The next day is the tournament, and the group heads over to the arena. Kang is bragging about how many kills he’s going to get, but the group doesn’t bother to respond. Kang seems to deflate a bit at the lack of a response, but Sen is sure he’ll perk up when he gets to showboat for the crowd.

When the first round starts, the enemy group circles up around a girl, who starts to set up an array, placing a bunch of small blocks of metal in a square. When she’s done, Sen sees a few blurry images of her appear, while she’s still perfectly visible.

“Hey Julie, why are all the images blurry?” Sen asks

“You didn’t think those bracelets only protected you from my arrays did you?”

Sen blushes a bit, he had thought the bracelets only did that.

“Considering all the weapons the images are wielding are blurry, they’re purely illusions and not energy constructs, so they won’t be able to do any damage either.” Julie adds.

Sen nods, and the group charges the enemies, not bothering to have Julie set up an array unless they start having issues. The enemy group is terribly confused as they simply ignore the images, the girl trying to blend in with the images, and being immediately killed by Kang as the group knows which she is.

While the array doesn’t stop working even as she turns to blue specks of light, with their number advantage, they easily eliminate the enemy team, even though they’re reasonably skilled. Once they’re done, it’s back to waiting for the next round.

“Julie, how many arrays do these bracelets protect us from?” Jennifer decides to ask.

“Well, it makes illusion arrays pretty much useless, and it will mess with the targeting for killing arrays, but it won’t reduce the damage to you, so don’t walk into the dangerous areas.”

The group nods. They’re all experienced with MMOs, they know not to walk into the damn circle. The next round, there’s not an array master, and the group doesn’t need to use any arrays themselves, simply staying close and covering for each other until Xue kills her opponent and then quickly kills the one Sen is fighting before the two basically walk through the rest of the enemy team.

Kang ends up being quite annoyed as he isn’t the one to kill his opponent, but quickly gets over it as he poses for the spectators in a cringy way. The rest of the group, as usual, doesn’t showboat like Kang is, and they all agree to start using arrays from this point on, as the opponents have been quite skilled already.

The next few rounds go smoothly, Julie’s arrays leading to their team significantly outnumbering their opponents, and then the tournament ends for the day. This time, due to complaints from the users, the tournament will be split over two days, so Lynna and Sen log off to have their family dinner.

Dinner passes peacefully, them sharing their success in the tournament, and their parents are heavily supporting them. Once they finish their meal, Lynna pulls Sen aside.

“You should ask Xue out,” she starts with.

Sen has no idea what to say to that. While he doesn’t dislike her at all, he’s utterly clueless when it comes to anything involving a relationship. He’d never emotionally matured in his past life, focusing purely on the sword, and the only relationship he’d had was the one with his lady. That relationship was closer to a master servant relationship, as he’d devoted his blade to her after they’d met.

In this life he’s had actual relationships, but they’d been that of friendship, and he has no clue about how to handle something like this. He’s not even sure if he should refuse his sister’s suggestion. This life seemed to be so much more vibrant than his past, as if he’d never truly lived in his past life.

“I… I’ll think about it,” He eventually lamely replies. He’s sure his sister can see his utter confusion, as she simply looks at him with a knowing expression. She lets out a sigh, and lets go of the shoulder she’d grabbed before walking away in a slow manner.

Sen goes to bed still confused, and for some reason he ends up thinking of his lady before he goes to sleep.

The next day, the tournament continues. As the first round of the day begins against a no-name team, Sen finds that his confusion about what to do has changed his swordsmanship. As Damien, he’d tried to learn how to fight to protect, but he would always revert back to the style he’d learned in his childhood when disturbed emotionally, and this case is no different. He allows his opponent to chop relatively deep into his chest in order to behead him with a swift Cutting Squall rather than dragging it out to avoid any wounds.

While the wound doesn’t stop him coming to the aid of his team, Sen berates himself for having allowed something so simple to muddle his thoughts enough to send him back to his old fighting style. The group looks at him a bit confused as he repeats the performance in the second round, but he doesn’t know what to say to them.

It’s not even bad, considering that all wounds are healed once they leave the arena. It may even be more efficient, but it bothers Sen that he’s fighting the way those people had taught him to.

The rounds go more quickly than normal with how quickly Sen is dispatching his opponents, and the group is shooting him glances about what’s going on, as he normally ends the fights with no wounds unless it’s a very hard one. Lynna is the only one who’s seen him fight like this before, and she looks at him in a worried manner, as that had been when the King guild was threatening her.

Eventually, they make it to the finals, and as they’re whisked to the arena, they see the main team of Team Cloud.