Of more than seven hundred contestants, only one was disqualified. The spirit summoner became a cautionary tale for all other students. Despite the referee's reluctance to call it, the tournament organizers and the Academy staff issued dozens of statements condemning the guy and his teacher. The spirit summoner was summarily expelled from the Academy before Amanda's fight started. A fate worse than death for most students.

Amanda drank an energy supplement. She didn't sleep that night, using all the time she had to evolve a beneficial variant of the plant she was going to use today. She blinked the scales off her eyes and slapped her cheeks. Then she climbed the tunnel and emerged under the sunlight.

"Good luck, child!" She heard the voice of Titania Samson in her mind. "Orders for the new ethertech power armor are through the roof. The publicity stunt with the minotaurs was a stroke of genius!"

Amanda couldn't help but laugh. Her granny was burning the power of a four-star Arch to talk shop and cheer on her. No pressure! No pressure at all!

Noah was standing in her corner. He gave her a thumbs up. With Robert's victory, Noah was guaranteed the spot as the number five combat teacher already. He wouldn't fall lower than this. It was a massive win for him. Amanda was happy she could help him but she was eager to push it further. She climbed the stairs and took her spot.

Her adversary was a lean and tall guy who was very popular with the girls. Some say his talent allowed him to evade getting a pink ribbon several times. Or maybe some of the girls were just boasting about sleeping with him for clout. Most likely.

The shield came up. "Begin!" The referee shouted.

Amanda ran to a corner, tossing seeds along the way. Then she ran along the north wall toward her adversary's side. The disk on her corner glowed green for Nature. The lanky casanova leisurely approached her. Grass started to grow and spread on her side of the arena. She could probably stop sewing the seeds now but she wanted to win fast.

She drew her sword as the guy approached. He had his hands in his pants pocket. "Hey, babe. Why don't you ditch Minotaur guy?" He started.

Amanda felt odd. It was as if his words had weight. "Sure. Consider him dumped," Amanda replied with a grin. She noticed that she felt good agreeing with him. Was this some sort of mind-influencing attack? It didn't matter. She swapped her sword for earplugs.

Kicking off the arena corner, Amanda started to drop seeds on the guy's edge of the arena. The circle on his side didn't shine once. What the fuck? Didn't he just use some sort of power on her? Unless that was his talent.

Could it be? Some sort of super persuasion? Could he really just talk his way into or out of things? Could he talk himself out of the pink ribbon? Was that how he cheated the Academy to sleep with the girls? Fuck.

"Hey, babe! Come over here, let's talk!"

Amanda felt compelled to go. So that's how he talked his way into so many girl's panties. But not this one. Amanda's panties belonged to one person only... herself! Yes. The only person allowed inside her panties was herself. Nothing weird about that.

But she found that the third corner was so far away. All she wanted to do was to turn around and talk to the guy. So she vowed to go and talk to him once she finished a full lap around the arena. Amanda found the resolve to reach the third corner and try to complete her home run.

On the way back, she saw emerald grass reaching almost half the arena on her corner. The grass was growing in a beautiful wedge. Now she needed to reach the fourth corner, and then run to the middle. Then she would talk to him as much as he wanted.

Touching down on the fourth corner, she looked behind her. The guy was standing at his starting point, grass growing around him. What a jerk. Amanda put on ear muffs and then took her hazmat suit. She donned the silver environment seal suit and started the onboard music player on the loudest setting. Now she was ready to talk to him.

Amanda walked slowly. The grass reached the center and completely covered the stone floor. It was bright emerald, swaying seductively. The guy looked down and said something. Her suit microphone didn't pick it up.

"So, what do you want to talk about?" Amanda asked through the suit's speakers as she approached him.

The guy spoke but she couldn't hear him. Amanda drew her sword and stabbed at him. With preternatural speed, he dodged. It was like he didn't need to build momentum. One moment he was still, the next he was ten feet away. She noticed the disk on his side glowing purple.

He had the Space affinity. Funny. He hadn't used it yet. Like, at all. In his six fights, this was the first.

The guy raised placating hands. Amanda charged. She slashed and stabbed. All the time, every time one of his attacks was about to connect, he would use his Space-affinity spell and move away. Well, it was his essence. Amanda kept the pressure, using her Lightning tempering to move faster than she had the right to.

But her opponent refused to fight back. He didn't draw a weapon and his lips kept moving. Wasn't he aware that she couldn't hear him?

On one strike, Amanda activated hydraulic flex, propelling herself four times faster than normal. She slashed and connected but the smooth-talking guy vanished right after. She cheered inside. The change in tempo granted her an edge!

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With his wound bleeding slowly, the guy showed some panic. He put distance between them. Amanda swapped her sword for her disk launcher and fired at him. he teleported away The disk crashed against the barrier and released the seeds. A patch of grappling vines erupted into existence. She kept firing. The vines dotted the arena, growing over the grass. She wasn't even using plant growth on them. Her upgraded talent alone was enough to make them grow that fast.

She placed the vines strategically, creating a maze. She could pass near them with no problem as they were attuned to her essence. But the guy would get caught and then it would be his end.

Five minutes and forty disks later, he had nowhere else to go. The vines caught him. But he teleported out of them. Amanda cursed inside her suit. Now it was a race against time. Who would run out of essence first? Amanda or the guy that was burning his essence on expensive Space spells?

Hint: Amanda gained a trickle of essence back from her druidic attunement because of all the plants she had on the field. It wasn't anything to write home but it wasn't nothing either.

She started to get the plant vases in her ring and dumped them around the arena. Biter vines, the Light-affinity sunflowers, and so on. Amanda threw red bamboo shoots to raise the walls. The guy teleported across the walls. it was infuriating. So infuriating she forgot to count the teleports and missed her chance to calculate his remaining essence.

But how was he not affected by the knockout grass she spent the night evolving? The same grass they found in a passage realm in the Gurglock world?

It had to be his talent. Amanda had him figured out now. That's how he won every fight without using essence. He just talked his opponents into losing.

His talent was super persuasive! Omni-persuasiveness! It probably allowed him to talk his way into or out of everything! Even to convince the pink ribbon ward not to tag him! Even his way into the girls' panties! And even to make the knockout grass ignore him! That's what he did when he looked down and talked to the grass! He convinced the grass to not affect him! Those traitor plants!

She stopped. Amanda met the guy's eyes but focused upward on his hairline. This way she couldn't see his mouth and get affected through lip reading. Not that she was good at it but yeah. Why run the risk?

The guy seemed annoyed.

Amanda liked it. She leveled her launcher and fired a stone disk at him. He teleported. She ran after him, firing disk after disk. The guy ran backward because he couldn't see behind him. So that was his game. She kept firing, forcing him to teleport every time. This time she counted the teleports. Even after she kept counting, he had teleported fifty times and counting.

It was impossible. Even if he was at the cusp of two stars, he would have at most two hundred percent essence. She knew each of these teleports cost more than five percent so how was he pumping this much essence through his system? Did he have something to give him essence?

It couldn't be. Did the guy have an Essence Satellite Core? It was an artificial construct one could take into their soul to provide them with essence. These cores had anything between one and five percent essence generation. Any time you used an ability, you could draw essence from the cores. They would refill to their full denomination of one through five percent the next second.

Amanda grinned. If this was his game, all she had to do to win was to put pressure on him. These cores cost a fortune. The cheapest ones sold for ten to fifteen million, while the five percent ones went up to a dozen billion dollars when one of them went up for sale. Could she afford one? Definitely. Could Samson get her the top five percent core? Yes.

But power always comes at a cost. For these artificial satellite cores, it was essence poisoning. The human body wasn't meant to conduct that much essence. And with every use of essence, some of that essence lingered on the body. Some cores were so bad at this essence poisoning they were treated like garbage and removed from the soul. And you had no way to measure the toxicity of a satellite until you used it.

How efficient was the one this guy was using? Amanda rushed forward, using hydraulic flex to propel herself over the grass, firing indiscriminately at him. She barely aimed. Once a disk was loaded on the launcher, she pulled the trigger in his general direction. Closing the distance, the guy turned around and ran for real this time. he timed his teleports with the characteristic sound of her launcher firing.

That allowed Amanda to fire even faster. Since he wasn't even looking, she could fire anywhere and he would teleport. She tried to aim in a way she would catch him but he always teleported to a safe place. He even avoided the vines that were cluttering the ground.

Fifteen minutes and almost two hundred teleports later, the guy was showing signs of fatigue. Amanda couldn't see very often but she knew he was speaking all the time. With how many constrictor vine patches crowding the arena, he had to use his talent to talk the vines into not grabbing him. He looked at her. His eyes were bloodshot and he was bleeding through the nose.

Those were signs of talent fatigue, when an Arch abused their talent so much it started to hurt their bodies. Not all talents were like that. Passive talents like hers or some special ones like Freddy's never caused fatigue.

The disk on her corner flashed brown. Amanda had conjured more slate disks straight into her ring as she kept running toward her opponent, firing all the time. These disks didn't even have seeds in them but she wouldn't tell him that. They were still sharp enough to cause a nasty cut if he let himself get hit.

Ten minutes of frantic pursuit later, the guy collapsed on the ground. The vines immediately turned him into a meat-and-veggie burrito. Amanda drew her sword and stabbed at his throat, intending to give him a complimentary tracheotomy and keep him from using his talent. She made sure not to cut the neck arteries. Then she used her shape plant spell and wrapped some vines around his jaw, making sure he couldn't vocalize either.

Staring at the referee, she put a foot on the guy's head and tapped the sweet-talker's skull with her sword.

The referee did nothing. Parting the vines with a burst of Nature essence, Amanda stabbed the guy in the kidney, twisted her sword, and pulled it sideways. Then she repeated the blow on the other side.

She could tell the guy was bleeding to death. The referee looked at the smooth-tongued Casanova's professor. The woman was fuming, screaming at the philanderer and bashing the shield. Amanda could bet a million dollars the teacher had slept with the guy. She stabbed him in the left lung now. Pink foam appeared on the guy's mouth. Then she flicked her speakers on.

"Seriously, guys. A student is about to die of exsanguination here and you won't call the winner?"

The teacher tossed her jacket to the ground. Next, she turned around and stomped away.

The referee shrugged and rang the buzzer. "Winner!"

The shield came down. Healers rushed into the arena. They immediately were knocked down by the grass. Amanda slammed her hand against her hazmat suit's faceplate.

"Natural Disaster: Dust Bowl Drought!" Noah shouted.

All the plants in the arena dried out and died. The healers woke up and approached to heal the sweet-lips but he was suffering from critical essence poisoning. The healing spells didn't have any effect on him because of that. He expired in the next minute.

"What a waste," Amanda shook her head as she walked off the arena.