I tapped my foot impatiently as I waited for the tournament to begin. After the system had announced the event several days ago, I had been very excited for it. I could finally have an excuse to measure myself against others in the tower. Obviously I always had the metric of levels and highest floor traveled to, but now I could really put those numbers to the test.
The past five days had been a back and forth between me grinding for levels and practicing to upgrade one of my skills. In these 7 days, I had managed to get all the way to level 96. Two of those levels had been gained not from fighting, but upgrading a skill that I often used yet rarely thought about.
Powerful Presence (Epic)
Slowly drains energy from the user when in use. While Powerful Presence is active, it increases the passive pressure outputted by their aura, reducing the cost of all spells cast within.
This skill had been one of the ways I slowed my pretty absurd drain of mana. I wouldn’t have known how I could upgrade it if I hadn’t gotten my hands on the dimensional anchor I had gotten from the goblin revolt event.
Powerful Presence (Special)
Slowly drains energy from the user when in use. While Powerful Presence is active, it increases the passive pressure outputted by their aura, reducing the cost of all spells cast within. Provides an additional minor reduction to the cost of dimensional magic within the user’s aura.
Through a lot of practice, blood, sweat, and maybe some not so constructive criticism from Talus, I had learned to slightly stabilize the space within my aura in a manner similar to the dimensional anchor. It was still not even remotely close to fully replicating what it could do, but every bit counted. It also helped lower the cost of the new trump card I’d acquired. That was something I’d be saving for much later though.
After what felt like forever of waiting, the notification letting me know that the event had started arrived. At almost the exact same time, I was teleported from my spot outside the arena directly into the stands. The arena was quite a bit larger than last time I had seen it, probably spatially expanded to accommodate the much higher levels that people now had. The stands were filled with spectators and participants, and after taking a quick look around I read the system notification.
System Event: Humanity’s Greatest
Welcome to the tournament!
All participants have been assigned an evaluation score based various factors, including pioneer title tier, level, and many more. You will not battle against any participants with a total evaluation not within a 25% margin of your own.
Evaluation score may fluctuate throughout the tournament depending on performance. Ending with a higher score than you began with will result in a reward at the conclusion of the tournament.
As the tournament progresses, higher scored individuals will begin fighting, and less fights will take place at a time. The event will conclude with a final fight between the two with the highest evaluation score.
Another notification arrived after I finished reading that one.
Calculating Evaluation Score...
Evaluation Score: 28,960
Evaluation Rank: #1
That seemed like a pretty damn high score. It had to be, since it was apparently the highest one anybody had gotten. For a brief moment I wondered if my rank or score would be shown, but that was answered for me quite promptly when thousands of numbers suddenly began appearing above the heads of every single person present. It showed the rank of each person, and suddenly I felt a lot more eyes on me than I was comfortable with.
I did my best to ignore them as I looked around at the arena proper. My previous assessment of the place being large had been a slight understatement. The place was absolutely titanic.
I remember a few times in university where my friends would drag me away from studying to go to a game of whatever spot happened to be in season at the moment. I remember being fascinated by the fact that nearly 80,000 people could fit in one of the stadiums they had brought me to. My brain had a hard time processing so many people being in one space.
This colosseum dwarfed that place dozens of times over.
From the outside, it was no bigger than your typical football stadium. The system had to have done some work behind the scenes, because even with spatial expansion, there was just no way that making a space that could fit everybody was within the capabilities of the Kingdom.
Now I was beginning to wonder how many people were actually here. I started looking around for the lowest rank I could find when I spotted one man with a rank in the seven digits. I checked his level as well, and figured he was probably pretty close to the bottom of the barrel.
Human (Level 27)
Rank: #2,194,512
Well, I think it is fair to assume he will be getting the boot after this is all done. My guess is he had a high tier title at the start of the tutorial, but only now saw an opportunity to leave early. He’ll probably throw his fight when it is his turn to-
Oh, and there he goes.
The man disappears from the crowd, and I spot him reappear in the arena proper. Walls of mana shine briefly, dividing the massive floorspace into hundreds of smaller arenas. They turn transparent a moment later so as not to hinder anybody's view, though I get the sense that the fighters within can still tell they are there. I wonder if they can see the crowd?
The man that I had seen disappear bows down and almost immediately surrenders his fight. As soon as he surrenders, both him and his opponent are sent back to the stands. The man’s rank drops by a few thousand instantly, and while I have no idea where his opponent went, I suspect he didn’t move very far up in the ranking given how easy of a victory that had just been.
I was about to settle in for a comfortable few hours of watching fights when I feel somebody tap my shoulder. I turn around to see a man in full metal armor, notably not having a rank above his head.
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“Sir, please come with me. The King would like to speak with you.”
I stand up and follow the man, having no qualms about getting to go speak with the King. After pushing our way through the crowd for a while, we reach a raised portion of the spectators area that is closed off from the rest by massive walls. A gate opens and allows us in, and soon I am seated next to the King.
“Hello again.” I say, looking at the imposing man. He may be a lower level than me now, but he is still very tall and broad. Actually, now that I can feel his aura... “Did you get stronger?” I ask him, using identify. Much like the last time I had tried to use it on him, it does not work.
Human (Level Unknown)
“Indeed I did.” The King chuckles. “The system gave me a little boost to still be as intimidating as I was the first time everybody met me. It is quite nice, even if it is temporary.”
“How big of a ‘little boost’ are we talking about?”
“Oh, just a small one. Level 125 if you want to be exact about it.”
“You are very bad at humble bragging.”
“I wasn’t being humble. Anyways, I called you here to talk to you about how this tournament will be going once it gets to a point where you will be fighting.”
“That sounds like I am getting a bit of an unfair advantage don’t you think?”
“You can look at it that way if you want, but depending on how this discussion goes that very minor advantage could turn into quite the disadvantage, if you want it to of course.”
My interest is now piqued, and my attention turns from the lackluster fights in the arena to fully be on the King. “Disadvantage? So it’s sabotage?”
“In a sense.” The King laughs. “First, before we get to that. I’d like to know that you have been treating my old staff with the love and affection she needs? I hope at the very least you’ve had some good fights with her, right?”
“Plenty. You should have seen me fighting the goblin patriarch from the last system event. It was a close enough fight that a weaker weapon could have very well been the deciding factor.”
“I’m glad to hear that. Now, back to the matter at hand.” The King summons a piece of paper into his hand. “As the system designated ‘organizer’ of this event, I have quite a few strings I can pull on to change how this event goes. I can set up fights, see everybody's evaluation scores, and a few other things I probably shouldn’t yet disclose. Speaking of things I probably shouldn’t disclose, take a look at this.”
He hands me the paper, and I take a look at it. Before I can even glance over it, parts of the paper are blacked out by some mysterious force. I’d felt no magic behind the action, the text was simply censored without warning.
“Guess the system didn’t want you seeing everything there.” The King shrugs. “Tell me what you can see though.”
I look over the paper, and it doesn’t take too long to realize what I am looking at. It is a list of the ten highest ranked individuals in this tournament. My score of 28,960 is at the very top of the list, followed by the next several scores. As soon as I look at it, one question immediately comes to mind.
“Don’t the rest of these seem awfully low for the top ten?” I ask the King.
“Maybe from your perspective. Every single person on that list has quite a bit of talent, and has been working hard since day one of the tutorial. They represent the best of the best when it comes to the nearly eight billion that entered the tower just 60 days ago.”
“I understand that much, but still.”
I couldn’t see who second place belonged to. What I could see though was their evaluation score. The evaluation score of the second strongest person in the tower sat at a cozy 25,670. Exactly 3,290 points below my own. The lowest score on the list that I was looking at was 24,880. For the difference between second and ninth place to be around four times smaller than the gap between second and first just seemed pretty damn insane.
“You can probably tell simply by looking at these numbers, but you almost certainly have a free win for this tournament.” The King says.
“I wouldn’t call it a free win.”
“Maybe not free, but a near certain win. That is why I wanted to propose a new challenge for you once your time comes to fight.”
“And what do you propose?”
“I say we switch up the format a little bit towards the end. You will not fight until the very end of the tournament, when there are very few people remaining. What fights you do take on will be against two opponents at the same time.”
“That almost seems like it is tipping the scales against me way too much.”
“It is, I can’t deny that. You are level 96 now though, so that does mean your first innate skill is completed, correct?”
“It is.” I say. The skill had received its final upgrade upon reaching level 95. I had gone and asked Talus about it after reaching level 90, and he had informed me the final upgrade didn’t come until shortly before evolution.
“That already gives you a pretty large edge in any fight. I don’t know exactly what the upgrade was, but I am guessing it is some kind of get out of jail free card? Something to escape death? Most’s first innate skill has something like that.”
“Actually, it’s not.”
“Really? What is it then?”
I grin, looking back to the fights in the arena. “I guess you’ll just have to find out once I use it. I’m up for trying out this plan of yours. At least tell me the rewards for managing to do it will be great.”
“Better than great. If you manage to win the tournament through purely two on one fights, your evaluation score will likely climb over 30,000. The rewards for that would be extremely good.”
“I sure hope so. If I am going to be risking a ‘free’ tournament win as you call it, then the rewards better match the potential loss.”
“Don’t even worry about that. The levels alone for winning those fights would likely make the whole thing worth it. Now, I shall call the others on that list into this room.”
The King motions to one of the guards in the room, and they leave. After about ten minutes of waiting, every single person in the top ten were present in the room. It took a bit for everyone to arrive since there was a crowd of roughly 200 million people to push through.
More chairs had been brought in so everybody could sit, but nobody yet dared too. Even if there was no open hostility, having so many strong people in one room would always lead to some tension in the air.
I knew five of the people present. Flynn and Fionna were two of them. The Archer and the Cloaked man from the previous system event were two more. The last was somebody I had not been expecting to see in the top ten. Ram, the sneaky rogue from the great city. I’d only encountered him one time before, but I some of the conversations I’d had with Flynn made me understand that he was quite strong in his own right.
The second and third ranks belonged to the cloaked man and the archer respectively, while ranks 4, 6, and 7 belonged to Ram, Fionna, and Flynn in that order. The rest of the people in the room I did not know, though a few faces I did recognize from the previous system event.
“For the sake of transparency I’ll tell you all what I already told River here.” The King says. A stack of papers appears in his hand, which he hands off to one of the guards to pass around. “I’ll make this short, but whenever any one of you is fighting against River, you will be doing so in pairs.”
There was a moment of silence in the room as everybody looked at the paper they’d been given. I could see a few looks of shock from some of the people I didn’t recognize, looks of mild surprise from those I did, and looks of annoyance from Ram and the archer. I assumed the cloaked man was also annoyed, but given that I couldn’t see his face it was hard to tell.
“How is that fair at all?” One man asks. Glancing over his head let me know he was rank 10. “Two on one doesn’t seem like a fair fight. I mean, two of us would add up to over 50,000 score.”
“Do not underestimate him.” The King shakes his head. “In a one on one fight, he could beat any one of you present. He wouldn’t even need to push himself to his limits to do so.”
Gonna be honest, I had not been expecting the King to suddenly become my hype man, but I was not complaining. Sure, he was kind of making some of the other people present pissed off at me, but what he was saying was probably the truth anyways. Nobody else in the room was higher than level 94, with the man who had spoken up being the lowest level at level 90. In a one on one fight, I doubted I would even need to use most of my passive skills against him.
“Bullshit. He may be strong, but we are strong too. I bet we could at least push him to go all out, if even for just a brief moment.”
“Be my guest to try.” The King shrugs. “Say the word, and I’ll gladly put you in the arena with him. It’d give the crowd a good show and get them excited for what is to come later on.”
“Alright, let’s do it.”
Everybody in the room is surprised at that. Even the King hadn’t expected the man to actually go for it. He just shrugs again. “Suit yourself. Once the fights that are still going on come to an end, I’ll put you two in there for an intermission match.”
While we waited for the fights to end and for the arena to clear out, I debated just how much of what I could do I should show off. Would it be wise to show everything I was capable of? Probably not. I’ll stick to simply using spells for this fight. I’ll avoid melee combat, as that looks to be what this man is built for. He has a large axe strapped over his back and thick metal armor wrapped all around his body.
When the time came for the match between me and the man, the entire arena dimmed slightly as the King’s voice boomed throughout the entire colosseum.
“We will now have an intermission match between two of the top ranked fighters in this tournament. This will give you all a chance to rest and enjoy a good show.”
The other man disappears, arriving in the arena a moment later. Before I get teleported, the King looks to me and speaks, not bothering to hide his words from everybody else present.
“Go ahead and make an example of him for me. I’m not fond of those with egos as inflated as his.”
I don’t get a chance to respond before I am suddenly in the arena. We have the entire place to ourselves, a massive battlefield to accommodate our high levels. The man looks at me with pure confidence and smugness. He probably knows he is going to lose, but his goal is simply to prove I am not as untouchable as the King was hyping me up to be.
Well, you can’t have a good show without a little drama. If he really wanted to see me putting some effort in, he was certainly about to see it.
Time to make an example of this prick.