As soon as the signal for the fight was given, he rushed towards me. I could see how he used multiple abilities to boost himself and the weapon he was wielding. I answered in kind, but I focused on defense for a moment.
His attacks were decently heavy and I constantly needed to move and adjust my shield to keep his attacks from sneaking through. Whatever ability he used allowed him to bend his spear, but it wasn't too dangerous of an ability thanks to my big shield and proper angles which didn't allow him to sneak past my defense.
After our second clash, I still hadn’t tried to attack a single time. He changed his tactic and this time it seemed his goal was to destroy my shield. Now every time he attacked, a strong explosion rippled out every time he hit.
But it wasn’t even scratching my shield as I was using my abilities to strengthen it quite a lot. He tried this approach one more engagement but he couldn't continue for long. Whatever he was doing was using a lot of his energy and I didn’t think he could continue fighting for long.
He was extremely frustrated and the second he opened his mouth to start insulting me or express his displeasure, I charged in. That caught him by surprise. My sword had barely started to cut into his neck before he was simply gone, only leaving a few drops of blood behind on my sword.
I was pronounced the winner and asked if I wanted to retire or continue. I had barely used any of my energy reserves so I gave an affirmative and just waited for my next fight.
It didn't take long until a female fighter was brought near me. I listened to the pre-fight explanations once again. She was wielding a long sword and was in medium armor. She looked like she knew what she was doing and as soon as the battle began I needed to defend against a flurry of blows that didn’t seem to have an end to them.
While she did have abilities to boost her weapon and armor, they weren’t her main abilities. She seemed to have many different kinds of multi-attack abilities which made it feel like I was fighting multiple opponents at the same time.
She was also quite fast, but her strikes were quite weak. She had to travel a lot more then me as I just had to circle in one spot to keep her from attacking anything else but my shield. I felt like her attacks were building something that was similar to my kinetic absorption.
So I decided to do some more active defending. Instead of allowing the full strike to hit my shield, I stepped into it to mitigate a lot of the strike's damage potential. This interrupted her flow quite a lot so I kept doing it.
It took only about a minute for her to make a mistake and extend herself too much. The shield blow that I made unbalanced her even more than she already was. For the first time in this fight, I attacked with my blade and I aimed a thrust straight at her neck.
She had two options: let herself be teleported out and lose the fight or let herself fall to the ground. She chose to fall to the ground but I didn’t even give her a single moment to think as I lifted my tower shield and prepared to bring it down with all my strength into her midsection.
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When I was about to hit, she screamed surrender but even for me, it was too late to stop the hit and she was teleported out when I suspected I was about to rupture some of her organs. I was proclaimed victor and then indicated that I wanted another fight.
Once again I waited while I thought over the fight. I didn’t much enjoy it. She hit too lightly to cause me real troubles and whatever she was building up was taking too long. But she might have potential if she gets some abilities that allow her to hit stronger.
The next fight I was against a young man who was quite small and was wielding two nasty looking daggers. My opponent was already grinning like he had won the fight and when the signal was given, I found out why he thought that. One moment he was in front of me and the next he was gone.
I moved as fast as I could, turning myself around while striking at the empty air behind myself at an appropriate height so I would hit his head. When I was about halfway turned around, my opponent appeared behind me but a little more to the right than I expected. That just meant my strike hit faster than I expected.
My opponent wanted to bury both of his daggers into my back but he was fast enough to figure out what had happened and even try to dodge but he was simply too late. He was teleported out and I got to enjoy the dumbfounded look on the referee's face.
It took him a few moments to recover before he declared me a winner and asked me if I wanted to continue. I gave an affirmative and went back to standing in my waiting area. The referee approached me and asked, "How did you know that he was going to be behind you?" I smiled at that. "I just guessed." I laughed harder from the expression he made from my answer but he seemed to be quite impressed by that but he didn't continue to talk with me and walked further away.
I am guessing referee shouldn’t be too cordial with the people they are judging and I didn't mind as I also wanted to think about what just happened. It honestly was a complete guess on my part. He just looked too young and probably hadn’t fought someone with as much experience as me. Then he would have probably known that his best choice would have been to attack from the front. Almost everyone close to my experience would have expected him to jump and try to attack from the back.
If I were the one to teleport, I would probably go to the side and try to be as low as possible but that wouldn't work in my size. Still, I think the side without the shield would be the best and then just try to overpower my opponent's weapon with my reach and strength.
This time it took a bit longer until another fight was announced. This time it was an average-looking man that was wielding a short sword and wearing leather armor. I immediately didn’t like his attitude but it wasn't like the previous fighter. I felt that he could back up that confidence.
I readied myself for a proper fight and from the first strike against my shield, I knew that this was going to be a lot more difficult than the previous ones. His short sword was able to deliver extremely powerful blows but he wasn't able to do them constantly.
Like that he still wouldn't get past my defenses but I actually started to angle my shield so his strike wouldn't be able to deliver so much damage. He was also quite fast and I also needed to defend with my sword. I was in fact so busy defending that I hadn’t had an opportunity to attack.
Of course, I could have boosted up my energy usage and overwhelmed him but I was not here just to win the fight but also to learn. Our fighting continued and while he did make a few minor mistakes they only gave me a few moments of time to ready myself for the continuous attack I knew that was coming.
Whoever he was he was experienced and had held back quite a lot of his cards so when another strike hit my shield I wasn’t expecting it to be so much stronger. This caused me to be off balance for only a moment but he once again showed that he was keeping his real aces for a perfect moment.
Suddenly I was surrounded by three of him, all attacking vulnerable places. He expected me to not know which one was real, but my eyes could easily tell. I also did something he wasn't expecting. I abandoned all defense and made it look like I was attacking one of his clones. I boosted my sword up enough that I knew that this strike should end the fight.
The next moment, I let the strikes hit me but I wasn’t surprised when every one of them had weight to them. Whatever ability he was using, the strikes would be real, but my armor was strong enough that none of them were a threat to me as I was strengthening my armor by quite a lot.
His face of surprise was amusing. He tried to get away almost immediately but it was already too late as my power strike crashed through his defensive ability and made him disappear. When the fight finished and I was declared the winner, it was hard to keep myself from smiling.