The Martial Unity

"Good fight man." Kane complimented. "That was clean."

"Thanks." Rui replied.

"Good application of Phantom Step." Kane noted. "I never thought about using it like that."

"It was the fastest way to end the fight." Rui lied. If he truly wanted, he could have ended the fight in ten seconds with either Blink or Stinger. But Gheelain was too weak to force him to use it. He didn't mind taking longer to win, what was three minutes versus ten seconds? It didn't make any significant difference. In exchange, his trump cards weren't revealed.

As time passed, they all got assigned their third fight one-by-one. Dalen and Milliana had fought only once, and they went onto fight two more times.

At the end of the day, out of all of them, only Rui, Kane and Fae got perfect scores with three clean victories. Milliana won only once out of three times and Dalen won two out of three in total.

The scoreboard was revealed by the end of the day, with all seventy-nine contestants' scores ranked.

Out of seventy-nine contestants, only nineteen contestants had three wins and zero losses, and about as many had three losses and zero wins.

nineteen roughly constituted the top twenty-five percent of the Martial Apprentices of the Academy as far as combat prowess went, of course there were some discrepancies where strong Martial Apprentices had run into just a notch stronger Martial Apprentices in the very first round or extremely incompatible Martial Apprentices against whom they

Martial Apprentices fell in

was quite sure that the victor of the preliminary contest would go on to be elected. Whoever the victor was, this person could not afford to lose

passed on, each Martial Apprentice fought roughly three battles a day. The number of matches per day would reduce until it hit one match a day by roughly around the end of month, by when most matches will have been

passing, he hadn't faced any of the top-twenty contenders asides from Gale. In fact, neither did Fae or Kane. They consistently faced the proportion of martial Apprentices that had much more losses than wins.

be... they're trying to maximize suspense and energy of the event by

true regardless of whether the Martial Artists fought in the beginning of the preliminary contest or the end. Thus, postponing those battle to the very end would undoubtedly create a much more tense and suspenseful

other Martial Apprentices. It did not matter who fought who when,

knew how to keep himself entertained. How else was the old man going to stave away his boredom? He was

In any case, this was good news for him. The more time

least difficult. Not because she was the weakest, it was just that she was a much more conventional Martial Artist than Kane and Nel were. Her strength came from having an immense number of potent techniques that she could apply extremely well. She had more defined and conventional weaknesses and strengths. She was generally average in all regards, but her offense was astronomical. Even the weakest of her attacks were stronger than

other hand was this powerful because of his absurd physical ability. He had always believed that humans were not capable of superhuman feats without Martial Art, but Nel had shown him how wrong he was. He still didn't understand

alone. Thankfully, the lack of techniques meant that the VOID algorithm was

didn't have maneuvering techniques, he just

didn't have defensive techniques,