Alistaira and the three armored men stared each other down from opposite sides of the dueling ring. While the heavily armored bozos had made the first move, they had also taken the first blow of the fight, their youngest cradling his sprained wrist as the medicine began to take effect.

“What in the nine hells are you?!” the middle brother yelled, his face, or what little of it was visible under his helmet, contorted in anger. “You can’t be a mage! Mages don’t have that kind of strength, even with a magic buff to their physical abilities! You tricked everyone! You lied! We win by default! We-!”

“Oh, for the love of all that is and isn’t, will you stop whining like the sad, pathetic little infants that you are for just one solitary moment?!” Alistaira yelled, her complaint applying not only to the men she was facing but also to those the men in the booths about to be cheated out of bet earnings. Accompanying her outburst was a surge of pure magical force that radiated from her body. The release of mana was powerful enough for even a dullard to notice, but not enough to cause any damage to the audience. This burst of power was more than enough to put the accusations of her ‘providing false information before a duel’ to rest, however. Neither a normal person or an expertly trained fighter had access to that kind of raw magical potential, after all.

The sudden realization of all present that Alistaira was a mage powerful and gifted enough to outclass a trained warrior in strength and reflexes with a magical self-buff immediately had everyone in the crowd wondering how they should take this. If she was capable and talented to the point that a self-buff could make her eclipse these hardened bastards, then what kind of power would she be able to display if she got serious? If she decided to pick up her staff and start slinging spells, potentially everything within a ten-block radius was at risk! This was no longer a standard duel; this was possibly an execution accompanied by excessive collateral damage just waiting to happen.

The White Tri-Stars almost cowered as Alistaira stood mostly still, her only real movements being the stretches she was doing. It was painfully obvious that this wasn’t a life-threatening situation for her, just a chance for her to show off her powers. She wasn’t taking the battle-hardened mercenaries as a threat; to her, they were just dime-a-dozen cannon fodder for her to sweep away like so much dust on the floor.

“Well?” the Arch Mage asked, her voice clearly showing how little she thought of the strength of her would-be noble superior and his hired thugs. “Do I really have to come to you?”

Alistaira took one step forward and the air in the entire city cooled down noticeably. She took another step and the atmosphere inside the dueling ring became heavy and harsh. Her third step saw the three heavily-armored goons feel as though they had just traded the 1G of Mortis’ gravity for that of a planet with four times the amount. Her fourth step sent the fear of a final, terrible death through the hearts of not just the mooks actively facing her, but the fat pigs with now frozen sweat that tried to overkill them and sent three professionals to attempt to gank her.

With her fifth step, the dam broke and the three thugs decided that they would not risk whatever fate awaited them if they stayed any longer. To hell with the retribution that their employer would force them to experience; facing this… thing was not worth the measly pay that they had been given! It would look bad on their overall reviews to give back what they had taken as payment, but fuck that noise, they were not sticking around to be that monster’s toys! The three brothers, overwhelmed with fear and despair, simply turned tail and jumped off the ring.

Or, at least they attempted to do so.

Instead, they bounced face-first off of an invisible wall, which was something that should not have been there in the first place. Both sides of the ‘duel’ looked at each other and then at the booth that currently contained a group of very suspicious individuals who were currently attempting to both look completely innocent and entirely calm, both of which they were downright horrible at.

“Bring it down! We’ll die! Help us!”

The three brothers begged and pleaded, but the magic barrier would not fade. No matter what they yelled and how hard they pounded the wall, it would not go down. Alistaira, for her part, watched the men descend further and further into the depths of terror and sorrow for a good few minutes before deciding to end it all then and there. But first, she needed to know exactly how much she needed to do. She looked over at the announcer, a man whose jaw was practically on the floor and who had forgotten to narrate the entire fight as well as yours truly has been.

“Is this a duel to the death?”

This one question would decide the fate of the brothers, and it was one that had an obvious answer. The ‘death or no death’ rule had been settled without the input of the crew of Darksol’s black ship, and as the people who had decided it had no idea that their ‘package-deal champion’ would be facing absolute annihilation, they had of course made what they had considered to be the logical choice.

“Yes, it is to the death.”

At this, Alistaira cracked a smile and held her hand open. The staff that she had planted in the ground rocketed over to seat itself in her grip and immediately the entire city and all within felt the cold gaze of death itself upon it. This caused the three white-armored men to become even more frantic, scratching and clawing at a barrier that would not budge even as blood from damaged fingers began to seep out of the gauntlets of their enchanted plate-mail.

Alistaira had wasted enough time on these fools, and now it was time to end it all. A surge of magical power flowed from her body to the staff in her hand before racing out into the enclosed arena like a tidal wave of pure materialized malice. The mass of purplish-black miasma filled the entire bubble to the point that nothing could be seen or heard inside of it from the outside, at least until the sound of the barrier that kept the darkness at bay cracking like a crystal ball in an industrial press caused everyone at the venue to realize exactly how precarious their position was. The cracking continued, but the fog within began to fade away until only Alistaira and three suits of empty, rusted and decaying armor were left in the ring, the very ground inside having been turned a sickly grey as if the very essence of life itself had been erased from it.

With the match over, Alistaira silently walked to the still-active barrier and, using nothing but her own fingertips, crushed it to bits before walking out of the ring and giving a middle finger to the terrified men and women in the booth that had attempted to screw her and her current subordinates over. The duel, or rather, massacre, was over, and now the defeated would be faced with a choice; do they accept their loss and move on in accordance with the rules of the agreement, or do they further show their disgust for honor and tradition by attempting to lash out in one last suicidal strike?

Hopefully, cooler heads would prevail, but with all that had been done who would be surprised if they didn’t?