“Alright my dear subjects, we will now commence the final battle of round 1. To the winner goes the spoils!” said the king.

Not much happened yesterday. After the poisoning, I told Hein to give up, and the king decided to postpone the final match for today. After which there would be a 2 hour break, until the group matches begin. After the announcement, we went back to the inn, and I took a short rest. Of course I was actually practicing my cultivation to replenish my mana. One thing I noticed is that when you have exhausted mana and then absorb the surrounding mana, the time it takes to replenish is the same as before. Meaning, that not only does the amount of mana and its density and purity increase, but even the rate of absorption increases, resulting in no change in time to replenish mana. Of course, the time it took was still significant, taking almost 4 hours to fully replenish. Once that was done, I moved on to completely check Hein for any remaining poison, healing the small scratched Krog got from fighting Sake, and supplying some healing mana to Shem. I need to wait, she said. Wait for the right time. But it’s just taking too long! How much longer! I’m sure Krog is suffering even more on the inside. Ugh, that b*tch! I’ll make her pay one day for putting her into a coma for so long! I also did not get much sleep, since I was busy experimenting my control over Erebus.

Anyway, after the king gave his speech, Joester jumped onto the stage and started riling up the crowd while secretly threatening me using his poison covered needles.

Ha! The guts of this a*shole is beyond the mortal understanding! I will push this f*cker until the edge of death!

Since the cultivation session yesterday, my mana has increased a little; to about 10 % more than before. Activating some of the mana, I reinforced my skin, muscles, immune system, bones, blood flow, and mana channels themselves. These were spells I came up with yesterday in order to reduce the chance of Joester’s weapons entering my body, and to reduce the damage caused by the poison. The reinforcement of my physical body is just a more specialised version of lesser strength, targeted towards resisting foreign elements. I have decided to name it lesser skin strengthening and lesser poison resistance. The reinforcement of my mana channels is strengthening the thickness of the walls of the channels, in order to prevent foreign mana from entering my mana channels, and thereby preventing them from entering my mana pool. This also has the extra effect of enhancing the amount of mana and the speed of the mana I can transfer from my mana pool to the external world. Which in theory should reduce the time it takes to cast magic. Let’s call it channel strengthening.

Anyway, I jumped onto the stage for the finals, and unsheathed my sword.

“Begin!” exclaimed Nicholas, marking the beginning of the fight.

Narrator’s Point of view…

Jon took his stance and so did Joester. However, neither of them moved an inch. Joester was waiting for Jon’s attack in order to sneakily poison him, however, Jon was aware of this and did not move, to throw off Joester’s plan.

Realising this, Joester employed a different plan. He began charging towards Jon while swinging his sword randomly from a distance, as he made his way to me. Suddenly, Jon noticed what he was doing. There were almost 20 needles hurtling towards him, and more were being thrown with every swing of Joester’s sword!

However, everything was according to plan! While Joester was busy barraging Jon with his needle attack, Jon was expertly positioning is body and limbs in order to deflect most of the force away from piercing, and allowing his strengthened skin to do the rest and prevent the needle from entering his body. He was doing this while also extracting mana. A very laborious task when actively moving your body, so all he could do was to extract it little by little and collect enough for a spell before Joester decided to change strategies.

…

After almost two minutes of continuous firing of needles, Joester finally runs out and the two of them are now left facing each other, planning their next moves.

After a brief moment of awkward silence, Joester springs into action!