His "Samson™ Minotaur" armor clattered as Robert climbed the steps to reach the arena under the ululating cheers of the crowd. As the contestant with the faster total elimination time, he was granted the privilege of facing the worst of the losers' bracket qualifiers. The girl on the other side wore a frilly dress that resembled that of a ballerina. She was clutching a staff and looking at him with a mix of admiration and fear. He put the helmet over his head and sealed the airtight joint. His opponent had some sort of scent magic that pacified monsters and people alike.

"Let this be a lovely fight!" She said, moving her arms and making a heart sign with her fingers. Then she blew a kiss toward him.

Robert felt something scratch the edges of his mind palace. He raised a hand and saluted. The scratch increased. He saw no essence usage on her side and that would be a tournament violation. Though the shield was still down, it was already recording their essence and affinities.

The horn sounded. The shield thrummed to life. "BEGIN!" The referee shouted.

Robert drew his sword and dashed forward. Two-star haste. Thought Acceleration. The world slowed down but didn't lose its colors. Then he used a new spell. Turbocharge muscle. It was a Life affinity buff that did what it said on the label. He became a blur as he surpassed a hundred miles per hour.

"Peace shield!" The girl shouted, staff leaning against her shoulder, both hands forward in the universal halt sign. The circle behind her flashed with a black X, denouncing she used a unique affinity.

Danger sense flaring, Robert stopped (instead of crashing into it) and slashed where the barrier was. His sword rebounded and came back at him with double the speed he slashed with.

"Stellar Barrage!" She yelled from fifty yards away.

The afterimage in front of him melted. None of his senses told him the one in front of him was a fake but the shield blocked his spatial senses.

Shooting stars, cartoonish five-point constructs shot at him, trailing rainbows. For a moment, the "peace shield" went down and he could sense her.

Robert dashed once again. He slashed each star with his sword, breaking them into showers of sparks that burned his armor wherever they landed. It was but a minor cosmetic damage. He charged straight at the shield, a dome in his spatial senses.

Anything with a unique in its name was bound to break the rules of reality. Flames with a unique cold concept could burn and freeze at once. Robert had no doubt that the peace shield allowed for no aggression, save when its owner lowered it.

With a flourish, his sword vanished. Robert cycled jade mind to allow him a feat many would consider impossible. "Mind Blackout," he whispered inside his helmet. The disk by his side remained clear.

He reached the shield. The girl flinched as he showed no signs of stopping. Then, Robert crossed the shield.

"What?!?" She shouted, stunned by the impossibility of the stunt.

Robert seized one of her hands as the other hand reached around her waist. The disk by Robert's side flashed with a black X.

Her skirt crumpled as he pressed their bodies together. She yelped and struggled but his grip was firm yet kind and soft.

The armor speakers started to play Blue Danube by Johan Strauss II.

And they danced. Robert led her across the arena in a waltz. The girl started to giggle and laugh, tossing her head backward to reveal her genuine joy.

The two spun and twirled, stepping forward, then to the side, joining the feet, backward and to the side. He added flourish, some hip movements hinting at something but still keeping his respects.

She tried to resist but found it impossible. Slowly, step by step, she became enraptured by the dance. Something whispered to her inner child. Again, Robert's side flashed the black X.

The music reached its high point. The girl's cheeks became a bright red. She laughed and smiled, her eyes sparkling as they stared into Robert's faceplate.

The arena speakers caught up to the music, with a few seconds of dissonance. Robert shut down his speakers and adjusted his pace. It was a rendition by another orchestra and it had little tempo differences due to the artistic preferences of the conductors.

She leaned closer, pressing her chest against his armor. "If only you weren't wearing a helmet, I'd kiss you now," she whispered with a mischievous smile.

"You don't belong on a battlefield, my lady," Robert said like a true gentleman. "You belong in a ballroom, in a garden of wildflowers, on a beach frolicking over the sea foam. You are made to float in the sky, to laugh in the meadows, to make love hidden by the mist and the roar of a secluded waterfall under the full moon."

She gasped and bit her lower lip. His lines were cheesy as fuck but euphoria was making more than her brain a moist mess.

Her hand moved from his shoulder to his neck as she leaned forward and kissed his faceplate, leaving a crimson lipstick mark on it. "Why don't you leave the Samson girl and date me, Robert?" She asked with a burning desire in her voice.

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He cringed as he thought about Camille watching this fight. If his conversation with Amanda in a Parisian cafe hadn't convinced him it wouldn't go forward, then this surely would put an insurmountable rift between them.

"She's my boss, not my lover. Everybody has the wrong idea."

The girl smirked, "Are you sure? I see you do not understand a woman's heart, Robert. You only know how to toy with them."

"I assure you, I have played with many a woman in my life, but I never treated them like a toy without being first requested." He lied through his teeth.

She laughed. Robert wasn't sure it was out of entertainment or mockery.

The song ended. They stopped, the lady panting and the gentlemen a mass of unmoving, unreadable steel.

"Shall we resume the fight?" She asked.

"Does your shield protect you from point-blank attacks?" He imagined casting a void lance at her head. His danger sense returned nothing.

"No, it doesn't. You wouldn't harm me, would you?"

The circle on Robert's side flashed pitch black. The lipstick mark slowly crumbled and dropped as dust. She watched it happen with horror in her eyes. Robert's hand around her waist was now a vice grip. He could sense her heartbeat spike.

"It would hurt me greatly to pluck the petals of a flower as beautiful as you," he purred.

"You wouldn't dare to deflower me," She gasped.

Robert snorted. "As if that ship hadn't long sailed. Tell me, was it your boyfriend that Amanda killed? Do you know what his talent was?"

The magical girl didn't like that a single bit. Instead of fighting back, she relaxed her body. "I Yield," She shouted.

Then, before Robert let go of her, she grabbed his hand. "Tell Amanda I owe her one," the magical girl said in a whisper. Then she winked and skipped away.

The horn buzzed. "FINISH!" The referee said.

*

*

Amanda wasn't happy. She paced back and forth along the gym. In the background, one of the Minotaurs was trying to use a viola as a violin, wary of crushing the delicate instrument under his snout.

"You Casanova!" She pointed an accusing finger at him. "Can't you, like, fight like a normal person? Did you really need to... DANCE! Dance of all things, in the middle of the tournament? And wipe that smirk off of your face!"

Robert still wore his armor. Amanda somehow was seeing right through it.

"Granny send her regards. She said she bought the rights to the fight and is going to use it as an advertisement for the Minotaur armor. You'll get five percent of the sales."

"Shouldn't we celebrate moving onto the round of eight? The quarter-finals?" Robert asked.

"NO!" Amanda roared. "Can't you feel bad for poor Camille? How is she feeling right now, knowing she is just another notch on the wall of a philanderer?"

"You don't care a bit about Camille," Robert said. "And I'm not a philanderer. Camille was the first date I had in two years."

Somehow, that irritated her even more. Robert didn't think that any of their outings counted as a date but maybe Amanda had other criteria to define a date.

"For the record, she was the one who first suggested we—"

"Don't you dare finish that sentence?"

Robert stood at attention and saluted.

"And take off that armor!"

The armor locked its joints. Less than a second later, Robert appeared next to it in his symbiote suit. A dissonant note came from the viola as the Minotaur scraped the strings with the bow. The other two nodded and mooed in approval.

"Congratulations on your victory," he said. "You managed to keep your essence underneath the stone all the time."

Amanda was still in a foul mood. "How did you get inside her shield? Nobody, in all the twelve fights she had before losing to you, managed to get a single attack through it."

That magical girl lost on the fifth fight of the winner's bracket, then went through the seven fights of the loser's bracket.

"Self-hypnosis," Robert said. "I used my spell on myself and gave myself instructions to not have a single hostile thought toward her until I danced with her for five minutes. After I came out of my self-hypnosis, I knew I could attack her without getting hurt because she dropped the damn shield. It's a unique spell but it must have some hidden cost."

"You know people are speculating that your talent is making people dance?" Noah said as he arrived at the gym with Andronicus.

"Professors! Welcome." Robert said. "No, I wasn't aware."

"Keep them guessing," Andronicus said with a chuckle. "You have my personal congratulations, Samson and Blaze. You are a step above the rest of the contenders."

"Thank you, Professor Andronicus. Your praise means a lot to us."

"You have tough fights tomorrow," Andronicus said. "I want you to rest today. No training, no going through passages to harvest essence. Let your bodies and souls recover. I know that both of you put in a lot of effort, and stress, and even came closer to burning out. As for you, Robert, you have a lot of time in that liminal void of yours. You should only work on softer tasks, like developing your mind palace and its related proficiencies. But refrain from using any essence."

"Any special reason for that?" Robert asked. He was planning to finish the map of the Gurglock world and try to push void heart to the cusp of stage 1.

Andronicus was stern. "Yes, you are on the brink of suffering soul damage. Both of you, but you are the closest. For different reasons. Amanda for overusing her talent, and you for using enough Essence in a week to make a four-star blush."

Robert examined his body. He felt fine. Only the burn of essence was channeled in copious amounts through his body but he didn't feel any signs of essence poisoning. "I think I'm fine, though? Between my void veins and the symbiote, I really didn't feel any detrimental effects from channeling that much essence aside from a slight burn of my channels. But by now, they are quite tough. It could even count as a separate tempering."

Andronicus eyed him. He took an absorption crystal similar to those at the gathering facility. "How big is your essence storage right now?"

"Two hundred and fifty-seven percent," Robert said. Seventy-nine of that was from his void heart. His second star was at eighty-eight percent full.

"You what? Did you ascend three... no. It's that void heart tempering, right? That's a very powerful ability. I'm afraid we have overlooked the Void affinity. But it is so rare and carries a big stigma, with the terrorist attack on the Academy. Let's go, then. How fast can you discharge your full essence pool? And don't use Void essence. Let's see, Space is an all-time favorite."

Turns out, it was fucking fast. It would be doubly so if Robert was allowed to discharge it as Void essence. Andronicus read the crystal display and was impressed.

"Some late-stage three stars, with decades of channeling, don't have this speed," Noah said. "For two stars, it is unheard of. Maybe someone with a specific talent but that is beyond the point."

"The way your Void tempering removes foreign essence is compatible with highly-trained Holy practitioners," Andronicus added. "Okay, I take back what I said. But I still think you should take a mental health break."

"I will defer to your wisdom and do as you ask, professor," Robert said with a nod.