** The Eve of the Challenge.
The arena was enveloped in a tense silence, the air thick with static energy. My muscles were taut, every nerve primed to react to the slightest movement. Lesley stared at me from across the battlefield, a lethal warrior whose relaxed posture was nothing but an illusion.
We were in the magic training field. Here, I was forbidden from using my warrior skills. Elian, Hera, and Dahlia watched from the sidelines, arms crossed, waiting for the battle to unfold.
Lesley's sharp eyes didn't miss a single detail. Her hands gripped twin daggers that shimmered with a red energy, fueled by her prana.
"Ready?" she asked, a predatory smile on her lips.
A shiver ran down my spine, but I stood firm.
"More than ever."
Electricity crackled through my body, sparks dancing between my fingers, arms, and legs, as the gravity around me subtly adjusted.
'Fast and strong, fast and strong,' I murmured in my mind. It was the only way to stay alive in a fight against Lesley.
Lesley moved before I could even blink. A silver blur tore through the air, and a shadow appeared in front of me. My legs barely had time to react.
Her daggers slashed in a deadly arc toward my jugular. I activated a gravitational pulse around me, twisting gravity for a moment, just enough to make her blade miss its target by millimeters.
My electricity exploded in a flashing arc, but Lesley had already spun away with agile grace.
Breaking the rhythm of her attack, I propelled myself at maximum speed. Lightning erupted from my body, and two spear-sized rods formed in my hands. I didn't throw them; I kept them vibrating as weapons. It was a technique I had been refining over the past few days.
I appeared in front of her, and with an X-shaped motion, the two lightning spears clashed with her daggers. The red energy in her weapons dimmed slightly, and electricity began to course through Lesley's arms, which she quickly shook off.
Bending her knees slightly, Lesley spun around my strike, her daggers cutting into my side.
I didn't let her retreat and hurled one of the lightning spears at her. A flash tore through the air at an impressive speed.
Lesley reacted by leaping into the air with a clever acrobatic move.
"Ah, but you won't!" I shouted.
With my now free hand, I made a pulling motion, as if yanking a rope. Using gravity, Lesley's body was pulled toward me. Seizing the opportunity, I attacked with the remaining spear in my other hand.
But when she was just inches away from my lightning spear, the weapons in her hands shifted into a longsword.
'Where the hell did that come from?'
Using the momentum of my movement, her prana-infused sword collided with my spear. A shockwave ran through my body, and I was pushed several meters back.
As I stabilized my position, a clenched fist was already in front of my eyes.
I was hit in the head by a punch that felt like a hammer.
The world spun.
I was thrown back, rolling across the stone floor. My lungs burned, and before I could get up, another blow came. A precise punch to my temple made my vision flicker.
"You think too much," Lesley murmured, her presence dominating my field of vision. A kick landed on my stomach, sending me flying two dozen meters through the air.
I gritted my teeth and stabilized myself with a zero-gravity field, avoiding a natural fall. From the high ground, my hands glowed, and lightning began to bombard Lesley, who was on the ground.
A rain of lightning started to destroy the arena floor, and in the midst of it, Lesley danced between the attacks, her eyes always fixed on me.
With a precise motion, Lesley kicked a loose stone block toward me. Instinctively, I increased the gravity around me, falling at full speed toward her.
The longsword in her hand disappeared, and her daggers reappeared.
'Some kind of dimensional pouch or something?' I inferred.
I reformed my two lightning spears and, with the high speed of the fall, we clashed again.
"BOOOOOOM!"
Part of the arena was destroyed by the impact, and both of us were thrown several meters back.
Without warning, her blades gleamed in a silver whirlwind. Her body vanished, her speed increasing beyond what I could follow. Her afterimages began to surround me, and attacks came from all angles.
Close to my neck, joints, ribs, nerves, and tendons, aiming to open my body only in the most fatal places.
Each attack was precise, calculated, and I could only dodge by a hair's breadth. Desperate, I kicked the ground and used gravity to propel myself backward, but Lesley gave me no space.
In the middle of a spin, her daggers disappeared. In their place, a massive war hammer appeared in her hands, and she swung it in a wide arc.
"FUCK!!!!"
Unable to dodge the attack, I raised my forearms, covered with as much electricity as I could muster, and formed a small gravity shield in front of me. A film no more than ten centimeters thick, but with almost twenty times the increased gravity at that point.
It wasn't enough.
Her war hammer slowed by more than fifty percent, but it still hit me square on. The impact cracked the ground between us, a shockwave reverberating through my body, throwing me another dozen meters across the arena.
My body slid across the rocky floor, and my wounds accumulated everywhere. My arms were broken, my fingers bent in anatomically impossible positions.
"This hurts so much!!!"
I saw her shadow approaching and began charging my trump card. I clumsily lifted my body, moving backward to gain some space, but to no avail. Her hammer was already descending toward my head.
Lightning exploded in my legs, destroying part of the ground and throwing me to the side. The hammer hit the ground, destroying everything around it, and the shockwave helped me gain distance from Lesley.
She turned her head toward me and didn't bother retrieving the hammer, which was now embedded more than fifty centimeters into the ground. With her bare fists clenched, she exploded toward me at high speed.
When her fist was just inches from my nose, my trump card finally charged. My golden eyes lit up like the midday sun, and two monstrous lightning bolts shot toward Lesley.
"BOOOOOOOOM!"
"I hit her!!!!" I celebrated.
There was no way she could dodge at such close range.
Dust covered most of the area where we stood. But as the dust settled, I could see Lesley completely unharmed, not a scratch on her, holding a large black shield in her arms.
"This is just mean! She's bullying me," I muttered, disbelieving that she had taken a blow that cost twenty-five percent of all my prana.
"That was cool," Lesley complimented. The shield vanished, going who knows where.
She advanced even faster than before, and a thunderous punch hit me in the stomach. Saliva and blood gushed from my mouth. My body floated three meters from the impact and then fell to the ground, motionless, unable to move.
Lack of air invaded my lungs, my internal energy had returned to an inert state, and I couldn't channel prana or mana to transform into magic.
I heard footsteps approaching and two people clapping, congratulating me.
"Congratulations, young master. You managed to finish the sparring with Lady Lesley without passing out this time," said Hera.
Dália knelt beside me, beginning the healing session.
"Hahaha, I have to admit, you're tough, kid. Now you've reached an impressive score of twenty losses, zero wins, and nineteen knockouts," Elian joked about my situation.
"Grrr..." a hoarse growl escaped my mouth, expressing my obvious indignation.
"It's not like he was going to win anyway," said Lesley.
"But your progress is impressive. That gravity defense zone, that's really something. As for the static lightning spear technique, maybe smaller ones would be better. Your best advantage is still speed; long weapons hinder your style as a mage. Of course, considering you're not going to act like a warrior," Lesley said, giving her feedback on our fight.
Air finally returned to my lungs, and my bones slowly began to return to their normal state with Dália's healing.
"I know..." I said, still groggy. "But the smaller the weapon synthesized with lightning, the more I have to concentrate to maintain them. In my current state, that size is the best I can do to focus less on the weapon and more on the fight."
"I see, that makes sense," Lesley confirmed. "If you had more time..." she murmured, interrupting her train of thought.
"What about the young master's Nexus?" asked Hera, expressing her confusion.
"I know I'm just here to follow orders and help, but I can't help but notice that he's been training without a Nexus."
"They're not ready yet," Elian replied.
"But couldn't he use a generic one for now? Or are you planning for him to fight Thadeus without one?" she asked, incredulous.
Receiving silence as an answer, Hera's expression hardened, not understanding the reasoning behind such an absurd choice. A Nexus could save up to fifty percent of energy. Its primary function was to absorb the energy normally wasted during the magic-casting process. And its other function was to facilitate the transformation of prana into one's affinity.
"Those are the queen's orders. No Nexus for him until he wins the fight tomorrow," Lesley added.
"Phew..." I sighed in understanding.
Selene wasn't the most transparent person in the world. But I was starting to form some ideas about her profile. And in this case, it was that she spared no effort in offering me the best, but that also came with a cost. And right now, what she was most interested in was fame.
'She wants me to defeat someone who might have broken into the champion rank, without a Nexus, no less. And I probably won't get the artifacts Isaac is forging if I lose.'
"Phew..." another sigh escaped my lips.
"It wasn't a bad week," said Elian.
Every day, I went through an intense schedule of sparring with everyone here. Sometimes, more than ten hours straight of intense training, combined with resistance potions, vitality potions, stamina potions, mental acuity potions, and so many others I can't even detail. All of them made by Hera. And on top of all that, Dália healing me after every serious injury.
In total, it was twenty duels with each of them per day. My best score was today.
Elian, twenty to zero.
Lesley, twenty to zero.
Dália, twelve to eight.
Hera, eleven to nine.
"Rest well tonight. Tomorrow will be an important day," said Elian, leaving the training field.