As they enter the arena again, they surround Julie, as even if her images can be seen through, they can still give them a numerical advantage as she simply makes more and more arrays.

The walls of light go down, and the enemy team charges towards them. As Sen goes to block two of them, he sends one of his wind balls towards them only to have it be blocked by a cone of flame, popping too far away for it to do much damage.

Sen grimaces, and starts to control the wind around him, he’s going to need a shell of wind to prevent the enemy from burning him alive. As he gets in close combat, his opponent uses a skill that wreathes his large two handed sword in flames. Each time their blades clash, a small explosion of flame is sent out, but the swirling barrier of wind Sen has placed around himself stops himself from getting more than a little singed.

The fight is quite even, but Sen’s opponent is using more energy, until the extra melee fighter the enemy team has joins in. Sen is forced to up his energy expenditure, constantly sending small gusts of wind to knock the newcomer off balance enough for him to dodge his strikes, but is starting to run a bit low on energy when Julie’s images join in the fight.

The enemies instantly turn to the images, using their flame empowered swords to slash through their energy weapons, but Sen uses the momentary distraction to use cutting squall to slash into the arm of one of them. They block at the last second, but still take a nasty gash, and Sen grins as he sees the bleeding debuff icon pop up over him.

The two swordsmen start to get a bit reckless, and Sen burns the rest of his energy running away to let the one he’d deeply cut bleed out a bit more, adding a couple of throwing knives which end up sticking into him for good measure. Eventually, Sen starts to feel a bit faint from lack of energy, but the unwounded opponent has been forced to cancel his sword of flame, while the other can’t strike with too much speed or power due to the wounds he’s taken.

Sen is still pushed back, taking a few glancing blows on his arms and body until the next wave of images join the fight. That evens the playing field, the wounded one going to erase the images while the one who is out of energy duels with Sen some more.

Sen is happy with their chances until he hears a loud “Fuck!” from Lynna. Looking over, he sees her opponent is limping, but has just shoved her sword through Lynna’s stomach.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Sen realizes he needs to finish this fight sooner rather than later, and lets the next strike bite into his arm as he slashes through the neck of his opponent. Sen grimaces, that arm is going to be practically useless now, which means he’s going to have serious issues using his sword from this point on.

Regardless, he leaves the guy fighting the images to Julie, and rushes towards the opponent that Lynna had been fighting, who had turned to fight Xue. Xue is using some sort of movement skill that makes her seem to sway as she dances around them, but she’s unable to engage them for more than a fraction of a second in order to not be taken down by the superior numbers.

This time, Sen gets lucky. The opponent he’s targeting hasn’t noticed her teammate’s death, and doesn’t notice him coming from behind as Sen stabs his sword through her neck. She jerks in surprise and pain from the wound, before Sen kicks her off of his sword and turns to help Xue focus down the other opponent.

Sen and Xue are slowly wearing him down, when Sen hears a “Bow before me!” from Kang, and looks over to see he has beaten his opponent with the help of a couple images, and is going to help Jennifer. Sen lets out a grin, and looks over to Julie quickly, to see she’s engaged the last opponent in close range with a few images as backup, and is wearing him down.

Sen feels a grin slip onto his face as the last of the enemies fall. It had been a hard match, and Sen makes sure to give a bow along with his teammates before they exit the arena.

As Sen gets out, he sees Lynna having an odd expression somewhere between anger and happiness. She spends the next few minutes taking turns complaining and being cheerful they’ve won, before starting to quiet down before the next match.

The next few rounds are actually easier, and they make it to the quarterfinals battered and bruised, but in no way broken. Their opponent for the quarterfinals is another pro team from the other continent of Iowes.

Sen doesn’t know them, but the fans in the arena are screaming out “Go Imperium!” and so he figures they must be pretty popular. As the walls of light go down, he sees that they have the same composition as his team, five fighters and one array user.

Both of the groups circle up around their array user rather than charge towards each other, and Sen grins, if they’re going to fight based on arrays, he’s certain that his group will have the advantage.

As the groups stay away from each other, both the arrays are finished, Julie slightly ahead of the opponent, and she gets five images compared to the four the opponent put down. The enemies don’t bother charging in though, clearly trusting in their array user, and Sen and the group are happy to sit back and exchange arrays.

Kang is the only one who seems dissatisfied with the match as more and more images appear. Every time, Julie’s clones grow faster then the opponent, and eventually the enemy team snaps, charging in. At this point though, Julie has four more images than the opponent, and those four images make it so that Kang is easily able to eliminate his opponent, leading to a chain reaction of failure for the enemy team.