Chapter 294: Boring Second Match
Brakhtar was of the giantkin/ogre race and believed to be of Gemrach blood, known to be one of the elder races. His body was massive, durable, and brimming with muscle strength, but as a follower of the Aether Path, his aspect was spiritual rather than physical. His greatest advantages lived in perception and mind, not in raw muscle alone.
Because of this, they knew an attack with that level of force would easily knock him out, and he would not be able to dodge it either.
The sword arc was too fast, the pressure too clean. So the only solution for Brakhtar Gorat to counter it was to act first and disrupt Adyr with his Mind Distortion skills, making him unable to use any attack skill.
He would have to seize initiative at the thought level, fracture focus before the cut could be formed, and bend perception so that timing slipped and the sequence failed to assemble. If the mind cannot hold the line of a skill, the body cannot release it, and that was the window Brakhtar would have to open for himself.
"Don’t bring shame to our ancestors’ names." The Chief of the Gorathim race spoke with a weight that left no room for debate and allowed no thought of defeat.
"I never will, Chief," Brakhtar answered with the same gravity, shoulders squared, taking this tournament more seriously than any other candidate.
—
While similar conversations were unfolding among every race, the atmosphere within the Velari was different—stranger, charged with a hush that felt like held breath.
"Adyr... tell me, are you the reincarnation of God Astrael?" Mirela closed the distance in quick steps and took his arm, pressing it between her full breasts again, as always.
Her warm breath brushed his neck as she spoke, eyes bright with reckless certainty, not even pausing to consider how blasphemous the question was.
"Ahem, Lady Mirela, please compose yourself." Malrik cleared his throat loudly in warning, though he, too, entertained a similar thought, if not the same.
Since the day they met Adyr, their thoughts had been a roller coaster—rising and plunging in a chaotic cycle.
Every time they witnessed something from him, the shock outdid the last. And now, after watching him use an attack no one had taught him—self-learned within a single day—they looked genuinely shaken.
If the strike had come from a prodigy of one of the top 3 races among the young generation, it would have been easy to accept. They would have called the Practitioner a genius and credited strong guidance from leaders and elders. But witnessing it from Adyr unsettled their shared sense of what was possible.
It was one thing to see him combine 2 skills into a single, flawless attack with no instruction and learn it in a day; it was another to feel that same strike register at Rank 3 on the power scale even though both skills were only Rank 2.
In their frame of reference, that kind of jump should take years of training and elder guidance, so the realization hit harder: he had not just added two effects together; he had compounded them into a result that exceeded their expected limits.
Even Mirela and Lucen, both Rank 3 Practitioners, were stunned by the power they had just witnessed. For the first time in nearly a century of training, they questioned whether their entire approach had been flawed—the way they calibrated their bodies, the drills they repeated, and the methods they trusted. Had they been doing it wrong all along?
Seen in that light, Mirela’s assumption that Adyr was the reincarnation of someone powerful felt, strangely, logical. Only an explanation like that seemed to justify the speed at which he mastered his abilities.
At the word "reincarnation," Adyr tensed for a heartbeat and covered it with an awkward smile.
Her assumption was only partly right: he had been reincarnated. But a god? Nothing in his memory said so. He was actually a serial killer, which was hardly the same.
While Mirela and the others kept measuring him in their thoughts, trying to understand the limits of his potential, Caprion’s voice rose again, cutting through the noise and drawing every gaze toward the center.
"After a strange, yet undeniably entertaining opening bout," he called, hooves ringing lightly on the marble as he paced, "allow me to announce the second match."
The arena’s talk dimmed at once. Focus snapped back to the announcer, thousands ready for another eye-opener from one of the top young geniuses.
This time, however, the pairing did not match their expectations. Caprion invited two teams from smaller, less dominant races to enter the ring. The shift was immediate; curiosity remained, but the edge of anticipation softened.
The match began, and unlike the first, it did not end in a single sweeping strike. Two 5-man squads ground into each other in a hard, methodical contest.
Formations closed and opened. Barriers rose and cracked. Healers stabilized just in time. Blades traded space without finding a decisive purchase. It was balanced enough to be respectable and competitive enough to hold interest, at least at first.
Minutes stretched. The exchange kept circling through the same patterns, each side refusing to give an inch. It was not dull, but it was relentless.
The fight dragged past the point where the crowd expected a conclusion and then kept going. Nearly an hour later, one team finally forced a clean break and took the victory by the narrowest margin.
The winning cheer sounded thin, more relief than thrill.
A new line of worry moved through the stands. There were more than 260 teams waiting to fight. If bouts continued like this, with every one taking more than 1 hour to conclude, the small tournament meant to decide the top 200 could take days.
The murmur grew into a low tide of conversation, calculations, and complaints mixing under the breath of the arena.
Caprion heard it. He lifted a hand for quiet and let the moment settle. When he spoke again, his tone carried a deliberate light.
"After that long contest, perhaps we make the next one shorter and a little more enjoyable to watch, yes?"
The crowd answered with a pulse of approval. He did not waste it.
"Now, for the next match, I call to the arena Team 1 of the respected Lunari race against Team 4 of the Aqualeth."
The name alone pulled the arena upright immediately.
The Aqualeth selection sounded modest, even fragile, but the Lunari roster carried the weight everyone felt. It meant one thing that mattered most to the spectators who had begun to drift. Thalira Luna, one of the top geniuses, would be stepping into the arena now.
The shift in the tiers was visible. People leaned forward. Conversations cut off mid-sentence. Those who had been counting how many matches remained stopped counting. Attention returned in a clean wave as the two teams prepared to enter, and the buzz that rises right before something noteworthy grew sharp again.
Expectations were clear: everyone wanted a repeat of the opening spectacle, with Thalira Luna single-handedly sweeping Aqualeth’s five-man team.
Anticipation reclaimed the arena, not the blind kind that chases a name, but the focused kind that rises when a fighter known for speed and precision is about to be measured in public. Thalira’s presence alone gathered the frayed threads of attention from the second match and tied them tight again.
Let’s see what the one they call the fastest of this generation can actually do. Adyr watched in silence, eyes on her feet and shoulders, tracking her breath and stance, more interested in her first move than the result.