The announcer keeps talking about the history of the two teams in front of us, and I keep tuning it out and trying to study the ten people on the field.

“So the shark-looking girl with the daggers and the arm-strap swords, she’s the Blade on Order, and the huge chick with the heavy plate armor that hides her whole face, that’s the Blade on Epiphany? But without really a blade. So presumably she’s going to punch people.”

“She has a sword! It’s just not summoned yet. It’s a big sword, about as big as she is.”

“And then there’s the offensive spellcaster, you’ve got the guy with the conjured chain flame-swords and Eternal with his Motes. How is it that the bitey guy is a Blade and the guy with swords is a Mage?”

“His swords are more like magical focuses than they are weapons. He, um. I think last time I saw someone with those swords, he used spatial magic to shrink space and then, um. Threw the swords.”

“Threw. The swords? Like, didn’t stab them or anything?”

“They’re not really swordy swords. The chain’s mostly for getting tangled in someone’s legs, and they’re made of elemental fire.”

“So not actually edged, or even capable of holding physical form, but if you even get it near someone it’s going to start burning them, and if you entangle someone’s legs in them…”

Vonne nods at me enthusiastically. “Yeah! And ‘cause he had the spatial magic and all, he could keep his distance and run the fight out.”

“What’s Eternal actually doing with the motes, by the way? I can see that they’re not inscribed with any runes, so…”

“He uses Skills that turn sets of Motes into spellwork. You’ll see! He’s very impressive, and I don’t think they have anyone who can really shut him down, which is interesting.” I look over, confirming that Vonne is frowning pensively, so it’s not just me who thinks interesting in this case means I’m fairly confident they’re not making an unforced error, so I don’t understand what they’re doing. “Maybe they’re relying on Node to soak it? But if Node is focusing on being between Eternal and the rest of Epiphany…”

“... then who’s going to keep Order’s Blade contained?”

“Exactly!”

I go back to staring at the field. “There’s the guy with the shards of, I dunno, maybe glass? There’s some kind of magic there. Reflection? Is that the play?”

“I’m not sure. I know that whatever Lord does, he’s amazing at it. But I don’t think I’ve seen those before.” I’m about to ask the obvious question, but she preempts me. “That doesn’t mean it’s new! I don’t usually follow the, you know.”

“The ‘actual’ tournament?” I do my best to give it the verbal scare-quotes, which seems proper, since there’s nothing fake about the fierce puzzles-and-whatnot competition that she’s the queen of the roost in.

“Yeah.”

She’s quiet for a bit, and I finish scanning over the rest of the people on the field. I toss the analysis up on my Visor, humming to myself tonelessly, wondering if there’s a way for me to cast the words up for Vonne to see so she can comment on it.

Epiphany:

• Houndmaster, big, has a bunch of machetes, team captain, generally defensive magic

• Lord, shards of glass, generally utility magic

• Node, gigantic spear and heavy armor

• ???, conjured flame-chain swords, offensive mage, spatial magic

• ???, Blade, swords/knives, sharky looking girl

Order:

• Joy, team captain, generally area-control-oriented magic

• War, utility magic

• Buzzsaw, sed, chains and sawblades? Seems very impractical?, bruiser type

• Eternal, “Evoker”, Motes that become spellwork, offensive mage

• Flip Flop, big sword and heavy armor, huge chick, Blade

I start paying attention to the announcer in time to catch a few names, like Flip Flop’s and the captains, but there’s still two whose names I don’t know, which I guess serves me right for being lost in my Visor instead of listening.

A couple of seconds later, there’s a pulse of mana, and the announcer starts giving a countdown. The arena starts shifting with a grinding not-exactly-a-noise, something that I don’t so much hear as perceive in a way that I can tell isn’t hearing but feels like it, and the entire topography of it changes, and something fundamentally changes in the air.

“Rot and rust, Vonne, is the arena time dilated?” I was about to ask whether the whole tournament was, everything other than the pitch, but then I double checked before opening my mouth. It’s a rhetorical question, though; there’s an overlay on our vision, marking time elapsed on the pitch, and in the five or so seconds since that fundamental something changed in the air, since the announcer started giving the countdown, only half a second has passed.

“It’s not exactly time dilation.”

Vonne’s words are distant, because I’m entranced by the magic. I can tell what’s happening immediately; not because it’s obvious to the naked eye, no, it’s actually phenomenally well-disguised by the simple scale of the magic, but the Visor has better time-resolution on its recording than my eye does. Actually, the Visor has impossibly good time-resolution on its recording and perceptions, something that has to come from its new connections to the System itself, because it wasn’t there a week ago. So: the time on the pitch isn’t exactly running on a different scale, and it’s not exactly being stretched, and we’re not being sped up. Instead, it’s like nine tenths of the time-quanta of the universe are gone within the battlefield. Eaten, rendered into pure mana, riven into possibility, sundered; the amount of power feeding into the scenario’s reservoirs from this isn’t just substantial, a minute of it dwarfs the amount that I estimated built the entire Sky Kingdom scenario.

There’s maybe a smoothing effect on the single tenth of time that remains. It’s hard to tell, because the time involved is beyond tiny. I curse, just a little bit, my general apathy towards the crunchier bits of quantum mechanics; the word chronon comes to mind, and I know the notation I’m looking for is Sigma-naught, but for the life of me I can’t remember what scale I’m supposed to be thinking of. What I’m seeing is on the order of sextillionths of a second, but twenty one zeroes is a long way from the theoretical floor of Planck’s work.

It’s still mind-bogglingly impressive. The Fleet’s computational infrastructure was quint-scale, standardized around one operation every 1e-18 seconds. That wasn’t for lack of more powerful options, but it turned out to be something of an optimal tradeoff for materials science reasons that I never even pretended to understand, and I’m fairly confident nobody had sexta-scale computing across the entire galaxy that I used to live in.

Thirty seconds for us, three seconds on the floor. There’s a northwest-to-southeast river with the two teams starting on the southwest and northeast corners of the arena, and when the horn blows, they spring into blurring-fast action.

Blurring-fast for them, that is. I watch, rapt, as the ten of them move, legs pumping explosively, terrain blasting backwards with the force of their steps. I estimate them as going about a meter a second, a not-particularly-brisk walk by outside time, and it’s hundreds of meters to go the diagonal. The sharky-looking girl juggles her shorter blades as she sprints, and I watch them hang in the air for ten or twenty seconds at a time before she catches them, hands flexing in slow motion around the hilts.

Mostly, though, my eyes are on the Evoker, Eternal.

He conjures his first three Motes the moment the horn blows to initiate the start of the match. He’s sprinting just as hard as the rest of his team, and not the slowest, but he also does something fascinating with the Motes. They… melt, melt might be the best word for it, into a spell-structure in the mana and sink into his skin, wrapping themselves around his left hand. He puts three more Motes up within five or so seconds, so about half a second for him, and those three likewise melt into spellwork and wrap themselves around his right hand and are replaced with a final three more.

There’s almost a moment of stillness when they all get to the river, at more or less the same time. Order seems to be expecting a bit of a standoff, spreading out to position Eternal on higher ground, a rugged and rough outcropping of volcanic rock half-covered in three colors of moss, War and Joy both spreading out to the sides. The two women, one a human in sensible armor and the other some sort of elemental or spirit made of crystal and lightning and wrapped in rags, are laying some sort of ambient magical effects down in layers, Joy doing something that I think is feeding War mana and empowering her in some way, and I wince as I see what’s coming for them.

While Order is setting up for a battle of skirmishing and mobility, Epiphany is charging at them at full speed.

Epiphany’s Mage engages first, a flashy barrage of flaming chains thrown using spatial magic to close the distance between the chains and their targets. In the cover of it, the announcer points out that Star, who I figure is probably their Blade, has gone invisible and is circling around with her eye pretty clearly on Eternal. There’s a vicious snapping sound as they barely dodge a crackle of magic from one of War’s traps and fail to dodge some sort of spatial tear that overlays them and hides them from sight for a couple of seconds, and then there’s a surge of Void-tinged magic that shreds the effect and leaves them visible to the eye and sprinting slowly for Eternal.

Eternal has bigger problems; Buzzsaw and Flip Flop sort of impact the equivalent front line of Houndmaster and Node to very little effect and not enough blockage. Buzzsaw’s looping chain with a sawblade at the end doesn’t have enough time to pick up momentum before Houndmaster hits it with a machete that has three more machetes following it like puppets, fouling the attack and leaving Houndmaster lumbering forwards, and Flip Flop hammers Node with her now-present sword but Node just bulldozes her with a shield charge. The swordswoman screams at the spearman, hurling herself through the air somehow as red energy courses through her and her weapon, and her strikes start hewing chunks out of Node’s shield as she desperately interposes it.

It’s a moment of pure rage, not something planned or prearranged, and it shows; not just in her face and body language but also in the betrayal and shock on Eternal’s face as Houndmaster sprints past her and, two-handed, hurls a machete dead-on towards Eternal’s chest.