The next battle passed in a similar manner as the first. Once Li used her Shadow Suppression it was all over. The third battle was a real challenge though.

Walt had read up on the people who were posting their stats on the online leaderboard and was able to recognize them from pictures. One of the people on the enemy team was number four on the leaderboard, with over a thousand mana and over fifty magic power. At the beginning of the fight she used all of her mana on a skill that nuked Kyle, Li and Walt and immediately took them all out of the fight.

Luckily Kyle had been able to shield Sarah before he died, so with her 4,000 mana shield she was able to finish off the four members by herself. You could not use mana crystals in the tournament to refill your mana so when Sarah had escaped from the range of the enemy’s nuke she only really had three people to deal with. It was a close thing though, and reminded them that they were far from the biggest fish in the pond.

But a win was a win, and after a short break for lunch the tournament continued.

When Kyle’s spiritual avatar appeared in the arena for their fourth battle, he immediately noticed that the enemy team all had custom armor on.

“That is the team I was talking about,” Walt said. “We need to be extra careful.”

When Walt did his research on the leaderboard members, there were a few people in particular to watch out for. At the top of the list was Gray Merrill, who was way ahead in stats, but right below that was a set of people. A team that had the people in fifth, seventh, and eighth place on it.

The team consisted of someone who was a clear tank, what looked like two backline casters, and someone who fought with a sword and shield and whose stats were more DPS than tank. The only one not on the ranking list was one of the casters, but that could also have been because they did not post their stats and not because they were low.

“Mages first?” Sarah asked the group. They had decided that unless they had a reason to do otherwise, taking out magic users would be their first priority.

“Yeah, let’s go with that,” Walt said. “I know that one of the mages is not actually on the list, but if the other three are I feel like that person should be at least as dangerous as the others, if not more so.”

“Got it,” Said Li. “One two caster combo control skill coming up.”

The battle started well. Sarah ran to flank the enemies with a 4,000 mana shield and Li successfully cast her Shadow Suppression.

For a fight that started so well Kyle would later wonder how it had gone downhill so quickly.

It turned out that Walt’s prediction was spot on, and the person who did not have their name and stats listed on the leaderboard turned out to be the most dangerous one.

When Li’s skill went off, it was redirected to the tank, presumably with some magic retargeting skill. The skill seemed to be a high level one too as both targets were redirected, not just one. That would have been fine if that was the end of it. Immediately taking out the tank was still considered a success, as now Kyle and Sarah should be able to finish off the rest without any tank to stop them.

The tank was not out of the fight though. As per Walt’s fear, the unknown mage used some sort of cleansing spell and removed Li’s Shadow Suppression only a second after it took effect. The tank was then able to block the skills Kyle was sending his way. Kyle was confident of being able to overwhelm one tank with his DPS if there were not a healer on the team. He never saw a healing skill used, but his assumption of there being one tank was incorrect.

The frontline fighter with the sword and shield was also blocking Kyle’s attacks. She seemed to have a skill similar to Sarah’s Basic Parry as she was slicing Kyle’s Compressed Mana Bolts apart with her sword.

The final nail in the coffin was when Sarah was taken out. Based on stats alone, no one should have a higher effective speed than she did. Sarah was sure of her close combat superiority. But that only worked if she could enter striking range. She couldn’t.

Sarah did successfully flank the enemies and close in, but ten feet was as close as she ever got.

The mage that was on the leaderboard used a skill that froze Sarah in place. The skill seemed nothing like Li’s skill, and Sarah had almost broken out three seconds later. That three seconds was too long, and it had given her enemies time to prepare.

Sarah was hit by a two skill combo. The second skill was a giant pillar of fire. It was an impressive skill, but would have been useless without the first skill. The first one came from the unnamed mage and dispelled the shield that Kyle had cast. Just like that the 4,000 mana shield was gone. So too was Sarah’s health as she was hit by the full force of the pillar of fire.

Now down a member, Kyle’s group was in a rough spot. From there on the match turned into a grind. Luckily Kyle realized the using a large shield was useless as it would just be dispelled, so he was able to conserve his mana and only used smaller shields. This meant that Walt had to take almost the full brunt of the enemies spells with his health. Kyle with his mana pool would have been advantaged in a longer grindy match barring anything unforeseen. He still had over half his mana left over and could continue firing skills for a few minutes at least while also being able to heal Walt. The enemy team was not able to burst Walt down in the time it took for his Self-Healing Crystal to come off cooldown so he was nigh unkillable.

Walt was not able to block every spell aimed at him and their team did not have any sort of dispel skill so the enemy team’s shields were able to block Li’s Pillar of Light and the Compressed Mana Explosion Kyle fired was sliced apart. This was where the status quo was altered. The enemy mages finally realized they could not kill Walt if Kyle was there to heal him, and switched their strategy.

The leaderboard mage channeled a skill for a minute, and right before it was used the unnamed mage used his dispel skill to get rid of Kyle’s shield. The other mage’s skill then fired and lightning fell from the sky, killing Kyle instantly and shortly wearing through Li’s shield and killing her as well. Walt fell soon after.

They were forced to admit it, they got stomped. The group was completely silent on their walk back to the waiting room. They still had one more match scheduled before the day’s matches were over, and after ten minutes they pulled themselves together and discussed their loss.

Numerous plans were suggested, and numerous plans were shot down. They eventually decided to use Kyle’s plan if they ever faced that team again. Their new plan was for Kyle and Li to time a Dual Target Pillar of Light and a Compressed Mana Explosion to fire at the same time, and then for Sarah to run in right after. They had no confidence in their new plan actually working, but at least they had a plan now.

Their last match of the day was easily won. They were now in the loser’s bracket, but successfully getting to day two had at least guaranteed them a good prize.

That night sleep once again eluded Kyle. He had been in bed for over three hours but his mind refused to calm down. He had even tried activating his mana regeneration skill to meditate, but it only served to highlight his racing thoughts once he stopped.

Kyle had died. He hadn’t literally died, but his spiritual avatar had experienced death. The experience had left its mark.

What had it felt like when his dad died? Unless there was a skill that could talk to the dead Kyle would never know. When his spiritual avatar had died it was more akin to waking up from a bad dream. First Kyle was in the dreamlike arena, then he was back in reality in the magic circle. The experience shouldn’t have been disturbing, yet Kyle couldn’t get it out of his head.

The worst part was the similarity to waking up. Now Kyle was afraid that when he woke up, he would experience that feeling again. And you can’t wake up if you never fall asleep his subconscious kept saying. So awake he stayed.

Kyle had tried taking sleeping pills before, but thanks to his new superhuman constitution they, like most other medicines and toxins, just passed through his system and had no effect. Even something as natural as melatonin did not work.

After another hour Kyle just decided to meditate through the night. His conjecture ended up being confirmed in the morning. He had hoped that his body would now be able to go a night without sleep without any consequences, and so far that seemed to be true. Kyle felt just as awake as if he had slept soundly the whole night.

The second day of the tournament consisted of two rounds before lunch and then the semi-finals and finals after lunch, which were open for the students to watch.

The first round of the second day they had a rematch with their third round opponents. Instead of firing off the spell she had used before, the leaderboard rank four mage this time saved her mana and tried to take out Sarah, but that just gave Li time to use her Shadow Suppression which sealed the enemy team’s fate. Winning that match guaranteed the group a top eight spot and a prize of at least 4,000 points. The school had realized that their prize pool needed to be increased to keep up with inflation, and had boosted the lower parts of the prize pool bringing the total prize pool up from 30,000 points to 60,000 points, which no longer seemed like the prize it once was. Dungeon looting had seen almost exponential growth and the value of a single point was worth less than half of what it was just three weeks ago.

In their last battle before lunch, and one they would need to win to get into the semi-finals, they once more were faced with someone from the leaderboard.

“That’s Paul Tranchet,” Walt said, pointing out the person taking the tank role on the enemy team. “He is currently number two on the leaderboard and has 1,600 health which is the current highest.”

“Once we take care of the rest of them it won’t matter how much health he has,” Sarah said, grinning in anticipation of the violence she was going to inflect on the enemy team. “Unless he has some skill that is completely busted he will fall eventually.”

Kyle nervously crossed his fingers hoping Sarah hadn’t jinxed them.

The teams both took their starting positions. In addition to having a leaderboard tank, the enemy team had someone wielding two scimitars, someone with a bow, and another backliner who was most likely a caster of some sort.

As soon as the screen dropped and the battle began Paul let out a yell that seemed to reverberate more than it should in the dreamlike arena. Kyle had enough time to cast a shield spell on Sarah and himself before he was overwhelmingly overcome with anger. How DARE that Paul yell like that? How DARE he stand there mocking them? How DARE he hide behind that yellow shield? He had touched what he should not, and he would pay.

Kyle focused all of his effort into firing spells and taking down the yellow shield that was protecting his prey. It consumed more and more of his mind, bringing him to a singular focus. Kyle never noticed the scimitar wielder that calmly walked up to him and proceeded to hack away at his neck, the same way you would hack away at a tree.

Kyle was the first to wake up in the magic circle. The others soon followed.

“What happened?” Kyle asked, still groggy and disoriented. “I just remember being really angry for some reason, and then attacking some yellow shield.”

None of the other three could answer him, and it took seeing the semi-finals to realize what had happened. Paul had used a rare and powerful taunting skill that caused his enemies to fly into a rage induced haze and attack him with everything they had.

While the skill was powerful, it did nothing to inhibit the attacks of Paul’s enemies. That is where another skill came in. This one seemed to create a yellow shield that basically made him invulnerable for sixty seconds, more than enough time for his allies to finish off the other team. It appeared the downside of this skill was that it worked both ways. Nothing could get in, but Paul could also not get out for sixty seconds.

This downside came into play in the semi-finals. Paul’s team went up against the team with three people in the leaderboards top ten and the unnamed mage, who Kyle later found out was named Curtis. Curtis was able to use his skill that he had used to get rid of Li’s Shadow Suppression to also get rid of the taunting skill Paul used on his team. Without a tank, Paul’s team was quickly eliminated and Paul followed once his shield’s sixty seconds was up.

Curtis’s team met Gray Merrill’s team in the finals. Gray’s team had dominated their finals mostly off of Gray’s strength. He seemed to function as a sort of Paladin, and took the position of his team’s tank while also buffing and healing his allies. He also did a substantial amount of damage to the enemy team with his “holy smite” that he yelled out whenever he attacked.

The finals were a close. The amount of resources that had been funneled into Gray must have been truly staggering. It seemed every time he was in a tight spot he would activate yet another powerful skill.

The deciding factor came down to numbers. While Gray was incredibly powerful, he was still only one person. He would have mopped the floor with any one or even two of Curtis’s team, but the match was not four sets of one versus one. It was four versus four, and that is where having four powerful members over one super member showed its worth.

Gray’s teammates were slowly but surely sectioned off one by one and killed. He was eventually left alone, and while he had managed to kill the sword and shield user, he eventually fell fighting in a one versus three.

Kyle and his team ended up in sixth place and received 4,000 points. 4,000 points had seemed like a treasure trove in the past, but it now felt rather lack luster. As the market got flooded by more and more skill crystals, the lower level ones dropped down in value while the more powerful ones stopped being sold. Most people who had access to powerful skill crystals would save them for friends and family or to trade for other very powerful skills.

It was announced that there would be another tournament next month. The prize was to be determined as announcing the prize pool early for this tournament had backfired.

The school received another 4,000 or so students the week after the tournament. Because of all the hubbub, Kyle and Sarah ended up going home to their Guild compound during that time. Li, who did not have a great relationship with her parents, ended up joining them while Walt went home to see his family.

Li squealed with delight when she saw Mickey. She had always wanted a younger sibling, but her parents barely had time for her and Li sometimes felt that they would have been better off with her not around. She had lived with her grandparents when she was younger and went to the same school as Sarah, and it was only after her grandparents had died that she moved in with her parents.

Kyle had talked to his aunt and uncle over the phone a few times about how the school was going and how much his skills had increased, but it was different talking to them in person. Sarah’s dad was still at the dungeon school doing some work, so Sarah and Li had dinner with Kyle and his family. Li insisted on sitting next to Mickey and feeding him, to his great delight.

Later that night Kyle was in his room getting ready for bed. He wanted to go take a shower, but at the moment he was enjoying lying on top of his bed too much to get up. It was his bed, and that meant a lot more to Kyle than he could ever explain in words.

Someone knocked on his door. Kyle waited a second for them to come in, but the door stayed shut. Most people who knocked on his door came in right after without waiting for a response, so it took Kyle a minute to respond to the knocking.

“You can come in, it’s open.”

Sarah slowly opened the door and came into Kyle’s room. It was rare for Sarah to even knock before she opened his door, so Kyle knew that she came with a serious purpose whenever she waited for his okay to come in.

She slowly went over and sat down backwards on the chair at his desk. Kyle sat up on his bed and waited for her to speak. They sat that way for a good ten minutes before Sarah opened her mouth.

She slowly closed it again and it took her another ten minutes or so before she eventually spoke.

“Have you been able to sleep alright?”

Kyle took some time to think it over before slowly nodding.

“I guess so. The night before the second day of the tournament I didn’t sleep and meditated all night, but I felt fine the next day.”

Sarah nodded, “That’s good.”

They lapsed into silence again. It was not an uncomfortable silence. They knew each far too well for that. It was a companionable silence, one that needs no words and only the sound of the others breathing.

Sarah eventually got up and sat down next to Kyle on his bed. She took hold of his hand and lay down, staring at the ceiling. Kyle slowly lay down as well. The rest of their bodies were a good foot apart and only their hands were touching. Despite lying so close, neither of their gazes ever strayed from the ceiling to acknowledge the other. They were both not ready for what would follow.

After a time that seemed to stretch forever yet also lasted but a moment Sarah got up and left the room with only a “Goodnight”.

Kyle lay in bed for a few more moment before getting up and taking a shower. There was a government announcement scheduled for early in the morning and Kyle did not want to miss it.