The two Mage Lords continued fighting for several minutes. If one of the two of them were noticeably weaker than the other, the fight wouldn't take this long.
Fights between Mages with unequal powers would be finished very quickly, but fights between Mages with comparable power could sometimes take hours.
Such a long fight was essentially not a race to kill the other person quickly but to gain a slight advantage over Mana. The two Mages would contest and battle each other for every 0.1% of Mana with all their power.
A fight between Mages either ended in just a couple of seconds or took hours.
There rarely were fights lasting a couple of minutes. That would only happen if one of the two sides made a horrible mistake.
Seeing that the fight had already gone on for several minutes, the people knew that it wouldn't end anytime soon.
However, they were also quite interested in watching the battle. The longer it took, the better.
After some minutes, Shang stopped paying attention to the fight.
He had already found the thing he had been looking for.
While the two Mage Lords continued fighting, Shang was planning how to actualize the thing he had conceptualized.
BANG!
Suddenly, the colorful show of light stopped, and the surroundings were filled with Natural Mana again.
The onlookers looked with shock at the two Mage Lords.
Why had the fight stopped?
This fight had been too long for a short fight, but it had been way too short for a long one.
Fights very rarely took a couple of minutes.
What had happened?
As everyone looked up, they could see that Lord Starsky was glaring at the person in front of him with narrowed eyes.
The Territory Lord still wore her blue cloak, but the position of her body and the unstable manner in which her Mana Shield vibrated told everyone that she had been on the losing side.
It seemed like Lord Starsky had been on the winning side, but for some reason, the battle had stopped before that.
For a while, everyone just silently looked at the two Mage Lords.
"I didn't expect you to be so powerful," Lord Starsky said.
The Mage Lord in the blue cloak just laughed bitterly. "Yet, you are still more powerful than me."
Lord Starsky's eyes narrowed further.
"In respect of your power, I am willing to let you and your group go. Mage Lords of our level are rare, and I wouldn't want to kill one of them for a mere disagreement."
"How humble," the Territory Lord said, "but I'm not on your level, Lord Starsky."
Lord Starsky only looked at the Territory Lord with furrowed brows.
"Leave," he said.
"Thank you," the Territory Lord said before lifting her four people with her and shooting towards the horizon.
And just like that, the group with the mysterious warriors that had crashed the tournament vanished.
"What happened?" one of Lord Starsky's friends asked Lord Starsky with a voice transmission. He knew that something couldn't be right here.
First of all, the duration of the fight was suspicious. Additionally, Lord Starsky wasn't someone that let people that slighted him go.
If Lord Starsky had actually managed to gain an advantage over the Territory Lord, he would have called his two friends to end her life in an instant before killing the group of warriors.
He would have never let them go like this.
Something definitely wasn't right.
"I don't exactly know," Lord Starsky answered as he kept looking in the direction where the Territory Lord had flown in.
"What do you mean with you don't know?" Lord Starsky's other friend asked.
"I mean, I don't know why they wanted to fight me in the first place," Lord Starsky answered. "Someone like that can just leave if they want to."
Lord Starsky's two friends raised their eyebrows in confusion.
"During the fight, they had only put on a show," Lord Starsky explained. "It looked flashy and fancy, but I felt no actual weight or will behind their Spells. It was like they were just randomly throwing stuff to look impressive instead of actually fighting."
The two other Mage Lords were quite surprised.
They hadn't noticed any of that, and from what they had been able to feel, the foreign Mage Lord had been quite powerful.
Yet, Lord Starsky was saying that they hadn't actually been serious during the battle?
"Shortly before the fight ended, they actually let themselves be hit on purpose by one of my Spells," Lord Starsky said. "That Spell was actually only meant to disturb the purity of Mana in the surroundings, but they actually walked into it on purpose and acted like they had been injured by it."
The two other Mage Lords looked with uncertainty at each other. "What are you trying to say?" one of them asked.
Lord Starsky furrowed his brows even more. "I suspect that they might have been an Archon."
The mouths of the two Mage Lords nearly dropped. If they hadn't had thousands of years of experience and practice, they might have accidentally shown their sheer shock to the masses beneath them.
"An Archon?! Are you serious?!" one of the two of them asked with nervousness and shock.
Lord Starsky only nodded.
What was an Archon?
Archon was a title for a Mage Lord that had comprehended a level five Concept.
In short, it was a Mage Lord that could become a Mage King if there were more Mana available in the world.
Archons weren't exactly rare. About 10% of each Empire's Mage Lords were Archons, which would come to nearly 10,000 Archons in the world.
However, Archons outside an Empire were extremely rare.
Nearly all the Archons were part of an Empire since the Empires were the only way for Archons to actually become Mage Kings in the future.
Finding an Archon that didn't belong to an Empire was extremely difficult. In fact, it was nearly impossible.
But one had appeared here?
The chances were infinitesimally small!
"Did they belong to a different Empire?" one of the Mage Lords asked.
"Possible," Lord Starsky answered. "I'll inform the Lightning Manor after the winners of the tournament have been crowned."
The two other Mage Lords weren't certain if it was a good idea to wait, but they knew their friend.
He wanted to keep up the appearance that he had been the winner at all costs, and acting all flustered and nervous now would destroy that appearance.
This was just one of his character flaws that they had to deal with.
