Chapter 12: 12. Conflict of Opinion

An excerpt from Captain Zilian Yuka’s ‘Handbook for Self-Defense.’

“In my opinion, it would be a finer world were we to all eschew and condemn the barbaric nature of the martial duel. Even a well-intentioned tussle with bare hands or dulled weapons can break bones or put out eyes. However, such is not true for duels between wielders of magic—sorceries can be made to tickle instead of torture, and as such the sorcerer can avail themself of ample practice. Due to this surfeit of experience, a spellslinger is rather more difficult to deal with in a self-defense situation compared to the average street thug. Your advantage in this situation is a magi’s lack of experience facing fists and bludgeons, so apply your experience from earlier chapters to…”

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Yenna stood at the edge of the circle, her body tense as she prepared herself to face the witch's challenge. Lumale however, had other ideas. 

“Good of you to step up, but we’ve not decided on a judge first! I’m not sure I can consider your allies to be impartial…except for the spirit, perhaps.” Walking around the edge of the circle to approach Jiin, she looked the yolm up and down as though searching for some hidden weakness. “Might you let your friend out to play for a time?”

Jiin nodded and closed her eyes, her body going through the immediate change in posture and expression indicative of Demvya’s arrival. Yenna noticed that the white glow over her eyes flickered into existence for a moment and faded away—a concerning point that she intended to address later.

“SPEAK THY DESIRES.” Demvya was nothing if not straightforward, and her booming voice received a chuckle from Lumale.

“If we are to have a duel, we need to have someone who will not favour one side or the other—an effective judge, willing to be impartial. Will you be that judge?”

“YEA. SPEAK TO ME OF THE RULES, AND I SHALL BE THY WITNESS.”

“The rules of this challenge are quite simple. Whoever can push this ball of magic past the other and out of the ring will be the winner. No inflicting harm on each other, or directly manipulating the ball.”

Yenna considered these rules for a moment—she knew that as the duellist accepting a challenge, she had the right to suggest amendments or ask for clarification¹. Not harming each other was an entirely standard request, though worded in a way that made her worry—it was typical to call attention to ‘direct, intentional attacks’. Not being able to directly manipulate the ball referred to any number of actions, and while Yenna was sure she understood exactly what Lumale meant, it wasn’t going to be any fun trying to find out if she was right in the middle of the duel.

“When you refer to ‘directly manipulating’, you mean we can’t hold it directly, magically or otherwise, right?” Yenna carefully looked between Demvya and Lumale—the spirit’s understanding of the rules was perhaps more important than their own.

“Exactly. You may cause something else to push it, pull it, or…well, I don’t want to give you ideas here. Grabbing it with your hands is rather crude, and simply manipulating the magic within turns this into a somewhat dull tug-of-war situation, don’t you think?” Lumale seemed to be having fun, pacing back and forth at her side of the circle.

“I think that all sounds reasonable.” Yenna didn’t want to push her luck here, as the challenger could always rescind their challenge. “Mayi, could you take Tirk and tell the captain we’re here?”

Tirk protested. “But I wanna watch—hey!”

Scooping him up, Mayi slung the boy over her shoulder, his legs kicking for a moment before he gave up. Mayi flashed Yenna a worried look.

“Please be safe, mage. I’ll go get the captain.”

With that said, Mayi moved off. Silence fell over the dueling circle except for the gentle rustle of the breeze in nearby trees, and the sounds of both casters’ hooves on stone. Demvya stood still at the edge like she was made of stone herself, her serious expression foreign on Jiin’s usually jubilant features.

“On your signal, spirit.” Lumale gestured, and Demvya nodded. Yenna and Lumale stood poised to cast, the mage’s eyes focused on the swirling mass of magic between them. With a gentle exhale, she compartmentalised her nervous fears and readied her mind for the duel.

“READY, ALL. THIS DUEL BEGINS NOW.” The spirit gave a resounding clap of her hands, and both casters swung into action to begin casting their opening spells.

Yenna’s world slowed to a sluggish crawl as she accelerated her thoughts. It was a potent result of her arcane mental discipline, a feat borne of a lifetime of study and research. It was also something Yenna wasn’t terribly good at—having little need for an ability like this outside of combat or extremely complex spellcraft, the mage didn’t often practice it. Still, if Yenna was willing to endure the post-acceleration side-effects, she could use it to stop and think at critical junctures like these—the opening of a duel between spellcasters being the most important part.

Not being much of a duellist either, Yenna still understood that casting in combat was all about managing resources. One had to divide limited concentration amongst casting spells, anticipating enemy moves, maintaining ongoing effects and other mundane factors like the terrain or positioning. Likewise, one had to manage the supplies of magic, both in the local area and within oneself—this area had plenty of magic to go around, so draining that resource wasn’t likely to be a huge problem.

Yenna split her focus. In her hands, she activated a ring designed to collect magical power, and another that acted as a capacitor, holding a temporary supply of magic for rapid release. As she did that, she carefully observed Lumale. The silupker witch was silently casting a spell one-handed—not speaking aloud meant your opponent couldn’t guess at your spell, and Lumale’s lack of mouth meant Yenna couldn’t even lip-read her. Still, both casting silently and one-handed meant it couldn’t be a big spell–

Before Yenna could even react, a violent gust of wind blew towards her—and through the magical ball. Even considering Lumale’s age and experience, the intensity of the spell was far higher than should have been possible from such simple casting methods, and Yenna strained her focus to divert her own spell into a means to stop the ball from flying straight past her.

Though she had intended to keep it for smaller and more frequent spells, Yenna was forced to use the contents of her capacitor ring to conjure a wall of earth. It was a quick and crude spell, the wall crumbling almost as soon as its job was done, and having to cast aside her intended opening spell and perform this one at such speed had been costly. In an attempt to give herself some space, Yenna charged forward, bodily blocking the ball from being tapped back out of the ring, as she prepared a new spell.

With her mental acceleration momentarily spent and a headache creeping up on her, the mage had to rely on her own natural reflexes. She pushed the ball back at Lumale using her own wind spell, though it was more to get it away from the edge than send it past her. To Yenna’s extreme worry, Lumale didn’t seem even remotely concerned—she made no attempt to stop the ball, even as it sailed precariously close to the witch’s edge of the circle.

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“I am aware we have some span of years between us, mage, but this is quite the pathetic showing.” Lumale taunted Yenna as she began to cast another spell. “I knew your method was inefficient, but this is ridiculous.”

Yenna did her best to ignore her, but the fraying limits of her focus meant she was rather less capable of resisting such goading. Frustration would be her downfall if she was to let Lumale continue her open mockery. Yenna took in another deep breath and recouped some of her focus. A realisation flashed through her mind as she did so—I’m no duellist, why treat this like a duel? I’m far better at puzzles—let’s treat this like one.

Accelerating her thoughts for a second, Yenna felt out the flow of magic in the area. It was nowhere near as precise a method as directly observing through a spell or enchanted item, nor was it a technique particularly encouraged by mainstream mages—it had a habit of producing faulty readings. Yenna found that she had a certain intuition for it, and smiled as she found what she had been looking for.

There were small roils of magic around the edges of the circle from the stone’s sudden conjuring. Likely influenced by elemental earth—or, lacking the other ‘colours’, as Lumale had put it—those roils would allow Yenna to form a barrier around the edge that she could bend to her will. Casting such a spell would require some time, and Lumale was not going to give it to her. As though reacting to her thinking that, Lumale shot a jet of water from her fingertip to blast the ball far up into the air in an attempt to have it sail over Yenna.

The mage divided her focus once more. She devoted one portion of her mind to casting the barrier spell, and gave over the rest of her concentration to forcing Lumale into a stalemate. As a start, Yenna froze Lumale’s jet of water—the ball plummeted back down with the weight of the ice for the mage to knock it back with another blast of air. 

Yenna could already feel the beginnings of a wicked headache forming—this concentration-splitting technique wasn’t designed to be used for longer than a minute or two, especially not by someone unused to it, and Yenna was rapidly approaching that limit. I have to finish this, fast!

In the back of her head, Yenna thought up a delivery system for the barrier. To keep it from draining her dry of both magical and mental resources, it had to sustain itself and respond to commands. That would in turn require engraved runes, which would need to be inscribed on the ground and subsequently protected. Yenna’s memory paged through imaginary volumes, constructing not just the rune’s spell, but the spell designed to draw that spell on the ground—she would never be able to inscribe them by hand at this kind of speed.

“Just what are you up to, mage?” Lumale bounded around the circle, the pair bouncing the orb of magic back and forth, achieving little. “I can practically hear the pages turning in your head. Why don’t we make things a little more exciting? How much more focus can you spare?”

With an ominous giggle, Lumale stopped her self-imposed handicap—using both hands to cast, and speaking her words aloud, she began to weave a number of spells concurrently. Her words were meaningless to Yenna as she spoke them in the chiming language of the silupker, and the mage’s attention was so frayed that she couldn’t even begin to guess at what they meant. Lumale’s gestures however insisted she was conjuring a veritable hail of objects, and readying them for launch.

Yenna’s concentration was almost broken as the air suddenly filled with dangerous sights. Shards of spear-like ice, balls of flame, and crackling bolts of lightning shot out towards and all around Yenna. She abandoned her attempts at stopping the ball’s movements and focused on defending herself, dodging towards the ice shards and using waves of wind to redirect them around herself. Yenna wondered in exasperation, is Lumale doing this with the knowledge I can dodge it all?

It would explain the wording of the rule—no ‘harm’ was to come to the other. Thoughts of winning were replaced entirely with a desire for self-preservation, Yenna knowing full well that a victory she was too injured to celebrate was no victory at all. 

The surprise of it all had almost entirely caused Yenna to forget about the fact they were in a duel—and that thought about the rules gave her an odd realisation. Sparing a glance towards Demvya, she noticed the spirit was standing as impassive as before—and staring at a rather unoccupied space within the circle. A guardian spirit like her wouldn’t simply ignore such a blatant attack to stare into space. But what if this isn’t an attack? The only thing more important at the moment was the ball, which Yenna had to admit she had lost sight of. If Demvya was watching for what was important, with eyes that saw first and foremost into the realm of magic, then she could see past illusions. If she had the time, Yenna would have gasped—Lumale’s barrage was probably nothing more than a set of fakes.

Yenna quickly wove a variation of her magical sight spell—similar to the one she had used to see through the illusions in Lumale’s cafe. Conjuring it into the circle formed of her thumb and forefinger, she swung her arm out wide across her face. The soap-bubble of a lens expanded, covering one of Yenna’s eyes with a literal bubble through which she could see past Lumale’s illusions. Closing one eye would allow her to see exclusively in one realm or another, though having both eyes open was a slightly disorienting vision of two realities.

The attacks that Lumale was firing off were quasi-real—they featured some real effects to give them added realism, such as a gust of wind on her illusory wind blasts, or a slight cooling or heating effect attached to the pretend ice shards and fireballs. It felt extremely unpleasant to allow the fake spells to pass through her, but they didn’t actually harm her—a judge may have constituted them an attack, real or not, but that wasn’t part of their rules. The witch was also using illusions to obscure her casting, and was rather languidly maintaining the illusions with one hand and weaving the small effects with the other.

“Seen right through me, have you?” The witch laughed a chiming laugh. “Then, I suppose I have no choice but to give you your final test.”

The illusory attack ceased, and Lumale changed tactics entirely. Yenna’s magical sight spell had allowed her to see where the ball truly was, but not for long—with a sweeping gesture, Lumale began creating illusions of kinds that Yenna didn’t understand how to comprehend. Her extremely specific variant of the magical sight spell was beginning to backfire somewhat, as Lumale crafted ordinary illusions, quasi-real replicas, reflective surfaces, smokey doppelgangers and all manner of other stage tricks until it seemed like the ball was everywhere and nowhere at once.

“Now, to finish your trial. I’ll blow them all away—which one will it be?” Raising a hand, Lumale conjured a storm of wind into her hands—real, billowing energy, as powerful as the illusory opening blast had been, already knocking away all of the magic orbs. Yenna accelerated her mind one last time and a blood vessel burst, causing her nose to start bleeding profusely. This was her last chance to think things through and solve this puzzle.

First, Yenna could rule out all of the orbs that were invisible to her magical sight spell—the real ball had been pushed around, but it was still going to be visible to that spell no matter what. She could also ignore those that weren’t going to go sailing past her, as that was the method for scoring. It still left several possibilities, some of which were prepared to go high above her, or sailing underneath her legs.

A voice in the back of her head said the barrier spell was ready for use. Bringing it to the front of her mind, Yenna made one last tweak—it wasn’t going to be worth it to block the entire edge of the circle. Expending all her gathered magic on the spell, she brought a rigid arcane circle into existence between her hands and slammed it down into the ground. The circle expanded, etching itself into the stone, and a harsh storm of sand burst out to form a wall behind her. In that fraction of a moment, Yenna flicked her eyes over to Demvya to confirm her suspicions—the ball was sailing past her, as predicted.

Several balls sailed directly through the wall of sand. A construct of smoke was quickly shredded, a simulacrum of dirt absorbed into the spell, another trick of the light fading as it went past its limited range. Then, Yenna saw it—caught and stopped by the sand, the real ball was stopped just behind her. It looked as though Lumale had put her all into this gambit, leaving herself wide-open to a counterattack she didn’t seem to expect would come.

With a sweeping gesture and a grunt of exertion, Yenna swept her hand forward. The sands swirled and became like a mighty hammer, launching the ball straight past Lumale. The shimmering orb slightly ruffled the edge of the witch’s hat, and came to rest in a bush a few paces behind her.

All was still. Yenna’s mind slowed down, and the pains in her body and mind crashed in. Her legs went weak, and the world pitched unceremoniously to the side. Before the mage entirely collapsed, she heard one final, indignant shout in that hollow, melodic voice.

“Now, aren’t you just too clever by half?”

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¹ - A contemporary text from Yenna’s time highlights the fact that mage duels are steeped in tradition and have a number of rigid ceremonies to be performed. Once such tradition exists to allow duellists to debate the rules, with amendments allowing the judge and crowd to weigh in. One anecdote from the time suggests that a particularly reluctant duellist, to whom victory was rather a matter of life and death, caused the duel to be delayed by nearly two days straight as she quibbled at length about the exact verbiage of the rules. Her opponent was forced to retire after collapsing from exhaustion, and shortly there-after a number of amendments blocked rules discussions from exceeding several hours.

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