The matches continued in steady succession after that, each one processed quickly and efficiently by the tournament officials. Some ended in seconds like Jade's had, quick eliminations where the skill gap was too wide to bridge. Others stretched into longer battles that had the crowd roaring with excitement as fighters pushed each other to their limits. A few ended in surrenders when one fighter recognized they were hopelessly outmatched and chose dignity over pointless suffering.
Jade watched them all, his eyes cataloging techniques and capabilities while noting strengths and weaknesses. These were the top thousand fighters in the tournament—every single one of them exceptional in their own right—and the variety of combat styles and abilities on display was genuinely impressive even to someone with his experience.
When the twenty-third match was called, the entire arena seemed to hold its breath in collective anticipation.
PARTICIPANT 847 VS PARTICIPANT 45,293
Darius Kane stood from his position in the top-ranked section, and the movement alone drew every eye in the arena like a magnet. He was exactly as imposing as Jade remembered from the earlier rounds. His golden armor gleaming under the lights, massive warhammer resting across his shoulders like it weighed nothing, and a presence that felt like a force of nature barely contained in human form. The air around him seemed heavier somehow, charged with the kind of power that made even confident fighters unconsciously take a step back.
His opponent was a thin man with nervous eyes who looked like he was already regretting whatever karma had led to this matchup. When Darius stepped onto the stage, the platform itself seemed to groan under the weight of his aura, and the thin man's face went from nervous to openly terrified in the space of a heartbeat.
The referee called the start, and Darius didn't explode forward with blinding speed or leap into immediate action. He didn't even need to, and everyone watching understood that immediately. He simply started walking toward his opponent with deliberate, unhurried steps that spoke of absolute confidence, his warhammer held casually in one hand. Each footfall was heavy enough to send small vibrations through the crystalline platform, and his opponent's face cycled through several shades of pale as those footsteps continued their inexorable approach.
The thin man threw everything he had in a desperate attempt to stop that advance—razor-sharp blades of compressed air that whistled through the space between them, each one sharp enough to cut through steel and fast enough that dodging should have been nearly impossible. They hit Darius's golden armor with sharp *crack* sounds and shattered like glass against stone, not even leaving scratches on the gleaming surface. The man's eyes went impossibly wide with horror as he realized his best attacks weren't even slowing his opponent down, so he immediately pivoted to a different strategy—creating distance and launching larger, more powerful attacks that tore chunks out of the stage floor.
But, it didn't matter at all.
Darius walked through it all like he was taking a casual stroll through a park on a pleasant afternoon, his expression calm and almost serene, completely unbothered by the chaos happening around him. When he finally got within striking range—close enough that his opponent could probably smell the ozone coming off his armor—he raised his warhammer with both hands in a smooth, practiced motion and brought it down in a devastating overhead arc that seemed to compress the air itself.
BOOM
The sound was like thunder contained in a single point of impact, so loud that several spectators in the lower sections actually flinched. The warhammer connected with the stage floor, and the entire platform cracked, deep fissures spreading out in a massive spiderweb pattern from the point of impact. Chunks of crystalline material the size of fists were thrown into the air by the shockwave. His opponent had dodged at the absolute last possible second with a desperate leap sideways and the force of it sent him tumbling backward with a cry of shock that was half terror and half disbelief.
The thin man scrambled to his feet on shaking legs, looked at the crater Darius had just created with a single strike, looked at Darius raising his warhammer for another attack with that same calm expression, and made the only intelligent decision available to someone in his position.
"I SURRENDER!" he screamed, hands shooting up so fast he nearly hit himself in the face. "I surrender! I'm done! Please!"
The match was called immediately, and the man practically fled from the stage while Darius shouldered his warhammer and walked back to the exit with the same unhurried calm he'd shown throughout the entire match.
The whole thing had lasted maybe forty-five seconds, and thirty of those had just been Darius walking forward while his opponent panicked.
The crowd went absolutely insane, cheering, screaming, chanting his name in a rhythmic wave that shook the arena.
Darius stepped through the barrier back into the contestant area, and his eyes swept across the seating sections. Then his gaze found Jade, his eyes brimming with anticipation and what looked like genuine battle intent. He stared for a long moment, a small smile curving his lips, and then he inclined his head in a brief nod before turning and walking back to his seat.
Jade felt his lips twitch with faint amusement beneath the hood.
These battle maniacs.
Still, the rank 1 fighter had real power behind that eagerness, so at least the eventual match would be interesting enough.
.....
.....
More matches followed in quick succession—some fast, some extended, all of them showcasing incredible skill.
Then match forty-seven was called.
PARTICIPANT 3,427 VS PARTICIPANT 2,109
Cassia Mordren rose from her seat with a perfect bearing, her posture and her expression focused in a way that suggested she'd already analyzed seventeen different ways this fight could go and prepared counters for all of them.
Her opponent was a broad-shouldered man with enhancement abilities who looked extremely confident in his chances, probably because his physical stats were impressive enough to intimidate most fighters.
That confidence lasted approximately two minutes before reality set in.
Cassia's gravity manipulation was devastatingly effective. She didn't crush her opponent with overwhelming force or try to flatten him against the stage. Instead, she controlled the battlefield itself, making the stage her weapon and her opponent's enemy. Every time he tried to advance, gravity intensified beneath his feet and turned simple movement into exhausting effort that burned through his stamina. Every time he tried to retreat, gravity behind him pushed forward and forced him into terrible positions where he had no good options. Every time he tried to attack, gravity shifted mid-strike and threw off his aim so completely that his fists hit nothing but air.
The man fought hard—Jade had to give him credit for that—but after seven minutes of being systematically dismantled, he finally surrendered with visible frustration etched across his features.
Cassia accepted the victory with a brief nod and walked off the stage like she'd just completed routine training, no celebration or posturing or acknowledgment of the crowd's cheers.
....
The matches continued rolling forward in steady rhythm, each one adding to the growing pile of eliminated fighters and advancing victors. Each contestant fighting with everything they had, well, until match seventy three was called.
PARTICIPANT 27,384 VS PARTICIPANT 12,847
Rivan shot to his feet like someone had set him on fire, his face cycling through about fifteen different emotions in three seconds—excitement, terror, determination, panic, resolve, and back to terror again in rapid succession. Orion grabbed his shoulder and said something quiet, and Rivan nodded jerkily before making his way toward the stage entrance on legs that looked distinctly unsteady.
His opponent was a woman with cold eyes and twin daggers strapped to her thighs who moved with the kind of fluid grace that marked her as a stealth specialist. An assassin type, based on her equipment and the way she carried herself.
The referee called the start, and what followed was quite possibly the most absurd combination of genuine skill and impossible luck anyone had ever witnessed.
Rivan immediately activated his ability, a kind of magnetic or force field surrounded his body, glowing faintly as strength flooded through his muscles and his movements sharpened with increased speed.
He launched forward with a punch with enough power to crack mithril if it connected properly, and his technique was more than decent for someone his age. The problem was the assassin woman vanished the moment he committed to the attack, using some kind of stealth technique that bent light around her form.
Jade's eyes saw through the illusion easily, tracking her as she repositioned behind Rivan for what should have been a killing strike, but Rivan was already spinning around with another enhanced punch, clearly trying to find his invisible opponent through movement and instinct. It wasn't a bad strategy, actually—keep moving, keep attacking, deny her easy openings.
She reappeared directly behind him mid-spin with both daggers aimed at pressure points. Just when her blades were about to connect, Rivan sneezed violently, and the sudden jerky movement made him duck forward at the exact moment the daggers would have struck his neck and spine. The woman's weapons cut through empty air while Rivan stumbled forward several steps, completely oblivious to how close he'd just come to elimination, before recovering his balance and launching another enhanced strike toward where he thought she might be.
His wild punch created a gust of wind from the momentum and speed, and that gust happened to kick up a piece of broken crystalline material from an earlier match that had been lying on the stage. The chunk of crystal ricocheted off the barrier wall at a weird angle and smacked the assassin directly in the forehead hard enough to make her stumble backward with a pained grunt.
The crowd's laughter rippled through the arena like a wave, and even some of the fighters near Jade started to grin with genuine amusement.
The assassin, clearly irritated now, threw one of her daggers with lethal accuracy aimed at Rivan's shoulder—a disabling strike that would end his mobility. Rivan tried to dodge but somehow tripped over his own feet in the process, and the dagger sailed over his falling body before embedding itself in the barrier wall with a sharp *thunk*. He rolled across the stage floor in a completely uncontrolled tumble before somehow popping back up, his enhancement still active and making his movements faster than they should be despite the chaos.
The match continued in this vein for another eight minutes. At one point he stopped mid-strike to avoid an incoming debris, and a thrown knife passed through the space where his head had been a second earlier. Another time his punch missed completely but the shockwave from it somehow knocked loose a piece of the cracked stage that hit his opponent's knee.
"Is he... is he doing that on purpose?" Kara mutteredto no one in particular.
Finally, after nine full minutes, the assassin made one last desperate attempt. She used what had to be her most powerful technique—a shadow-step ability that let her appear directly behind Rivan with a dagger pressed against his throat.
Rivan, who had been in the middle of executing a spinning strike, an actually legitimate technique, just poorly timed—completed the rotation at that exact moment with his arms extended for momentum.
His elbow, boosted by his abilities, caught the woman directly in the solar plexus with a 'thump' that echoed across the suddenly silent arena.
She folded like a house of cards, all the air exploding from her lungs in a pained wheeze, and hit the ground hard enough to bounce slightly before lying there gasping. The referee moved forward immediately, and after a moment spent examining her he called out: " Winner: Participant 27,384!"
The arena exploded into a mixture of laughter and disbelieving cheers. Even the commentators sounded stunned.
"Pure chaos!" a commentator exclaimed. "Participant 27,384 just defeated a skilled assassin through what can only be described as weaponized clumsiness and impossible luck!"
Rivan stood in the center of the stage looking utterly confused, staring at his elbow like it had betrayed him, then looking at his unconscious opponent, then looking at the referee with eyes so wide they looked like they might fall out.
"Congratulations. Please exit the stage."
Rivan stumbled back through the barrier entrance in a daze, and Orion was waiting in their sit with his face buried in both hands while his shoulders shook. The moment Rivan reached him, Orion looked up with an expression of complete disbelief.
"That was one of the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen in my entire life," Orion said flatly. "You tripped. You sneezed. You stopped to tie your boot in the middle of combat. And you 'won' by accidentally elbowing someone while doing whatever that spinning thing was."
"I know!" Rivan was practically vibrating with manic energy. " I thought I was dead like five times but then she kept missing and I kept accidentally doing things and then my elbow just—and she just—!" He dissolved into incoherent excited rambling.
Several fighters were openly grinning now, and conversations broke out about what they'd all just witnessed.
"That can't be real luck," someone muttered. "That has to be some kind of talent. Maybe probability manipulation?"
"If chaos is a talent, that kid's probably SS-rank and doesn't even know it," someone else replied.
"I want whatever he's got," a third person added. "That was insane."
The matches continued after that, but people kept glancing at Rivan with expressions ranging from amusement to calculation to outright envy.
By the time the first round finally concluded, five hundred fighters remained standing while five hundred had been eliminated.
Jade settled back into his seat, and despite the hours of watching fights and participating in his own matches, he felt completely relaxed.
The semi-finals had only just started.
.....