by Jakob Tanner
He then walked back to his squad with Harold.
They had to go capture another team’s flag.
They now had forty-five minutes to do so.
Mirabel and the rest of the cat-folk stayed high up in the forest trees within the throng of branches where no one could see them lurking.
Through the mess of branches, Mirabel watched the human team head off from the defeated frog-folk.
All the eyes of her teammates watched the human team with a hunger.
“Are those the brats that harmed you two?” asked their leader, the A-ranker known as Atticus.
“Yes,” Gregoire hissed.
Gregoire’s eyes were filled with anger and bloodlust.
Mirabel could recognize it so easily because she felt it herself.
The humans had made a mockery of them.
It was time they showed them that the cat-folk were not a race to be trifled with.
Even if this was a mere simulation, Mirabel planned to eke out as much pain and punishment on the humans as she could get away with, especially that red-haired brat.
“Alright,” hissed Atticus. “Once they’re out of earshot of the frog-folk, we strike.”
33
Max and his companions moved through the forest at top speed with Harold leading the way.
Max wasn’t sure where the old man was taking them now that their initial plan had been scrapped.
Would they attack the next weakest team? And who exactly was that? Or would they simply fight the first team they came across?
They were running out of time to strategize for the perfect target. They just needed to find another team and steal their flag.
Harold suddenly stopped and the squad quickly followed suit.
“We’re being tracked,” said Harold.
Everyone’s shoulders straightened.
Sarah gripped the flag tightly in the center of the squad.
“The enemy has surrounded us,” said Harold. “I tried to get us out of it, but they’re quick and agile and moving above in the trees. A battle is unavoidable now. Get ready—”
A rustle of leaves came from above and suddenly they were being attacked from all sides.
Atticus, the cat-folk’s A-ranker, was confident that they could annihilate the human team and acquire their flag with ease.
He thought this as he descended through the trees of the simulated forest and locked onto his target.
Harold Swiftstriker.
The human team’s A-ranker.
The team’s one and only trump card. The only real threat they needed to concern themselves with.
The old human looked up and locked eyes with Atticus.
The fool, thought Atticus. He thinks his time manipulation trait makes him invincible. Think again!
Atticus swung a fist at the old man.
The old man dodged it with ease.
But Atticus expected that and sent another fist flying at the man.
The old man dodged it again.
But Atticus expected that too and had a kick ready to go.
Atticus knew the old man could manipulate time within a small space around him, but if Atticus simply came at the man with an endless barrage of attacks, he would force the human A-ranker to trigger the trait continuously until he ran out of uses.
The old man seemed to catch onto this idea and tried to hold down his wrists.
But that was where Atticus’ trait came in: extreme contortion.
The cat-man stretched his arm out of the old man’s temporal defense and then leaped above the man twisting his arm in such a way that would have broken it had he not had his special trait.
Now above he could attack with his other hand or with his feet.
The old human’s eyes bulged.
He now sees his mistake, the fool, Atticus thought.
So long as the old man clutched his arm, the temporal defense was pretty much locked into that movement.
Meaning if Harold wanted to manipulate time further, he’d have to let go of Atticus’ hand.
The cat-folk’s A-ranker grinned.
He’d put the old fool in a bind.
He could let go and free Atticus’ hand again to keep swinging attacks at him; or keep clutching, but force another type of attack to go through.
What’s it going to be foolish human?
Max watched the fight between the two A-rankers with awe and horror.
They were moving at such intense speeds, he could barely keep up with them.
The cat-folk A-ranker had some kind of extreme contortion ability which allowed him to bend and swerve in odd ways that kept Harold on his toes even with the temporal defense.
Meanwhile, the other attackers had been pushed back by Blake’s swirl of flames attack.
They’d been pushed back but they definitely weren’t down for the count.
“What are you going to do now without your precious A-ranker to save you?” snickered Gregoire in the distance.
Max gritted his teeth.
As if he needed Harold’s help to kick that guy’s butt, he thought to himself. Had the cat forgotten their most recent interaction?
“I’m sorry,” said Max. “Did the last time I beat the crap out of you give you amnesia?”
Gregoire snickered.
“Foolish human,” he hissed. “I was going easy on you!”
Max’s eyes twitched.
Could the cat-man be serious? What other tricks was he keeping up his sleeve?
POOF!
Max’s eyes widened.
Gregoire had not brought a new trick to the table, but he had increased the scale of his one trick’s power.
Instead of two doppelgänger copies of himself, there was suddenly a group of clones surrounding them. At least twenty or thirty Gregoire’s filled the nearby forest.
Max and the rest of the team tensed and prepared themselves for the onslaught.
They were completely surrounded.
“This doesn’t look good,” said Blake.
“What are we going to do?” asked Casey.
Sarah trembled holding onto the team’s flag.
Damn it, thought Max.
The cat-folk’s offensive strategy began with a brilliant start. They neutralized their most powerful team member and now they were overwhelming the rest of the team with their special abilities.
Think, Max, think.
They needed to come up with a strategy on the fly to compete with this.
There was just one problem.
They had no way to communicate with each other without their opponent’s overhearing it.
34
Mother watched the humans and cat-folk brawl with each other from the shadows of the tree trunks.
She grinned at the cat-folk who were overwhelming the humans.
“When do I get to play,” said The Toddler, drool falling out of his mouth as he watched the battle eagerly. “I want to kill too!”
Patience, Mother thought to herself.
She would more than happily kill them all, but that wasn’t their current goal.
Mother placed a hand on the deranged man’s shoulder.
“Wait, darling,” she said. “Let the two tire themselves out. Then you can play.”
The Toddler moaned and cracked his neck a few times and then slumped on the ground.
The rest of the team kept their arms crossed and kept an eye on the nearby battle.
“If only The Gambler was here,” said Mother. “Then we could bet on this match.”
The mercenary team snickered in the shadows, waiting for the right moment to strike.
Max and the rest of the team didn’t waste any time.
If they were going to be surrounded by an army of Gregoire’s as well as the other members of the cat-folk team, they had to strike.
Take back control of the battle.
“It’s time to show off what we accomplished during our weeks of training,” shouted Blake. “Sarah! Casey! Let’s do this!”
Ma
x had no idea what was about to happen next; but he did know that they needed to hit the cat-folk with as much offensive power as possible. Either it would be enough to harm and push the cat-folk back, or it would at the very least, distract them long enough for Harold to be freed up to help them.
“Max, hold this for a sec,” said Sarah, tossing the flag into his hands.
Uh oh, Max thought.
Sarah then leaped high in the air, far above everyone else’s heads.
Max was impressed. She was using mana manipulation in her feet to augment her normal jump. It had taken Max’s more than half a year to master such techniques.
Once in the air, she glowed silver as she imbued her entire body with mana.
Casey leaped in the air following after Sarah and materialized a long roll of paper from her climber’s pouch, wrapping it around the E-ranker until she was surrounded by a sphere of paper.
Blake then added to the combo move by lighting the origami sphere holding Sarah on fire, followed by Casey creating a huge gust of wind to hurl the sphere down towards the cat-folk.
“ORIGAMI HUMAN METEOR!” all three of them shouted.
The cat-folks’ eyes bulged at the immensely powerful attack.
“Such power! How is that even possible!?”
The combo ability meant that the spell was being augmented by all of their strengths—it didn’t matter that Sarah’s base stats were E-rank because combined with the other two climber’s power, the whole ability was raised to a high C-rank level, if not B-rank!
KABOOM!
The meteor smashed into the ground dealing tons of damage and even creating a huge crater in the surrounding area.
As the smoke cleared and Sarah’s body regenerated from the combo ability she had been at the center of, Casey and Blake continued their assault.
Casey unleashed from her pouch a flock of paper cranes imbued with mana and the manipulated wind around them.
She guided them forth in a huge tornado towards the enemy team, while Blake triggered his flamebringer spell and lit the birds on fire.
But the cat-folk didn’t just stand there and take it.
The team’s E-ranker lifted up her hands and diluted some of the tornado energy with her own airbringer trait.
“Oh crap,” said Blake. “They have their own airbringer!”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Casey with gritted teeth. “She can’t overpower me at her level.”
“No, I can’t,” snickered the E-rank cat-folk girl. “But I can still dilute your ability’s full strength.”
Max didn’t fully understand their E-rank opponent’s confidence. Then he saw what the cat-folk’s D-ranker was up to.
The D-rank cat-folk had black fur and the slice trait. He was triggering his ability to slice down forest trees, creating more fire all around them.
Damn.
These guys were clever, Max realized. They knew they couldn’t win against Casey and Blake’s offensive move, so they used it to the best advantage they could, which was to harshen the environmental conditions for all of them.
There was a silver lining though. Their attack had put the cat-folk on the back foot; before this forest fire reversal the cat-folk had full control over the battle, now they were jockeying back and forth to set the terms of their fight.
They had to keep piling on the pressure.
He quickly looked around.
Casey could reuse some of her paper cranes but not all of them and he wasn’t sure how many more she kept in reserve.
If only I could help add to their firepower, he thought.
Max glanced at the swirling ash of the trees on fire. The fallen leaves of trees that had been sliced in half.
Maybe I can.
He tossed the flag back to Sarah and told her to get back into a defensive position. He then lifted his finger and let it be hit with the swirling wind of Casey’s airbringer trait.
He then triggered the ability, creating a swirl of wind energy around him.
He focused the wind on all the fallen leaves around him and let them be picked up with his wind spell.
After enough leaves had been collected he shot the tornado towards the cat-folk.
“One thousand razor leaves attack!”
Everyone looked at the attack with amazement. Blake and Casey couldn’t believe they were getting reinforcements to their offensive ability.
Max grinned as his plan succeeded in front of him. He had used the principles of Casey’s paper crane attack and applied it to the forest leaves on the ground. The leaves might not be as powerful as her cranes, but they led to a similar damaging effect.
The leaves sliced through Gregoire’s clones. The army of cat-folk doppelgängers lifted up their arms to withstand the attack.
Unfortunately for them, the razor leaf attack was too powerful.
The leaves sliced through the skin and flesh of the doppelgängers, causing them to burst into smoke and reveal themselves as the cheap distraction that they were.
“Looks like we’re back to fighting on even ground,” said Max, readying himself into another fighting position.
With Gregoire’s clones diminished, it was back to four on four, while Harold and the cat-folk’s A-ranker fought off to the side.
“Don’t worry,” shouted Gregoire, adjusting his fighting stance. “We’re just getting started!”
Of all the mercenaries, it was the one whose face was hidden behind their hood that spoke up.
Mother and the rest of the team had been watching the ferocious battle with both eagerness and excitement, until the hooded figure broke through the immersed concentration.
“We can end the tournament now,” said the figure. “We can capture all the flags.”
Mother’s eyebrow raised.
That certainly was the plan, but she still believed it was better to let the teams duke it out until they had nothing left and when they believed they’d either won or lost the battle, that was when they should ideally strike.
SWOOSH!
Someone was behind them.
How is that possible? How did they sneak up on us?
Mother turned around to find a squad of five climbers with golden eyes and tiny horns on their heads.
The Caesarians.
“Collect all the flags and win the tournament before it gets started, huh?” snickered Tiberius, the Caesarian A-ranker. “Sorry, but only one team can win that strategy and it’s going to be us.”
35
Mother raised her eyebrows.
The Caesarian squad stepped closer to them.
“An old lady, a psychotic man dressed up as a baby, a wild card hidden in shadows, a goth chick, and a surfer dude,” laughed Tiberius. “Just hand us over your flag and make it easy for all of us.”
Mother smirked. So this man was underestimating the strength of her squad, huh?
That was fine.
But she wasn’t going to rise to the bait. Pride was for fools.
She snapped her fingers and the entire mercenary team vanished before the Caesarians very eyes.
Tiberius blinked in shock.
The mercenary squad had been standing right in front of them and with a snap of fingers they had all entirely disappeared.
“What the—” groaned Tiberius.
How had they done that? Did the A-rank woman have some kind of group teleport ability? Or area of effect invisibility?
How did that woman pull the rug out from them so easily?
Smoke filled the forest as a nearby battle between the cat-folk and human team raged on.
“Anyone sensing the mercenary squad nearby?” asked Tiberius.
“None captain,” answered one of his colleagues.
“Alright, change of plans,” said Tiberius. “We let the cat-folk and humans rip each other to shreds and then swoop in. After we’ve done that, then we can keep focused on the mercenaries and everyone else.”
It’s a good plan, Tiberius thought. Sure, there was a quick change of directi
on, but their mission and goals had stayed relatively the same.
Tiberius was fairly content and unruffled by the strange disappearance of the mercenary team. He still felt like they had this round in the bag.
That was until the Elestrian team stepped out of the nearby shadows.
“Looks like we’re getting into a fresh fight after all,” said Tiberius.
All five of the Caesarian team then conjured their mana weapons, bright blue energy taking the shape of spears, swords, daggers, whips, and claws.
“Ah, the uniformity of the Caesarian soldier class,” mocked the Elestrian team’s A-ranker. A woman named Florence Seedling.
Tiberius gritted his teeth. He took pejorative remarks about their positions in the Caesarian social hierarchy every day from his own people, he refused to be disrespected by another tower race entirely.
Tiberius made a move to rush the Elestrians with his team right behind him.
Florence smirked and wagged a finger.
“Not going anywhere too fast with vines around your feet,” she smiled.
Tiberius looked down and saw that vines had wrapped themselves around him and the rest of his accomplices’ legs.
They were paralyzed!
“Ah, Caesarian’s are renowned for a lot of things,” laughed Florence. “But not quite their fighting ability, isn’t that true?”
Tiberius scowled and with his mana sword, shredded through the vines and helped his teammates.
“Just because your abilities are more colorful than ours,” said Tiberius. “Doesn’t mean you’re going to beat us.”
“Oh, they’re more than colorful,” said Florence. “Will?”
Will, the Elestrian team’s C-ranker, triggered his trait.
The boy’s muscles began to bulge, growing bigger and bigger. His skin began to turn purple and his jaw elongated until towering above them all was a shadow bear.
“Still think you got this?” snickered Florence.
The kid had a transformative monster ability. It was quite unique and Tiberius could see why such a teenaged boy would get nominated for the Elestrian team.