The ring was open and the students of Class 1-A were standing around the stage with excited eyes.
On the ring, two students fought, releasing a barrage of watery pellets or shadowy spikes at each other. Cheers and shouts rang out in tandem as the climax of the battle rapidly approached.
But, while the blood-boiling battle continued, two students were staring at each other with confident and challenging eyes. It was as if they were having a silent war of words and thoughts.
A dominant and tyrannical aura can be felt from the two students, with one being the previous first place in the monthly dungeon diving tournament, and the other being an unknown and nameless student.
Winston opened and closed his palms while fixing the blade on his waist. He wore a light suit of leather armor, and around his hips were various sheathed knives of the same general appearance. His pockets were filled to the brim with marked pebbles, each radiating minute traces of mana.
“Space magic?” Noel inquired as he sensed the traces of mana radiating from Winston’s sheathed knives and pebbles.
“What can I say? I like to be overprepared,” said Winston with a smirk. He then grabbed a pebble from his pocket and passed it onto Noel, “Here, you can have it.”
“Hmm.” Noel eyed the pebble with prying eyes, but eventually took it and planned on studying it further. Unfortunately, before he could do so, the fight on the stage ended with a loud boom, taking his attention away from the pebble.
“James wins!” Eliott announced loudly as the two students bowed respectfully at one another, a basic show of sportsmanship between sparring partners.
Their teacher then coughed loudly as he glanced at his list showing each of his students’ names, and picked two at random.
“Noel Crowley, Winston Champ, please get on stage!”
When the class heard of Noel’s name and recalled his various exploits and past achievements, a sense of pity overcame them for their classmate Winston Champ.
But the astute ones quickly realized something wrong.
“Wait a minute, who’s Winston Champ?” they murmured with low voices and stared at the brown-haired and brown-eyed youth coming up on stage, but as they were about to talk to others about this mysterious situation, Winston’s eyes blared with golden light and those students stopped in their tracks.
In an instant, they each stared at the ground in a daze as they had the same general thought.
What was I doing again?
Then, they moved on with their lives, dismissing their previous question entirely.
Winston smiled as he saw their weird reactions and moved his gaze back to his opponent with an excited grin.
“It seems like we’re really meant to be with each other,” Winston joked.
“Fate is simply an extension of causality. There’s always a reason for something, no matter how big or small. Our fight here today is merely just a mystery waiting to be solved,” Noel said sagely, like a wise philosopher of old.
“Flowery words.” Winston rolled his eyes and grabbed the hilt of his blade. “Let’s start already!”
Noel nodded his head and prepared to cast numerous protective spells in one go, but Winston was faster.
Before Noel knew it, a dagger was already flying straight at him with its sharp edge gleaming brightly with a silver luster under the sun’s illumination. He instinctively and rationally created a barrier at the front, but a sudden burst of mana erupted from his back pocket, and Winston popped into existence out of nowhere.
The pebble! Noel thought with slitted eyes and rapidly spread out his barrier, focusing more of it to the back while leaving enough at the front to deal with the incoming dagger.
Winston smirked in response to his actions as pebbles scattered through the air all around him as if rocks were like droplets of water when rain came. Then, with another blink, he reappeared in front of Noel holding the flying dagger, and plunged it forward with ruthless ferocity.
His plain yet staggeringly sharp blade augmented with magic crashed through his weakened barrier and broke it into fragmented shards, while his other hand wielding the dagger quickly approached Noel’s head.
Noel hastily teleported out of the way in a burst of bright light, which caused Winston to close his eyes, allowing the reborn archmage to distance himself from the precarious situation and get the time to think.
So he can recall himself back to his pebbles and daggers, which should complement well with his close-combat skills. Since he only needs to return to his marked items, his mental exhaustion is greatly diminished.
There’s also the fact that this must be his main fighting system. With a mixture of teleportations, feints, and distractions mixed alongside deadly swordsmanship and dagger-wielding, he can continuously exhaust the minds of enemies by keeping them in constant tension.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
And if I were to assume he has at least a Mage’s capacity of mana and he could cast his teleportation spell at extremely high efficiency, then that means I would be the one losing in a battle of attrition.
My mind would be strained way before I could find a way to deal with his annoying feints and close-quarter combat. Since that’s the case, I have to retaliate physically!
In a single second, Noel’s mind accurately analyzed Winston’s fighting style and hurriedly created a countermeasure.
With a wave of his hand, a blade of frost appeared in one hand and a whip of green vines appeared in the other. He ferociously sent his grassy whip at the temporarily blinded Winston and a loud crack boomed in the air.
Winston easily noticed the approaching whip as the hair on his skin stood on its end, and since he trusted his instincts, he recalled back to one of his scattered stones and opened his eyes as his lost vision returned.
The whip cracked the ground with destructive might, causing the ground to break and form a large inward dent before the whip magically bounced back into the air and targeted Winston with terrifying accuracy.
It was as if it were a living snake made of grass in the form of a whip, and Winston was its prey.
In response to this attack, Winston hurriedly threw a dagger, rolled to the side to avoid the whip, and threw another dagger by a fraction of a second behind the first one.
Noel’s attention was drawn towards the two approaching daggers and his focus was quickly split onto multiple different places at once. The daggers, the pebbles all around the circular arena, Winston himself, the magic he should cast, the weapons he wielded, and other variables that could affect the tides of the battle.
At this moment, Noel couldn’t help but marvel at Winston’s scary efficacy in one-to-one battles. He has mastered the act of controlling the minds of his enemies by creating so many distractions and points of interest.
Ignore one and you’ll get stabbed through the chest, ignore two and you’re dead. If he wasn’t careful, he would easily get overwhelmed by feints and attacks by having his attention placed elsewhere, leaving him at an unfortunate loss.
But if he had his attention placed on everything, then his mind would quickly exhaust itself a couple of minutes into the fight. If Noel were to also consider the natural stress and tension brought by life and death, then he could easily imagine just how quickly WInston’s opponent would get engulfed in this storm of glaring red lights.
Unfortunately for Winston, he was up against a seasoned archmage and was even considered one of the greatest mages to have ever lived in the history of Tyr.
With his highly trained intuition, he soon found a way to overcome the prominent issue of split attention.
A strong gust of wind swept through the arena, colliding against the two incoming daggers and sweeping up the various pebbles on the ground into the air and out of the boundaries of the confined ring.
Winston seemed surprised by how quickly his main advantage was taken away from him, but not to the point of losing all of his composure.
Instead, his smile brightened up as the scattered pebbles and daggers flying in the air suddenly disappeared and were recalled back to their respective places, the sheaths on his hip and his pockets.
“Huh, witty,” Winston praised while he pulled out a handful of pebbles from his pocket and grinned.
“Smart, but unrefined,” Noel advised as one barrier after another covered his body, encasing him in a literal shell of magic.
“Well fuck me!” Winston smirked and tossed the handful of pebbles up into the air like before, with his brown eyes glowing brightly with a hazy purple light. “It seems you’re more of a smartass than I first thought!”
As Noel tensed up and created another gust of wind to preemptively deal with the falling pebbles, he saw in his peripheral vision that Winston’s figure abruptly disappeared and next thing he knew, an extremely sharp blade had pierced through two layers of his defense in one single blow, with Winston staring at him with a chilling grin.
“You like my technique?” He asked as his figure once again abruptly disappeared and reappeared a few meters away from Noel.
Noel squinted his eyes as he glanced specifically at Winston’s feet with curious eyes.
“That was… raw mana control?” said Noel. This time, there was a trace of shock and utter surprise in his cold voice.
“Cool, right?” Winston laughed sheepishly as he tapped the tip of his foot against the ground. “If I was a thief, then I’d be a godly one with my speed and teleportation. After all, if you want to successfully steal something, then you’d have to steal it fast to the point they wouldn’t even notice it was stolen.”
“A unique analogy… But aptly created. To think you’d have the speed of an average Royal Knight with a body barely reaching the levels of a Knight,” murmured Noel as he rubbed his chin. “And physical training isn’t even your main focus, am I correct?”
“I’m a mage through and through!” Winston placed his hands on his waist and grinned cheekily. “After all, space magic is my jam, and speed is second.”
“Well, it seems like I’ll lose at this point with how fast you move,” declared Noel with a helpless tone. “That extremely minute traces of mana… At that point, even if you only have the mana capacity of a mage, your speed can make up for it! And betting on you losing control and messing up is relying too much on luck.”
“That’s right, that’s right!” Winston laughed loudly as if he already had the win in the bag. “I’ve nearly mastered that little movement technique of mine, so messing up my control would be way too improbable.”
“So you should just give up already!” declared Winston haughtily. “You already know I’ll win at this point, so fighting back is just a futile struggle.”
“Who told you that you’ll win?” Noel abruptly interjected, with his rainbow-colored eyes glowing brightly with iridescent light.
There seemed to have been a shift in his aura like an overwhelming mountain suddenly taking life and transforming… into a dragon. When their eyes met, a tremor ran down Winston’s spine, and goosebumps formed all over his body.
Winston once again appeared right in front of Noel, with his sword banging straight against another barrier, shattering it into broken fragments, while his calm and relaxed gaze turned frighteningly cold.
“What did you just do?” Winston asked, with his blade piercing through all the layers of Noel’s barriers and stopping just a few centimeters away from his forehead, but no matter what Winston did, it felt as if the tip of his blade was blocked by an incomparably thick wall.
“What did I do?” Noel asked rhetorically. “I got serious.”
As he said so, he smiled and muttered, with each word dropping heavier than a mountain.
“Your sword will break.”
And as if his words were the declaration of a god, his sword did indeed break.
With dumbfounded eyes, Winston watched as the hilt of his sword disconnected with the blade of the sword itself, which then fell to the ground with a loud clang.
“…” Winston stared, aghast by the turn of events. “Huh?”