Not for the first time since meeting Rei, it occurs to me how utterly implausible the probabilities are that are involved in our teams running into each other. For the first time since meeting him, though, I now have a clear answer. It was never random chance at all that made us not only be in the same scenario together at the same time, but to literally encounter each other in that room.

It was enemy action.

“Everyone present here,” the announcer finally gets around to saying, after talking up the amazingness of the tournament’s sponsor and the grand - and almost certainly fake - history of the tournament itself, “are all either Imprints like yourselves… or surfacers, whole of soul and looking to stay that way.” He’s talking to an audience, pandering to them, but I can’t see them; everything is hazy and indistinct past a certain distance. I start taking a look at the stage itself. “Eight pre-screened teams and over a thousand individuals have joined us today for the opportunity of a millennium: freedom!”

The roar of the crowd is a buffeting to the senses, and I increase my focus on the surroundings. What I’ve seen of the stage is reasonably good, level ground with good tread, but it’s different ground every few meters. Where we’re all standing is rock, a set of separated daises a step up and out from the main level; within a few meters of us, I see sand where stone becomes sand in one direction and close-trimmed grassy soil in another. I could see that being interesting if some of the teams have elemental manipulation; throw up a localized sandstorm, snare peoples’ ankles in the grass, transmute water into steam, there’s plenty of possibility, and if my guess is right, it’ll make the battlefield that much more dynamic.

My eyes keep roaming, while the announcer keeps talking. I don’t particularly want to pay attention to him; the stuff he’s going over is beyond fraught, a structure of rules that’s more like a lack thereof for the individual competitors for the first few rounds. With the promise of being embodied and released onto the surface to be truly alive again, it’s going to be a mess, that’s obvious enough; but being in the eight pre-existing groups at least exempts us from that, and there is a rule against people in the individual meatgrinder interfering in any way with us almost-forty standing on the stage.

My eyes are starting to get adjusted to the lights that are roving across our faces and across the stage in general, enough so that I can tell where they’re coming from. They’re elongated crystals in wood housing of various shapes, casting cones of brilliance across the arena, swiveling to and fro on mounts crafted from bone and stone and more wood. They’re everywhere. Above us is a structure hanging down from the roof over a hundred meters away, and there are lights mounted there splaying their beams across the stage; crystal spotlights and floodlights dot and jut out of the walls below the seating that surrounds us; and above that seating, in the separators between the vertical levels of the stadium, there’s more lights. They’re not all one color, either, nor is a single one of them white. Most of them, maybe about two thirds, are some flavor of dull yellow-orange or amber, but the other third is split all the way across the color spectrum, reds and blues beyond imagining.

Come to think of it, and to take another look, it genuinely seems like every single light is a different color, too. I have to give some credit; that’s impressive, and shows an intensely personal level of detail that had to come from a person.

We’re a long way from where this Temple started, down on the lowest levels.

“- and it is my absolute pleasure to introduce to you the last group of contestants.”

I’d been mostly tuning out the announcer for a while, but Zidanya jabs me under the ribs, gently enough that I only mutter in complaint a very little bit, and I start paying attention again. He’d been introducing the other teams, and I know I should have been listening closely to try to tease out any details that would give us a tactical edge in the upcoming fights, because obviously that was going to be a thing, but his bombast levels are unpleasantly high and it’s not like he was somehow guaranteed to be telling the truth, anyway.

All of those sound like excuses even inside my head, and I know I’ll be asking one of the others to write down every word of every introduction.

“It’s not unusual,” the announcer drawls, dragging the words out, “for a team that comes into the Temple to make it down and then back out again. To surmount the challenges they’re laid and persevere, to triumph as champions!” He pauses, acknowledging the roar of the crowd and also goading it higher. “And that’s what everyone is expecting from the Magelord, but this is something different entirely.

“Gentlebeings and savages, this is a first in the history of this Temple. Not only has this man made it down and come out no worse for the wear, he’s in the midst of doing it again… unless one of the other teams can stop him. Give him your respect, give him your hate; he’s the heel of every scenario, he’s the whirlwind of steel and the lowest-tier Saint of Swords to ever walk these halls. There’s more than two dozen of you on the stage who’ve died to his team, and when he jumped into the arena during a free-for-all, the gutters ran red with the blood of those who failed to survive his onslaught! He is the one! He is the only! Gandrhei, Lord Mayor Pravad!”

The cheers are deafening, and they redouble when Rei raises his fists to the sky and howls, somehow audible over the cacophony of the crowd. I scowl, and something in me itches to put an orb combo through his head, but I’m far from indulging myself in that regard. The urge fades after a moment, right around when the dais we’re standing on deploys a series of steps that lead down and along a now-lit path of glowing stones. Each of the eight teams has our own path, and it takes us down in a meandering path that brings us under seating that’s projected out on thick spars from the lowest ranks of seating. There are balconies on those ten-meter-wide viewing suites, and curtained little rooms that are big enough to live in, and people standing there gazing down at us with emotions that range from excitement to interest to a coldly, incisively measuring flatness.

“They name those the hells,” Zidanya murmurs to me. “They who stand there are those who qualified as contenders and were asked to stand down, or volunteered. They have all those things which stand for wealth in this realm: influence, power, strength, and riches.”

“There’s money down here?”

She snorts. “Crystallized mana.”

I nod slowly. We’re walking slow, following the pulsing beat of something not entirely unlike music. It’s not audible; I have the feeling it’s something like a ripple or pulse in the manasphere, like someone’s playing a marching beat on a set of drums that don’t exist in the physical world. It gives me time to match stares or trade smiles with the people in the boxes; my mood swings as I do, mirroring what I’m seeing and the attention we’re getting.

It’s not entirely unnatural. I’m pretty easily moved by the emotions, and I always have been. Still, there’s something in the air boosting that, some manner of magic or possibly something literally in the air, and I find myself resenting it as my emotions flip and flip again like a rookie pilot trying to land a grapple on some debris. Some of the people are, well, some of the ones who are practically hanging off the edges are almost offensively physically attractive, and I redden at their catcalls. They’re not all directed at me; most of them are directed at Zidanya, which makes it bearable, because at one particularly emphatic catcall, Zidanya pulls an arrow out of her quiver and throws it. She does it barehanded, which absolutely shouldn’t work in the slightest, but it hits a shield about two inches in front of a guy’s face so hard that the arrow shatters, and the crowd roars in pleasure.

It doesn’t reduce the catcalling, but it does change them to be more to her liking, and she struts down the lit pathway, swaggering.

There’s probably a lot to be learned about the cultural and social significance of the people who are in the boxes on the basis of their clothing, but I don’t have enough context to make meaningful deductions about it. It’s all very showy, at least; there’s glints and shining from gemstones in various color and glorious rich fabrics and gleaming metals. There’s often not a whole lot of it, either; the Fleet usually tends, tended, towards wearing leggings under even the longest of what anyone’s wearing up there, for warmth and chafing reduction if for no other reason.

I’m pretty flushed when the walk ends, but for all the rising tide of my emotions, there’s a piece of me that’s furious and cold at the brazen manipulation, and that piece floods me when the door leads us into a small room with five chairs, one of which is occupied.

“Zidanya.” The woman in the chair smiles, and the menace in it has me a hair from firing off every Mote and orb I have.

“Lady Sheid.” Zidanya smiles back, with a voice full of smugness. “I was hoping your Coliseum would rise once more.”

The other three of us inhale almost in unison, and the Lady Herself, architect of the scenario we’re in, locks eyes with me and smirks.