Eventually, his turn came, and he suddenly found himself standing in the middle of an arena segment, facing off against a titan of a man. Easily twelve feet tall, he had six arms, each of which clutched a weapon. Sam could tell that most of his stat points had gone into Strength just by looking at him.
“I will kill you,” the man declared, each word sounding like the product of a bellows.
“I will not deny you then,” Sam replied. “If you want to die, let us fight to the death.”
The border of the arena flared with red light. Sam simply stood there, waiting for his enemy to make the first move. The fighter leered down at him and began to smash his weapons together, imbuing them with Dao energy. Sam continued to stand there, his eyes lidded with the surety that no matter what happened here, he would win. He already had the measure of his opponent, ever since seeing his Dao in action.
With a roar, the brute lumbered forwards. Each step shook the earth, but they came incredibly slowly.
“Damn, you must have completely neglected Dexterity,” Sam observed. “Have you even crossed the first threshold?”
“I will mash your bones into paste!” The other man said, showing the strange state of mind that propelled beings such as him, despite nominally having a superhuman level of intelligence. If there was nothing there in the first place, increases would do little.
“Neither of us have bones,” Sam replied drily. “More importantly, how are you this slow? We’re having an entire conversation in the time it takes you to reach me.”
By that point, the egregiously slow fighter had reached Sam. Despite all his bluster, Sam likely had less Strength than his opponent. Though, none of that mattered if he could avoid every hit.He waited until the last moment and then took a step back. The lumbering brute before him tried to turn, but in comparison to Sam’s immense Dexterity, he was like a tortoise trying to catch a cheetah.
Sam stepped under a follow up strike and grabbed the man’s leftmost arm. As expected, he was weaker than him, but not by much. With a grunt, he pivoted, using his leverage to send the fighter flying up and over his shoulder. Then he raised his hammer, gathering elemental energy and Dao energy to it. Using his mana here would be overkill.
His opponent tried to strike, but it was far too slow. Sam’s hammer descended like the fist of a god, slamming into the brute’s head. There was a small detonation as the energy was absorbed by the man’s body, blasting a crater into the ground. The sand turned to glass, clinking beneath his weapon as it came to a stop. Sam stepped back, and found himself sitting next to the Overlord once more.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“That was quick,” his companion observed, his fingers steepled before him. “Normally you take more time with your enemies.”
“Normally, I’m fighting people at a higher level than myself,” Sam replied, frowning at the slight dig at his battle capabilities. “That guy was far weaker. Perhaps you should see how you do.”
“I will soon enough.”
Sam shook his head at the Overlord’s antics. He knew that it was some form of Dao cultivation for the man. Sometimes, it was quite annoying. Sam noted to embark upon the more interpersonal Daos with care as he proceeded on his journey. They were powerful, but they brought their own problems.
It was the Overlord’s turn soon enough, and he flickered down to the ground, matched up against a mage. The woman was one of those present at the crystalline pillar during his attempt, and her face was filled with terror. For once, she did not challenge her opponent to the death.
The Overlord quickly took her out with a simple punch that broke through a triple layer of condensed mana. Sam was able to see how the System dealt with those fights that did not end in death. Just before the fist touched her, she was teleported back to the stands.
The Overlord appeared beside him, a look of disappointment on his face. Whatever he had been looking for, that had not satisfied him.
“You know, a loss of stamina is natural as we age,” Sam said, getting his own back on the man. “Don’t feel bad about it.”
All he received in response was a baleful stare.
The tournament continued on, but to Sam, it was more like an opportunity for him to show off than an actual challenge. There were fighters that would have been able to stand against him for a bit, but the concentration of them was so low that in the five battles he had participated in during the span of an hour, none of them had lasted more than a few seconds. More annoyingly, all of them had refused to surrender, forcing him to kill them. It was an expression of the attitudes of the larger Multiverse, a place where life meant little and power meant everything. If someone was willing to kill for a chance at a few more points in a tournament, then what would they do if real power was on the line?
The Overlord had cultivated a steady stream of power from his easy victories, but it had not improved his mood one bit. Although his Dao drew power from others, it also drew some power from himself. Without a challenge, the victories he had so easily gained meant increasingly less.
At this point, there were about a tenth of the number of competitors still in the match. Most of the losers had died, but a few had surrendered three times, and were out of the event. Sam wondered what the death toll would be after the end of this floor. There were still four more events like this.
It was a way of separating out the chaff, but it was akin to using a sledgehammer to crack open a walnut. As with everything in the System, it was unnecessarily brutal and wasteful of life. Then again, in the grand scheme of things, the people here were less than specks of dust. The only way for an E Ranker to mean anything was if they had the potential for far more, like Sam. It was a grim state of affairs, made far grimmer by Sam’s life experiences on Earth. He had thought that his planet was a hive of violence before, covered over by an all too thin veneer of diplomacy, but compared to the Multiverse, Old Earth was like Eden.
Sam sat there, knowing that he had contributed just as much as most here to that meatgrinder of butchery. However, when it was kill or be killed, there was no other choice.