The Royal Academy Coliseum was smoking ruins.
Chunks of marble lay in jagged heaps, magical scorch marks blazed like abstract art, and a half-melted statue of the founding king now looked suspiciously like it was dabbing.
The five-way magical wife brawl had ended not with victory, but with something closer to mutually assured destruction.
Seraphina's holy light cannons had burned away the clouds. Drakana's dragonfire had split the earth. Rosette's cursed daggers had blackened the air. Lilia's holy-laced chains had tangled half the arena into a cosmic knot. And Lucivella's abyssal despair magic had reduced three noble judges to gibbering jelly.
Now silence reigned. Then whole crowd, singed and traumatized, sat in stunned awe.
Rei, covered in soot, bleeding confetti from somewhere, and holding a half-burned sign that read "Vote Love Not War" muttered:
"…I'm too young to be a war widow."
