The first fifteen minutes of the challenge were a frantic rush as no one knew where the flags were. Their interdiction team had taken up position blocking the entrance to the competition’s base while a group from the opposing team had done the same to their own base. Neither side had claimed to locate a flag but the area to cover was significant and the search pressed on.
The greatest concern on Duke’s team was the speedster, Thryxxion on the other team wo everyone was convinced had scouted the entire area already. The fact that he hadn’t run back into their base or at least run into the speed trap that was set up at the entrance to their base confused everyone. Varis was convinced that Thryxxion would be the first to find a flag and had based their strategy on intercepting him. Right now, it appeared that the strategy was either failing or something unplanned for was occurring. The uncertainty was driving them to desperate action.
On the blue team, things were equally intense. Their speedster had come up empty-handed which threw their entire strategy into shambles. Their team had left the base confident that they would have one, if not both flags before the red team could get halfway to one. They had scouted the entire area quickly with Thryxxion’s speed and came up with nothing. The insectoid Contestant was on his third run of the entire area and completely frustrated.
Frustration bred mistakes and that was what Duke was hoping for. He continued to relax in his base, knowing the outcome was already set. His DUNGEON SENSE was locked in on the area, watching every movement. It was difficult to track the speedster directly, but he was able to tell that Thryxxion was as panicked as the rest of both teams. Duke smiled as he saw the exact moment things went from competitive to violent. It was exactly what he was waiting for.
Thryxxion had been pushing himself for an hour at his extreme speeds. He was drained, his reserves faltering. With dread in his fluttering heart, he made the move to return to his base and refuel himself. He needed rest and food as he suspected that this would be a longer competition than any of them had planned. He made one final sprint for his base. When he approached, he saw the red team waiting for him and contemptuously increased his speed to his maximum.
When travelling so fast, Thryxxion was able to see details that others missed which is what told him that he had made a grievous error. His third step through his foes was greeted with the springing of a temporal trap. The trap was designed to alter the flow of time for its victim, slowing them down relative to the rest of the world by an enormous factor. For most everyone, it all but froze them in place. For him, it slowed him down to the speed of a very fast Tier Seven fighter, which was easily within the capacity of anyone left in the Contest to handle. As the first attacks formed, he pushed his speed faster than he ever had before, tapping into his soul reserve to push beyond his previous limits. He dodged attack after attack as his speed increased. Every step pushed his Master-ranked speed boost further, calling on reserves that he had never dared tap into before.
Thryxxion twisted past a scything blade aimed at his thorax, his speed increasing exponentially as his soul reserves were poured into his Ability. Finally, an eternity later, his Ability pushed past the threshold, and he sprinted past the last of the red team and into the blue base of operations. As he passed through the doorway, the temporal field fell away in an instant and he tried to stop.
He did manage to slow himself down significantly, but not anywhere near enough. He burst into his team lobby at a speed greater than he knew was safe but the instantaneous loss of resistance against his newly pushed limits was jarring. He managed to slow himself down to a hundredth of his normal speed before he impacted the far wall of the lobby. That was still, however, a significant percentage of the speed of light.
Instantly, every contingent protective Spell and magitech barrier he had layered on over the years triggered, doing their utmost to mitigate the impact. Every contingency he had imagined was focused on one thing and one thing only – his own survival. Immense magics redirected the kinetic energy away from him, virtually negating the effects of the impact on himself and directing it all away from him.
There were two more factors in play here. One, the wall of the room was the absolutely immutable substance of the dungeon, made so by the controlling will of the pocket dimension of the dungeon itself. As such it reflected the entirety of the energy of the impact back into the room. The second factor was the nature of the room itself. The dungeon had made the room a no-violence area and as such the devastating effects of the impact were shunted out of the room – through the entryway.
The temporal net covering the entrance to the lobby had begun to fail when Thryxxion had penetrated it. The field generator overloaded which sent wild fluctuations in the field itself. Some areas in the field held slowed time, while others had time accelerated significantly. When the force, heat, and radiation of the blast equivalent to an atomic bomb going off and being channeled into an immutable passage the size of a hallway struck the fluctuating field, it was amplified further in this localized area.
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The team of eleven who had been sent to guard the lobby entrance had been confident that their trap would work and were still reaching for the now absent speedster when the blast tore through them. Jets of superheated atoms twisted and warped as they met with the distorted time fields. The ultimate effect was as if atom-thick blades of force scythed through the team. Any normal person subjected to this devastation would have been annihilated instantly. These Contestants were made of far sterner stuff, however. They were merely cut into chunks.
Contingent healing and lifesaving Spells and Abilities triggered as the blast wave passed through and onwards down the hall, expanding, and reducing in intensity as it hit countless side passages. When it was all done, seven of the eleven Contestants managed to survive by expending every healing and lifesaving trick they had saved up. They were still battered and most still carried wounds that had yet to heal. And then their luck turned for the worse.
Eight Contestants who had been held in reserve and have been penned-in by the red team burst through the doorway and attacked with everything they had. The red team Contestants were only outnumbered by one and might have been able to match the blue team’s reserve if not for their sorry state. The fight was over quickly with surprise and the freshness of their wounds placing the red team at too much of a disadvantage. When the first of their number went down after having been double-teamed, it quickly devolved into a rush of collapsing dominoes. Still, three of the blue team had died in the fighting.
Duke observed all of this with disinterest through his DUNGEON SENSE. It was all falling within his expectation and plan. He suppressed a grin as the last remnants of the blast puffed against the entrance going unnoticed by most in the room. Conversations started up tension mounted.
“Someone should have found one of the flags by now, and here we sit, doing nothing. This doesn’t sit right with me. I didn’t join this Contest to have my victory or defeat determined by someone else. I’m going out there to seize my destiny!”
Others responded in kind, voicing their support for going out and finding the flag on their own. Duke considered sitting back and watching but decided this would be a great way to reveal he had found the flag without having to reveal it in the lobby. Seconds later, the red reserve group had left and was scouring the area just like everyone else.
Conflicts continued as the two teams’ frustrations boiled over. Each saw the other team as the enemy in more than just assignment. As word of the deaths near the blue base spread, tensions continued to rise. Every time opposing members met, fighting broke out. Duke’s group was no exception.
After nearly a dozen inconclusive fights, Duke decided it was time to thin the herd so to speak. He knew that everyone involved was a powerhouse but he also knew that when powerhouses fought like this, there was opportunity. It came when his team that now consisted of six of them ran into a group of eight blues. In this group, Duke recognized Ragnar Volthorn, the Contestant that was ranked just underneath him at 4th before the finals.
He immediately reviewed what he knew about the creature that seemed to be made of glowing green energy. Ragnar was known to have a venomous touch, his energy invading the bodies of his opponents and breaking down their internal organs like acid. He was also known for being immune to virtually every attack that has been tried. This was one of the opponents that Duke had been most concerned with when speaking with the Overmind. Still, he engaged just like his fellow teammates.
As fate would have it, Duke was not the first one that Volthorn went after, leaving Duke free to deal with others. Since they were outnumbered, he would up facing off against a pair of thin grey creatures that reminded him of Greslarnier. As he quickly discovered, they shared their penchant for mental powers.
The pair combined their mental might in an attack on Duke’s mind. The assault would have been crippling, injecting despair and hopelessness overlaid with paralysis directly into his mind. Voices full of authority were simulated to well up from the depths of his personality to lull him into inactivity and helplessness. The combined assault was particularly powerful with their minds’ powers intertwining and pushing their way into their victim’s mind.
Duke looked at the pair and slowly stepped backwards from them, his hands held up in front of him, his eyes unfocused. Each step took him further away from the group and the pair pursued him relentlessly. They matched him step-for-step as he backed down the hall playing terrified and overwhelmed. All the while, Duke could hear the sounds of the fighting getting worse and worse. From his DUNGEON SIGHT, his side was on the losing end and it was getting bloody. More than one life-saving measure had been triggered. None seemed to have an answer for Volthorn.
Finally, Duke was far enough away that he felt he could slip away and not be missed from the rest of the fight. He struck. Two heavily OVERCHANNELED IMPLOSIONS, each directed at their heads activated. The whole time he had been backpedaling, he had also been studying them with his various senses. They were so focuses on pounding through his MENTAL FORTITUDE and Psyche that they did not notice his probing. What he had found was that they each had a secondary brain deep within their skulls that seemed to be the source of their Ability. It was these secondary brains that were the target of the IMPLOSIONS.
In seconds, the Ability reduced the pair to naught but compressed flesh. Their screams of anguish echoed through Duke’s mind. His hands clutched to his head, he crumpled as the echoes gained strength, pounding at his mental defenses before suddenly being absorbed by his subconscious. Once again, the pressure in his mind increased. He retreated back to the base to recover.