When the stage began, all of us received a notification through our smartphones (good thing mine was waterproof, but even if it wasn"t I had it enveloped in a protective field of my magical aura) right before the invisibility cloak wore off. I felt a tingle, and sensed that the cloaking spell had been lifted. Not that it made any difference for me.There was no one else hiding in the sea with me. Smiling to myself, I began casting my summoning spells.
Above, battles erupted sporadically as teams or individuals encountered each other. Alliances were forged or broken, and pitted against one another. Unlike normal webnovels, they couldn"t be bothered to single out a specific target and focus all of their energies into hunting him. I mean, they had better things to do with their time, and more imminent threats to deal with, rather than look for someone they couldn"t find at the moment.
I mean, seriously, it wasn"t as if they held a deep grudge against me. They recognized me as one of the bigger threats, true, but that didn"t mean they would go out of their way to search for me and eliminate me, like all those caricature villains did in xianxia stories. In reality, most people had more important matters to deal with, and they couldn"t invest too much time and resources into prioritizing the elimination of someone they regarded as "trash" or insignificant, not when there were so many other strong partic.i.p.ants competing against them.
So I didn"t have to worry about that. Additionally, I did not know any of the other partic.i.p.ants personally, so I could hardly think of why they would hold a grudge against him. Perhaps…perhaps if this was a typical Chinese webnovel, I would have offended some arrogant young master who was swaggering into the qualifying stage, either bullying other people or s.e.xually hara.s.sing the female partic.i.p.ants, by stepping in and stopping him (bonus points if I slapped him in the face for his behavior). Sometimes the arrogant young master has relations with an insider on the tournament staff, and requested for help to cheat, resorting to despicable means to eliminate the protagonist at all costs for no reason other than a stupid grudge, even if it meant risking being exposed for cheating and getting disqualified. But this was reality, and no such nonsense transpired.
The water around me gently churned as my mana acc.u.mulated inside me, tiny bubbles drifting away leisurely as they formed from the increase in magical energy within the vicinity. Since I was given such time and opportunity, I was going straight to one of my Celestial Guardians, but I thought I might as well stay underwater a bit longer and summon a few other Constellation spirits as well.
The docks were a great place to test out my new summoning spells and their improved abilities. And I intended to unleash them in full.
*
Above ground, Ding Ke Po was running around, trying to avoid blazing fireb.a.l.l.s, sharp icicles and jagged lightning. The docks had erupted in a furious melee as students from the fifty or so different academies engaged each other in combat. Some were laying low, hiding out until the conflict was over and tried to reap the rewards while everyone was exhausted or wounded, but the majority didn"t bother with such tactics. After all, it wasn"t worth waiting until the end, and taking out opponents net them more points than surviving until the end.
The last ten surviving people would get forty points, for example, plus the ten bonus points for being the final partic.i.p.ants remaining – so a total of fifty points. But everyone received ten points per "kill." In other words, a person who eliminated ten other students would get a hundred points. High risk, high rewards against low risk, relatively low rewards – of course, fifty points were nothing to scoff at, but you ran the risk of being taken out by surprise before there were ten left, and thus you gained very little points in the end. It was a very risky gamble.
By the way, the first person to get eliminated would receive one point, the second person to get eliminated would receive two points, and so on and so forth until the fortieth person, who would receive forty points. The last ten would therefore receive forty points each, plus the bonus points, for a total of fifty base, because that was when the stage ended.
"Huff…"
Ding Ke Po wasn"t the team captain – he was just a show-off who was nominated for the fourth stage by his team in Divine Divination Academy because…well, they had no choice. At this rate, they wouldn"t get enough points to qualify for the next round. Ding Ke Po was the least bad option in their current roster.
Not that Ding Ke Po himself had any faith in his own abilities. While the Divine Divination Academy was famous for their ability to predict the future and they specialized in Feng Shui, the sad truth was that they were fairly bad in combat. Ding Ke Po himself was not adept in fighting, which was why he was running instead of resisting.
Throwing himself into one of the s.h.i.+ps to take cover from a volley of fireb.a.l.l.s that arced across the air and smashed down on a wooden pier, incinerating the broken splinters into blackened ash. Rolling across the deck, he then dove into the bridge as a bunch of icicles thudded against the metal. The casters weren"t paying too much attention to an insignificant threat like him, though. They were focusing their attention on other opponents.
A small slice of luck.
"d.a.m.n it," Ding Ke Po grunted, frustrated. He hastily cast a small astrological screen – a spirit circle that possessed hovering esoteric runes that manifested in strange patterns. Those who could decipher the patterns would be those capable of predicting multiple trajectories of the future and could thus act accordingly.
Of course, the future was never set in stone, and diviners such as him often saw more than one possible routes ahead of the present. The difficulty lay in trying to identify which of these routes was the most likely to occur. Divination was never certain, often muddled in ambiguous temporal tides that obscured their inner sight. Time was not a singular, linear existence, but rather multiple strands of possibilities tightly woven together. Even a single minor action was enough to throw the entire path off into an entirely new branch.
Attempting to predict the future under battle conditions and combat stress was not very advisable, but since this was the only thing Ding Ke Po could do, he had little choice. Sighing, he glanced up at the broken window and saw a volley of spears hurtling toward a cl.u.s.ter of mages, who conjured a s.h.i.+mmering barrier to deflect the lethal projectiles. Seeing the small group of mages who had banded together temporarily to form a formidable alliance, Ding Ke Po couldn"t help but clench his fists.
"If only I was able to ally with somebody…" he muttered under his breath. It couldn"t be helped. Most people didn"t take divination mages seriously, especially in a match like this. With very little combat ability, there was little that he could offer them. normally, fortune telling would usually only be useful before the battle, where he could predict what the enemy would do in advance and thus allowed his teammates to set up traps and ambushes at possible routes of advance or paths that the opponents would take. They were extremely useful in a support role, but they were pretty much dead weight in the middle of battle when the future came to pa.s.s, and the mages were all already embroiled in furious combat, too busy to listen to predictions and speculations. Additionally, everyone knew how fickle fate was, and how the divination mages" predictions were not always 100% accurate. There was no such thing as certainty when it came to forecasting the future, after all.
That was in part the reason why Ding Ke Po"s Divine Divination Academy fared so badly in the qualifiers. While they could easily make use of their divination abilities to avoid danger, monsters and bad weather, and plot the safest route possible through Aurora Forest during the first part of the qualifiers, those fortune-telling skills weren"t as helpful now that they were in the thick of actual battle. Especially since they were not allowed to use their divination spells before the stage or matches started, out of fairness. I mean, if they could predict the types of matches, the venue of the matches, and the movements of all their opponents beforehand, and make their preparations, they would have an overwhelming advantage – thus, just like every other spell such as summoning magic or ultimate spells, they were obviously not allowed to cast divination spells before the match. This ended up gimping them quite a bit.
While they couldn"t directly cast divination spells to predict the matches or their opponents directly, they could do other stuff with their fortune telling spells. So, avoiding anything to do with the tournament, they cast a different type of divination spell to measure luck or success, and calculated that Ding Ke Po would be the one with the highest odds of success for this particular qualifying round. However, that was the limit of what they could do – any more direct, and they would be breaking the rules and would end up being disqualified for casting spells for the match before the match. So all they knew was that Ding Ke Po would have the highest probability of making it past the qualifiers. The issue, of course, is that the forecast was still pretty bleak. Just because he had the highest chances didn"t mean the chances were actually high. 2 percent of winning was still higher than 1 percent, especially if that was the scores for everyone else"s. Even so, the other members of Divine Divination Academy decided to stake everything on him.
"We have nothing to lose," the captain told him with a shrug.
And thus he was here, cowering in fear from the aggressive and powerful spells from all the other partic.i.p.ants. Cursing his breath and wondering if he would eventually be ignominiously eliminated without even knowing what hit him, Ding Ke Po continued to trace the astrological circle with his finger and muttered incantatons under his breath. He could see several paths open to him, none of which looked promising. Stay here, and he would eventually be eliminated when a powerful spell destroyed the s.h.i.+p he was taking shelter on. Leave his refuge and he would be taken out by a stray shot. No matter what action he took, it seemed that he was doomed for failure…
…until he saw a single narrow strand of time that offered him a tiny hope of salvaging his situation and preserving some dignity. His face fell when he saw it, but he steeled his resolve, realizing that he had little choice.
"Time to convince him to ally with him," he muttered. Then the s.h.i.+p he was on rocked, a ma.s.sive fireball disintegrating a huge part of the s.h.i.+p. Rolling away from burning metal and blazing debris, Ding Ke Po coughed and gagged on the smoke as he ran off, swearing at himself for jumping s.h.i.+p a second too late.
"!!!"
As he did so, landing clumsily on the pier that was next to the docked s.h.i.+p, he realized that a barrage of earth spikes was raining down upon his position. There was no way he would be able to evade those in time…
Splas.h.!.+
At that moment, a colossal tidal wave swept up, inadvertently was.h.i.+ng away the bombardment of earth spikes in its fury. The small tsunami poured dowh on the mages in the sh.o.r.e, and while most of them were skilled enough to withdraw and leap out of the way, there was still a good number who was caught by the wave, which immediately froze once it touched the ground.
In just a few instances, a dozen or so mages were frozen solid, encased totally in ice. They weren"t knocked out or eliminated yet, judging from their mana signatures that flared up viciously as they sought to break free of their ice. Even so, it would be quite the strenuous endeavor that consumed a huge chunk of their mana.
But they still broke free.
Everyone spun around and stared in my direction as I emerged from the waves, standing atop Cetus"s head. The gigantic whale almost flailed about, leaving a ma.s.sive trail of frozen ice in his wake, and encasing the imprisoned dudes once again.
Having been forewarned and sort of predicting my entrance, Ding Ke Po was able to seek shelter somehow. Just before the wave hit, he had jumped into another s.h.i.+p, seeking refuge inside one of the cabins. Once Cetus was done with his second spell, he slowly poked his head out of the frozen cabin, breaking a small hole in the wall of ice that coated the door. He watched me, stunned, but not as stupefied as everyone else in the docks, almost all of whom were staring at me with their mouths hanging wide open.
"Hey, everybody," I greeted them with a wave of my hand. "I was hoping that I would make a big splash with my entrance…did I succeed?"