Tonight on the Eurtec thunderdome: Amy and Beatrice sort out their differences in a no holds barred magic duel!
The Wizard duel started with a traditional greeting; Beatrice hurled a screaming fireball at Amy, who countered the move with a veil of water summoned at the flick of the wrist. The energies were calculated, precise. When they collided, nothing was left but dispersing steam.
Beatrice had challenged Amy to a formal duel. There were no stakes for this fight apart from seeing who was the better mage, though that was everything for those two. Being at the pinnacle of their crafts, there was only one place to hold the duel: the Eurtec ICSUT arena.
A domed cage of scrantonite surrounded them. Surrounding the cage were rows upon rows of screaming audience members protected from the immense energies soon to be within. Amy stood proud and tall in her finely-tailored suit, while Beatrice wore her favorite dress, bright orange and purple, covered in homemade greebles. Their cybernetic augmentations glistened in the flood lights of the stadium, gears ticking like a metronome for a song about to start.
With the greeting out of the way, both sides summoned their elements. Amy started with the solidity of Earth; boulders of solid rock being thrown with force at Beatrice. The rocks were captured and torn apart by Beatrice's walls of roots. The roots were carefully sheared by fragments of steel shards leaving dead wood. The steel was rusted by a maelstrom. Air was consumed by void. Void destabilized into energy. Energy dissipated into entropy. Thesis met antithesis. Concept clashed with concept.
Young mages cast spells. Seasoned mages, however, realize that the structure of a spell is unnecessary, and the exact formulations of spells give way to flows of elements. When a mage reaches the peak of their craft, elements give way to directly manipulating reality itself, and abstractions pull away until all that's left is the universal wavefunction.
As she started to exhaust her own magic reserves, Beatrice moved on to step two of the duel. Within her chest, organs long since replaced with the precision of machinery, a synthetic star ignited, feeding its raw energy into the Everhart resonator. Rapidly rotating superconducting electromagnets surrounded a tiny sliver of irrilite, the Tyrant's Metal, which created a tightly wound knot of electric and magnetic fields. These fields danced their mathematical dance as Beatrice's frizzy red hair stood on its ends from the energies.
Fire and water collided between Amy and Beatrice as the magicians’ waltz swelled in tempo.
This knot was bombarded with microwaves, and trillions of spinning balls – that are neither balls nor spinning – started to not-spin in the other direction. The irrilite's spin state heated up into the paradoxical realm of negative temperature. Inside this strange state, vitons interacted with excited electrons and one viton became two, then four, then eight, and cascaded into a pure flow of EVE.
Beatrice flung a flash of impossible colours, which flew towards Amy like tiny meteorites.. Her competitor dashed to the center of the stage with a flicker of a smile as the light glistened off Amy's earrings. Beatrice always loved those earnings.
Amy spun up her own Everhart resonator and the elements themselves were no longer needed, leaving only the flows of raw EVE bouncing off each other and the scrantonite cage surrounding them. Their resonators were equally matched, dancing in time to each other but neither leading nor following. The crowd cheered for the drama of a stalemate.
The stage was divided into two parts; a sphere of repulsion created by Amy and the storm of magic, sustained by Beatrice.
Focusing in on her heartbeat, Beatrice cast on pulse after pulse. Amy, as the brilliant mind she once knew, did the same, her perfectly straight hair fluttering in the non-existent wind. The audience listened to the echoes of their hearts beating in tune. never out of sync.
Beatrice and Amy were childhood friends and even alleged roommates. They both dreamed of becoming the greatest mages in the world, constantly pushing themselves as hard as they could. They were frequently in trouble for nearly breaching the Veil.
Within the dancing vortex of impossible energy, Amy started to weave with the flows she generated. The crowd roared on sight, and that was fuel for her soul. Her true weapon was the spectacle of gathering the audience behind her. Like little dancers on a stage, the spirals behind her synced to a new tune: fractal whirlpools spinning with their partners, forming thaumomemetic structures woven into the fabric of reality itself. Other flows grounded themselves as chaotic audiohazards, a cacophonic symphony focused on Beatrice.
Beatrice's perception of the universe warped, seeing thaumic flows where there were none, pushing back on phantom concepts. The bubble of clashing concepts surrounding Amy distorted, vibrating to the unseen composition that Beatrice could not hear.
The audience screamed at the oscillations.
While the memeplex stopped Beatrice from noticing the memetic complex, it did not prevent her discovering the inhibition. She triggered a preplanned backup. Beatrice knew Amy, and she knew what Amy would do. A synthetic lobotomy, split the left and right halves of her brain, one lobe looking through one eye, the second half looking out the other; a crude but highly effective counter to most memetic attacks.
Pushing back, the waves on the boundary started to dissipate, like ripples on a pond, as conceptual entropy yielded to regular entropy.
Metaphorical entropy, on the other hand, dictates that eventually all objects will drift apart. Amy picked up a prestigious scholarship to ICSUT Zurich, while Beatrice picked up a much less prestigious scholarship to ICSUT Portlands.
They planned on getting drinks together to celebrate their achievements, one last time.
They would make it work.
Trying to keep up the momentum, Amy flicked a mental switch in her mind and the characteristic whine of a Scranton reality anchor whirled to life. Scrantonite pumps pulled on the fabric of reality until it was threadbare.
Amy smirked at the sound of the system warming up. She had worked hard on this bleeding edge merger of thaumaturgy and mechanized reality bending.
A knife of beryllium bronze stabbed a gaping hole into the universe and needles of exotic matter bound the wound open. The hume field flowed out of the wound and was manipulated by the raging EVE storm surrounding Beatrice, reinforcing the flow of magic. The focus of blending caused a drop of blood to drip from her nose
The hume and EVE fields danced their pas de deux as the superconducting hume condensate that is Reality thickened. The EVE field changed as the hume field granted Amy's magic greater mass and momentum as dictated by quantum mechanical interactions. This new momentum behind the magic threatened to break though the bubble.
The hemispheric bubble, glowing with the energy of clashing magic’s tearing spacetime apart, that separated the inside with Amy and the outside with Beatrice, distorted. A spear of magic pushed out from the center, directed right at Beatrice, following her as she moved and danced. The bubble held for now.
Beatrice raised an eyebrow, and then her cybernetic arm. Inside, thousands of electric arcs in an ontokinetic storm created tiny leyline loops as spacetime was broken down and improperly reforged. Accelerated with a thought, these creases in the fabric of reality disrupted the ontokinetic stability of Amy's attacks. Beatrice smiled smugly, she knew her girl, calling her a brilliant idiot in her mind.
The bubble rebounded and the dance of energies continued, reinforced by Amy's and Beatrice's hearts setting the pace, high and low. 1, 2, 3, 4.
They never got those drinks. They never did make it work.
They promised to stay in touch, but they never did.
They blamed each other for that and let it simmer.
Beatrice, in her own long wisdom, saw that thaumaturgic methods were ineffective here, so she moved from magic to noospherics. She tried to reach into Amy's mind and hook a foot under her ankle. Beatrice's metaphorical hand extended and was quickly pulled back after it ran into a wide variety of conceptual and mental knives inside of Amy's noospheric environs. Amy rode on the recoil, pushing conceptual uncertainty into Beatrice's mind. The sphere of clashing fields surrounding Amy resonated to the unseen music before expanding around her.
Beatrice's worries only grew from there. Amy's gold earrings flashed silver with the beat. She didn't notice it at first, the earring was a gift from her, a symbol of their love. As EVE concentrates in a location, it pushes against the laws of physics themselves. The finely tuned quantum and relativistic effects that give gold its beautiful color were pushed out of balance, destroying the color that represented their friendship. Baseline reality reasserted itself fast, but with each swell, the gold corroded some more as the fight destroyed the nobility of the metal.
A thought clicked in Beatrice's head: Resonance. The circular room caused low-frequency waves to build up dramatically. Like a stone dropped in a pool, waves rippled out and bounced off the walls, reinforcing each other over and over again. She had been playing into this plan, casting in time to the symphony performed by the master conductor.
As the standing wave reached a crescendo of energy, Beatrice went for plan desperation. While her ex-lover was probably a better caster, she had a few underhanded tricks. She wrapped her hand around a gift from her mentor, a jade fishhook she wore as a necklace. Greenstone stores the power, the Mana, of its wearer and of all who wore it before. Beatrice pulled on this Mana and converted it into EVE to counter Amy's empowered blast of refined, raw energy.
The bubble of magic had popped and instead of finely clashing magical powers, energies were bouncing everywhere. All stability from the duel had ended as the dance was reaching a crescendo.
Looking through her mental library of tricks, Beatrice decided on an old Masonic method. Step one was to bluff a Naiver-Stokes gambit. She started pushing EVE into spirals dancing in an impossible-to-predict pattern, and waltzed in closer while Amy was working out what Beatrice was doing with this performance.
It was at this point that she hit Amy with a half brick in a sock and the orchestra of magic stopped.
Distracted and pushed from the apex of magical energy to its nadir, Amy pulled on more EVE from her Evenhart resonator, which was already overloaded and straining. Inside the knot of electrical and magnetic fields that pull miracles out of logic, reality finally pushed back. Two tightly entangled electrons responsible for the marvel of superconductivity were torn apart inside the magnetic field. They were the first of many.
Superconductive quench point.
Smoothly flowing bosonic electron pairs collapsed into fermionic sand as the coils rapidly converted the electric currents into useless heat. Liquid nitrogen boiled in rapidly expanding clouds of gas. Amy's Evenhart resonator detonated as the electromagnetic knot untangled. Amy's wards, bereft of power, suffer cascading failures as they consumed themselves. Secondary systems, finely tuned to local reality conditions, triggered emergency shutdowns. Amy had lost.
The chaotic storm of magic died down without the fuel of the participants, leaving an area clear of chaos. The remnants of the former bubble of clashing magic could still be vaguely seen as the damage to local reality would take time to properly heal.
The crowd went wild, many loudly protesting the ending. The commentators argued vehemently over the legality of whacking your opponent with a brick while Amy rolled on the ground, trying to put out her burning clothes. The burns would heal over time.
With nothing more than one final, simple bolt of lightning, Beatrice had won the duel, proving that she was the better mage.
"Well matched," Amy remarked, as she was pulled up by Beatrice.
While this fight was very much for honor, the truest essence of a wizard duel was upheld: to show your mastery of the arcane arts and to learn from your opponent. As such, win or lose, both combatants were satisfied.
"So…," Beatrice asked, "Want to get a drink after this?"