At this school, no one’s ability is ‘strong’ per se.

Logically, if an ability was significantly more effective than others during combat, it’d simply be unfair and incapable of determining the true strength of a student. As such, every ability would have been designed to be just weak enough so that there was a way to defeat it.

My ability was no different.

Each ability has a description, but what that description doesn’t tell you are the various activation conditions that come with it.

If anything, the conditions of my [Mind Breaker] make it one of the worst abilities I’ve witnessed at this school.

...

「You may begin.」

I looked forward at Kai, standing arrogantly with his arms crossed. It wasn’t as though he was genuinely looking down on me, that’d be inexplicable for someone of his rank.

He was trying to distract me, like you do in poker.

Sometimes, there were more layers than a simple poker face.

Instead of giving your opponent a 50-50 chance of knowing your intentions. You control how they think, and that quickly becomes 100%.

I simply waited for Kai to make the first move.

He stared at me for a little.

Suddenly, a lush forest of faux trees appeared all throughout the arena. Tall stumps and thick leaves distorted my vision of the grounds. It was the same ability that Kamura had used in his battle against me. An ability like this gives a lot of critical information about what other abilities your opponent might be using.

Knowing that Kai’s {Personal Ability} was [Scanner], he must have had some other trump card up his sleeve.

If I were to simply make a deduction, considering that he was using a) an ability which gives you perfect vision on the battlefield and b) an ability which reduces vision of the battlefield, you’d guess that the next likely ability was one which benefitted off ambushing the opponent.

He could use an ability like [Snipe] to try to capitalise on the vision, but I’d guess that Kai has more up his sleeve.

I might try to bait out another ability.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Raising my arm, I conjured my [Perfect Diary].

Kai laughed a little as he saw it in my hand.

“A useless ability like that one, I didn’t expect you to use it, Akira.”

In essence, it was an ability which would show me the previous movements of the opponent. It only travelled back a few seconds and did nothing aside from that—there were no tricks, nothing.

However, after a moment, he looked at me with suspicion. Slowing his movements, he hid part of his body behind the dark brown tree stump.

It was just a bluff. My [Perfect Diary] was genuinely a useless ability.

It was just an attempt to throw him off a little.

Footsteps echoed through the arena, the sound of shoes clacking on the hard, marble floor. His figure flashed in and out of my sight, moving erratically. As he ran between the trees, he suddenly disappeared—with nothing appearing on the other side of the tree.

That was definitely some sort of teleportation ability, or perhaps an invisibility one.

With all three abilities out of the way, you’d think that I’d have all the information I’d need, right?

However, none of his abilities included a win condition.

He couldn’t have just forgotten, and getting into hand-to-hand combat with me was simply a waste of all his other abilities, as such, he must have had something else up his sleeve.

The school didn’t give many options for weapons, as most of the shops simply sold generic, everyday goods, so the best thing he could get was a relatively dull kitchen knife.

Still, this was a pretty bad matchup for me.

My [Mind Breaker] has several, rather debilitating restrictions. The main one, which wasn’t a problem for me during the duel with Kamura, was the fact that I needed to be able to know where my opponent was. At the moment, I couldn’t hear any footsteps or see any hints of his possible whereabouts, which further pointed toward his ability being invisibility as opposed to teleportation.

I wouldn’t be able to use [Mind Breaker] at all until his ability wore off.

There was no point in me moving from my starting position. I simply looked around a little and observed the scene.

There were a few different paths he could take to reach me through the trees, there wasn’t an easy way to pinpoint the exact ones, but I could narrow down the general direction just from the formation of the trees and branches.

Sigh.

This was going to be troublesome. I still didn’t know exactly what Kai’s win condition was. It definitely had to be something related to the ability to ambush, likely an insta-kill ability of some sort with a hard-to-fulfil condition.

If that was the case, I needed to draw out that condition until his invisibility wore off. If he was using [Invisibility Cloak], it would only last for 30 seconds.

Of which, he had less than 15 seconds left.

I guess I’ll have to be careful.

I summoned my [Perfect Diary] again. Despite seeming like a perfect opportunity to use it, the ability actually couldn’t show his movements while he was invisible.

It was just another bluff—since he likely didn’t know of that restriction.

Dead silence fell upon the arena.

A few more seconds passed.

Judging by the distance between his starting position and now, he definitely had enough time to have been able to reach me by now. I had been glancing around for a little while, trying to pick up any clues, but it seemed that there was nothing I could figure out about his ability.

Aside from the fact that his trump card was clearly a fourth ability.

Not only that, his fourth ability was a sneak attack of some sort—one which must have required the victim to not be looking at them.

I guess one of his girls must have had an ability which could transfer abilities, or lend them, perhaps.