Chapter 58
I was sleepless for the most of night, tossing and turning as I worried whether I would be able to get through the first round the following day. Had I trained enough? Shored up my weaknesses and enhanced my strengths? Or had I spent the two weeks leading up to the Counties doing completely useless activities?
All that would be answered in less than an hour, more if I somehow managed to hold out for that long. What am I thinking, the competition hasn’t begun yet and I’m already not sure of my chances in the first round?
I got out of bed at around 0400hrs, when I could no longer take just lying there doing nothing other than reminiscing about my time in The Grand Competition. The morning routine felt heavy and bothersome as I slowly pushed through it, sometimes not even going through whole exercises. I knew that I couldn’t afford to slack on it, but the willpower to push myself to do it wasn’t there either. The good thing that came out of it was the fact that I spent more than an hour at it.
The cold shower that followed was a sharp wake up call, cursing whoever forgot to figure out how to install hot shower heads. I was of a mind to go straight to the library and spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how to warm the water from the shower.
Even from old earth, in the days before hot showers were invented, or even showers for that matter, the wealthy and affluent would have maids and servants that hauled buckets of hot water to their bathing tubs just to enjoy the refreshing feeling of taking a bath with warm water. I found it hard to swallow that in a world that civilization had existed for more than fifteen thousand years, no one had been tempted by the allure of hot water and tried to use Mana to achieve some kind of an approximation of a hot shower.
From the shower, I went for my clothes, and armor. With how uncertain I was with my chances, I decided to go all in, holding nothing back. I slowly donned the new set of clothes that Xan had purchased for me for the first time. I was surprised how they fit me so well considering I hadn’t even tried them on while we were purchasing them. Did they self-adjust to fit my frame? How could clothes with such qualities be cheap, relatively, while armor with even a little bit of Mana enhancement was exorbitant?
On top of my clothes, I wore the torsoplate and the vambraces. I kept my fingerless gloves tied to my waist, I hadn’t forgotten what it had been like during the first fight in the Baronies. I would wait till the last minute before I wore them.
But when I picked up my staff, something felt off. Like I was naked somehow, with my hand on the staff feeling a little bit off. It was the first time I was not wearing the gloves while intending to go outside. With that strange feeling, it made me realize that I had picked one of the old staffs. I slowly returned it, before picking the last remaining virgin staff. I tested it a few times to check for sturdiness and cracks too, just because I had been taking care of the staffs didn’t mean that cracks wouldn’t appear.
After deeming it fight worthy, I slowly went through the process of imbuing it with Mana for attenuation. It would cost me a few precious points in Mana that I might not be able to recover fully before the competition began, but working with a Mana attuned staff would be better. I hadn’t yet managed to use an attuned staff, but I was sure it would be better than the staff not being attuned.
I went for my breakfast as I slowly got myself used to the staff in my bare hands. The Mana inside the staff kept calling to me, as if asking for something, maybe a little bit more Mana to keep it going, or maybe it wanted back into my body.
My breakfast was a rushed affair of chapattis and meat stew. The variety of my meals was wanting, but in my defense, I didn’t have the time to experiment as much as I would have wanted. I always came to the restaurant too tired to think about anything other than just getting something into my belly, anything really.
“Wait up!”
I turned back to make sure I had heard right, and yes, it was Xan, rushing towards me with his array of colors. I hadn’t even walked for ten steps out of the Competitors’ Inn, had he being waiting for me?
“I knew you would be up early,” he said as he caught up with me. “How have you been?”
“Hmm…” was the only reply I could manage. I had yet to speak a single word ever since I woke up, even ordering for food had been done with gestures and nods. I guess that was one of the other reasons I wasn’t trying different foods. They required me to talk too much.
“How are you feeling about today?” he asked as we walked towards the Jibane Arena.
I cleared my throat as I tried to prepare myself to speak, but he was already on another question before I could manage to form a coherent sentence.
“Are you well prepared? Eaten enough for breakfast to last you through a whole fight?” he asked as he punched me lightly to my arm.
“Hmm…” I replied, giving up altogether on coming up with a proper response. And what was he doing eating away at my Health before the fights even began, did he want me to lose or what?
“Hmm… Level 36, another two Levels in a week. If you keep it up, you might break Level 40 before the Counties are over,” he said as he studied me over.
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That, I couldn’t let go without a proper response. “You know I can’t keep up the kind of training I’ve doing so far.”
“But you will still be fighting, if you maintain a modicum of a training regime, it will be like you are training more than you have been for the last two weeks,” Xan countered as we finally approached the entrance to the arena.
Now that we were finally there, it occurred to me just how early we had come. Surprisingly, there were a considerable number of people already heading inside.
“It’s like two hours away from the official start of the opening ceremony, aren’t these people a little too early?” I asked as I turned to Xan. “And you too for that matter.”
“It takes a lot of time to let all the people in. If we all came at the last minute, the ceremony would be over before all people where let inside,” Xan said.
We had finally arrived at the gates, taking our place at the end of the queue. As a competitor, I could have easily waltzed in, but I suspected that Xan would appreciate spending a few more minutes with me. And I didn’t want the people around to realize that I was actually a competitor.
“Besides, this is what it means to be a fan. Getting here at unsightly hours just to get the perfect spot to watch the fights from,” Xan added as the line slowly crept forward.
“Don’t they have anything else to do? Like provide for their families and such,” I asked, lowering my voice a little in fear that our neighbors might overhear me.
“For cities that host the low levels of The Grand Competition, it is usually a month or two and life goes back to normal,” Xan answered. “And it isn’t even the whole month, the Baronies only lasted for a week, and the Counties will only run for two weeks. There is plenty of time to do other things. Besides, people don’t watch all the fights from morning to evening, at least not everyone.”
“What about in cities that host all the levels? The competition lasts for the whole year, every year.”
“Didn’t you hear what I just said? There are breaks in between the levels, for the Duchies, the break will be more than a month. That’s enough time to amass a little capital to allow someone to watch the fights anyway they want. Besides, no one gets forced to watch the fights, if one can’t afford it, then they don’t.”
The conversation carried on as the line took us closer and closer to the arena guards. Soon enough, we made it through and Xan headed for the entrance to the terraces, leaving me with a good luck. I, on the other hand, slowly made my way to the waiting room. Unlike the Main Arena back in Sjuma, Jibane only had the one waiting room, and so did the other arenas in Choska.
I was surprised to find a smattering of individuals inside the waiting room, all of whom I assumed were competitors. And now that I was actually paying attention to them, I realized that there were a few individuals of the other species present. I quickly averted my gaze from them, heading for a somewhat empty bench as far as I could tell. From what little I had seen, there were definitely a few elves and anima among the competitors. I hadn’t seen anything that could hint at another species being present, but I couldn’t be sure.
It felt awkward sitting there all alone. It wasn’t that I wanted to engage with any of them, but they were being all chatty-chatty with each other, and I was feeling a little bit left out. And I hated that feeling. I was loath to admit, but I wasn’t as I was before my death. There was a part of me that craved interaction with others, but at least it wasn’t overwhelming as I had heard other people say. If I had turned into a complete extrovert, I might have killed myself just to get away from it.
“Why do you look like you are planning someone’s murder?” Artina asked, drawing me away from my suicidal thoughts. Another thing that had changed about me, I couldn’t keep my emotions from showing on my face.
“It’s not me, is it?” Sunshine asked, taking a seat beside me.
Looking up, I realized that the whole group had arrived. Had they even had breakfast? Why had I not seen them in the dining area? It hadn’t been that long since I arrived, had it?
“Why would I want to kill you? Have you done something that I should know?” I asked her. “It doesn’t matter though; it wouldn’t be worth it.”
“Why would killing me not be worth it?” Sunshine asked.
“I… do you want to get killed?” I decided to ask instead, after losing any sensible answer I could give her.
“No, but I want you to acknowledge that I would be a worthy kill,” she argued back.
“It’s too early in the morning for this kind of conversation,” Mutex complained as she took a seat besides Sunshine, wrapping one of her hands on her shoulders.
“Is there any time to be having it?” Akos asked, keeping to his standing position.
“No, but…” Mutex trailed off.
Artina piped up then, “We are about to maul each other to death, there is no need to talk about it too. Hey, do you know…”
And the conversation trialed off in that direction as we waited for the opening ceremony to start. The waiting room slowly filled with the other competitors with the noise level slowly increasing as the number increased. By the time the first names were called, a mild headache had already set in. If I was having issues staying in a room of around hundred people, how would I fair if one of the other levels had thousands of participants clumped up together in a single room? I might go crazy then, die of people overload.
The ceremony proceeded as it had for the Baronies, the competitors were introduced, the crystal did its thing in creating the Counties’ ladder of destiny. There were four seeds compared to the two for the baronies, and I somehow landed smack-dab in the center of the ladder again. My first potential fight with a seed would be in the quarter finals. There would be a total of seven fights from the first round to the finals.
We were divided into four groups again, with each group with a seed and having their fights up to the quarterfinals in their own arena. I had not gotten any of the others in the group in the same arena as me, but I had somehow landed in the runt of the litter arena, the Ithima, the one near the training facility I had used that one time. The farthest from the Inn. As for the others, Sunshine got Chulu to herself, while Artina got Jibane to herself. Akos and Mutex would meet each other in the second round if they made past the first in the Alani Arena. If I made it to the semifinals, that was where I would meet Artina, again. For the others, it would be the finals, the same as the last competitor from Sjuma.
Unlike the Baronies, the fights in the Counties would have a day of rest between them, with the finals to be held exactly on the fourteenth day from the start of the competition.
Then there was what had brought me to The Grand Competition in the first place, prizes. Participating in the first round earned you fifty-gold, seventy for making it to the second round, the third round earned one hundred-gold, the fourth one-thirty-five golds, and one-seventy-five golds for making it to the quarterfinals. The fourth place earned three-hundred golds, five-hundred for third place, a thousand for second place, and fifteen hundred for the top finisher.
I was salivating all the way to the Ithima Arena, thinking about the amount of gold I would pocket just for making it to the finals.