The crowd was electric with anticipation. After the staggering preliminaries, few could predict what kind of fight would follow Keem's previous display of magical brilliance. Yet here he stood again—carefree and grinning, lazily twirling a pebble between his fingers—as his opponent stepped onto the field.
Gem's entrance was quieter. Graceful. Her long black hair flowed like silk under the arena's lights, her obsidian-toned skin shimmering with glints of blue. Around her wrists coiled her signature chain-threaded gems, each one pulsing faintly with restrained power.
Ari leaned forward in the stands, eyes fixed. This wasn't a fight of brute force or beastly shifting. This would be a match of technique, resourcefulness—and depth.
The duel began with Keem making the first move, hurling the pebble forward. It burst mid-air—not with explosive force, but with thin glyphs, ethereal and shifting. They looked like nonsense at first. Until Gem tried to summon.
Her garnet summon hesitated, threads delayed—slowed by a subtle distortion Keem had preemptively weaved into the battlefield.
"Oh?" Gem smiled coolly. "You're already playing."
She snapped her wrist. Chains snaked outward with pinpoint speed, two gems flashing: Topaz (Speed) and Obsidian (Anchor). The former boosted her reaction, the latter clamped down any thread distortions trying to disrupt her summons.
Keem didn't flinch. Instead, he muttered a few numbers, then waved his hand gently.
The glyphs around him recalibrated. Suddenly, the air warped—Gem's chains curved ever so slightly away from him, bouncing off some unseen barrier of calculation.
For every spell Gem cast, Keem dismantled the logic behind it. Her Sapphire Barrier shattered on contact with his dispersal weave. Her Ruby Lance detoured mid-flight. Even her attempt to entangle the arena in a full-thread snare was broken mid-cast by a flick of his fingers.
He made it look effortless.
But then Gem began to change her rhythm.
She began layering gems in strange patterns—ones not often seen in duels. A Moonstone to enhance instinct. A Peridot for thread disruption. And then, without warning, she flung a diamond-threaded gem into the sky.
Keem smirked. "Predictable—"
The gem exploded into a fog of sparkling motes. Then, silence.
Keem's threads fizzled. All of them.
He blinked. "Wait—"
That's when she struck.
From beneath the arena floor, a chain burst upward—Alexandrite—wrapped in twisting nullification threads that had been buried since the match began. It struck his side, knocking the wind from his lungs and pinning him before he could recalibrate.
The bell rang.
Keem coughed and chuckled, eyes wide with disbelief. "That... was dirty. I liked it."
The crowd erupted. Gem didn't gloat. She simply nodded with calm elegance and withdrew her chains, which dissolved into threadlight.
Ari leaned back, exhaling slowly. "Keem lost?" Kaien muttered beside him. "He actually lost."
But Ari only smiled, impressed. "That wasn't just power. That was artistry."
Even Keem admitted it with a laugh as he limped off the field. "Note to self: Never underestimate a jewelsmith with a long memory and an even longer chain."