The whistle blew, and the match began.

Naba screamed as she lunged forward, her fists a blur as she unleashed a barrage of punches with lightning speed. Sheer quickness seemed to be her superpower; her reflexes were almost supernatural, and for every strike she landed, the next came even faster. It seemed to have some sort of stacking effect, like an attack combo in a video game.

But Ruie wasn’t shooting off the map yet. While he wasn’t as fast as Naba—he ate the brunt of her light, quick hits, unable to mount a counterattack—as soon as she tried to rear up for a heavy attack, one that would do enough damage to knock him from his defensive stance, he dodged immediately, sly as ever. Grinning like a devil.

It’s almost like he knows ahead of time when she’s going to change her strategy.

In fact, the more Akemi watched them spar, the more certain she was that he could somehow see the waitress’s attacks coming. Despite Naba’s attempts to change her approach every couple hits, alternating between jabs, hooks, and kicks, he’d always be ready to block whatever area of his body would next become vulnerable. He wasn’t fast enough to dodge the quick ones, but he clearly knew they were coming.

“Yo, pit fight aficionado,” Akemi said, nudging Bamo. When he didn’t hear it the first time, she shoved him hard on the shoulder, causing him to jump. He was as absorbed in the match as a child in front of Saturday cartoons, eyes wide, mouth open and drooling. “What kind of magic is Vokasha using? How does that whole Blind Seer thing work?”

At first, Bamo seemed agitated by the interruption, but he quickly recovered once he processed Akemi’s question. He obviously enjoyed talking about the subject.

"It’s a biologically inherited class," Bamo shouted back over the deafening roar of the crowd. Conversation felt like shouting into a hurricane. "The Vokashas are a long line of pit fighters, and they all have the same set of skills—"

A thunderous crash shook the arena as Naba collided with the unforgiving tension of the ring ropes, the sound reverberating like a cannon shot. Naba’s head hung slack to the side, her body splayed open across the ropes. A wet blue bruise was already forming beneath her lip.

“Damn it,” the waitress gurgled, grimacing.

Ruie approached her, cracking his knuckles. Akemi’s head whipped back around.

Huh? How did he break through her offense?

“You give up yet, you little street mongrel?” Ruie asked, towering above Naba, who was staggering back upward.

Naba teetered forward, raising trembling fists. She was practically foaming at the mouth.

“Don’t call me that,” she said, and spit on the ground by his shoes. Blood splattered at his feet.

He scowled. “Careful. Those are worth more than your entire bloodline.”

With a scream, she kicked him in his bad knee with all of her remaining stamina, an attack that was both quick and fierce; virtually undodgeable. But something strange happened as her foot approached his leg. In the same second, as if the two briefly shared a mind, he ducked to the ground and wrapped both his muscular arms around her leg, tugging upward.

Naba’s head hit the floor with a thud. And instead of letting go of her there, Ruie began to twirl around, dragging her body like a spinning top around the ring. She growled and screamed, trying to peel his hands off her with her own, but she couldn’t fight against his momentum.

“Let go of me, you fuck!” she screamed. He ignored her, grinning.

Akemi expected him to let go at any second—to finish her off by throwing her to the ropes—but he didn’t. Instead, he laughed; his head thrown back, he played with his food like a hyena. Naba began to get sick by the motion, her head lolling around her neck. The crowd roared like all hell, Naba’s fans threw their masks to the ground, cried and stomped and heckled the referee.

Akemi stared, and felt something build in her stomach.

She was all too familiar with the kind of person that barbed you with small needles—a push here, a condescending comment there—until you finally found yourself lying on the floor, a crumpled mess, no longer strong enough to fight back.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

She saw herself spinning around that stage, the harsh light bathing her.

It wasn’t empathy, she told herself as she began to cast the spell under her breath; it was selfishness. Ruie was her target. A body in exchange for experience points.

Influence Check (Easy – Target is Distracted)

Success! Target is under your influence.

Adrenaline pumped through her.

It worked.

He didn’t know it, but Ruie Vokasha was her plaything now. All she had to do was play this right. Play this as she had planned it.

“[Brain Drain].”

There was no point in casting it quietly, so she shouted it proudly alongside every other jeering fan in the stands. No one noticed or cared; the declaration blended in like a small pebble in an ocean of voices.

Influence Check (Easy – Target is Distracted)

Success! Target remains under your influence.

Brain Drain Applied!

Ruie twirled Naba around faster and faster, like a child with a plaything, mad with power. All the while, Akemi watched, a wolfish smile on her face, her chin cupped in her hands. He was puddy in her hands now. The more he prolonged his finisher, the easier this would be.

Prior to arriving, she had double checked all the notes the System could offer about Brain Drain. But, ultimately, it was a beautifully uncomplicated skill: for as long as her target was under her Influence, he would continue to steadily lose health points. And because he was currently distracted, all Influence checks were considerably easier.

A target with all his faculties intact was much harder to keep in your domain, but one that was spinning around a waitress like a dog with a tennis ball—not so much.

“God, this is hard to watch,” Bamo said, his claw covering his eyes as he turned to Akemi.

Akemi pushed his hand away from his eyes. “Come on, crybaby, don’t give up on our girl yet.”

As if on cue, Ruie’s spinning began to falter. At first, it looked like it might have been of his own volition, but upon closer inspection, the wide, animalistic grin on his face had faded into an uncomfortable frown. With a violent cough, he began to slow down, until he finally, angrily, tossed her aside, throwing her body to the ropes with an anticlimactic flourish.

“That’s quite enough of that,” he said coldly as she hit the floor, his chest heaving.

The crowd erupted in boos.

“Oh, shut up,” Ruie shouted back, wincing as he did so. He held his chest, hand over his heart. “Ref, do your job, won’t you?”

As soon as it was apparent that Naba wasn’t getting back up, the referee jumped to her side, and began a countdown from ten, holding up her limp hand.

Her fans quickly let her know that wasn’t an option.

“Come on, U’zaki!”

“Don’t let that shitbag get you down!”

“Yeah!” Bamo agreed heartily, his voice breaking before he finally cleared his throat. “Don’t let the worse Vokasha beat your ass, send him crawling back to daddy!”

Akemi raised both eyebrows at Bamo as she heard that little quip escape him. She didn’t know he was capable of stringing together those words, much less in that order. Apparently, neither was Bamo: his cheeks reddened, and he looked sheepishly down at the floor.

“The bat’s right.”

Naba’s voice was barely audible, a broken blood vessel of a sound, but it slapped the entire auditorium into silence. She whacked the referee’s hand away, and rose to her feet, swaying but still stable.

After all, Ruie’s finisher wasn’t the devastating blow it had been intended to be. Since he faltered before he could use that momentum to throw her, it had been more an exercise in dizziness than anything else.

Vokasha looked scandalized, and he turned his aggression toward the referee as Naba stalked slowly toward him. “This is unbelievable. She easily spent ten seconds on the floor, you just count with the speed of a snail. This match should be over.”

Naba gnashed her teeth together as she raised her fists, nearly on him.

“But it’s not over, is it?”

Ruie looked at her as one might regard a toddler challenging them to a fight.

“Oh, please. Don’t kill yourself trying to—”

Ruie cut himself short, his jaw going slack. The words died in his throat.

It looked as if he had just spotted a meteor throttling straight toward him.

“[All You Can Eat Assault]!”

As it turned out, Naba was that meteor.

Akemi didn’t know if it was one punch or ten thousand, but the deafening series of cracks emanating from Vokasha’s ribcage suggested somewhere toward the latter end. The skill had caused Naba’s fists to not be concentrated in one direction, but in hundreds at once, puncturing his body from every angle.

That explained the abrupt change in his demeanor; using Blind Seer, he had sensed the skill coming, but he was absolutely useless to stop it. Caught like a deer in the headlights.

When the dust cleared, Akemi saw him lying there, crumpled and bruised, his blindfold hanging off the side of the stage. She gasped as she saw what lay beneath it. There were no eyes. Just skin. His features stopped at his mouth and nose, and traveled up toward two eyebrows.

So this is a biologically inherited class type.

The referee took Ruie’s hand and raised it.

“Ten, nine, eight…”

The seconds ticked on. Eventually, two became one became zero, and the referee took in a humongous breath, his chest filling with air.

He blew his whistle.

“Naba U’zaki is the winner of the Bronze League Championship!”

The waitress cried out, ripping her mask off and throwing it into the audience. The crowd erupted, climbing out of their chairs and fighting each other like wild wolves for it. F and G—who, now without their masks, were revealed to her by the System to be Fred and Gary—began to sob. Bamo did a little happy dance in his chair.

All the while, Akemi stared at Vokasha’s body, noticing the subtle rise and fall of his chest, and the way it was coming slower and slower. No one but her seemed to notice when, a few seconds later, as the crowd chanted U’zaki’s name like a war call, his chest stilled completely.

*You have defeated a level 12 Blind Seer / Pit Fighter - 500xp gained*