Chapter 53.1- Doom Days

The rest of my qualification duels passed without note and I took note of the Leaderboards as the second day wore on. At the beginning of the day, there were several of us on perfect 4/4 records. By the end of it, only about eleven of us out of the chosen sixty-four had perfect 9/9 records. That didn’t mean they were all on my level though. It also didn’t mean that those with less than perfect records were very far off. Several of them were on 8/9. In fact, only three out of the chosen sixty-four had less than a 7/9. That probably said more about the difficulty level of those blocks than it did about their skill levels…or lack thereof.

So I stood now in a line with eight other contestants. There were eight such lines as the opening theme of this year’s duelling tournament played. It was good music, I thought. Very grand, very orchestral, all that. We patiently waited for the music to end and then Russo was back again, on the stage.

“Witches and Gentlewizards, please join me in a round of applause for our top 64” He said, pausing briefly to allow said applause reach a crescendo. The noise of the crowd was something else. The stadium’s roofed come down during the music and it seemed like the crowd’s noise was trapped with us in the center, an echo chamber if you would.

“From this point on, the duels will proceed one at a time. Today, we can expect each candidate who makes it to the end of the day to duel twice. Once to cut us down to thirty-two contestants, and another duel to take us down to sixteen. From the last sixteen, we should have a single duel a day for four days. On the final day, two will remain and one of them will end the day a champion. The rules remain the same as for allowed spells, but there will be a single twist when compared to the qualifying rounds. Meet ECSR. The Environmental Condition Simulator and Replicator. Every duel apart from the finals which will happen the old fashioned way will take place in one of five pre-selected environments. Powerful enchantments will replicate the chosen environment so perfectly that neither the duelist nor we the audience would be able to differentiate it from the real deal. As for what the environments are, well, we’ll leave that as a surprise. Now let’s applaud our duelists once again as we prepare for the first duel of the day” He said, lifting his hands in the air. He was such a showman. He had one of those smarmy smiles that you could just tell belonged on television. It was too perfect.

But it spoke of a hidden malice to my instincts. And they were screaming at me once he began speaking about that ECSR thing. It was going to matter a lot more than he was letting on, I could tell.