Sworded Affair

"I've had enough of this! Burn!"

A wave of heat slammed into Emma, followed immediately after by a deafening crackle as the air ignited, searing her skin despite her relatively distance to the epicentre. Her own opponent took the chance to lunge forward, stabbing at her ribs in the hopes she was distracted, but it was a half hearted probe at best. He didn't want to risk losing the spear over such a move, so the moment Emma reached for the haft, he immediately backed out of reach, not even going for a contest of strength he was likely favoured in. It wasn't necessarily the choice Emma would have made, were their situations reversed, but she still appreciated it in the moment, as it gave her the chance to turn her head and observe the mess over in the middle.

One man was dead centre, surrounded by red flames that left him entirely untouched, his body the familiar translucent sheen that denoted Emma's own intangibility. Behind him, a chunk of the floor slowly lowered itself back into place, the last fading flickers of magic bleeding away into the night as their creator stepped out from behind, completely unharmed. Finally, the culprit responsible for the fireball hovered ten feet up in the air, both arms outstretched with a gobsmacked expression on his face at his failure to kill either of his opponents. In tune with his emotions, the flames beneath his feet died out, but before he could come back down to earth, an immense purple hand grabbed him out of thin air, gripping him hard enough that Emma could hear his bones crack even through his scream of pain.

Felix emerged next to him, walking on air with no need for external propulsion, the Games Master naturally needing no such support within the confines of his own arena. His face was purple, nearly matching the hue of his toga out of sheer rage, his eyes alternating between each of the three offenders in sequence; because they were surely offendings, having all cheated to cast spells in an ostensibly magic-free environment.

"All three of you," Felix growled, confirming Emma's thoughts in real-time. "You couldn't even have the grace to use smuggled magical items, at least making an effort to stay in theme? I'd have permitted that, and only arranged for a little humiliation to balance the scales, but no, you just had to bind instant spells to your souls, completing flouting the restrictions on magic before letting them loose in my arena. Did you even know what you were doing? Magic cannot be freely used in an environment where the laws of physics exclude it. If I didn't have contingencies in place for exactly this scenario, you would have been ejected instantly from the simulation, with a very real chance of serious mental damage from the sudden return to bodies of flesh and blood!"

Judging by the paling of the two contestants on the floor, they did not in fact know of this potential problem. The man caught in the hand only sneered, glaring daggers at Felix for all the good that did.

"So you did know, but thought you could handle it. It wouldn't even have won you the event, not with two more contestants out of the line of fire, but you just couldn't stand being shown up, could you? What a mess."

By now, neither Emma nor her opponent even bothered with the pretence of battle; both of them were openly watching Felix as he delivered his condemnation to the rest of the field.

"Contestants 14 and 79, since you only used your spells in self-defence against the aggressor, never using them up until that point, I'll let you off just this once. You'll still have to pay a penalty in the post-event debrief, the circumstances of which will be changed to account for this rampant cheating, but you'll be permitted the chance to win the event fairly."

Both of them gasped as a purple collar appeared around their necks, digging into the flesh in a manner that could not possibly be comfortable.

[Null Collar: Suppresses the magic of the wearer to negligible levels, barely enough to be considered alive and far from the amount needed to activate even the weakest magical artefact.]

"Thank you for your leniency," both of them bowed gracefully, demonstrating both noble bearing and a refreshing degree of common sense compared to some of Emma's earlier opponents.

"As for you," Felix ignored them both, preferring to focus on the main subject of his ire. "The aggressor, the unrepentant, the one most certainly in the wrong. Since you're so keen to dispense with the rules I set, I feel no need to keep to them myself, and am thus happy to name you as Johan Weber of no fixed abode, a recent graduate of the Imperial College of Magic."

With a wave of his hand, Johan's disguise faded away, the face of a tanned blonde man replaced by a gaunt teenager, pale as the grave with sunken cheeks and thick rimmed spectacles on display.

"I had to do it!" Johan complained, still trying to justify himself before the judge. "I didn't have a fancy surname or a powerful backer to give me a plum job after graduation, unlike the rest of them. This was my one shot to impress, you have to understand!"

"Well, you've certainly impressed me," Felix smiled, a thin-lipped little smirk that was always the prelude to trouble. "Not for good reasons, but you have. Since you're so desperate for employment, it just so happens that I'm in a spot to help you out. For making a mockery of the rules in a sanctioned event, I sentence you to ten years of menial labour in my Academia. Oh, and as for your participation in tonight's event? You're fired!"

Adding insult to injury, Felix punctuated his last word with a much larger fireball than Johan had managed; incinerated the boy in the blink of an eye.

"Now that that's taken care of, you can all get back to it," Felix remarked absently, barely sparing Emma a glance before vanishing back to whence he came.

Emma spun around just in time to dodge the spear aimed at her head.