At the very beginning of the tutorial, I had been given a massive head start thanks to the fact that I had earned an S+ tier title. The 25 percent increase to my stats had been a great boon, and had allowed me to surpass others quite quickly.

As everybody had progressed through more and more floors, they upgraded their own titles and closed the gap that I had made. By now, everybody left in the tutorial had at minimum a B tier title, with many having an A tier one. At that level they were given a 15% boost to their stats, not too far off from what I got.

Thanks to the other titles and passive skills I had accumulated, my stats were still quite a bit higher than everyone else’s. That gap wasn’t as large as it used to be though, and the flaws in my strength had begun showing themselves throughout this entire tournament.

If I had to guess, almost every person in the top 10 participants could defeat me in hand to hand combat if we had the same stats. My martial prowess just wasn’t up to snuff compared to the best of the best. The only person I had confidence in winning such a bout against was Blair, and her class wasn’t even focused on combat.

That is why for this battle I decided that I could not rely on my ability to fight in close range. Soon I would have to learn to properly wield some weapon, but for now I would be falling back on what were by far my two greatest strengths. My overwhelming stat advantage, and the fact that my magical capabilities were completely unmatched.

I start the fight by immediately activating powerful presence. The space around me stabilizes slightly and mana bolts begin flying towards my two opponents. The archer responds in kind, sending a storm of arrows my way.

The cloaked man does something that I had not been expecting. When he had been fighting in the goblin raid event, he almost exclusively used simple weapons and spells. He had a sword that he’d picked up from some monster, and had an upgraded version of the mana bolt spell. I don’t know why he’d been hiding what he could do back then, but the point is that I didn’t really know what his strengths were.

As it turns out, he is a mage. Not just any mage, but an earth mage.

A pillar of stone erupts from the ground in front of him, shattering into hundreds of shards a second later. Each of the shards fly towards me, and with the sheer quantity of shards it is damn near impossible to dodge all of them. The ones that hit me scrape against my shield, taking a bit of mana with each impact.

I draw my aura in closer to my body, adding slightly to my defenses. Since neither of them were close enough to be affected by my aura, this was the best use of it for now.

More arrows are fired towards me, and I am knocked forward when a few of them strike me from behind. I glance over my shoulder and see that some of the arrows are bouncing off the ground or far wall and redirecting themselves back towards me.

I use my staff to knock a few of them away before deciding that it is too inefficient. I summon a wall of mana behind me to block most of the arrows, continuing to send my hail of mana bolts.

This pattern only continues for about 30 seconds. The two of them quickly realize that the odds are in my favor if this turns into a battle of attrition. My high capacity for mana storage, coupled with the mana in my aura, meant that they were burning their resources faster than I was.

The earth mage begins closing the distance between us, and I retreat closer to the wall behind me to get away. I only take a few steps before the ground beneath my feet shifts. I am now stuck up to the knees in the earth, and by the time I can free myself the man has already made it to me.

He slams his staff into the ground between us, and it gets embedded into the ground. The end of it glows a bright yellow, and I feel something about the ground under me change. It felt kind of similar to when the space around me stabilizes, except he had done something similar to the ground under us.

I instantly summon my cloak of flight, using it to hover about a meter off the ground. If the entire floor was a weapon he could use against me, then the last thing I wanted to do was to be standing on it.

Two pillars of stone rise under the man’s feet, and soon he is at the same height as me. Before I can go any higher his fist is flying towards me. It is a bit of a blur, but I can barely make out the fact that his hand looks jagged and rough, as if the skin itself was made of stone.

I summon a shield of mana in my offhand, using it to ward off the flurry of punches as the rest of my attention is dedicated to deflecting the still ongoing storm of arrows. My shield shatters after a few seconds, catching me by surprise as a fist slams into my gut.

I don’t try to push against the blow, instead letting it throw me away from the earth mage. If his staff worked similarly to my dimensional anchor, then it should only work within a certain radius. Getting out of that was my best bet for evening the odds again.

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Soon the ground beneath me felt normal again, but I didn’t dare to land on it again. The mage was already closing in again, and distance was my best friend right now.

Mana thrust activated at full throttle as I flew towards the archer. She doesn’t seem surprised, and readjusts her aim to be pointing almost straight up. The next several shots from her bow are fired towards the sky before I reach her. Several consecutive blasts of mana erupt from my staff, but not a single one manages to land. She had disappeared from where she stood before any of them had reached her.

I glance up at where she had fired the arrows, seeing that they had duplicated into many smaller arrows. In the middle of the cluster was the archer, already drawing the string of her bow again. I want to chase after her, but the mage is already on me again.

His fists have grown in size, and the air around them ripples as they fly towards me. I am too close to dodge the strikes, and so I store my staff away as I grab both of his hands with my own. Each of my gloves use up the charge of mana blast I had stored in them to cancel out the strikes, and just like that we are locked in a standstill.

I activate empower at its full 25%, and begin pushing the man back. That is at least confirmation of one thing. I was stronger than him. Thanks to my king killer title and empower, my body stat wasn’t too much lower than my mind stat. He must have had his focus set to strength, because even with the difference in our body stat he is only a bit weaker than myself.

I am forced to let go and retreat as the rain of arrows arrives. The mage doesn’t pursue me, instead backing up to avoid the hail of arrows as well. The archer lands gracefully a moment later, releasing a shot from her bow that had evidently been charged up during her fall.

It rockets towards me, and I am forced to throw up a thick barrier of mana to prevent it from skewering me. The barrier shatters on impact, but the arrow is disintegrated as well. I see the archer frown after seeing the powerful attack fail. She shouts out to the mage.

“Cover me!”

The mage nods and runs towards me. The archer begins firing more and more arrows into the air, and she activates some kind of rapid fire skill several times to increase the rate of fire.

I don’t know what exactly she is planning, but I have a feeling it is related to her innate skill. It might just be her preparing to use one of the effects of the skill, but if she needs to be protected during it she is probably preparing to use the active ability granted by completing the skill.

I try to maneuver around the mage with mana thrust, but walls of stone rise all around us. I am boxed in, and it feels eerily similar to the trick the titan had pulled off way back on floor 20. The walls start closing in slowly, and the mage is once more on me and battering me with blows.

I summon thick barriers of mana over my forearms, using them to block most of the attacks. The ones I fail to block send shocks through my mana barrier, and I can tell that if this goes on for much longer he would almost certainly break through it.

That chance never comes though.

“Now!”

I barely make out the muffled shout of the archer through the stone walls, but the mage had heard it loud and clear. Without warning, he jumps to the side and goes right through the wall of stone like it isn’t even there.

The remaining walls collapse in, trapping me in my own tomb of stone. I can’t see what is going on outside, but if the massive amount of mana I detect coming from directly in front of me is any indicator, it isn’t anything good.

“Alright, time for a little gamble.” I say to myself.

My aura tightens in a cylinder between me and the massive source of mana, which should hopefully slow down the impending attack a bit. My mana shield flares as it is infused with even more mana, and in particular the shield around my head is given even more mana.

In less than a second, the massive mana source fires towards me, and light once more fills the world around me as my tomb is turned into glorified Swiss cheese. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of small arrows pierce straight through the stone, and nearly all of them hit my mana shield head on.

The mana in my aura is nearly all gone in an instant. That one attack had drained damn near everything I had to block. My mana shield was very good at handling large quantities of weak attacks, but in exchange blocking so many attacks was also stupidly expensive.

My mana shield oscillates in brightness before stabilizing. That lapse is enough to tell my two opponents that my defenses were pretty damn close to failure. They both begin to lay on the pressure, but one quick glance at the archer tells me that she is running on fumes after using that skill.

It was pretty expected, as the amount of mana I had detected getting used in that skill was nearly as much as my total mana pool. She didn’t have the same kind of capacity as me, meaning that the skill probably used a massive amount of mana from her while adding to it through some unknown means.

I do my best to get some attacks in while the two of them break away the last bits of my mana shield, but eventually the inevitable comes to pass. With a sound like glass breaking, the mage’s fist smacks against my chest, sending me flying back as my defenses give out entirely.

I use mana thrust to reorient myself mid air, landing on my feet and sliding back several dozen meters.

Before either of the two can get another attack off, I finally pull out the trump card I had been saving for the entire tournament. It was becoming increasingly clear that my odds of winning without it were essentially zero, and the only thing I had been waiting for was my aura to run out of mana.

I feel the arcane tags I had placed at the beginning of the fight flare up, and the world begins to shift to a blue hue as the space all around us stabilizes. Powerful presence redoubles its efforts to assist the innate skill, though even with all of this it is still not as effective as my dimensional anchor.

A massive hemisphere of blue encases me and my two opponents as I let out a deep breath, the feeling of my aura expanding taking over. It is like taking off compression socks after a full day of wearing them.

I look to the two who are now trapped in here with me, smiling as dozens, then hundreds of spells appear in the air all across the enclosed space. I can’t help myself from getting at least one good quip in before my spells are released. I had spent several hours trying to think of what to say after using this skill for the first time in real combat. Call it corny or basic, I don’t care. It probably is both of those, but it just feels so good to say.

“We don’t have too much time in here, so let’s make this quick.” I say. A moment later, the mage and the archer are bombarded by hundreds of spells.