Left without any particular plans for the second shift, what Zidanya calls afternoon, we watch the bloodsports.

Chef Gavish does a credible job trying to convince us to stay in their restaurant. There’s an offer of viewing screens of high quality, configured to whatever viewing configuration we want; we leave anyway, because both Amber and I want to wander a bit and get a feel for the crowd and the venue. They manage to talk us into some more desserts to take with us, roasted nut-alikes that taste nothing like nuts, coated in a glaze that’s sweet and tangy, stuffed with something that tastes orange, not that it takes much convincing, and we depart in joy.

Tastes orange, mind you, not like an orange. It’s my first time having taste-color synesthesia, and it’s odd and uncomfortable enough that I split my share across the ladies, Khetzi adamant in their refusal to partake.

I push whatever’s going on with the Bergers out of my head as we walk, or try to. I have a substantial amount of experience with compartmentalizing the feelings when someone no-ping no-shows to something they said they’d come to, and while ignoring the matter and pretending like the plans were never made might not be the healthiest approach, it lets me get and stay engaged with the surroundings. They’re worth paying attention to, worth being engaged with; the buzzing energy of the crowd as they mill around or stride or fly with purpose, the riotous colors and mixture of the alien and familiar, the storefronts and restaurants and more.

There’s art, too, art everywhere; tiled across the floors, muraled across the walls, shown in statues and icons recessed into niches and shrines, and scattered across lounges to break up the line of sight and induce a feeling of intimacy and separation from the crowd. We settle into one of those lounges; not any one in particular, not one of the Person of Esteem lounges that Khetzi delicately suggests we find, just a lounge like any other.

The viewing area of the lounge is comfortable and elegant without being decadent or showy. It’s a few steps elevated from the rest of the lounge area, when you’re walking up it, but to look up the steps it’s like those four steps take you a hundred meters away; the sound up there is crystal-clear and a little loud for my taste, but down in the rest of the lounge area, it’s nothing.

It’s not the first time I look for the runes powering an effect in Lily’s Tournament and find nothing, and I’m a little disgruntled. Spatial twisting on that scale would be… weaponizable, I guess, but mostly I’m thinking of the surface, and being able to build a house that uses it.

Maybe Zidanya can barter for the knowledge. That’s not a conversation I can risk having.

Up in the viewing, a sheet of some kind of crystal-y rock shimmers, once I drop in a sprawl onto a couch, into a view of the arena, and I’m so busy gawping in horror that I don’t even notice Amber and Zidanya joining me.

By the time we’ve tuned in, only a few minutes into the “show”, more than two-thirds of the participants, more than two-thirds of the hundred people down there on the sand and stone and metal and grass are dead. Their corpses and the bits of their corpses litter the ground, and an entire section of the field, a formerly grassy section, is now a red swamp.

Even as I watch, two of the remaining ten-person groups sweep around, almost herding a few scattered singletons and small groups into the third squad of ten. There’s an announcer raving about how this puts paid to the rumors that the Moon Daughter and the Earthquake are on the outs, because they’re clearly cooperating against the Knight of Ruins, and I manage to get my head on straight enough to realize that those are the three remaining ten-person groupings.

The singletons, the small groups, those people die. Most of them try to make a break for it at the last second, in something close to a concerted gambit to break the line and get out of the way so they can hide; none of them makes it, as far as I can tell or the announcer can. One almost does, some sort of multi-clone ability, but it’s too slow by a wide margin.

It’s a Tier issue, the announcer explains. With people from the surfacer contingents at or below the third Tier, all of the contestants are being suppressed down to that level, in order to foster a somewhat even playing field and not have the “great monsters of our glorious Temple crush the living by their very will alone”, which, honestly, having seen Lily shrug off the best shot I was willing to take, probably fair. So that multi-clone technique, where the guy was trying to jump his real self between the clones while having them drop into shadows, retaining their momentum, when he wasn’t in them, wasn’t fully baked.

Then again, neither were the abilities the guy got killed by.

Twenty against ten, and the fight pauses. The two squads aren’t interested in rushing it, probably because neither of them wants to lose a member; lose someone and they’ll have to scavenge a fifth for the group that no longer has one. The announcer babbles excitedly about how the ten are haggling, lounging around looking like they don’t have a care in the world and playing to the crowd as they try to bid up each of the other two groups, no, the other four groups, for… a clean surrender? Fighting hard but directing their ire to one squad in particular? It’s not especially clear to me, and maybe the announcer doesn’t know either, because in the middle of a sentence from him the fight starts back up again.

I’ll give the announcer this, he’s good. He’s talking about a decameter a second, and he calls out every single kill shot and most of the setup for them, clear enough for me to follow the flow of the battle if not the actual mechanics.

Or, well, it would be if I could focus properly. Most of my attention needs to go to suppressing my… revulsion, really, at what I’m watching.

“The Earthquake has his third tier build focused on the fissures, and they’re starting to rip their way out of the ground. Reb is coming in for his signature strike, and he’s been absolutely buffed to the gills, it’s going to be a slaughter if the man can get his Slashes of the Tempest off cleanly. They see him coming, though, and ouch, that’s a straight block, Jieyi was faking being disoriented, she just face-checked him with a one-inch sphere shield. The Daughter is content to take it slow, she’s channeling, her team is providing ranged support, no, they’ve sent in two frontliners, the Bee and Maccah. This isn’t just a threat to the Ruins team, the Daughter’s channel is a threat to the Earthshaker, they have thirty seconds to wrap this up, and BASTIENNE! With the PULVERIZE!”

The announcer isn’t the only one screaming. Zidanya practically lunges at the rock of the screen, and Amber yells something I don’t catch. The effects turn my stomach and astonish me at the same time; the Earthshaker’s fissures had been, not exactly a feint but something close to them, and someone, presumably Bastienne, had just blasted her way up from beneath the Knight of Ruins’s team.

All of the gasses that the fissures had been emitting promptly exploded, a fireball that left only three survivors of those ten and took with them the Bee, a lightly-armored woman who’d been flitting around the battlefield so fast with her daggers, looking for weak spots in a hemispherical shield they’d thrown up, that she’d been a blurred streak in motion.

That shield, though, cast by one of the Ruins, caught most of the splash before shattering, and it billowed back out doubled onto the Earthshaker’s team. No, on the other half of the Earthshaker’s team; was this a calculated—

The wooden totem comes down from the man’s enormous shoulders and slams into the floor in the way of the explosion as he barrels through his own backline, sending them sprawling to the ground roughly. His totem seems to soak in the flames and the pressure wave, and the announcer is yelling about how he’s going to redirect what he’s absorbed, but to my eye he seems to be having trouble controlling it, and then he slams the totem not into the ground but through the ground, and throws himself onto the hole that it leaves.

His body ragdolls through the air a substantial distance, but he’s moving, if only barely, when he lands.

It’s not for nothing. The earthquake from his totem exploding underground, which is apparently what happened, disrupts the Moon Daughter’s channeling, preventing her from bringing some sort of lunar manifestation down onto the battlefield, which to hear the announcer talk would have been the fight sealed right then and there. There’s a wild clash of spells and Skills meanwhile as the nine remaining combatants on each side open up on each other, nothing held back; even the announcer, for all the speed of his words and his obvious mastery of the high-sensor view, can’t keep up with it.

Maccah goes down to some sort of luminous beam. Shafta gets him up again, but about three seconds later she coughs twice and falls over, to the announcer’s wild surprise and his surmise that what took Maccah down was some sort of false-damage healer trap; leave the girl alone and she’d be back up in a few seconds, heal her and you take the actual damage to yourself. Reb takes advantage of the split second of surprise to stop, standing on a shard of air and staring straight into the eyes of a mage in gorgeous red-and-purple robes, who seems to be unable to look away. The mage claps his hands to his eyes and is mid-leap-sideways when his body just falls apart, and the archer next to him takes a deep slash to the chest as Reb appears out of a gust of wind behind her and then shoves his sword deep into her chest.

It’s not all one-sided, though. The Daughter pulls out a glaive and does some sort of ridiculous thrusting spin-the-glaive parry that knocks a sword off course and opens up someone’s throat, I didn’t catch who, but when she turns that into a sweeping strike at the next person Bastienne ducks in under the strike and unleashes an inferno, and then the fight is over.

There are ten people left alive on the field. Seven of them are from the Earthquake’s team, one of them from the Knight of Ruins, and two from the Moon Daughter’s.

Amber sweeps me up into an enthusiastic embrace, glowing with an intense joy at the show, just in time for me to lose the fight against the rising contents of my stomach.