Yujun Doesn't Watch the Duel
Yujun did not watch the duel. He put his head to work instead, hard, on the study of magic.
He had laid down a new system of magic, but he did not consider it complete. Set beside Ancient Magic it stood two full dimensions higher, so incomplete hardly meant it lagged behind anything. It simply failed to satisfy him.
A spell thrown together in a hurry hits weaker than one I've prepared.
By the theory, that should not happen. Will alone ought to call a perfect spell into being on the spot.
Is it because I get impatient?
When he practiced alone, it had never once gone that way. His best guess was that in a crisis the spell's power failed to come out at full strength.
Strange. I have Equanimity.
If a spell did not manifest perfectly the instant he thought of it, New-Generation Magic lost a measure of its advantage, and that did not sit well with him.
Should I raise Equanimity's rank?
That might be the answer. New-Generation Magic, which manifested through will, had been built with Equanimity's effect taken into account. If that effect fell short of what he had expected, the same thing could happen again.
A gem would be nice. I don't have one right now, though... troublesome.
Setting trait gems aside, what other way was there to raise Equanimity's rank?
Like the other skills, I might be able to train it up.
Yujun began to meditate.
The chatter of players watching the duel was enough to scatter anyone's focus, but Yujun was not the sort to yield to that much. Right there, he even used Super Concentration.
Meditation calms the mind... it might even have some effect on Equanimity.
In truth it didn't mean much. He was only doing it because he had nothing else to do. Had things been otherwise, he would not have tried at all.
And yet, after about three minutes, the meditation proved more effective than he had expected. His heart eased, and his head felt clear besides.
Could this be Super Concentration's doing?
It didn't matter either way. Yujun sank deeper into the meditation, keeping the Equanimity trait firmly in mind.
Time passed, and Yujun drifted wholly free of everything around him. He slipped into a trance of self-forgetfulness, of total absorption. He had felt something similar once before, mid-swing with a sword, but this time the sensation struck far harder. He could not put it into words. He simply tasted ecstasy.
The three great appetites of humankind — hunger, lust, and sleep.
A pleasure that leapt clean past all three slammed through his mind. Even so, his spirit did not grow faint. His mind stayed whole. His focus held, sharp and unbroken. Even while the pleasure washed over him, Yujun reached for something more.
Let's try holding Equanimity here.
It was plainly not a state in which calm came easily, and that was precisely why the training mattered. More accurately, it was training of the mind's image. Set against his present condition, it was like dropping a great boulder into still water again and again without pause — and demanding the surface not ripple even when the stone struck. By any ordinary sense it was absurd, yet little by little Yujun was managing it. The water was not yet truly still, and the disturbance was not yet small, but the waves were shrinking.
It's actually working.
Yujun broke into a crooked grin — and in that instant:
A single, plain line from the System. It held more than enough to please him. Not one rank — two.
This is a jackpot.
The gain outstripped what even a decent trait gem would have bought him. He had half doubted it, and yet mental-image training had raised a trait's rank this easily. Of course it had not truly been easy. His abilities were so absurdly broken that the results only looked effortless.
He glanced around. Not much time seemed to have passed. Two duels had ended, so fifteen minutes at most. How far did Equanimity reach now that its rank had risen? He was intensely curious, but he could not test it here. He needed something capable of stirring his heart.
If someone reasonably strong shows up, I should enter.
To manufacture a crisis for himself, he had no choice but to fight someone. Yujun waited. Until a true powerhouse appeared, that long line of challengers was unlikely to vanish — and that, if anything, made joining then the right moment.
"No sign of him stopping at all! How far do you mean to go, Brian!"
Hearing the announcer's noisy commentary, Brian wrinkled his nose. It was a look of pure satisfaction. He was on a fourteen-win streak, and with no further challengers stepping forward he simply stood there, waiting for the next one. The longer the streak ran, the more of the dozens queued up peeled away from the line. In the end it had come to this: step into the queue, and you were challenging Brian on the spot.
"I wrote him off as your typical musclebound orc, but he's no joke."
"Right? I was at the front of the line and nearly jumped out of my skin."
"You ran? Pathetic."
"You think you'd have done any different?"
"...Fair point."
A member of the Heavenly, listening in on the two players, muttered to himself.
"Brian. Quite the name on the Continent. If anything, that reputation undersells him. To think even skilled Heavenly can't match him at all."
"Famous? How come I never heard of him?"
"Most of the Heavenly don't spare orcs a thought. They consider them a lesser race, don't they?"
"..."
He had nothing to say to that. The Heavenly, by and large, really were that way.
"Then who's going to stop him?"
"It isn't that no one could. Whether those sorts would bother with a duel like this, I couldn't say... For an event of this scale, though, you can take Brian as the strongest."
Just as they said, Brian had yet to meet his match. Worse, even when he could not quite kill an opponent, he left them at death's door. His strength was so overwhelming that a swift intervention from the referee did no good at all. Unless one was thoroughly confident in one's own skill, stepping up was no easy thing.
That was when Yujun, cloak pulled low over his face, climbed onto the stage. He looked as though he were openly trying to hide who he was, yet no one said a word — because he had taken his place with the point of his sword leveled at Brian. A challenger, at last. Most of the eyes in the banquet hall swung toward them.
"Um... you'll need to remove the cloak."
At the announcer's words, Yujun threw the cloak off without hesitation. What showed beneath was not his face. It was an elf's — breathtakingly beautiful, and nothing like him at all.
This ought to fool them all, right?
He had altered the look of his face with magic. More precisely, he had laid an illusion over his surroundings so that it would appear that way. Casting an illusion looked harder than simply changing one's features, but in truth it was not.
Changing my actual form just doesn't click.
It was not a matter of magical skill. He simply did not know the method. That sort of thing, as he understood it, was what dragons did.
Turning undead is possible with an item, but...
He had given up on that. Becoming undead would only make him stand out more. The illusion was something he had just devised, and he judged that no one here could see through it. Even if someone with a sharp eye did, it hardly mattered.
And if they notice, so what?
That was his frame of mind. If anyone protested, he could change his look again, walk out, and walk back in. Or he could threaten them. Nothing was more convenient than having the power to back it up. He had reshaped the look of his equipment as well, to suit an elf's frame.
"Damn, he's handsome..."
"An elf? Shame. That face is about to turn to dough."
"No. I think it'll be over clean, if anything. Honestly, how many of Brian's punches can that elf take?"
Among players, few habits were more foolish than judging strength by bulk. Even so, the gear Yujun now appeared to wear was so plain that their lack of expectation was only natural.
"What? An elf for an opponent?"
Brian snorted. He had never once lost to an elf. It was not that orcs and elves had some special racial matchup. He simply knew elven habits so well that they called him the Elf Butcher. An elf stepping up only stoked his excitement.
"You. Don't think you'll go without pain."
"Huh? You mean... you're gonna kill me?"
Yujun said it with his eyes gone round, as if he understood nothing at all. Brian's smile turned sinister.
"Not that I mean to kill you... just that the odds of an accident like that are high."
"The opposite could happen too, couldn't it?"
"...What? Hahaha!"
Brian roared with laughter, clapping his hands.
"You've got a mouth on you, huh? Might be a waste to kill you."
"Your story keeps changing. You're not right in the head. Is that an orc thing?"
Racial slurs were not, in truth, especially taboo in the Tower of Infinity. Orcs, though, were proud, and they tended to fly into a rage the moment their race itself was belittled. Players, for their part, unconsciously held beautiful elves to be the superior beings — and the orcs knew it. Brian's eyes flushed red. For a moment it looked like a skill, but a check of his mana showed nothing of the sort. He was simply furious.
"Come on."
Yujun crooked a finger and did not let up, needling Brian for all he was worth so the orc would be driven to his strongest skill.
"Fine. If you want to die, I won't stop you."
"W-wait a moment! It hasn't started yet!"
The announcer rushed in to hold them back.
"Looks like we're both ready. Hurry it up."
"Yes. Very well. The duel begins!"
The instant the words left the announcer's mouth, Brian charged. Yujun did not move. He only extended his sword. It was a simple motion, yet the line and the arc of it were so exquisite that Brian flinched and hurled himself aside. The shift from a full charge into a dodge flowed as smooth as water.
Not bad. That isn't easy.
Yujun was impressed. Brian had something of a gatekeeper about him. He could not so much as set foot in the Heavenly Realm, but beneath it he might well be called the strongest — and strong he certainly was. Among the other races dwelling in Heaven, perhaps contending for the very top. The way he moved was anything but ordinary; his abilities seemed weighted toward combat rather than magic. In the duel itself he had not used magic even once. A player of that level would have magic skills, so it was not that he could not use them. He was showing his confidence in his own way.
Yujun did not press the attack. He waited for Brian's. Brian put on a blank face, as if he were not rattled in the least, raised both axes, and came on like a shot. Far faster than before — and this time he swept in along a curve, as if circling wide. He was clearly wary of the strike Yujun had just made. It did him no good. Brian was already in the palm of Yujun's hand.
Crack!
A fist shot out like lightning and buried itself dead center in Brian's forehead.