there.

  More ‘oomph’ is put behind the next pulse. The moment it transitions between the threshold that is my body and outside, I sense an interaction. New sense is overwhelmed, inundated with information, momentarily proving too much even for my vast mind.

  Another pulse. But this time, I filter away the deafening noise that is ambient mana. As my magic travels, it encounters an anomaly. Pulse after pulse tracks the—from my point of view—sluggish influence as it alters them, showing me its trajectory, its very nature.

  Force moves my body. Yilivin’s magic misses, merely brushing against my field. My needle hits dead-on.

  The Yilivin-shaped field changes yet again. It collapses to the ground. But instead of remaining still, it spreads like mist, creeping along the fine sand.

  New sense screams a shrill alert, the dreadful sound carrying promise of certain death. Can I go three for three?

  Crackling lightning wreathes my body, charging it full of potential. It climbs and climbs, until I discharge. Light returns to the world, bringing with it an uproar as other senses and functions come back all at once.

  An already recovered Yilivin is waiting for the stunned mages to restore the shattered enclosing barrier, her illusory—and other—spells destabilized from the surge, forcefully returned back to nothingness.

  As the barrier reforms around the arena, her body pops again, not into a puff of spores due to a spell of hers or an attack of mine, but into a cloud of smoke. From within the obscuring cover, two bright green eyes open, larger than they were. Two flaps of great wings blow away the lingering trace of transformation, uncovering her new form. An enormous dragon with dull green scales.

  Her mouth opens, showcasing many sharp teeth. A flash of green, too fast to avoid, escapes out like a silent roar. Whatever the light touched is covered in cute mushrooms, including myself.

  As a powerful pulse scorches away the fungi growing out of me, my enlarged opponent blinks out of existence. Claws the size of my arm strike from behind, shredding my body into chunks.

  One more pulse takes care of the mushrooms emerging from the ground as I put myself back together.

  Her jaws snap closed around my waist. A whip of her head sends my top half flying before I can take advantage of my location.

  My bottom half regrows fast as I slow down in the air, landing on two new feet.

  Deep crimson chains entangle my beastly adversary. They tighten around her scaly skin. And then rattle inside a cloud of smoke. A tail swipes me into the arena’s protective bubble. A paw slam crushes my crumpled body further. A green breath turns mangled flesh into quite the effective substrate.

  A new shell loosens a shoulder.

  Yilivin’s large head twists to look behind her. Reptilian lips curl up into an approximation of a smile.

  A puff of quickly dispersing smoke confirms the expression. “I surrender,” she says. “My approval is yours.”