A lot can happen in 40 years, especially when anyone could be the next person to make a big breakthrough, when it's not just large companies with massive R&D budgets that can advance humanity in any significant amount. It especially helps when no one knows almost anything about the field to begin with and the internet is already set up to help the flow of information.
With the 45 years Luke had gained humanity, they had already began to touch the beginnings of how to create arbitrary flows of magic. They couldn't just model a potential spellform and place it in water or liquid with similar viscosity to magic, as the properties of free-flowing magic changed based on its velocity relative to nearby magic, but mathematical models were in place to understand its properties. Taking the extra step those models needed to go from verification of the effects to production of spellforms was still being developed, but the groundwork had been laid.
Souls had been confirmed to exist, just as Laura had predicted. So far, the only methods of interacting with them were to detect they existed, and her predictions about the reason magic couldn't directly be conjured inside others were almost correct. The soul itself stretched to reach the conduit point of the magic that was to pass through it.
Society had returned to almost normalcy. With Luke taking the pressure off the world, the focus of combat magic switched from the nebulous to once again figuring out ways to use it to grab power on earth. The anti-murder freeze laws were still in place and the gods were no fools. They knew that an order to kill that was successfully carried out was just as bad as being the one to pull the trigger. Many world leaders wee found frozen in place during the initial scuffles for power before wars were wages completely bloodlessly by golems and non-magical drones, and indirectly through production wars.
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After Luke died, the gods instated a limit on match length. If combat did not start in the first 5 seconds of the two combatants entering the arena, or a gap in combat lasted for more than 15 seconds, they would both die. The matches themselves would last a maximum of 10 hours, where both combatants would immediately die, as well.
Humanity, after its initial stumblings in the beginning, had raced well ahead of the fraxions in terms of magical might. Many took up the torch Luke had lit, extending fights for as long as possible in hopes that humanity would one day reach and overturn the rule of the gods. It only a few years after Luke died that the round time got further shortened to one hour.
After a full century beyond Luke's arena run, the world was significantly different. Humanity had figured out how to create arbitrary spells, as long as they had the imagination, could simulate the magical flow required, and computational power to evolve the correct spellform for the job. They had begun investigating the stars, teleporting hundreds of light years in mere seconds.
Given enough imagination and time, many who believed in Luke's cause of taking back their lives from the gods thought that goal not too far off.
