Tearing Through Leo and Lily Alike
"I'll tear through Leo and Lily alike."
"Lil-ha~!"
The moment the stream went live, what greeted the viewers was Lily, gearing up for a ranked match, and a pristine white battlefield.
A vast expanse of white, with a curtain of blue light draping down over it.
The rank match will begin shortly.
Platinum — 891 Points
Match Format — Single Round · Stat Adjustment · Equipment Adjustment
From Platinum onward, the battlefields start to change. Up through Gold, you fight your opponent two-handed in a bare, blinding-white room — but once you reach Platinum, a scattering of terrain features appears, and the arena dresses itself in the colors of the tier. A sky of shimmering blue overhead, gray walls evoking a great temple.
And then the opponent came into view.
A psychomancer, idly lifting the stones scattered about the arena with telekinesis.
"I'll be starting my Saturday ranked stream now."
The Psychomancer.
A rare class that drew on a peculiar resource called mental force rather than mana. So long as one's mind held firm, the telekinetic power it granted was virtually inexhaustible — a discipline so demanding that even back then, only a handful of people had ever mastered it.
Clatter.
The temple's broken stones rose into the air, pulled up by telekinetic force. A head of deep indigo hair, a touch long for a man, floated upward with them, and his black eyes bleached bone-white.
I could feel his mental force pushing all the way out to here.
He drew a spear.
Wise. Swing a hammer and shards would scatter everywhere — and every one of those shards would become fuel for a psychomancer.
The instant the match began, I darted behind the psychomancer at speed. The spear twisted in my grip, and a charge wreathed in the wind spirit's gale came howling forward.
KKRRAK—!
The stones compressed midair, forming a wall that swallowed the charge whole. But the spear ground those pathetic pebbles to powder in a heartbeat, as if amused that rock alone had been offered up as a defense.
Any ordinary fighter would have flinched. The psychomancer simply calmly summoned something out of thin air and parted his lips.
Vmmm…!
"Reverse Gravity."
The pull of the world inverted. In a single breath, everything on the battlefield lifted off the ground — and even the spear meant for the psychomancer's throat lost its weight, its force bleeding away into nothing.
What he had summoned were golden blades forged of some peculiar alloy. Five of them rode his telekinesis straight toward my body.
'Emergency.'
The inverted gravity released me all at once. The spear whirled in a full circle around me, its mana-laden edge shattering the telekinetic force threaded through the blades — and with one clean parry, I batted a single blade hurtling back toward its owner.
The golden blade came to a dead stop, a hand's width from the psychomancer's throat.
"Blades do not strike the hand that owns them."
Fwp. The blade returned to his grip.
"And they never fail to strike an enemy of their master."
KA-KANG!
Shhk!
"...!"
The blade grazed my cheek. I had blocked it — I was certain I'd blocked it — and yet it cut me anyway on its way past.
The remaining four blades were already wheeling toward me. Each one carried the Sure-Hit enchantment — a full matched set. Blocking them meant nothing at all.
'This is where skills really shine, isn't it.'
People marveled at how everyone used mana in their own unique way, envied it even — but in my eyes, the system-granted skills these players possessed were extraordinary. Effects like absolute certainty simply hadn't existed back then, not outside the higher Celestials and Demons.
Simply put, these people were wielding something not unlike the power of Celestials and Demons themselves.
The spear twisted. Onto one layered current of mana, a second current folded itself, then a third — a spear of howling wind. The Sure-Hit blades that never failed to seek their target found themselves pushed back, inch by inch, unable to close.
But they would break through eventually, and open wounds in my flesh. To stop those blades, I would have to incapacitate the caster — or kill him outright.
And this opponent was a psychomancer, built entirely around telekinesis. A battlefield strewn with ready-made debris was enormously to his advantage.
Perhaps sensing the threat, he hoisted every shard of stone into the air and stacked them around himself layer upon layer, wrapping his body in a wall of shields. Not ordinary fragments, either — every single one was reinforced by telekinetic force.
They wouldn't break easily.
'Spear of Fission.'
Crack.
One spear became two. Two became four. Then eight.
"...!"
'Eight's the limit, then.'
In the past I had split it into hundreds. But given my current state, eight was a respectable showing.
After all, the Spear of Fission was a technique originally built on divinity. Substituting mana for divine power alone was already quite the feat.
KWAAAAAAAH!
The first spear gnawed away at the telekinetic force in the debris. The second spear split the debris with cracks. The third blew half of it away. The fourth shattered the shield wall entirely.
And the fifth—
Crunch.
"No need for that one."
The fourth had already skewered him through.
"Wow."
"Good game."
"...Yeah."
The psychomancer, wearing a look of sheer defeat, dissolved into motes of light and vanished. Wins had become such a foregone conclusion that neither the chat nor his opponents seemed to be all that surprised anymore.
Nothing real would show up until I climbed into Challenger, would it? The fight against Vlack, for what it's worth, had been genuinely fun.
Platinum 891 Points → Platinum 900 Points
Promotion to Diamond: V o o o o
Upon reaching Diamond, the Honor Shop will unlock.
Maintaining Diamond rank for 1 week grants 50 Honor and the "Diamond" title (weekly retention).
Losing 3 matches below 900 points will result in rank demotion.
"Oh."
The Honor Shop, huh. What did they sell in there?
"What do they sell at the Honor Shop?"
"Rank 1? Who is it?"
Who among all these countless rankers stood proudly at the very top? Choco, Vlack, all the formidable rankers I'd crossed paths with lately held fast to their spots in the top ten — but none of them was first. Even Leo, practically hailed as the strongest alive, sat at number two.
"Hmm..."
Sword God, was it.
'I only ever knew one Sword God.'
"Hngh, hn-hngh~!"
Somewhere on DeoEn's battlefield, Team CO's private scrim was in full swing. The teams were running practice matches against one another to prepare for the DCK Summer, opening in July.
Team CO's sparring partner was WoW, a squad renowned for its formidable mage lineup. CO was a strong team in its own right, but its matchup against WoW had never been favorable, and their scrim record showed it.
And yet, somehow, every recent scrim had been ending in a CO victory.
Vwoom~
"Hhhk—!"
At the center of it all stood the team's ace, the wielder of the golden spear — ChotaChokaChukaChip. She'd always been praised for her spearwork but faulted for everything else. Ever since the Mock Siege Battle team selection, though, she'd become a different person.
Her spear's movements and rhythm had turned wildly unorthodox — as if her sheer technique had leveled up, raw stats aside. Her ranked standing had climbed along with it; she now sat at fourth.
"So? Something good happen lately?"
"Who knows?"
At her cousin Rater's question — the psychomancer who juggled his purple cubes — Choco gave a little smile and spun the golden spear once in her hand.
Golden mana coursed quietly along its shaft, flowing through her heart. It no longer moved only along its sanctioned paths; it acted on its own, obeying its master's will alone.
Exactly like that someone from the Mock Siege Battle.
'Releasing something like this all by myself — no wonder it goes berserk.'
She had no idea why that idiot had set it free, but one thing was certain now.
'I can win.'
"Your form's been great lately. Even the coach is happy."
"The Spring championship is as good as ours."
"Confidence is good, but... don't forget the Mock Siege Battle first. Everyone's counting on you."
"Obviously."
VWOOOONG~!
The golden spear, buffed by the cube's power, lanced across the arena, ripped straight through the two enemy mages in the distance — and announced Team CO's victory.
"I'll tear through Leo and Lily alike."