During my preparations for this tournament, I had wanted to make sure that my defenses were as good as my offense. My titan skin armor was effective against physical attacks, but I wanted to have more of my bases covered than just that.
As soon as the tournament had been announced, I had commissioned Blair to make me two more sets of equipment. One set was to fight off piercing and slashing attacks, which the titan skin armor was not as great at dealing with as it was with blunt attacks. Another was purely to absorb the damage of magical attacks. I had lent her my robe to study so she could have a better idea how to make magic proof armor, and the final result had been quite nice.
For now, I equipped the armor I had prepared against slashing and piercing attacks. The black metal armor appeared on my body, having been pulled directly from my aura. My cloak of flight appeared over my shoulders, though I doubted I would use it this fight.
The man began running straight at me, closing the large gap between us quickly. I simply raised my staff to the sky, charging a cast of mana bolt. I used one charge in my staff to empower the spell, and after it reached full charge I let the large bolt of mana appear above my head.
I split the spell into 5 pieces, each of those splitting into five more. A very large chunk of my mana was used up doing this, but that didn’t matter to me much. Each of the now 25 bolts was empowered to be as strong as the original, draining even more of my mana.
The man slowed his run slightly, seeming wary of the attack. I still was not done though. In front of the mana bolts, arcane spikes appeared. Each one was ready to punch right through the metal armor that the man wore.
Now he seemed really worried as he used a skill of some kind to set up a barrier in front of him. Unfortunately, he made the mistake of not covering his sides. He was just barely within range of my aura, meaning that I could control my attacks however I wanted.
Each of the 50 attacks shot away from me at a different angle. It took a lot of concentration, but given that each of them was following a pretty simple arcing path, it wasn’t too difficult to manage.
The man seemed to realize what was happening as he set up two more barriers on each side of him. Once more, he made the mistake of not covering his rear. If he believed that those barriers could hold back my attacks, then he must have put quite a bit of energy into summoning them. Let’s see if he is willing to sacrifice the energy to make another one.
The first mana spike hits his heel from behind. He lets out a pained yelp before summoning another of the barriers behind him. It takes 10 total mana spikes to puncture the thing, a testament to the strength of that defensive spell. Too bad there were still 39 more spells coming to tear him apart.
His body is turned into glorified Swiss cheese as the many spells bombard him all at once. Still, once the dust settles and the spells stop coming, he remains standing. There were holes all over his armor where the many spells had pierced through, and there were nearly as many holes in him.
His skin started to take on a slightly redder shade as his wounds began to heal at a visible rate. The holes in his body closed and his muscles began to budge as energy seemed to fill him once more. He began running towards me again, this time moving far faster than he had before.
“A berserker type skill,” I note. “neat.”
I still wanted to avoid melee combat for the time being, so as he got closer I began hitting him with close range mana blasts. Each time I left a crater in his skin or knocked a chunk of skin off, the wound would heal within a few seconds. Meanwhile, his axe was swinging at great speed, and dodging it was getting harder and harder as he kept up the pressure.
One particularly powerful swing was aimed at cleaving me in two at the waist. Thankfully it had been extremely telegraphed, and I bent backwards at a very awkward angle to avoid the strike. The blade still grazed the part of my mana shield that covered my nose, but hopefully nobody noticed. It probably still looked pretty cool from the outside.
I launch my upper body back forward with mana thrust and deliver a flurry of mana blasts at the man. My staff comes around as the remaining two charges of the spell are used, and the berserker is forced to heal more and more wounds that would ordinarily be very fatal.
Eventually, he seems to run out of energy. He didn’t slow down over time as he got tired. No, a berserker would never be so graceful. Instead, the man seemed to lose every last bit of stamina in his body as he collapsed to the ground mid-swing of his axe. He looked nearly immobilized from the strain of using whatever powerful boosting skill that was, so I take a moment to charge up a powerful spell.
The mana blast is in my hand, being charged up to its maximum potential, but before it can be released the man looks up to me.
“I yield.” He manages to say, his head falling right back to the floor as soon as the words are past his lips.
We both reappear back in the King’s spectating booth. I take a moment to steady myself as suddenly my mana reserves are completely topped off again. It is a weird feeling going from having so much missing mana to suddenly being full again, despite how used to going the opposite direction I was.
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The other man looked just as revitalized as myself. You couldn’t even tell he had just been in a fight. The many wounds on his body were gone, his armor was completely fixed up, and he didn’t even have a look of fatigue on his face.
“You didn’t have to go all out with that attack from the very start.” The man huffs, sitting down in one of the seats. “You could have at least let the fight last longer than a minute.”
“Oh don’t worry, I didn’t go all out.” I say, smirking a bit. “That was just a combination of a few skills that happen to work very well together. Speaking of skills, whatever one you used at the end there was pretty damn powerful. In a close losing fight, that could probably eek out a win most of the time.”
“It usually does.” He says, seeming to calm down now. “I guess it just wasn’t as close of a fight as I’d really been expecting it to be.”
“Now,” The King butts in. “Would anybody else like to challenge River to a one on one fight before we get to the later stages of the tournament?”
There were no volunteers, which I was happy about. I didn’t want to have to jump into another fight right after that one. Against probably about half of the people here, I would have had a harder time concealing my capabilities while also still winning the fight by a comfortable margin.
The next many hours were spent chatting amongst ourselves while watching fights down in the arena. Me, Flynn and Fionna talked with each other while the others also formed their own little groups. The cloaked man and archer just stuck to themselves, while Ram didn’t speak a word to anybody.
The other four people present talked to each other without much care for the rest of us. Eventually, somebody I knew was finally put into the arena. I squinted my eyes as I spotted Hassan appearing in the distance. I was surprised to see him. I had thought he’d planned on leaving the tutorial in this most recent wave. Perhaps he had changed his mind? I’ll need to go and ask him about that later.
I infused my eyes with a bit of mana to try and see a bit better, which actually helped a bit more than I expected it to. Actually, my vision was getting better the longer I focused.
Identify (Common) has been upgraded to Keen Eye (Uncommon)
See basic information about any target. Focusing on a specific target will steadily increase the effectiveness of the skill and enhance your vision while paying attention to the target.
That was a very conveniently timed upgrade. Now I could watch Hassan’s fight much more clearly. At this distance, I had to wait a few seconds before I could get a response from the skill.
Human (Level 76)
Level 76, not too bad. I don’t actually know what his fighting style is. I’ve never seen him in combat. Above his head, I could see that he was ranked in the top 5,000 contenders. It had taken a long time for the fights to get to this point. Since the tournament had actually started, 18 hours had passed in total. The fights got more interesting as time passed, but in truth just about everybody was getting bored.
I watch as Hassan pulls a spear from some spatial storage device. Despite my enhanced vision, I can’t tell whether or not he is wearing a ring that could act as storage.
I watched for several minutes as he dueled against his opponent, who wielded a mace as their weapon. From the get-go, Hassan had the advantage due to being faster and having longer reach with his weapon. With each hit, he seemed to drain a bit of energy from his opponent. It reminded me of when he sucked the very life out of the assassin that had plagued his camp during the first few days of the tutorial.
Eventually, his opponent collapses to the ground, dead. Hassan had taken a few hits here and there, but he had been able to heal the damage done and prevent the damage from slowing him down.
A few more people I recognize begin entering the arena, and most of them win their fights. Hassan got pitted against somebody else, losing the fight unfortunately. Andrea managed to win a few fights in a row, eventually defeated by somebody with five levels over her.
It wasn’t long until the tournament reached the most interesting parts. The final 100 contestants were left. 24 hours had passed since the start of the tournament, and we were finally in the home stretch. Of the hundred people left, all of them were over level 80 and were quite talented when it came to combat. One of the people in the top hundred was Blair, who was the highest leveled person in the tournament that had not been placed in the top ten. She was level 94, though I knew that was thanks to her obsessive crafting and improvement of her skills.
The numbers were whittled down more and more until the inevitable finally happened. One of the people within the top ten had been dragged into the arena. The berserker from before appeared within the arena, looking ready to defend his title as one of the top ten strongest individuals within the tower.
The berserker stood on one side of the arena. I was about to start silently rooting for him, right up until I saw who was standing opposite of him on the other side of the arena.
There, about a kilometer away from the heavily armored man, stood Blair. He had a wicked grin on her face that even at this distance I could see. In her hands she held her signature anti material rifle. She had a pistol holstered at each hip, and slung over her back she had a rotating machine gun pointed straight at the ground.
The fight began quite dramatically, as a bullet fired from her rifle at great speed. The berserker held up his axe to block the shot, barely deflecting it. He began running towards the woman in order to close the distance, but just about everything that could go wrong for him went wrong as Blair smiled.
She flipped a lever at her waist, and as soon as she did the gun strapped to her back began firing. The recoil from the gun was way more controlled than should be naturally possible, and soon she was flying high in the sky, far out of reach of the poor berserker.
Her rifle charged up another shot, and the man was forced to throw up a defensive barrier in order to block the deadly attack. Then, something unexpected happened. I don’t know why exactly he didn’t pull this trick out against me, but maybe it was just because I hadn’t been flying with a machine gun jetpack.
He threw his axe with all his strength, and it spun through the air in a graceful arc as it traveled like a boomerang. It moved very fast, and seemed to be homing in on Blair’s position. She tried to dodge, but the axe managed to catch her. With a swift chop, the gun on her back was cut cleanly in half and stopped shooting. Blair plummeted to the ground, landing on her feet as she stored away her rifle and pulled the two revolvers from her hips.
Her voice echoes through the crowd, clearly projected to everybody through some magic in the arena.
“Looks like I can’t just cheese this fight. Guess it’s time to get serious about it.”