Free Web NovelChapter 64: Chapter 64: The Tournament 2
With the magic circle appearing before Kael, he had a grin on his face. "Let’s get started," he said, stepping through the shimmering arc of runes and feeling the familiar pull of spatial transfer. The light faded, and he found himself standing in a room that was too clean to be real. Walls, floor, ceiling—all stark white, featureless, like the inside of a tooth. At the far end, a single door stood ajar, leaking a faint, sterile glow.
Kael looked around, rolling his shoulders. The air was thin here, mana-dense in a way that made his skin prickle. No windows. No spectators. "I guess we are in his domain," Kael thought, eyes narrowing. The simulations always had tells, and this one reeked of someone trying to make an impression. "This was a bit predictable," he continued aloud, though there was no one to hear him yet. He walked toward the next room.
The door slid open with a soft hiss. Beyond it stood his opponent: a first-year student with a lance strapped to his back and a sword already drawn, standing in a loose, confident stance. The boy had a grin on his face.
"Ah haha, today must be my lucky day if you’re my opponent," the student opposite him said with a grin, drawing his sword. "You’re the only student that didn’t participate in the entrance exam, and at the bottom of the entire first years," the boy stated. "I’m Frank, first year, Class C. Rank 406.this is going to be fun." The boy said with a grin.
Kael stared at him, confused.Kael’s fingers flexed on the hilt of his blade. "What’s with the generic speech, Frank," Kael asked as he drew his blade, slowly approaching Frank. The steel whispered as it cleared the sheath. This battle isn’t meant to take any time at all; it’s an easy battle for Kael, but he felt like testing something out. He’d been grinding under Stella’s regimen for a week now, weights and gravity chewing through his stamina, and he wanted to see if any of it had stuck. He stared at Frank. "Alright, Frank, let’s be frank, you aren’t winning this match," Kael said with a teasing grin.
A vein spurt on Frank’s forehead. The smirk cracked. "Are you joking with me? What do you mean by that?," Frank said, dashing towards Kael, slashing his blade at him. His footwork was clean, his swing committed, but it telegraphed from the shoulder. Kael could see the path of the blade a half-second before it moved.
Kael’s mind shifted gears. He’d been experimenting all week with a fused movement technique—something born from Flash Step but warped by the conditions Stella had forced on him. Flash Step was fast, linear, a burst of mana through the legs to cross distance. But under 5x gravity and 400kg of weight bands, raw speed was useless. He’d started playing with the timing instead, using a micro-disruption of his mana output to create a false afterimage, then slipping through the gap in his opponent’s perception. In-game, using Leon, it’d been a glitchy but devastating combo tool. In reality, it was stamina-hungry, prone to failure if his concentration slipped, and his system never registered copied moves—only those he truly learned through repetition and failure.
He vanished from his position, reappearing a few meters behind Frank. It wasn’t teleportation. To an observer, it would look like he’d blurred through the space between steps, his body folding into the blind spot of Frank’s swing. The drain hit his thighs immediately, a cold burn spreading through the muscles. "I guess I pulled it off", Kael muttered hearing the system’s chime[New Skill Learnt: Vanishing Step].He couldn’t perform it because of the weights and gravity he had been under the past two weeks. But now under normal gravity the technique clicked into place.
Kael paused, turning to Frank. Fundamentally, Vanishing Step is a glitched movement technique—an exploit of perception and mana timing that top assassins had already learned. It relied on the brain’s inability to track a target that moved faster than its saccadic eye movements, aided by a burst of mana that distorted light around the user’s silhouette. It would not be surprising if Aurelia Voss already had it in her bag of techniques, but that aside, Kael vanished again as his blade clashed against Frank’s own. The sound was sharp, steel ringing off steel, and Frank staggered back a step, eyes wide.
"Come on, Frank, you can do better than that, this is your chance to prove yourself. Defeat the weakest in your set, like you said," Kael said, irritating Frank, who rushed at Kael, pulling a variety of sword skills in combo that looked a bit slow from Kael’s point of view. The combinations were a textbook three-hit chain, a feint, then a lunge. Solid for a student who hadn’t seen real combat. But Kael had spent the last week fighting Rank 20s under conditions that would’ve crushed Frank’s knees. He even felt like yawning. He avoided Frank’s attacks, walking backward, each Vanishing Step costing him a breath but letting him stay just out of reach. The white room made it easy to track Frank’s shadow, and Kael used that, slipping sideways whenever the blade came close.
Frank paused when he heard Kael yawn, he jumped back. His chest was heaving. "Do you think that this is a joke, take this fight serious," Frank said furiously. His knuckles were white on the hilt. "You participated in the Ogre test? No," Kael asked, tilting his head. He wasn’t mocking. He was genuinely curious. fгeewebnovёl.com
Frank frowned. "Are you trying to remind me of when I blacked out because for your information it caught me off-guard. I’ll definitely win if I fought the ogre again," Frank replied. There was a tremor in his voice now.
A sudden realization to Kael, "I see," Kael replied, like a puzzle in his head has finally been fixed. The pieces clicked: Frank hadn’t been in the observation hall the day Kael fought the Ogre. He did not see Kael take it down. But it was general knowledge that Kael listed at the bottom of the class roster, a Rank 1000 student who hadn’t done the entrance exam and bought his way into the academy. "So you were knocked out when I battled it," Kael stated, holding his chin in a thoughtful posture.
"What exactly do you mean by that, why would I want to watch an Ogre beat you up," Frank replied, quite annoyed. He shifted his grip, trying to regain his stance.
Kael had a grin on his face as his eyes glowed, he circulated his mana around his body. The domain’s white light seemed to bend slightly around him. He wasn’t going all out—he didn’t need to—but he wanted Frank to feel the gap. "Come on now, I definitely going to remind you of that day.No show you what happened that day," Kael said.
Vanishing from his position, he appeared beside Frank. The movement was smoother now, less drain, the mana flow refined by repetition. Frank’s eyes tracked him too late—he was barely able to follow Kael. Kael kicked him by the side, the impact carrying the full weight of his adapted strength under 5x gravity conditioning. Even without the weights, his muscles remembered the load. The kick connected with a sickening thud, ribs compressing, and sent Frank flying to the opposite room. He hit the wall and slid down, gasping. Kael then pointed his blade at Frank. "Frank, we’re going to do a little experiment," Kael said. His voice was calm, almost clinical.
Frank could barely talk, every time he opened his mouth, blood poured out. His entire ribcage, left side of his ribcage was shattered from the impact of Kael’s kick, only disbelief remained in his mind before he heard the rest of Kael’s statement. "I heard that no one has actually died in the academy tournament before, we’ll be testing that theory today using you, but no hard feelings if you actually die," Kael said. The words weren’t a threat so much as a hypothesis. Kael wanted to know where the domain’s safety net actually was.
Vanishing from his spot, Frank’s eye dilated from both fear and shock as he saw Kael quickly approaching him, before his memory seemed to recall snippets of conversations that happened in his class. "Do you know that dude in Class 1D?"a student asked."The student at the bottom of the rankings," another replied. "I heard that it took him 2 strikes to take down the Ogre and that’s because he missed the first time." Another said, "Yeah there’s also something about him being in the bottom of the class only because he didn’t participate in the entrance exam." Another said, "What if that’s the only reason he’s in the bottom rank, he literally copied Zion’s move by looking at it." Another said, while Frank just flushed out the conversations not bothering to listen to it. freёwebnovel.com
But now looking at Kael, now this monster approaching him with obvious murderous intent, he just gave up on life, as Kael blade cut through his skin. The blade didn’t go deep—the domain flared white an instant before it would’ve pierced the heart. Frank’s body dissolved into light particles, teleported out. Kael clicked his tongue, angrily, "I guess he survived, got teleported out before my blade reached his heart, what an annoying domain," Kael muttered. The safety protocol was tighter than he’d hoped. "Onto the next opponent," Kael said, leaving the room.
