The next day Sen gets up quite early, and goes to practice the next level of his skin enhancement skill in order to try and get his mind calm and focused. He keeps losing focus during his practice though, and eventually gives up in frustration. He spends the time instead practicing cutting squall, the whistling sword of his blade, and the snapping sound of it impacting the target a much more calming thing for him in this case.

After a bit, he hesitates, then decides to message Xue and see if she would like to get a meal in game, as he doesn’t have much time out of game to spend with her. She agrees in seconds, and Sen wonders if she had been waiting on his message.

They go out together, and end up chatting over a meal, mostly about their adventures in Last World Online and their experiences in Gladiator.

“How did you manage to do so well in Gladiator with a two handed sword? I thought it wasn’t a common weapon for a reason.”

Sen tries not to wince, it’s from his experience from his past life, but he doesn’t know what to do about that. He feels he should share, he’s even considered telling his family before, but something always stops him, mainly the thought that he doesn’t want to be sent to counseling. Eventually, he decides to hint at it.

“It just feels right. It’s like I have an extra life of experience with a two handed sword, and it has its own advantages in fights, the extra reach and power can snag a lot of wins.”

Xue looks at him a bit curiously, but dismisses the look quickly as the conversation shifts back to other things. Sen is a bit gratified to get a couple of laughs out of her with some of the more ridiculous fights he’s had in gladiator, thinking he needs to get her to laugh more.

Around thirty minutes before the tournament starts, they head back to the Lotus school to meet up with the rest of the group, and they all head to the arena together, Kang claiming that the great DarkBlade is going to crush all the opposition.

The group is a bit disappointed when they arrive, as they’re going to have a bye the first round, so they decide to spectate Team Cloud’s first match. As they wait in the arena for the match to start, Sen notes that their opponent doesn’t have an array user, and grimaces, this is probably going to be a stomp.

The walls of light go down, and Team Cloud circles up around their array user. The enemies simply charge in, and Sen is pretty sure they’re all using the fire versions of body enhancement skills, as they seem to explode off the ground with each step.

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Team Cloud relaxedly intercept them, LostMind sharing the extra with one of the other members, and they’re easily able to hold them off until the images appear from the array. Once the images appear, the enemy team starts to back off, and they start to focus on hitting the swords the images are using, their swords enhanced with fire shattering them quite easily.

Just as they break the images though, they all slow down, and Team Cloud easily overpowers them at this point, their array user joining in the fight rather than sitting back and setting up more arrays.

As the match ends, Team Cloud bow to the bodies dissipating into sparkles in unison. They then give some waves to the crowd and leave the arena, and Sen and his friends leave as well, going back to check the tournament brackets, only to see that their next opponent has already finished their match.

They all chat a bit while waiting for their next match, Kang actually going quiet, seemingly a bit nervous regardless of how he usually acts. When they arrive in the arena, they take up positions around Julie, and all click to ready up, but have to wait for the timer to count down to zero for the walls of light to go down.

Sen is cursing whoever forgot to ready up as they see the enemy team. Interestingly, they seem to have two array masters, both of whom are using what seem to be darts as their array keystones. Seeing as how they are basically two people down, Sen yelled out a quick “Charge!” before rushing towards the array master to his left. One of the opponents goes to intercept him, but he’s able to get past him with just a quick blow to stop his movement.

The one who went to stop Sen has apparently been practicing the earth versions of the body enhancement skills, as he isn’t able to keep up as Sen continues his rush towards the array master, and the man switches off to face Xue.

Sen is almost there when the array master lets out a smile, and turns slightly fuzzy. An even fuzzier image of her appears, though its sword is clear, made of energy with which to cause damage.

Sen simply ignores the image, and sends multiple knives flying to her real body, laughing a bit as he sees her panic. Clearly she was confident that she is not able to be seen. While Sen kills her, the rest of the group has paired off, none of them able to get through the steady defenses of the enemy team.

Sen starts to head to the other array master until he sees that Julie has far more images than him, and is about to kill him along with her images, so Sen changes plans and turns to go help Xue. Arriving behind the man she’s fighting, he slashes at him from above, but he pivots to block it as if he has eyes in the back of his head.

Xue doesn’t let the opening go however, slashing into his neck, a watery looking whip of energy wrapping around his neck from further away than her sword can reach. The man’s hands drop his sword and go to his neck as he turns into blue sparkles, his neck having a deep blue line in it where the whip had been.

The two of them then easily wipe the rest of the enemy team, and they’re heading on to the next match. Kang is complaining again about how the great DarkBlade wasn’t able to get the kill on his opponent, having been helped by his sister.

This time, they’re able to spectate their next round opponents, and see one team without an array user and one team with one. The one without the array user seems to be winning however, simply slashing through the energy weapons the images are using to dissipate them, and ignoring the array that slows them down far less than it should have.

As they finish the enemy team off, Julie mentions that she’s probably not going to be of too much use, as they have items that can deal with arrays.

Exiting the arena, they wait the fifteen minutes they’re given before the next round, not talking aside from Kang, trying to focus their mind for the match to come.