“What is this…” Treston looked down at the field far below, where the fourth strongest man in his fighting pit was being taken apart. Multaeuos was an expert with the bow, the best Treston had ever seen. His shots always landed on target, and there was no one in this range of raw power capable of escaping his sight. In a drawn-out battle with a mage, there should have been no contention, and the fight he was watching was by far the longest of any that night after having stretched on for more than fifteen minutes.

  He watched the two combatants stare each other down from across the length of the arena, each readying their next attack. With shaking fingers, Multaeous reached behind himself for his quiver. Though it was empty, the stonespeaker's ebony fingers closed, and the fletching of an arrow made of light appeared before they could touch. Multaeous pulled the arrow of light from his quiver and hung it on his bow, inhaling a long breath before straining to draw the string.

  Multaeuos stood apart from many of the archers who tried their hand at the arena. Firstly, he had a natural charisma about him. Most knew the stonespeakers to be a very literal and straightforward people, but in the archer, the honesty of his culture was captivating. He showed his anger and glee in equal measure, and the audience that just then was chanting his name cheered for him with naked hearts.

  The second, and most likely most important difference, was that Multaeuos was a huge man, stonespeakers tended to be. Their kind was blessed with a natural affinity for magic, and the archer carried with him the blessing of lightning, very rare. Combined with his huge natural strength, the man's arrows hit like the lightning bolts they appeared to be. In every fight where the man wasn't bullied with swords or opponents far above him in power, he succeeded near effortlessly. The man's past successes made watching the match all the harder,

  With an incredible inhale powered by his mighty lungs, Multaeuos drew the string of his bow. The arrow hummed on the wood as power built behind it. Magic poured into the arrow, empowering it further, but even to Treston's mundane eyes, the light of the arrow was far less impressive than the ones he had been firing just minutes before. Sweat poured down the archer's brow, and he had to blink it from his eyes as he sighted his quarry.

  Across the arena, Charlene Devardem, the Nightmare Artist as Galla insisted on calling her, stood ready. The woman held a staff in her hands that looked to be made of moonlight. They had checked her prior to allowing her to enter the arena, and she had no storage items on her. She must have made it through some ability of hers. The staff and the incredibly concentrated bead of steely magical force topping its end weren't Treston's main concern.

  “How is she still going?” he asked aloud.

  Despite the numerous fights that the woman had participated in already, she showed no sign of strain. After the first two bouts, Treston had thought she was flagging as her blasts of magical fire seemed to become less and less potent, but that no longer seemed to be the case. Rather than running out of magic, the woman was limiting herself to avoid injuring her opponents.

  It made no sense. There were rules for how combats were supposed to work out. Mages were powerful, and they were capable of dealing incredible damage over a wide area. That was, as long as they did not run out of mana. In a fight between a mage and a warrior or guardian, the mage tended to come out on top unless the brutes were able to outlast them. Such brutes were typically able to handily defeat archers, who in turn were excellent counters to mages. Treston had been arranging fights for a very long time; while there were exceptions to these rules, they were rare.

  “No second-rank magician should have this much mana,” he complained. Yet, there he sat, watching a contradiction play out before his eyes. There were only a few possibilities for what he was seeing, each more dangerous than the last. His mind juggled the options, and he opted to settle on the worst-case scenario, his natural default.

  She could actually be a rank-three magician already, he thought to himself. It would contradict the information that the Adventurer's League had on the woman and what his own providence detecting devices told him. Both the league and his devices could be fooled, but to what end? It didn't really matter, but what Treston was beginning to feel made him worried. He would give the odds of her actually being a secret rank-three magician, an undercover member of that very exclusive club, perhaps twenty percent odds. Still, he was wary of it being true.

  The two combatants finished building their attacks, and for a tense moment, silence overcame the field. Hardly anyone in the arena caught the moment the two attacks flew. Twin streaks of light appeared, stretching across the gulf of the arena simultaneously. On one end of the arena, the beam of light terminated in an explosion that threw Multaeuos back into the glowing barrier of the stadium. A flash of light and a groan echoed the barrier's strain as the man was thrown into it, but it held all the same. The other side of the arena painted a different story.

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  The stream of shining lightning that marked the flight of Multaeuos’s arrow bent sharply as it reached the woman standing near the wall. A lingering tail of smoke curled from the shaft of the woman's staff from where the arrow had struck it before it was diverted into the ground, where it joined more than twenty others. Above the burning arrow dissembling into motes of light, Charlene Devardem stood tall, her smile mocking and expectant. Another bead of force began to form at the head of her staff.

  “Sir.”

  Treston nearly jumped out of his seat at the sound of Mallivar appearing in the box next to him. Calming himself and looking away from the next exchange of attacks, Treston looked upon his servant. “What do you have?”

  “Not much,” Mallivar admitted. “With so little time, it is difficult for me to overturn anything in the prior investigation, but I was able to find something. It would seem that just thirty minutes prior to betting closing on matches for the night, a wafer of a hundred thousand suns was placed by one Charlene Devardem on someone completing The Run tonight.”

  Those words brought Treston pause. He looked down at the arena once more. In his head, the tension he had felt began to unravel as the hideous truth of what was going on began to dawn. It was a bad truth, but it made sense, and he was glad for the knowing.

  He could be mad that no one had caught that such a bet had been placed, but no one would have. The Run had never been accomplished by anyone. Everyone knew that, which is why it was the perfect vector for his more influential friends to get their money into the city without too much scrutiny. They would place such obscene bets on something they knew would never occur, purchase his insurance to cover their bets, and then, when they inevitably lost, Treston would give them back ninety-percent of their original wager. It was a good system. An open secret. There was only one way that it could possibly turn against him, which is why he personally checked every single entrant into The Run to make certain that none could actually finish it.

  He never allowed a rank-three fighter to enter. Hells, he never allowed anyone approaching rank three in. There was no one of such low power that could fight ten fights in a row without using up all of their magic or strength by the time they got to the arena's true fighters. And even if they could struggle that far, his top two fighters were rank three magicians. The difference between someone with the power of the second rank and the third was just too wide a gap. It was impossible to cross.

  Treston sat back in his chair, tension fleeing him as the plot was laid bare before him. “I doubt she purchased insurance to cover such a wager.”

  “No, sir.”

  “What were the odds when betting closed for the night?” he asked.

  “For someone completing The Run, odds closed at 517 to 1.”

  Treston whistled. He did not believe now, nor had he ever believed, that a rank two magician could complete The Run. What he saw in front of him was desperation. He knew that the two human roommates were hard on funds, which was how he ensnared the first to begin with. Someone out there, one of his competitors most likely, convinced this young woman to try for the impossible. If she managed to do what no one else was capable of doing before, he would be hit hard. It was always his policy to be capable of covering every single bet going against him on a given night; quite a good policy for someone who owned several casinos and houses of more dubious gambling pursuits.

  He could cover these bets, but it would hit him hard. Treston doubted that his “friends” would be willing to eat the potential loss of having their throw-away bets suddenly pay out multiple millions of suns. Despite knowing that paying them and not contesting anything would be the best path, it would hurt his relationships, and losing so much capital all at once would damage him in other ways. This smelled of the Faeth that he knew, and he couldn’t help but breathe in relief at that seedy understanding.

  Treston stood from his seat, turning away from the fight below. “When this match ends, bring The Nightmare Artist back below. I need to discuss something with her.”

  Mallivar glanced past him to the field. “Not going to watch how this turns out?”

  Treston shook his head as he reached the door. “This was decided five minutes ago.”

  With that, he left, rubbing his hands together as he built his own weapon for the attack. A part of him savored the rare few minutes he had to plan; he relished the pressure. Above everything else, Treston Mox was a businessman, and he only had a few minutes to cook up an offer, one that Ms. Devardem would be unable to turn down.

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