The Lone Dragon

First match was between Reina and a spear using student. He was tall and st.u.r.dy and seemed to have attained first stage in spear mastery. But, Reina wasn"t all gossip and no substance. She was nimble and quick witted. She danced across the arena avoiding all the spears. Even Shi Meng was impressed. "Dang! Those are some nice dodging moves. Meng she might just be as fast as you." Jian Tan was clucking nervously on the side.

Reina was a staff user and had attained near first stage mastery in combat attacks. This combined with her excellent dodge rate, made her a front runner. She had a streak of victories in no time. However, Shi Meng and Jian Tan had more raw power and excellent movement skills. Though she tried her best, Reina still lost to them and was closing in on the third place at the end of her matches.

Shi Meng and Jian Tan swept all their matches and took the first two places in no time. When it was time for Shi Meng"s and Jian Tan"s match, Shi Meng smirked and intentionally dragged their match to a full half an hour. It was only when the blood instructor Lingtian cleared this throat loudly, Shi Meng stopped and knocked out Jian Tan, "I need to pay you back for all that incessant chatter man" and smirked again. Immediately there was a loud applause. It has been like this for all of the blood academy students matches and Shi Meng"s in particular.

The blood academy fights were finally over and the huge fan fare tamed down. It was time for the final five students from the three academies to battle against each other. Though several students from the other two academies had performed extremely well in the preliminaries, it was an established fact that the blood academy students will take the final five positions as always.

The final five students of the violet peak academy couldn"t put up much fight, against the ashenville academy students or the blood academy students. Also, except for Eluraa, the other four ashenville academy students lost to the blood academy students. Though fatty chutput came very close to defeating one blood academy student. Ultimately, he needed more experience and he lacked the real strive for the win.

Eluraa had won nine out of the fourteen matches so far. She only needed one more win to place within the top five finalists. She originally had planned to go all out and take the first position but she later decided against it and planned for placing fifth, so as to not stand out too much. There will probably be gossip about her victory being a fluke but that is exactly what she wanted. She didn"t want anyone to think that she had real strength.

The other students were struggling in their combats against the blood academy students, precisely because of the difference in innate affinities, which basically places them in an advantageous situation right from the get go. n.o.body was disappointed that they lost the matches. This tournament"s other purpose was also to show the difference between different fighters" levels and how when they are outside in the contested territories, they will face disadvantageous situations.

After their innate affinity, the next factor is the particular student"s specific expertise in combat skills mastery. The more insight you are able to perceive in a combat art, the better your moves are and more difficult to block them. You would need that much higher agility and strength to overcome this difference in mastery.

However, Eluraa had neither of these issues. Though she had tested as a student with yellow affinity, in reality, Eluraa had a white affinity, which has never been recorded in history. She also has a much stronger mental power and perceiving ability than these children, because she has basically been around for more than a million years. She had achieved first stage in both sword mastery and target mastery, which enabled her to use guns or bow and arrows as weapons as well.

Eluraa had chosen her duel swords for all the matches this tournament and was ready for her first match with the blood academy student. This is it. She only needed this match. Her opponent was a spear user from blood academy. He had placed fourth in the preliminaries and was quite confident that he was not going to lose his position in the final five.

Slowly as she had planned, Eluraa started with a basic slash attack and moved quickly, almost instantly to the opponent"s blind spot and hit him in his temple area on the neck. The highly confident student from the blood academy hadn"t prepared for this speed and had vastly underestimated the girl in front of him.

Eluraa"s strategy, from the beginning, was to win this match as quickly as possible and chalk it to luck. So, she had imbibed some trace amounts of wind elemental energy in her movements and this gave her a slight speed boost. All it took, was this slight boost, and she scored an easy win this match. She didn"t want to drag out the match, in case anyone else noticed her energy rich movements. After all, the instructors were looking over their matches and their abilities were nothing to joke about.

Contrary to her thought process, Max and Lingtian had actually not at all paid any attention to her match and hence she was able to escape their scrutiny, even, if only for these few seconds. Lingtian had turned towards Max to drag his attention back to the arena and Max was laughing and chatting with another female expert. Both of them didn"t expect the match to be over in a split second and completely missed the whole fight.

After Eluraa"s critical blow struck, the opponent was knocked out and fell down with a light thud. The whole arena was in complete silence for a few minutes and then there was a thunderous applause. Since the past five years, Eluraa was the first student, who managed to clinch a position among the finalists and was not from the blood academy.