“Can I make a request?”
The King looks at the cloaked man who had just asked the question. It was the first time he had spoken since entering the room, and just about everybody went silent. We all wanted to hear what the ever stoic man had to say.
“What is it?” The King asks.
“For the fights that either she or I,” he points to the archer, “participate in, I request that River be unable to watch them.”
“Why is that?”
“We both believe that the advantage of him not knowing our capabilities is one we can not give up.”
“That seems like it would be unfair considering you have already seen him participate in several fights.” The King points out. “You already have the advantage of having two people.”
I can’t see the cloaked man’s face, but I can practically feel the frown. He seems to accept the King’s response though, and instead of arguing further he simply returns to being his stoic self.
The next two fighters are announced, and it is a battle between Ram and the archer. The two of them both appear in the arena, and there is a short moment before either of them actually do anything. I take this moment to turn to the King and ask a question.
“Actually, if you could somehow make it so I can’t watch this fight that would be great. I think it would be a much better battle if I don’t know everything that my last two opponents can do.”
“Are you sure?” He asks, surprised. Actually, everyone in the room looks surprised. Nobody had been expecting me to so willingly give up a chance to improve my odds in the coming fight.
“I am sure. In exchange though do you have somewhere that I can warm up my mana control for the fight? I want to be as prepared as possible once the time does come.”
“I don’t really have anywhere to put you.” The King frowns. “I have some authority over the tournament, but not that much.”
“Could you not put him in his own fight?” The cloaked man asks, speaking up once more. We both look over to him, and he elaborates. “Anybody in the arena can’t see the other fights going on, right? Well in that case you could simply place River in a sparring match with somebody else until it is time for his next fight to take place.”
“That actually sounds like a pretty good idea.” The King admits. “I could even make it so nobody can see your practice. I can’t exclude a single spectator, but I can exclude them all. Though you would still need an opponent. I don’t know who would want to sit there and watch-”
“Me!” Blair shouts, skipping over. “I’ll watch!”
The King raises an eyebrow to me, and I nod. “Yeah that should be fine.” I say. “I am actually really curious to see how that innate skill of yours interacts with mine.”
“Does that mean I get to see what it does now that it’s fully upgraded?” She asks, getting even more excited.
“Well I’ll have no better chance to test it out than now.” I shrug. “At the very least, I’ll get a good idea of its limitations.”
“Then so it shall be.” The King says in overdramatic fashion. He waves his hand and both me and Blair are whisked away into our own little arena. This is the first time that I am in an arena while there is another fight actively going on, as all my previous battles had taken place when we were down to only having one fight at a time.
Massive gray walls boxed us in, and they extended up seemingly forever. The stone box is only about 100 meters wide and long. Is this what people were seeing in the earlier stages of the tournament? I am just glad I didn’t have to deal with this in an actual fight.
“Alright, show me the skill!” Blair demands. “It has to be great! What is it? Is it a massive mana bomb? Maybe a storm of magic or something?”
“You’ll see it when I try it out.” I say, cracking my knuckles. “It is going to wear me out quite a bit after I use it, so I am just going to do some normal control exercises first.”
I pull the dimensional anchor from my storage and stick it into the ground at the very center of the stone box. Nothing happens for a few seconds, and it takes a moment for me to realize why.
“Could you go over to the corner?” I ask, pointing to one of the corners of the box.
“Why?”
“Just do it please.”
She walks further away from the anchor, and as soon as she makes it past the 50 meter threshold it activates. I had forgotten about the fact that it wouldn’t work when anybody else was within its range. When I had used it during training with Talus he had used some weird trick with his mana to make a hologram of himself next to me. That didn’t count as him being there, so he had been able to be right there while I trained.
The space all around me stabilizes, and it feels like a weight is lifted off of my shoulders. My mana feels like it is practically falling into a separate dimension. I fully allow it to, and soon my mana is flying all around me in intricate patterns. None of it is visible to the naked eye thanks to it being in a higher dimension, but I’m sure Blair won’t mind too much that she can’t see it. She’s probably too enamored with the dimensional anchor.
I glance over at Blair and am a little creeped out to see that she is watching both. One eye is staring unwaveringly at the anchor, studying every bit of it. The other has what looks like a circle of magic spinning around in front of it as it darts all over the place.
“You alright over there?” I ask her.
“Better than alright.” She says, her voice finally a normal volume. Probably due to the fact that she was too distracted to be loud.
I finally realize what her eye is darting around to look at. Part of my mana flicks towards her, and I see her flinch back despite the fact that she shouldn’t have been able to see it.
“You can see all of this?” I ask her.
“Yeah, I figured out how to do it after learning you used a lot of dimension magic.”
Well, there goes my plans of being an undetectable ninja by placing my entire body into a higher dimension. I remember Talus mentioning that people could figure out ways to deal with me no matter what tricks I tried, and apparently this was her way of doing it. I wonder if she has some way to harm me if I did retreat to a higher dimension?
“So, you still want to see my big skill?” I ask her.
“In a bit, in a bit.” She says, her eyes still working independently of one another to absorb all the information possible. It was actually pretty creepy to see.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Alright, I’ll give it a bit before I actually activate it. That way you can finish... whatever this is.”
Well, I got some time to kill now. Talus had told me that one way to make mana control feel like second nature is to do it in the background while having your attention turned to something else. So, I decide to give that a shot. It wasn’t usually something I could do with a lot of ease, but with the stabilization of the dimensional anchor it shouldn’t be too bad to do.
I pull the “Tower of Legends” book from my aura and flip to the first page. I glance at Blair, and see the eye that was previously focused on the dimensional anchor now flicked back and forth between that and my book. After a moment it finally comes to rest back on the anchor. I let out a sigh of relief. I had half been expecting her to somehow sprout a third eye to study the book as well. If she had done that, I doubted I’d be able to focus at all.
My eyes skim over the pages of the book, but often I have to reread a page or two after drifting into the ever tricky mindset of “reading but not really comprehending”. It happened quite a bit thanks to needing to keep quite a bit of attention on the mana that was slowly knitting a blanket in my aura.
I had been expecting the book to give detailed explanations of each floor, but after I had finished the chapter about the second floor I came to realize that it gave way more information than I could have possibly hoped for it to.
As it turns out, speeding my way through the floors of the tower resulted in me missing quite a few secrets on the floors. For instance, on floor two there is a set circle about 20,000 kilometers where monsters would be about as strong as they were when I had first gone to the floor. This was where everybody would arrive when they went to the floor.
After leaving that massive circle of land, the levels of the goblins start steadily increasing. That explains why there were goblins that were such a high level during the goblin raid event. I’d been under the impression that the tower had simply summoned the goblins for the purpose of the event. Hell, we may have been tens of thousands of kilometers outside the main circle. The event wasn’t mentioned in the chapter, but I had a suspicion that there was another section somewhere in the book covering it.
The goblin patriarch was apparently the hidden boss for the floor. I don’t know if it is still there after killing it during the event, but either way I wasn’t going to go and find out.
The higher leveled goblins were far, far from the only thing I had missed on the lower floors though. In all fairness, traveling that kind of distance while being anything lower than level 50 would take forever, but there were instances of floor mechanics that I had completely missed while traversing them.
On floor 3, there was apparently a function that prevented anybody from dying during the trials. If you were killed during one of the ten trials it put you through, you would be kicked out for 24 hours before being allowed to reenter the floor. I hadn’t failed any of my trials, so I never discovered this feature.
It did make me think back to when I had sent the initial batch of trainees Ben had given me to floor 3. I’d told them to finish it within 24 hours if they wanted further training. I had assumed that the ones who’d failed had left the floor after either facing a trial or a fight that they couldn’t yet handle, but it was very possible that they had discovered this feature and been locked out for the remainder of their time limit.
By the time I feel our time here is running low, I had finished the chapters on the first five floors. There were a few things I wanted to check out after the tournament now that I’d read about them, though it was more likely I wouldn’t get around to them until after I reached my next evolution.
I stand up, and pull all of my mana back into my body. Not a trick I could normally do, but once more I could thank the dimensional anchor for doing the bulk of the hard work. I pluck the implement from the ground and store it away. The weight of dimensional instability once more presses down on me, but it only takes a few seconds to get used to again.
“Are you ready to see what I have in store for my last fight?” I ask Blair.
She hops up from where she had been sitting in the corner. “Absolutely!” She exclaims, storing away the various diagrams and sketches she had made on some paper. I hadn’t even noticed she’d been taking notes, but it makes sense. Higher stats gave us pretty good memory, but with the amount of information our heightened senses gave us some of it was sure to not make it into long term storage.
Once she is finished packing up, I place an arcane tag on her. Unlike all of the other tricks I’d used up to this point, she doesn’t seem to notice it. I take a deep breath and activate the skill granted to me by reaching the max level of my innate skill.
__________
We reappear in the observation room a short time after my skill had been activated. I blink a few times, adjusting to once more being somewhere other than a stone box. We had probably been in there for about 2 hours by the time I’d activated my skill, and the scenery had gotten dull quick.
I take a quick look at Blair, who for once is not her normal bundle of energy. She is currently slack jawed, staring off into space. I can’t blame her, as I’d had a similar reaction when learning about the last effect of my innate skill. She’d even gotten to experience it firsthand, as she had used her own innate skill to copy it.
“Welcome back.” The King nods. “You have good timing. There should only be one or two more fights before it is your time to shine.”
“Good to hear.” I say, glancing down at the arena. Flynn and Ram are down there fighting one another. “What’s up with this matchup? Aren’t they a few ranks apart?”
“They are.” The King confirms. “We went through the top ten again to solidify everybody's ranks and give everyone a good boost to their evaluation scores.”
He hands me the same paper he had when I first entered the room, and I see what he means. Everybody's evaluation scores were higher than when we’d started. Most had increased by around 2000, with those closer to the top of the leaderboard having gained upwards of 3000. In second place was the cloaked man, who currently had 28,860. That was 3190 points higher than when the tournament had began, and exactly 100 points lower than my starting score.
My score currently sat at 29,970.
“Damn, haven’t quite made it to 30,000.” I say.
“It is impressive you even made it so close while still having another fight left.” The King notes. “I only expected you to barely crest that mark, and here you are about to blow right past it. Even if you lose, your performance will likely be good enough to raise your score past that threshold.”
“Awesome.” I grin. “Maybe I’ll even make it past 31,000.”
“A long shot, but it may be possible.” The King says. “We will have to see.”
“So who is fighting after they are done?” I ask, looking back to the arena.
“Your next two opponents will be. I will be hiding the fight from all spectators though, as they would still prefer that you are unaware of what they are capable of.”
“Understood.”
The current fight ends, and soon the cloaked man and the archer are sent down into the arena. A massive gray wall appears all around the arena, and I lean back in my seat a bit. It seems I had still not yet fully escaped the mind numbing dullness of the featureless gray obstructions.
While the two of them fight, I take the time to read over the chapter about the first chain floors. Most of it is about the history of the kingdom and a bit of backstory about the world it is in, and about halfway through the chapter I just skip over it. I was looking for juicy secrets, not a history lesson on a kingdom that wouldn’t even be relevant after I left the tower.
The fight soon comes to an end, and the two of them are brought back to the observation room. Having a suspicion of how the fight went, I use identify on both of them and see exactly what I had been expecting.
Human (level 95)
Human (level 95)
“Looks like things just got a lot harder for me.” I say. “Not that you’ll hear me complaining about it.”
“Hopefully it is enough.” The cloaked man says.
“No time for anymore chat.” The King cuts in. “When you get down there, give me a moment to hype up the crowd for this. They’ve been sitting here for over a day now, and it is finally going to pay off for them.”
Before any of us can say anything else, I am once more in the arena. On the other side of it I can see the cloaked man and the archer standing there. The King’s voice fills the arena, the deep baritone to it shaking some of the loose particles of dirt on the ground.
“Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for the final battle of this tournament! On one side, we have a mage of great power, and on the other we have a duo that has trained endlessly to work as the best team we’ve yet to see!”
I look around at the stands, and see that some energy is finally entering the crowd. I even feel myself getting excited, more than I already was. It must be the effect of one of this King’s leadership skills.
“No matter the results of this battle,” The King continues. “Understand that what you are watching is the best humanity has to offer! For decades to come these will be the people you look up to in times of hardship and fear! Rejoice, as you will see for yourselves just how well protected you are!”
The weight of his words hit me hard, and they don’t even need to be affected by the skill that I’m sure backed them. People would be looking to me for protection in the future? I already felt a bit of responsibility to protect others with my strength, but hearing that it would be actively expected of me felt like a lot of pressure. If that pressure weighed down on my opponents, they didn’t show it.
The pressure is lifted off me a moment later as the calm of an impending fight settles on my mind. It was a calm that was triggered by two words that had come from the King.
“Fighters, begin!”