"「Shield」"
The barrier snapped into existence, translucent and thin, it broke almost instantly under the weight of the strike, but it bought exactly what Soren needed, a fraction of time to twist his body aside, the sword cutting air where his ribs had been.
He staggered, almost lost his footing, then caught himself, laughing breathlessly despite the danger.
"Haha, it really worked!"
He couldn't stop smiling.
It was too good, the feeling of it, the proof that magic was just memorisation and grinding, and that meant he could just steal what he had already seen.
'Thank you,' he thought, and the gratitude was real, even if it was ridiculous, even if it was aimed at a skill that wasn't a person.
Now that he knew it was possible to copy a magic circle, he reached for the next one before his fear could argue, a yellow circle, sharper, more violent.
Yuli was already closing again.
Soren held out his hand.
"「Shock」"
The bolt snapped out, thin and imperfect compared to Eugene's, more like an angry thread of lightning than a true strike.
Still, it was lightning, it was real, and the moment it left his hand Soren's grin widened with the kind of joy that had nothing to do with winning.
Yuli didn't have room to dodge at that distance, he raised his sword in a textbook guard, trying to meet the spell with steel.
It hit anyway.
The electricity crawled over the blade and into his arms, his muscles locking for a heartbeat, his breath catching in his throat, and the discipline in his stance finally cracked into something human.
Soren didn't waste it.
He lunged forward, not with a swordsman's step, but with the same ugly commitment he had used in Rena Forest.
Body first, thoughts second, because if he hesitated he would die, or in this case, lose, and his body didn't care about the difference right now.
He swung the handaxe at Yuli's side, the arc too wide, the motion clumsy, more chop than cut, the edge bit anyway, shallow but painful, and Yuli's expression twisted.
Blood appeared, a red line across his uniform.
Yuli refused to fall back, even injured, he forced his arm to move through the lingering sting, and Soren saw it, the way his training fought to reassert control, his feet adjusting, his shoulders settling, his sword coming back into line.
The gap vanished.
Soren jumped back, heart pounding, and immediately started forming another circle because being close to Yuli felt like standing in front of a door that wanted to slam shut on his throat.
Yuli's gaze stayed fixed on him, sharp, offended, but underneath it, something else brewed now.
Not confusion.
Recognition.
"Huff…" Yuli exhaled slowly, eyes closing for a brief moment, like a man resetting himself before a final form.
When he opened them, the air around him felt different, denser, pressured.
"Fine," he said, voice quieter, more sincere than before. "Maybe you weren't playing around."
He lifted his sword, and Soren saw mana begin to move through his body in a way that wasn't spellcasting.
It wasn't a circle.
It was internal, controlled, the kind of control Soren had only ever seen from older students.
"But I will not lose."
Cold sweat prickled down Soren's back.
'Mana enhancement.'
The words landed like a stone.
'How?'
Typically, Class E students couldn't even feel their internal mana clearly, never mind shape it through their muscles, even some Class C students struggled to activate enhancement without it turning sloppy or dangerous.
Yet Yuli did it like breathing.
Soren tried to create distance, instinct screamed at him to run, he threw another [Gaia] onto the ground between them, mud blooming outward to catch Yuli's feet, but Yuli didn't slow, he drove through it with overwhelming force, his step cutting the mud like it was shallow water.
'It doesn't matter,' Soren realised, horrified. 'Nothing I do matters if he's that much faster.'
Yuli crossed the distance in an instant.
The pommel of his sword slammed into Soren's chest.
The impact stole Soren's breath so completely his mind went blank, his body folded, his feet left the ground, and he hit the arena floor hard enough to rattle his teeth.
Pain spread from his sternum in a hot wave, and before he could even cough, Yuli was there again, turning his blade and striking Soren across the face with the flat, a controlled hit meant to incapacitate without cutting.
Soren's head snapped to the side, light bursting behind his eyes, his mouth filled with metallic warmth, and he flew, rolling until his shoulder slammed into the ground and his vision smeared.
He tried to breathe, but his chest refused.
"Cough—!"
He spat, then coughed again, blood pooling on his tongue, and it shocked him how quickly his body had gone from "manageable" to "I might actually black out."
His arms trembled when he tried to push himself up.
His ribs screamed.
'Fuck, it hurts.'
Two hits.
That was all it took to completely flip everything.
And it felt like heaven and earth compared to everything before, like Yuli had been wearing weights and had finally decided to take them off.
Soren's hands shook, his injured palm slick with sweat and blood.
His legs were unsteady, but he forced himself upright anyway, not because he was brave, but because the idea of failing, of taking that penalty, of watching his stats drop while he lived in this world where weakness got you eaten, made something ugly rise in his throat.
He stood, swaying.
Yuli looked at him with raised brow, a faint flicker of surprise slipping past his trained calm.
"You're still getting up?" Yuli asked, and the question sounded almost genuine. "Do you need to be hit again?"
Soren wanted to answer with something witty, but his lungs still hadn't fully recovered, his chest felt bruised from the inside, and his jaw ached where the sword had struck.
He lifted his head anyway, and in that moment, through the pain haze, he noticed something off.
Yuli wasn't advancing.
He was breathing hard too, sweat pouring down his face, and his smile, the one that had been so controlled, looked strained at the edges, and above all…
'Why isn't he moving?'
Yuli's stance was correct, but it was stiff, like he had locked his knees, as if shifting weight might collapse him, and his sword wasn't held like a threat anymore.
It was held like a crutch.
'Could it be…?'
A click in Soren's mind, sudden and clear, the kind that only happened when fear forced his brain to sharpen, and the moment he understood, emotion surged through him so violently his eyes stung.
Relief.
Anger.
Vindication.
A laugh tried to spill out of him, half-hysterical, half-triumphant, and he swallowed it badly.
A wicked grin still crept onto his face, uninvited, because pain did strange things to him now, and because the world had finally given him a crack to pry open.
"Heyy~" Soren drawled, forcing sweetness into his voice, even while his ribs screamed with every breath. "Why aren't you moving? Is something wrong?~"
Yuli's eyes sharpened, irritation flaring, and he tried to lift his sword with authority, but the movement faltered, barely there.
"Tsk," he spat. "You must want to be hit again."
'He's bluffing,' Soren thought, and the thought made him almost giddy, because it meant the monster had limits.
"Heh…"
He was out of mana, and not just low, he was emptied, the kind of emptied that made your limbs heavy and your head swim, mana exhaustion so severe it turned a trained fighter into someone who couldn't even take a step without risking collapse.
Soren had felt it once already.
He knew the shape.
Using up all his mana meant Yuli was on the verge of passing out, and the only reason he was upright was stubbornness, pride, and the sword acting as a support.
Soren's grin widened again, and this time it wasn't just spite, it was something messier, too, an emotional release that made his throat tight, because he had been so close to being flattened into the dirt, and now he had an answer.
"Hmm," Soren said, voice still airy, like he wasn't shaking inside. "How should I end this then?"
He could walk in and hit him, it would be simple, it would be clean, but his cheek pulsed where he had been struck, and the humiliation of it burned hotter than the pain.
Yuli hadn't cut him there, he had hit him, controlled, proper, knightly, and somehow that made it worse.
'My face…' Soren thought, stupidly, selfishly, then felt a flash of shame immediately after, because who cared about his face when his ribs felt like they would crack again if he breathed too hard, still, the thought was there, raw and petty. 'It's all I have going for me.'
He lifted his hand, and instead of reaching for grey or yellow, he formed a dark blue circle, one he knew well, one he had used for survival, not elegance.
When the circle completed, Soren held his palm toward Yuli.
"「Aqua」"
A glob of water appeared, hovering, trembling slightly because his control wasn't perfect, then Soren pushed it forward with a sharp gesture, forcing it to stretch and spread over Yuli's face.
Water sealed over mouth and nose.
Yuli jerked, arms lifting instinctively, then faltering, his hands clawing at the water in a sudden, panicked motion that looked horribly human for someone who had been so composed a second ago.
He tried to pull it off, tried to disrupt it with mana, and failed.
Soren watched, chest rising and falling unevenly, his hands still shaking, his heart pounding like a war drum, and something twisted in his gut.
This was cruel.
He knew it.
He also knew he wasn't strong enough to end it any other way without risking Yuli finding one last burst of movement and breaking him again.
The weakness of using [Aqua] like this was obvious, anyone with mana left could interrupt it.
They could force the water apart, or shove it off, but Yuli didn't have that luxury, and Soren's spite latched onto that fact like a starving thing.
"If only you had a drop of mana left," Soren murmured, voice quieter now, less teasing, more raw. "How unfortunate."
Yuli's eyes were wide, furious, desperate, and Soren flinched internally, not because he regretted it, but because being stared at like that reminded him of goblins, of yellow eyes in torchlight, and the memory made his skin crawl.
He swallowed, then rubbed his cheek with the back of his wrist, wincing when the motion tugged his bruised ribs.
"Was there any need to hit my face?" he muttered, and the words came out smaller than he intended, childish, almost, which only made his embarrassment flare even before the duel ended.
Yuli couldn't answer.
The TA stepped forward quickly, hand raised, and called the end the moment it was clear Yuli couldn't recover, healers rushed in, disrupting the spell, forcing air back into Yuli's lungs, catching him before his knees could fold.
Soren stood there for a moment, adrenaline draining in a sick wave, then turned and began walking toward his seat, trying to keep his posture steady, trying to pretend his legs weren't trembling.
Then the familiar system chime rang out.
Soren's head snapped up before he could stop himself.
.
▶ Main Quest Complete! [First Steps (1)] ◀
[Reward: Inventory, Hidden Reward]
[Receive Hidden Reward?]
[Yes] [No]
.
A grin spread across his face, immediate, genuine, and completely inappropriate.
It wasn't joy at hurting someone, it was relief, it was the violent drop from terror to safety, it was the thrill of magic working, of copying spells, of surviving a C-ranked problem through sheer stubborn improvisation, and the system rewarding him for it.
"Hehe…" he laughed, soft and stupid.
Then reality caught up.
He realised what he looked like, standing there flushed and battered after nearly drowning a student, grinning like he had just been given a treat.
His stomach dropped.
He turned his head, scanning the stands, hoping no one had noticed, and immediately hated himself because of course they noticed.
The crowd's attention was heavier now than it had been for his first two matches, faces twisted with disgust, people leaning away from him like the air around him had gone rancid.
He caught fragments of whispers, the words landing like insects on his skin.
— Creepy… he almost killed someone, and he's smiling like that.
— What a psycho.
— What a waste of that face
Soren's face flushed hot, embarrassment flooding him so fast it nearly drowned the lingering triumph, and he hurried back to his seat like running could erase what they had seen.
Felix looked at him, eyes bright with amusement.
"Someone's popular."
"..."
Soren stared forward, jaw tight, because if he opened his mouth he might either scream or cry, and both sounded equally humiliating.
Felix leaned closer, relentless.
"Was it fun?"
"...Please, shut up," Soren whispered, voice strained.
••✦ ♡ ✦•••
"Strange."
That was her first thought after seeing Rank 96 of Arcane Studies duel against Rank 83 of Martial Studies.
Rank 96 wasn't strong, if anything, he was weak, almost pathetically so, but his fighting style made him stand out, messy and desperate, the kind that didn't belong in a polished academy arena.
When she first saw Rank 96 cast a spell in the middle of punching, she, like many others, believed it was just a fluke, but the duel that had just ended had proved them all wrong.
At first, she had only glanced over at Rank 96's duel because his face was exactly her type, but when she saw how he fought, she felt like she needed to keep watching, because it was inconsistent in a way that made her curious.
Then, when Rank 96 won the most recent duel against Rank 83, he even started grinning and giggling like a madman, and the disgust around him only made him feel more noticeable, like a bright stain on white cloth.
Even though the Hero had already been revealed, she was more interested in the 96th-ranked student.
She had seen that the person everyone was calling the Hero was weak, and the only thing he had shown was that bright light, but Rank 96?
He was unique.
The way he fought.
The way he acted.
They both deeply interested her.
It was even to the point that she began to ask herself,
'Should I keep an eye on him?'
But she quickly shook off that thought.
"No. Too soon."
Rank 96 was interesting, but he was still weak.
The way he fought showed his inexperience, and even his strange action of picking up a weapon only in the last duel showed he still hadn't figured out his own fighting style.
One thing was certain, though, Rank 96 had unknowingly caught the attention of a predator, whether he wanted to or not.
————「❤︎」————