Dionysus gazed into his backstage mirror bearing his many sets of sharp teeth and delicately threading a fine string betwixt the gaps of his sharp pearly white weapons. The floating head slowly revolved in place so that each mouth had its turn at the mirror. He wanted to look perfect for his finale.

For the last time for quite a while the arena was packed with a dense warmth of thralled people. These few lucky people who managed to reserve live seating were now sat in their arena seats for the last time. The last fight to present at this arena was none the least in interest for the insatiable audience.

Dionysus felt a bittersweetness as he walked out on to his raised podium for the last time of the first round. “Welcome back!” An honest explosion of cheers excitedly ripped through the arid morning air. “I am so glad to have been able to spend this month with you all. I loved being here at the start of perhaps the most historically significant piece of media that anyone has ever witnessed!” A raucous chorus of agreement followed after. “I loved sitting with you and witnessing together that outstanding performance by Poetaster and Liederkranz. I loved resting mouths agape at the baffling wonder that was the match between Palmer and the Game. I loved feeling that cloudy haze lift from our minds as the mokoi queen, a supposedly monstrous entity, mercifully reintroduced the Animal to the soul sea.”

Emotions ran unfiltered through the crowd. For some average citizen or sheltered noble, the past month has been the most violent, energetic, terrifying, inspiring, powerful moment they had ever experienced or may ever experience.

“I am truly thankful that I could have been through those moments along with you. But our adventure isn’t over! We have one last farewell before you all flock to your incessant fireboxes to view the rest of the Tournament through that small lens.”

“And fret not, because I can guarantee that we did not leave the weakest showing to the end. Before now you all have bore witness to some truly outstanding battles; but alas, that was all they were: battles. Today is different, today you witness no mere spectacle, today is history! And no history such as witnessing the first televised tournament, but history as in the maps may need be redrawn upon our fights conclusion.” Even with some already expecting it, to hear the gravity so succinctly pointed out drew gasp from the crowd.

“I am bounding with excitement to introduce today, not two individuals, but icons, symbols. For the first time in this, the sixth centennial Tournament, we have a battle between a human and a mokoi.” Shock coursed through the audience. “And we have with us not just any mokoi, but one of the oldest, most terrifying, aggressive, and certainly the most successful mokoi to ever live. That’s right, I don’t even need to go through the rest of my written intro. You know who he is, you know who was the only mokoi to storm through our continent, you know who still to this day runs an entire country surrounded by his enemies. You know who fought back a whole eight invasion attempts with worrisome ease. You know who graces the front of many bulletin board warnings for frequently traipsing across our borders without consequence. You know the Vampire!”

The crowd stilled as the bordering arena entrance opened and an unfortunately familiar face revealed itself. The Vampire formed an imposing figure, taller than any man had a right to be. Leaning off his shoulder, the Vampire carried a gargantuan rose umbrella whose incredible brim easily shaded the pale mokoi. Equipped within either hand he wielded a glaive and a trident, an unconventional combo being as it was a pair of two-handed weapons. The oddity of the Vampire’s combat gear did not end there. The strangest part of his get up was without a doubt his pastel blue bib; on the right of his bib was the letter ‘I’ stacked over the word ‘your’ while on the left of the bib was a large cartoonish drawing of a heart.

Seeing that the obnoxiously interruptive trees placed by the Game were still planted and permitting ample shade, the Vampire closed his umbrella resting it along the closest trunk to him. A single brave rebel from the stands rose from her seat and through her half-eaten apple which managed to land and roll right to the Vampire’s feet. The rallying protest instilled a courage in the audience who cocked their arms back en masse prepared for a major assault of whatever they could get their hands on.

Before the first of the secondary attacks could be thrown, the Vampire looked down to the apple at his feet and easily identified its source. He cracked an entertained smile at the woman which immediately crushed any rallied protest from manifesting.

Dionysus, the ever-prepared host that he was, was quick to reclaim focus and bring back the once present fervent excitement. “But fear not my friends for we have not been left alone with this beast of human form. Representing the entirety of the human race we have none other than one of the best. For those untethered to the going ons of the academic world, this name may prove foreign to your ears. To the rest of you, you are keenly familiar with the second of the legendary Ken Ream the preeminent’s apprentices. A prodigy the likes of which have only been seen before with the legendary Ken himself. I present to you the sword of humanity, Picayune Distingue the Apprentice!”

The crowd ruptured with near hysteric glee as Picayune entered the arena. He wore the tightfitting garbs usually saved for rune experiments; the pale white of the clothes easily showcasing the dark ink stains of drawn runes. On his face, the extra-dimensional threads of his drawn blood rune circled around his eye and rose up off the side of his head and off his flesh forming about his hair like a grand half crown, the magic of the crown so brilliant it ignited to the sights of even the peasants most unfamiliar with magic.

Strapped to the underside of his left arm was a large offhand wand equipped with a physical barrier rune. In his right hand, he held his usual smaller primary wand in a white knuckling death grip. The walk to the center of the arena felt like an agonizing eternity. His eyes scanned around the audience in search of familiar faces. In the VIP contestant stands he found the strange collection of giants he somehow came to know as friends. It appeared that the Game had used his power to somehow grant the three of them magical billboards in which they could compete to be the most supportive. Liederkranz’s sign had knock’em dead with an animated winking face on it; Poetaster’s sign said, “Make it flashy!”; while the Game’s read “I have a lot of money on this, and you owe me.” The sight lifted his spirit and he moved on his gaze through the crowd for who he really wanted to see. Just as he was about to arrive at the arena’s center, he found her. With the ubiquitous chorus he knew that he could hear nothing distinct, but somehow, he felt that Belabor’s cheers could pierce through the noise and whisper right by his ear. Emboldened, Picayune brought his gaze off from the audience and towards his opponent, and this time he did not cower.

“I will not hold you any further. Let the arena of Dionysus’s final battle begin!”

With a practiced perfection, Picayune lifted his main wand and fired. A dark cloud launched backwards obscuring his face and immediately following, a blinding corona blossomed from the wand end and engulfed the entire arena. The Vampire screeched in unmitigated agony dropping his weapons to cover his eyes. Before his self-inflicted blindness even subsided Picay switched his wand’s rune cover as he charged towards his weakened opponent while simultaneously ensuring that the stilettos on his boots heel carved small grooves into the arena floor. Arriving next to the Vampire, Picayune danced around his opponent weaving his legs in strange seemingly unnecessary patterns all while bombarding the Vampire with the manually casted prismatic blasts that Poetaster had taught him. Picayune, pushed the still blinded Vampire making him stumble over an intricate series of circles that Picay had just carved onto the ground. Picay ran away and then imbued magic into his created rune setting off a towering inferno to completely consume the Vampire. The raging pyre so thick that not even a charred shadow of a corpse could shine through the light. The rising licks of flame caught a few low hanging leaves of the Game’s arena trees, incinerating them to ash.

With time the inferno subsided, leaving nothing in its place. “Very imprezzive.” Picayune quickly span on his heels seeing the Vampire completely unmarked behind him. Only his constant training with Liederkranz allowed him to dodge the incoming fist. Using his offhand wand, Picayune cast a physical barrier, the opaque wall of dark purple energy blocking the Vampire’s follow up strike. Aiming his other wand, Picayune released the rapid barrage of the flare repeater spell as he ran behind one of the giant trees.

Picayune switched out his primary spell cover again and flicked open the small blade hidden in his ring. “Quite ze runner aren’t ve?” The Vampire managed to turn around the tree just in time to see the human finish carving a rune into the trunk of the tree and activating his wand flying up into the air. A spray of vile smelling gas seeped out from the rune work on the tree. The Vampire cried out in disgust as his nostrils took the aromatic insult. Picayune hadn’t expected his opponent to flee the gas so quickly managing to escape it before the spark shot he fired could ignite it. Upon the spark shot striking the cloud of gas a completely silent explosion blew a flume of fire in every which way forcing the Vampire to take a few steps back else he singe his bib. The Vampire glared up at Picayune who was perched on a thick tree branch changing spell covers. The Vampire plugged his nose more irritated at the smell than the attempted barbequing, “Vhat a low blow human.”

The Vampire jumped up with inhuman strength easily landing on a low hanging branch. Picayune started running higher up the tree. As he felt the Vampire approach, he turned around and fired from his offhand wand a switch spell which made the two spontaneously exchange positions. Now with the Vampire higher than him, Picayune unleashed his flare repeater upwards.

The Vampire dramatically wobbled in place, “Uwah, you’ll make me dizzy.” Despite his comedic exaggerations, the Vampire perfectly dodged every spell fired at him, if Picayune didn’t know any better he would even guess it was done accidentally.

The Vampire span around in place until he found Picayune, “Oh, there are two of you now.” The Vampire smiled at his enemy and then with a before unseen speed he dove down to strike him. Still dizzy, rather than hit its target, the Vampire’s punch grazed by the side of Picayune’s head and pierced cleanly through the magical tree behind him.

A little fear creeping back from the sight, Picayune slipped off the branch though with still the wits about him to shoot another barrage of flares.

The Vampire dashed to the side of the flare barrage and frowned at the Apprentice, “Don’t zlip now,you vere doing zo vell.”

Picayune ignored the taunt while quickly swapping out his primary spell cover casting his propulsion with glider coat and elegantly landing on a nearby branch before splattering on the hard arena floor. Ignoring any of his available tools, Picayune quickly started to manually fabricate a spell directly from his root. For a brief second, the Vampire quirked an eyebrow at the impressively complicated spell; it was so large that it would usually take a whole group of wizards to cast. Intrigued, the Vampire waited for his enemy to finish the spell.

Ready, the gargantuan mass of pure arcane energy flew towards the Vampire easily eviscerating any branches in the way. Too impressed to dodge, the Vampire simply congratulated, “Vow, I’ve never zeen zuch a denze zpell before.” Just before being struck, the Vampire copied the spell, taking a fraction the time to craft it and sent back his own arcane artillery that easily overpowered Picayune’s and now charged towards him. Unable to escape the blast radius in time, Picayune pulled out a cracked handheld mirror pointing it at the incoming attack. The terrifying artillery weakly shrunk to a mere point and sunk into the mirror face. Intaking such an incredible force proved too much shattering the fragile mirror and impaling Picayune’s hand with several of the mirror’s glass shards. Picayune bit back the pain and used his own flowing blood to draw runes over his hand magically discarding the shards of glass and slowly healing the injury.

The Vampire bursts into laughter, “How dizzapointing, I vas atleazt hoping for a boom.” A quick swap of rune covers and Picayune used his primary wand to attempt to overwhelm his opponent with an incessant volley of flares while simultaneously weaving a separate spell in his other hand. Completing the spell, Picayune fired out from his hand a wide spray of miniscule arcane pellets, the spread of the countless magical shots was so grand in scale that it started raining shrapnel. Unable to dodge so many densely packed bullets, the Vampire simply covered his face with his hand and accepted the hits.

The Vampire took his time dislodging the arcane bullets from his skin and investigating his handcrafted clothes for damage, unfortunately for him, there was a lot of damage. The Vampire brought his attention back to Picayune to see the young boy squinting passed his raised thumb at something in the distance. Curious, the Vampire turned around, looking up at the tree above. He saw that the combination of flare repeater shots and that shrapnel rain created thin carved grooves all over the tree branches. If he tilted his head just right and lined up all the branches, he could turn the 3d canopy into an apparent flat canvas with which an odd shape had been carved into.

Picayune imbued his magic into the painstakingly crafted rune and immediately every leaf of the tree disintegrated. The revealed day star shined unabated onto the Vampire enticing a horrendous screech of shear torment from him. The screaming mokoi fell from his branch and plummeted to the ground so hard that he bounced upon landing. Back on the ground, the Vampire scurried over to his umbrella in a terrified rush and hid under its reopened tent.

Picayune followed upon his long since crafted plan pulling out his second shattered mirror and breaking it, upon which the previously captured artillery spell spawned and flew towards the recuperating Vampire. The Vampire tilted his umbrella so he could see his opponent, but rather than finding Picayune he was greeted by the gigantic artillery spell. The Vampire desperately dove to the side just barely managing to escape the blast radius, “Now zat vas unnezzeza-” he was abruptly interrupted by another barrage of spells forcing the Vampire to hurriedly duck and weave protecting his umbrella from shearing.

The Vampire charged at Picayune unleashing a maelstrom of strikes so rapid that Picayune could only dodge half of the attacks. The other half he managed to block with the barrier spell equipped in his offhand wand, though the strength behind each strike was so great that the barriers could only slow rather than stop the hits. With every passing second Picayune was collecting more hits, his movement slowed and grew sluggish, his warded armor slowly breaking down. He didn’t have much time left in the fight, with a final rally of will he put all his force into kicking the Vampire away using those scant gained seconds to unleash a full magic bomb; Picayune took every ounce of his essential flux and ignited his own magical root permanently damaging his magical foundations in a final climatic attack. The incredible attack so monumentally massive that the arena wards flared to life safeguarding the audience from its fury. Poetaster and Arete both stood to add their magics to the failing wards, as did Belabor and many of the Tournament staff.

Within the arena the explosion raged over, its visceral power rending the very fabric of the two magically created trees apart leaving nothing but a scorch in the newly formed crater. Picayune’s pendant melted along with all his clothes and equipment but he himself remained unscathed. His skin was turned to a pristine beauty unmarred by any ails of age. Soon the raised dust of eviscerated stone stilled, and the arena came back to whole sight. Across from him, Picayune saw, he knew not how but the Vampire smiling back at him and clapping. “Bravo! Bravo! That vas incredible. You’ve truly exzeeded my exzpectationz.”

Picayune collapsed on all fours, the magic bomb destroying any essential flux he could realistically muster. Dionysus saw that the fight was over. Not even he knew how the Vampire managed to evade such an attack. Regardless it was not his place to question such a thing but instead to declare, “The Apprentice is no longer capable of fighting. The winner is the Vampire!”

No one cheered, and the only one clapping was the Vampire himself; but the Vampire wasn’t clapping for himself, but for Picayune. “You shouldn’t feel zo bad zat you lozt. You really did better zan I thought you could.” The Vampire approached Picayune and helped him up to his feet having to support a fair share of the weak-kneed boy’s weight. He eyed his surprisingly capable opponent up and down before finally smiling upon a decision. “You know? Maybe you are vorthy of eating.” The Vampire thrusted his hand into Picayune’s chest ripping out his heart. He let the lifeless corpse flop to his side and took a large lustful chomp of the still beating treat. He chewed the snack for a while ignoring the cries around him before spitting the hearty chunk back out in disgust. “Ugh nope, another dud.”