As Sen appears in the arena, he can see his opponent, a tall man with a lithe frame, similar to a gymnast, or more likely, an actual fighter. As they both press the ready button without any preamble, Sen’s opponent crosses his sword over his shield and gives a short bow. Sen returns the gesture, holding his sword horizontal and bowing down a bit. It’s odd to see things like this outside of Gladiator, but Sen is always willing to be polite if he doesn’t have any enmity with his opponent.

They both raise their weapons, and from his posture, Sen can see that this will likely be a long match. They slowly step forward, and Sen only uses body strengthening for now, wanting to conserve his energy considering that he’s facing a competent opponent. Sen leads in with a swing from the top, and is blocked by the shield which barely gives as the greatsword impacts it, making Sen glad he hadn’t bothered using Weight of the Mountain.

Sen has to take a quick step back as his opponent uses the opening to stab forward, and Sen drags the lower half of his sword down in order to deflect the blow, using the distance gained from stepping back to get it down in time. His next blow is in a more cautious manner, probing rather than trying to end it quickly.

They slowly continue the dance, Sen disabling his body strengthening for feints in order to conserve energy. His shield seems to be everywhere Sen strikes, but with the lighter blows Sen can easily get his sword back in position to parry his swings. Sen slowly tests out his defense, noting he tends to be a bit slow with blows on his lower body on his shield side.

Sen doesn’t let on that he notices though, continuing to give light blows and parry the return swings and stabs. Sen ends up taking a small cut on his arm as his opponent uses a skill similar to weight of the mountain, leading Sen to misjudge the force needed to parry. In return, Sen goes for a blow high on his body on his shield side. Taking advantage of the fact that his opponent raises his shield, cutting off his vision, Sen uses Earth Step to get to his shield side, delaying his strike enough to pivot it downwards.

His opponent notices too late, hastily lowering his shield to block, but he’s not stable, and Sen uses Weight of the Mountain to enhance his strike. His shield slamming into his leg, Sen’s opponent stumbles, and that gives enough of an opening for Sen to slam his pommel into his opponent’s face. The man reeling from the blow, Sen Earth Steps to dodge the hasty return blow, sending another swing to his sword side.

Stumbling a bit from what is likely a broken leg, he has to try and parry using his sword, but it’s still out from the strike, and he isn’t able to brace enough for Sen’s strike empowered with Weight of the Mountain. The blow crashes through his hasty guard, cutting down to bone in his arm. At this point, he can barely raise his sword, but Sen is still careful, using measured blows to make sure it doesn’t end in an upset

By the end of it, the man is bleeding from numerous cuts, not that Sen can see the blood, he is stuck seeing the debuff over his head. Eventually, he can barely raise his shield, and Sen finishes the fight with a clean stab through his chest.

As the man turns into blue sparkles, Sen repeats the bow he gave at the beginning of the fight, showing his respect for a good opponent. While he’s fought better on Gladiator, the man will definitely have been able to place in the top thousand or so.

Sen looks at the crowd a bit, who are cheering with enthusiasm, likely from the bloody show that anyone over sixteen can see. Sen doesn’t bother entertaining the crowd though, and quickly logs out to spectate the others. He is soon watching Lynna, who is having a lot of trouble with her opponent. The person she’s fighting is using a sword and shield just like the man Sen had fought, which doesn’t surprise him. For PVP, sword and shield is one of the best options if the skills in game don’t support other playstyles.

Lynna dances around her opponent for a while, before getting frustrated at not being able to get through their guard, and having to dodge all of the attacks. She eventually pulls a shield out of her inventory, and after that slowly grinds down her opponent with feints, baiting them to block blows that have no force behind them., quickly transitioning to blows elsewhere. She gets first blood with what seems to be the same sword skill that Xue uses, her blade twisting down in an unnatural fashion to get past their guard.

With a cut that has applied a massive debuff icon in Sen’s vision, She simply lets her opponent slowly bleed out, steadily blocking his final desperate assault. By the time the match is over, none of the others are still fighting, and Sen leaves the arena.

With little surprise, he learns that all of the others have swept their tournament, which isn’t surprising. Xue is a top fifty player in Gladiator, and considering that the Gladiator server she plays on has forty million people rather than the twenty thousand or so people that are placed in Falan, it’s expected that she won’t have much trouble until the next tournament. Julie has her weird arrays to abuse, and Lynna has been taught swordsmanship by Sen after he dragged her into Gladiator She’d already been an excellent gamer in immersion games, and had picked up proper swordsmanship ridiculously fast.

Poor jennifer is the odd one out, and she’s pouting as the rest share their success. She makes Lynna promise to get revenge on the guy from Ares before she’s mollified, completely ignoring the fact that she might not even be in the same bracket, as the second round of tournaments is going to be global. Sen’s mind goes back to conspiracy theories at that, they clearly had some way to make the latency bearable if they were willing to risk that.

He kicks the thoughts out of his head, it’s time to meet up with the rest of the Ares guild to go pick on the King guild. He has to practically herd the group around as three of the girls have changed their conversation from gaming to more girly topics. Xue doesn’t bother participating, not that she participates in many conversations at all.