“Our boy looks pretty nervous,” Michael noted as he finished treating an F-ranker’s arm.

“Well, a lot is riding on this.”

“You think they’ll be able to go all the way?” Michael asked.

Eik didn’t answer right away and instead gave it honest consideration. “It’s… possible.”

“Mmm.” Michael nodded as he replenished his first aid bag from the supplies laid out on the table.

The referee called for Heath’s match to begin and his opponent immediately rushed in, water roiling excitedly in her palm. From the beginning, the Captain’s Tower had been raised high in front of Heath’s body, the experienced tank only just peeking out at the edge, his thick blade ready to snake out from behind the solid defense.

She slung a blade of shaped water at the shield but it didn’t so much as scratch the intimidating visage in the metal. Heath stood his ground while she kept charged. She threw another blade of water, this time directed at his feet, but he hopped it deftly.

The water manipulator paused just before entering melee range and slashed a length of gooey water across the edge of the shield which then flapped over Heath’s helmet, whipping his back with a snap.

He arched his back with a hiss of pain and suddenly exploded forward, surprising the woman as he bashed her forcefully on the shoulder. The pure momentum of the charge knocked her onto her ass where she tried to regain her balance and fling another blade of water at Heath.

With a grunt he bashed that away as well and hacked his blade into the meat of her shoulder, eliciting a scream as she gripped the bleeding wound.

Michael was instantly on his feet, jogging toward the downed woman. By the time he got there, Heath was already on his knees and putting pressure on the gash. She glared up at him with clear ire but the big man didn’t seem to notice.

Eik snorted with amusement. The tank was always so cluelessly helpful and caring. When Michael arrived, Heath hauled her onto her feet and supported her to a chair next to Eik where the healer could begin his treatment in earnest.

“Smooth win, man,” Eik praised.

“She really surprised me with that whip,” he noted with a respectful nod to her. “I was just lucky to be able to surprise you too,” he said with a grin.

“Screw you, dude!” she spat.

“Alright, alright, I suppose you get to say that to me,” he chuckled.

“When’s Sonja up?” Michael asked.

“Should be any minute now.”

“You guys all know each other or something?” the young water manipulator asked through clenched teeth while the healer scraped around in her injury.

“We’re a team, yeah, along with my sister.”

“You’re on the same team as one of the test organizers?” she questioned with a pointed glance at Eik. “This is grounds for a complaint! How can I be sure you weren’t given preferential treatment in your fight against me?”

“Listen,” Eik began. “I get what you’re saying and all, but if I was allowed to pick and choose the participants on a whim like that, I would have simple done that from the beginning and you would have never even been invited here to try out today,” he argued. “And if you don’t mind me being honest, then it looked to me like Heath simply beat you fair and square back there.”

“You like hearing yourself talk, huh?” she asked snarkily.

Eik snorted. “Yeah, you don’t say. You know, you should have gone for a poison-based fighting style with how venomous your mouth is.”

“That’s weak as hell, idiot!”

“Yeah, okay.” What the hell was up with this woman?

“There she is!” Heath said, his eyes glued to the E-rank fights, having lost interest in the conversation about six verbal exchanges ago. “She’s fighting another archer.”

The moment the beginning was called, the opposing archer sent three arrows flying side by side. Sonja had to leap into a roll to avoid it.

“What the hell? That looked insane! Sonja should practice that,” Heath exclaimed.

“Multi Shot is just an Archery trait, dumb ass,” the woman said.

“Damn, it looks cool,” he said, barely noticing her scathing tone, which in turn seemed to make her even more annoyed.

To dodge another arrow, Sonja used Disengage which carried her up next to the opponent, an arrow already nocked and ready on the string. She released and the woman could barely react as the projectile bored through her thigh like a drill and sent her to a knee.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

The opponent tried to recover but didn’t manage to do anything in time to avoid Sonja’s quick blade slashing into her other thigh.

Expressionless, Sonja caressed the downed archer’s throat with the cool, bloodied metal of her weapon. The woman conceded immediately.

“Well done!” Heath praised when she joined them. “But why didn’t you use your boosted arrow?”

“That’s a little too dangerous, don’t you think?” she said.

Her brother just shrugged. “We live in a dangerous world now. It’s full of dangerous people and dangerous monsters, neither of which will hesitate to take lives. We might as well get used to it early and spare ourselves some grief down the road.”

“Damn,” Eik said after a moment’s pause. “Dude, that’s kind of callous. You’re starting to sound a bit like Atla.”

“I don’t sound like freaking Atla, man!” Heath half shouted, turning a couple of heads. “She’s crazy! I’m just saying that if our mindset is stuck in Old Earth then we’re going to get our asses handed to us by civilizations and monsters that are willing to do whatever.”

Eik held up his hands placatingly. "I was just kidding. I doubt I have any right to speak on that with some of the things I have done."

“I didn’t need it so using it would have been excessive,” Sonja reiterated.

“Yeah, sure, that’s true,” Heath conceded, still moping a bit.

“Who’s Atla?” the rude water manipulator asked.

Eik gave her a look. “Little evil alien lady. Pink hair. Always smiles but is actually a predator disguised like a wad of half-chewed bubblegum.”

“That explanation didn’t make any sense,” she said.

“Yeah, well, maybe if you had been a little nicer I would have tried a little harder.”

The woman snorted and looked back to the fights.

They watched for another five minutes’ time before Heath was called back to fight his second match. His opponent this time was already twirling his twin blades confidently around his fingers by the time Heath stepped into the arena.

The young man said something to Heath with a taunting smirk but the tank barely seemed to care. He just lifted the Captain’s Tower and took a low stance with his weight shifted forward onto one leg.

Clearly a speed focused fighter, the twin blade wielder shot forward like a bullet. Without even attempting to go at Heath head on, the young man whirling to the side like a running back dodging a linebacker and lunging at Heath’s seemingly unprotected flank.

But where the attacker had needed a large, energy inefficient move to flank the tank like that, Heath simply had to spin on his front leg and keep his shield lifted in front.

The twin blade wielder was certainly faster than Heath, but at E-rank it was not really by much, and their reaction speeds were similar, so the minimal movements required to defend made it more than possible for the tank to keep up.

And with Heath’s defensive style, he excelled at fighting duels like this. Large scale defense seemed more suited for a barrier caster like Goran Gehun, the vice leader of the 6th squad of the 11th division of the Department of Internal Conduct.

After a few minutes and several small cuts sustained by Heath, the twin blade wielder was growing visibly exhausted flitting around. It was clear that his fighting style really needed a team to support his flanking maneuvers, or at least an opponent with a ineffective defense.

Having had enough, Heath surprised the rogue by stepping out to meet a lunge head on and bashing his blade hand away. He followed it up by slamming the corner of the shield into the opponents face four times in quick succession and sending the man down for the count.

Just that single skirmish with the assassins in the Crucible practical alone had probably given their team more realistic experience fighting other Awakened than almost anybody here in Forest could boast.

“I thought we couldn’t afford to be stuck in an Old Earth mindset anymore,” Michael said when the tank came back.

“Shut it. He was just too easy, that’s all.”

Sonja lost her second match. The opponent was an earth manipulator. The opening exchange was almost identical to her first fight. The opponent hurled two volleys of condensed earth which Sonja avoided with Disengage and closed the distance, and arrow nocked on the string of her bow.

But where the archer from her first match hadn’t been able to ready her own projectile in time to counter, the earth manipulator simply sent three more heavy chunks at her, one impacting her arrow midair, while the other two took her in the shoulder and the stomach respectively.

She was actually not as crestfallen about it as Eik had expected her to be. She almost seemed a little relieved to have dropped out.

“That sucks,” Eik said when she came back.

She just shrugged it off. “It’s no big deal. My skill set isn’t very suited to duels, after all.”

None of them commented further and just let her sit in silence as Heath was called out for his third match.

He beat his third opponent somewhat easily and got a clear rush of adrenaline that carried him into the fourth match. Going hard with a bull rush from the get go, he appeared to have the upper hand for while as he defended and attacked with skilled smoothness.

But the enemy, a mobile fire manipulator with a small buckler strapped to his forearm, gradually began to grasp Heath’s aggressive rhythm. Avoiding a lunge from Heath, he delivered a painful burn to the tank’s neck and cheek.

That rattled Heath, and he accidentally opened himself up to several more such burns which all drained his energy and hindered his movements.

Eventually the referee stepped in to stop the fight and Heath’s loss in the the fourth match was declared.

And unlike Sonja, he didn’t take it particularly well.

“You can try again next time, mate,” Eik said in an attempt to console him.

“Next time?” Heath said, looking up from his feet. “When’s the next time?”

“Oh, uhm, I— I don’t know,” Eik admitted sheepishly. “Later?”

“Great…” Heath said, head lulling down to hang between his knees against.

The D-rank group slowly began to gather near Eik as the E-rank preliminaries approached a conclusion. Eik’s fellow test conductors began to appear. They were two C-rankers who Eik hadn’t met before. One had declined to participate for a reason Eik didn’t know and the other couldn’t go to the Championships because of obligations here in Forest.

“Alright, gather around, please,” Eik said to the D-rankers. He gestured to the two C-rankers. “We’re going to be taking turns fighting you guys, so you just fight as hard as you can to beat us.”

Mushroom Head pushed his way through the crowd again in the exact same way he’d done before. Was this was deja vu was? “And what if we kill you?” he smirked. Damn.

“You won’t,” Eik said, smiling back as he shook a vial of Potion of Mighty Strength class 2, drawing eyes.

“What’s that?” a woman piped up.

“Potion of Strength,” Eik said. “These little guys alone can bring me to near C-rank levels of power.”

“You’re doping yourself, you damn coward?” Mushroom Head exclaimed in disbelief. “How the hell is that fair?”

“I’m not a competitor, dude…” Eik said tiredly, massaging the bridge of his nose. “And could you maybe cool it a bit? I know we have a pretty bad past, but this isn’t making anything better.”

“Shut it, traitor!”

“Right… Shall we get to it then, people?”