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Lezard Valeth It's another brutal battle set up for the MECC! A mighty series of contenders continue to work through their opposition, vying for one of the bracket positions for the next round! Some fight for glory, some fight for gold, some fight for the ability to fight strong opponents.

Lezard Valeth fights, well... He hasn't specifically said why. He certainly seems glorious enough and he has never had any care for gold. But the Sorceror of Midgard steps into the ring, looking over the familiar crowd with a slight adjustment of his glasses in the classic manner. Unlike his opponent today, he doesn't seem inclined to showboat for the crowd. Instead he takes up his position and draws out both the untitled tome that always seems to be present around him, the book opening up and floating over one hand while the other produces a dark, twisted rod surmounded by a heavy soulsteel ornamentation.

Dramatically, he flares his tattered cloak and looks upon his opponent. "Well, Mr. Lowell. Are you prepared? I hardly can imagine a time that you are not ready to, ah... Strife, as it were."
Arthur Lowell     Arthur's music plays in the arena: https://iodbc.bandcamp.com/track/new-broom-extended

    Arthur's entrance and approach are much like entrances of old. Thickly stacked rows of tiny fission magic constructs suddenly activate, carving a brilliant path of upward-facing lights. Like a vast, tall screen, the motes of light display Arthur's symbols, his green ampersat, his face, his spacey spirographic whorl, in their black-and-white patterns. Vivid green lines carve a half-circle pattern like a rising sun from the ground, and more fireworks gush from within as the GATE opens to reveal Arthur Lowell.

    With wide, swaggering strides, he approaches slowly, his hood trails dramatically, and stars shimmer through the air behind him. He leaps into the arena with a stylish twisting flip, prompting tiny magic rockets to go off in spiraling patterns behind him and explode near him the moment he lands. A projection shows his name in lights: "ARTHUR" and "LOWELL", flashing repeatedly in the background.

    There's plenty of CARAPACIANS and IGUANAS from Afterus in the crowd today, and they're easily whipped into a screaming cheer as he makes a wide, arms-out gesture, raising his palms to encourage more and more screaming. It transitions fast to a dramatic point at Lezard. "HEY WIZARDFACE!" He shouts. "You fuckin' KNOW I'm READY TO ROCK. You're gonna need some WIDE-ASS MARGINS to write all those good ways I'mma ABRA-KA-BEAT YOUR ASS. Let's DO THIS SHIT!" He roars to the crowd, raising a fist and pacing around. "Don't you wanna SEE IT? I'mma MAGICAL SWIRLY this NERD! SHOUT FOR IT, HELL YES! GIMMIE THAT NOOOOOOOOISE!" The crowd loves this schoolyard bully shtick.
Arthur Lowell     The fireworks start easing and fizzling, and instead they're replaced by some of Arthur's own strange worldlogic. A pair of large HEALTH VIALs are visible above the arena, paired with ASPECT GAUGE bars; Lezard's is likely just an estimate. A bitcrushed voice speaks in sixteen-bit quality. "HEAVEN'S CYCLES ARE SPINNING, BABY!" Arthur's broom flicks to his hands from his Strife Deck, and he takes a battle-ready stance that bounces between his feet. Spellcircles pop into being around his body like he's boiling magic. "GET READY!!" The broom /roars/ dramatically, as he pulls the ripcord on a powerful engine, and it gleams dramatically down the full length all at once.

    "STRIFE!!!"

    The very precise moment that the voice is done, Arthur's blasting off on a rocket-ride straight for Lezard. His whole body is covered in a dense gravitation field, and he's eager to rush him down and two-ton tackle the fellow magic expert.
Lezard Valeth Arthur's dramatic entrance rolls in and the crowd roars appropriately. Arthur is showy, and the crowd loves showy. Lezard, however, seems to be trying to prepare himself for what's coming more than mugging. The broom's engine fires up, and Arthur rushes right in. Lezard smiles, and leaps forward, pages from his book flashing out in a forward shield to take the blow. For several moments, there is a spray of sparks as the titanic forces clash...

And with the sound of cracking glass, the shield... And the entire stage blows out, Lezard crushed down into the field as it fractures, space itself seeming to rend apart into a light show of swirling nebulae and spinning stars that rush past. The field hangs there, shattered into craggy chunks of earth that float there while Epic Boss Music fires up:

BGM SHIFT: https://youtu.be/aWvOBnMBac4

Lezard, for his part, seems much the worse for wear. The colossal hit took him straight on and has takes a huge chunk off his HEALTH VIAL... But it's not empty. Lezard stands, wiping blood from his face as he smiles. "Just as I would expect from a god. Very well... I will show you my own power in return! PRISMATIC MISSILE!"

Despite being in close range, Lezard doesn't seem to have any problems still casting magics, energy curling around him and exploding in countless multicolored lines that sweep in and home for Arthur!
Arthur Lowell     It's like a dance. The first missile meets Arthur's body dead-on, and it's all he can do to put his broom between him and the blast; the impact still washes over his body, and bites a chunk off his HEALTH VIAL. "Ought'a expect it from a HERO!" He shouts, broom-engine roaring with activity. It starts to blaze with starlight, and as lines fall upon him, he matches them with his own. "HAH! HAH! HRRRH!! YEAH!" Each impact is punctuated by a call of bloodthirsty joy, and responded to with one of Arthur's own strikes.

    Unless Lezard backs away, Arthur is going to be continuing to pursue him, refusing to let the dancing beams landing on his body deter him. He can't refuse to let them deter his HEALTH VIAL though, nor stop them from disorienting him. No, in fact, it sounds like he's taking a strange joy from it. "ONE MILLION VIEWS!" He shouts, at one impact. "TWO MILLION! THREE!" He continues. "You gonna bring me NUMBER ONE RATINGS here or WHAT, LIZZIE?! BRING THAT HEEEEAAAAAT!!"

    His own barrage intensifies, pure white to match against Lezard's multi-color dazzling display, arcing and sweeping in pre-made, rather than homing, ways. These, though, are far more prone to explode in splash damage, tiny bursting supernovas that leave behind multicolored stardust tinted with the prismatic missile colors!
Lezard Valeth The pair are going all out, that much is certain. They're both happy to put on a massive display for the crowd, and the crowd, safely outside of the Final Boss Arena the pair share, is eating it up. There's some massive views and likes going on the stream, to be sure. "A hero? I'd think you'd have outgrown such things by now, Lowell!" Lezard calls out as he naturally rolls deep on heel. He continues to blast dozens of lines of light at Arthur, trying to curve and blast through his guard as he finds himself in the equivalent of the mage duel equivalent of trying to play DDR on a high BPM song on double time.

Lezard, however, is perfectly fine with staying in close. He's a Norseman, he's used to this kind of thing when dealing with other people. They think 'mage rushdown' is a good tactic. "You have not yet BEHELD the ratings you will receive!" Lezard calls out. "The Multiverse is waiting to see you defeated!"

That said, the return fire blasts Lezard clear off of his platform, shattering it into sparkling starlight, sending him crushing through several more as he spins in space and halts some distance away with a wave of force, countering the movement. He hangs there in space, projecting fields of force to prevent the follow ups from air comboing him into a kill shot. "Gggh! Not so fast, hero!" Lezard says as he shakes off the impact... And then the air around him blooms in lightning and flame as he channels frankly irresponsible amounts of power through the air.

    "HARK! Lightning writhes within the ashen depths!"
                Descend now as a storm upon my foes!"

As Lezard intones, the power funnels into a glittering sphere in the center of the arena... That suddenly collapses into a black hole, sucking in and crushing platforms... And Arthur, if he can't escape! It looks like he's trying to front by using SPACE against the SPACE MASTER!

                            "GRAVITY BLESSING!"                            
Arthur Lowell     Arthur manages to knock Lezard back! And with the last strike that manages to pursue him before that forcefield, they seem to transition to a different stage of the process. "OUTGROW? HAH! Homie, ain't NO SCHOOL like the OLD SCHOOL!" Arthur declares, landing on another chunk of earth after the forcefield repels him, panting heavily, recovering his exhausted breaths. It looks like that forcefield matched up with his game-logic. They're transitioning to...

    "ROUND TWO!" The bitcrushed voice shouts again.

    "Gonna have to wait a WHOLE LOT LONGER, motherfucker, 'less ya DROP SOME CASINGS and EMPTY THAT MAG up in this bitch." Arthur says, confidently pacing a little on his aerial island. "Come on!" And Lezard obliges.

    "READY!?!" Shouts the sixteen-bit announcer. "STRIFE!!!"

    Lezard's opening shot is heavy, a massive rush of dangerous energies. Arthur's immediately taken in, caught off his guard. He falls directly into the black hole! His entire body seems to unravel into strange and esoteric lights, like someone pulled a loose thread on his particles and unwove him into black-and-white strands that streak into a swirling mass in the center of the black hole. His HEALTH VIAL suffers harshly, going down, down, down... Before it suddenly stops.

    The strands that once were Arthur arc above the surface, dancing along the event horizon, shifting and churning like highly advanced industrial machinery, or like the display of an advanced holographic system. They carve spellcircles along the surface of the event horizon, where the singularity conserves information in accordance with info-conservation principles.
Arthur Lowell     The whole thing makes the celestial equivalent of the noise of a gun chambering a round before it lets out a Hawking radiation blast so concentrated and intense that it splits the dust still swirling in the air into a stylish eight-pronged funnel. From within the black hole, Arthur has stabilized, and is now using it like some kind of turreted bunker to blast back at Lezard with heavy artillery shots of Hawking radiation! With his surprisingly rapid shots, two or even three a second, he's likely to expend the whole thing and expose himself shortly, though, and still presumably suffer the pains of gravity compression.
Lezard Valeth ROUND TWO begins, and with the round change, the music changes too!

BGM SHIFT: https://youtu.be/b_oEDGONSc4

Lezard floats there, unaffected by the massive gravity pull and smiling as he watches Arthur get sucked in and crushed into strings of protomatter.... But even he isn't so foolish as to think that the MAGE of SPACE would be undone by something like that. Suddenly, he realizes that he might just have played into Arthur's hands. "What...!?" He gasps as he sees how Arthur is using the gravity sphere against him. Suddenly, the radiation blasts crash in, battering into him as he desperately tries to repel the assaults using yet more magical barriers... How many of them does he even HAVE?

The first two blasts shatter it, and Lezard pulls up more pages, which get blown out. The next two shots promptly irradiate Lezard heavily with the QUICK MATHS, searing him and dropping him to a knee as he is rebounded off the invisible back wall of the arena and falls back in. "Ghhhh..." He breathes, shaking his head and forcing himself back to his feet. "Patience... is a virtue. But not one I possess in quantity!" He retorts, a seething circle of light engulfing him as he vanishes....

And reappears safely standing upside down on the bottom of one of the floating crags. He looks up towards the fading black hole below him and weaves his hands. "Let us see how confident you can remain! FRIGID DAMSEL!"

Just as he announces, there is a wave of ice that forms into a glossy princess of ice that lunges in to slash at Arthur with a broadsword forged from a long, sheer ice crystal!
Arthur Lowell     Arthur eventually runs out of mass, nothing left to convert to hawking radiation. He drains the black hole dry, just in time for the FRIGID DAMSEL to take some shots. Floating on a wave of antigravity, Arthur immediately launches into a duel with the summoned ice being. He weaves, parries, blocks, and engages it in a raw one-v-one duel while he builds up energies. "You gonna want more PATIENCE if you wanna hit the day I GO DOWN, MOTHERFUCKER!" Arthur shouts, darting side to side and twisting about.

    Unfortunately, his dedicated one-on-one melee abilities have certain limitations, and they're the kind of limitations that result in some brutal arm-jarring blocks, shallow cuts, and getting knocked about before Arthur manages to build up beyond the threshold he's looking for. "First, take down the ice bitch...!" He calls out, suddenly ejecting out of every angle of his body huge volumes of gravity that threaten to impale the ice-golem on gravitational differences -- or, at least, knock her back. Unfortunately, after that long duel, this round has TIMED OUT, with Arthur well below Lezard's HEALTH VIAL levels. Round goes to him! There's a short, momentary break.

    "Then you. Alright, BITCH. Looks like you've hit the LAST SEGMENT OF THE SHOW. You ready to TAP OUT on this BIG FINALE, homie? 'Cause you ain't got a CHOICE on how this bit ENDS." He lifts dramatically, and fireworks go off at the blasted edge of the crater. "SHOUT, YOU MOTHERFUCKERS! It's time for..."
Arthur Lowell                          "FINAL ROUND! SUDDEN DEATH!"                        
                         "FINAL ROUND! SUDDEN DEATH!"                        

    The bitcrushed voice returns in synch with Arthur's own. Arthur drifts, darting about in the air, pumping his fist, whipping the crowd into a furor. "YEAH! YEAH!! Who's NUMBER ONE! You know it! SCREAM IT! It's ARTHUR goddamn LOWELL!!" His fireworks reach a peak, and several streaking lights explode in the air.

                                  "READY!?!"                                  

    "Let's do this shit!" He shouts, pointing his broom dramatically back to Lezard. His expression turns to a tense, teeth-gritting grin. "Let's fucking GOOOOOO!!"

                                 "STRIFE!!!"                                  

    Arthur slams both hands onto the hilt of his broom. "Haaaaaaaaaaa..." There's several crashing noises, like magical metal slamming into place. Spellcircles layer behind him. "HaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAA..." They begin to rotate and pulse, spirographic symbols in desynchronized orbits, interlocking dramatically. "HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!! YOU WANNA LEARN A FUCKIN' ONE-HIT KILL!?!" The moment they rotate into alignment, there's the sound of something locking into place, and then the whole thing fires at once. A singular massive beam, an effort to take Lezard out all at once for the sudden death round!
Lezard Valeth Lezard's looking ragged, his narrow escapes from being HYPERCRUSHED showing all over his scorched and battered body. Still, he radiates intense energy as he cuts his hands through space, manipulating the ice being like a puppet while it works to Guard Crush Arthur. The gravity spikes skewer the being however, the center of it crushing down and disintegrating under the radical gravity differential. A moment later, the rest of the Frigid Damsel shatters, the icy remains hanging in space...

                         FINAL ROUND, SUDDEN DEATH.                        

The announcement goes out, and Lezard, if anything, looks even more enthusiastic. "YES, LOWELL. COME! SHOW ME THE POWER OF A /GOD/!" He laughs, casting aside the Manus Catalyst and bringing forth his Philosopher's Stone, focusing utterly upon it as pages begin coruscating around him in atomic orbits. While the circles form, some form around Lezard as well, complicated graphs working themselves across the air like canvas, with Power as ink. While Arthur forms his Grand Cross, Lezard himself is incanting.

    "If ye shall accept the benedictions of beauty,"
        "Then yea, let these chains of aster surround thee!"

The atmosphere in the Boss Arena suddenly drops to an impossibly cold state, making it feel more like actual space... or /colder/. Wind pulls together, icy crystals forming in the air and collapsing in before Lezard, rapidly locking together and fusing...

And as the beam fires, Lezard cries out,

                              "ABSOLUTE ZERO!"                              

The beam fires, hammering into a perfect refraction point of ice before Lezard. The beam scorches into it, the tips of Lezard's fingers beginning to sizzle from the proximity, parts of his clothing beginning to catch on fire in that terrible moment...

And then the prismatic formation shatters, taking the hellbeam with it as the shards flip through the air in perfect mathematical arcs, refracting the split beams right back into Arthur in an attempt to channel his force back into him!
Arthur Lowell     This is the only kind of beam-to-beam tug-of-war that is, in any way, remotely scientifically accurate. Geometric experts would need to spend years if they wanted to see all the exact details of precisely what happened. Shards rotating through the air, translated through space by the shattering of the central, splitting mass, each themselves reflecting or sometimes splitting. To track each shard, each shard's splitting, each shard's refractions, each beam, would require a tremendously active mind. And, to Arthur's credit, he may have that, somewhere. But it's not what he has right now.

    What he has right now is a goofball bullying mindset that doesn't know how to shift gears towards geometric thoughts as quickly as it would take to stop it when the beams begin lancing into him. It's like a laser light show, with dozens, perhaps millions of micro-beams lashing about the arena, against the stand-barriers, and shortly, against Arthur himself, from a multitude of directions.

    His HEALTH VIAL drops, first a few flickering chunks, then a titanic drop in millions of tiny chipping impacts. Lezard's end of the arena is host to a combo-counter for each beam that hits Arthur, and it ascends far past "9999 COMBO!" rapidly. At the peak of the burning light, and the last of his HEALTH VIAL, Arthur lets out a heavy, pained grunt!

    "K.O.!!" The bit-crushed voice echoes, as Arthur's knocked out of the air, falls to the cratered arena, slams into the ground, and groans, holding his head in pain and smoking from the thousands of impact points all over his body. "WINNER: PLAYER 2!" Arthur grooooooans.
Lezard Valeth The cacaphonic response is intense. The overwhelming power shifting in the arena creaking even the considerable safety limits of the arena itself... But in the end, everything is safe, and the crowd has been given a battle to speak of for at least a couple months before it finally gets algorithmically demoted in favor of cat videos.

The battleground returns to its basic appearance once Arthur is declared a KO, and Lezard steps forward, looking down over the smouldering god. "That was quite the battle." He says, sparing the gloating. He even holds a hand down to the fallen Mage of Space. "Come, get up and let us get some refreshments, this wall all pass."
Arthur Lowell     How does this place interact with Arthur Lowell's unique composition? Mostly by seeming to do some fancy, gamified "rez" on his body, transforming the silhouette into a strange, pulsing, roiling light, before settling him back on his back. "FUCK." He declares. "Fuckin' FIGURES I bring out a ONE-HIT KO, get that shit SHOVED BACK DOWN MY THROAT." He responds to the offered hand by first doing several coolkid handshakes on it, before pulling himself up. "Yeah, yeah. Gotta refill on the GAMER FUEL and shit."