You're not really in the mood to suffer any more mentally-scarring visions, so with some regret, you switch off your ki sight. This will mostly likely keep you from seeing half of what Lyra can do, but if she does in fact use mana to augment her personal fighting style, observing the match won't be a complete loss. Thinking on it a moment more, you cast a second, much more minor divination spell that will let you observe the impending releases of magical energy within the ring, without actively probing them and potentially ticking off Beryl. Lacking the built-in analytical factors of your standard detection spells, this one will force you to exert more effort towards puzzling out what a given spell does (and how it does it), but it's a more potentially productive option than simply blinding yourself to everything the sorceress does in this fight. Speaking of which...
The Announcer drops his hand. "FIGHT!"
Lyra brings her hands to one side, necromantically-infused energy coursing between her curled fingers, and releases a large, fast-moving sphere at Beryl - who responds by raising another pillar of dark crystal as a shield. The glittering barrier absorbs the attack in an instant, dark blue energy crackling wildly along its surface, but a moment later, the crystal shatters violently, forcing Beryl to back up a step, a more standard magical shield raised before her to block the debris.
It doesn't stop Lyra, who leaps through the cloud of flying debris in an arc that carries her over Beryl's shield, and stomps on the redhead's skull before she can adjust her defense to block the unorthodox attack. As Beryl staggers under the blow, Lyra springs away, reaching out and smacking her opponent in the face with one darkly glowing hand as she does.
"Too easy!"
Beryl comes back casting, spitting out a spell that causes more of her crystals to erupt from the tiles before her in a wide arc, bent at a forty-five-degree angle so that their narrow, keen-edged tips thrust forward like spears. Lyra backflips away from the attack, ducking at the end to avoid a beam of hissing darkness. Grinning maliciously, the braided brunette rises to her feet, folding her arms across her chest - and vanishes, to reappear standing behind Beryl.
"Still! Not! Good! Enough!" she shouts, punctuating each word with a blow from a glowing fist. Beryl takes two of the blows - one to the gut, one to the face - manages to impose her staff in the way of the third, and then disappears in a teleport of her own before the fifth can land. Unlike Lyra, the sorceress reappears in mid-air, hovering over ten feet off the ground, a few unbound strands of hair and the edges of her clothes billowing ominously in an unseen wind.
"Try this," she hisses, right before she unleashes a rain of dark bolts that fills the entire ring. There's nowhere for Lyra to dodge, and she knows it, hunkering down with both arms raised to shield her face and chest, her aura flaring to absorb as much of the attack as it can - which proves to be very little, as Beryl's necromantic assault eats into the life-force-based defense with glee. When the deadly rain passes after several seconds, Lyra is trailing wisps of something that looks like smoke, but which your spells tell you is actually tattered soul-stuff. She should be in significant pain after an attack like that, but when she lowers her arms, there is a wide, tooth-baring grin on her face.
"That's better! More! Show me more!"
Scowling, Beryl obliges, raising her staff. Instead of a projectile attack or conjured shards of razor-edged minerals, her next spell englobes her in a sphere of protective force - and the one after that creates a ring of mystical symbols on the arena floor. You don't recognize all of the arcane characters, but enough of them are familiar for you to conclude - even if you weren't picking up the aspected mana radiating from the construct - that this is a summoning circle.
"Oh, shit," Briar sums up, having recognized the magic herself.
A spot of pure darkness appears at the center of the spell-construct, rapidly expanding to fill its interior until it looks as if a chunk of the ring some seven feet across has just been sucked into oblivion. You half-expect to see Tall, Dark, and Eeeevil rise from the depths of that void, but Beryl is not so foolish as to completely give away her complicity in yesterday's incident. Rather than a towering figure of living darkness, what emerges from the hole is human-sized, and sufficiently human-shaped that it could pass at a distance, with the proper clothes and the right lighting conditions. As it is, you and the entire crowd are given a clear view of something that looks more like the fresh corpse of a famine victim, withered down to a sagging sack of skin draped across jutting bones. What flesh it has is brown, spotted with unpleasant patches of green, its hair is long, thin, and as pale as snow, and its eyes are empty sockets, lit by tiny embers the color of old blood. It wears the dirty, tattered ruin of a garment that was probably a red dress - the only real indication that it might, at one time, have been female.
The Announcer makes a sound of disgust. "W-well, folks, it appears that Beryl has chosen to call in a ringer. A really creepy-looking one..." He shakes his head. "For those of you unfamiliar with the rules of the competition, summoning assistance in this manner is permitted, much as solid replication techniques are, provided that the competitor's own power is used to do so, and that the capabilities of the summoned being are compliant with the tournament's other regulations."
As if on cue - and with a gesture from Beryl - the undead thing in the summoning circle spreads its hands and drops its jaw in a wordless moan, demonstrating for those with good seats or keen eyes that it has no claws or fangs - close enough to "bladed" weapons to merit a disqualification, for the tournament's purposes. The Announcer inspects the creature, grimaces, and then nods.
"Let the match continue!"
Beryl's creature shambles forward, surprisingly nimble despite its zombie-like appearance and manner. Lyra regards it with clear contempt.
"Che," she all but spits, before leaping forward to intercept the beast, coming down on it much as she did Beryl - and then stomping on it a second time when it's off-balance, forcing it to its knees. She lands, kicks the thing in the face hard enough that it is nearly carried off the tiles, and charges up and releases her projectile attack before the summoned corpse comes back down, blasting it neatly in mid-air. It drops at once. Ignoring the fallen thing, Lyra glares up at Beryl. "Don't insult me, witch! I-"
Lyra stops abruptly, and looks down, to where the undead creature has just grabbed her by the ankle. She kicks out at once, trying to dislodge it, but the monster - visibly less withered than it was a moment ago - manages to hold fast.
"En... er... gy..." It rasps.
Lyra's eyes narrow, and this time, she brings her other leg around, kicking the monster in the face for a second time. This time, it lets go, but it recovers from the blow and drags itself to its feet.
"Give... me... YOUR ENERGY!" the thing howls, lunging at Lyra with both skeletal hands outstretched. You can see a faint necromantic aura glowing around those thin, fragile-looking fingers. Whether she can perceive the aura or not, the brunette fighter clearly senses the threat, and skates backwards on a cushion of her own dark power, hovering just a finger's breadth above the floor. She disappears in mid-evasion, once more teleporting behind her target to unleash a ferocious assault. Unlike Beryl, the living corpse hardly seems to feel the blows, turning about as fast as it can manage, reaching for Lyra with its ominously glowing hands. Again, the girl withdraws, Beryl's minion in hot pursuit. Lyra lets it come, falling back to the edge of the ring - and then, when the undead creature surges forward in defiance of a sudden shouted order to the contrary from Beryl, Lyra seizes it, spins, and flings it out of the ring. The fall does no actual damage to the creature, which picks itself up and looks around, taking in Lyra, the Announcer, and the closer members of the audience with an expression of pure hunger.
"B-by the rules, Miss Beryl," the Announcer says hastily, "your ally is out!"
This of course draws the monster's attention back to the man, but before it can do more than smile in anticipation, Beryl snaps another command, speaking not to her summon but to her magic. At once, the spell that brought the life-force vampire ends, causing its body to break apart in a haze of dark particles, which swirl back into the hole that the creature emerged from. The void reseals itself and vanishes, the runic circle fading away along with it.
Lyra looks up at her opponent. "Summoning a ki-absorber was a clever move," she admits with a renewed smirk. "It might even have worked, against a lesser fighter." Her smile falls. "But I am no lesser fighter."
"You talk too much," Beryl replies, twirling her staff while orbs of darkness gather and grow larger at either end.
"Indeed? Then I shall graciously put you in a state where you will no longer be able to hear my voice."
"That may prove difficult," comes the retort, in company with two easy swings of the staff, which release the clustered orbs at each end. "Considering how you're down there, and I'm up here."
"Not so difficult as you may think," Lyra answers, casually dodging the two scattershot waves of dark spheres.
And then, like Beryl, she takes to the air.
"What's the matter, Beryl?" the brunette sneers, as she comes face-to-startled face with her opponent. "Not what you expected from a mere mortal?" Her expression turns dire as she begins to drift to one side, circling her opponent. "You sorcerers and your feeble tricks. You have no idea what real power is - but I'll give you a glimpse."
Lyra backs away, seeming to half-crouch in mid-air as her energy spikes, and then she flings herself forward, arms extended as she spins laterally, an aura of necromantic power crackling along every inch of her body. The crimson-clad brunette collides with Beryl's shield head-on, and there is a dazzling dark flare as their respective energies clash, which forces you to shield your eyes - one of the drawbacks to passive divination scans is a lack of good glare control. While you're still blinking away the afterimages, you can hear the familiar sounds of fists meeting flesh, and when you're able to see clearly again, you find that Lyra has successfully broken the shield and closed with Beryl, who is taking a nasty beating. The red-haired spellcaster tries to fly away from her opponent to get the space and time she needs to fire off a spell, but Lyra pursues her relentlessly, keeping the pressure on. After scant seconds of this, Beryl gives up on spells and just starts throwing raw mana around, imbuing some of it into her body in a rough echo of ki-reinforcement, and the rest into her staff. You wince in sympathy, knowing that without the precisely-calculated shape and limitations of a proper spell, efficiency drops like a stone when one starts using pure magical energy like that, draining a mage's reserves like nobody's business.
Lyra doesn't get the remainder of the fight entirely her way. Inefficiently used or not, Beryl has a LOT of mana, and her counterattacks, like the necromantic spells that preceeded them, take a visible toll on the other girl. In the end, both fighters fall from the air, too drained of power to maintain their respective methods of flight. It's that fall, as much as anything, which ends the match; Lyra is the superior martial artist, and she uses the abrupt drop to slam Beryl into the waiting tiles.
After a long pause in which the brunette gets up and casually dusts herself off, while the redhead merely lies there groaning, the Announcer declares Lyra the winner. The brunette smirks and leans down to stare the dazed Beryl in the face.
"Goodbye, dear. You were almost entertaining."
And with that, Lyra straightens up, adjusts her hat, and strolls calmly out of the ring.
Gained Abjuration F++
Gained Augmentation E+
Gained Conjuration F
Gained Divination E+++
Gained Earth Elementalism F+
Gained Mage Sight E
Gained Necromancy F++
Gained Summoning F++
The intermission is upon you. What do you intend to do with it?