by Jakob Tanner
Max shook his head. I can’t have that.
He leapt back and triggered the slice ability once more.
The energy blade shot forward and ripped through the flesh of the mushroom monster with ease.
As soon the monster was defeated and had disintegrated into the monster core, Max immediately jumped out of the ring to make sure he wasn’t hit by the venomous mushroom vapor.
The crowd booed. They were losing money as they kept betting against Max. They had come to this arena to see someone like him get devoured and killed. They were all out of luck today.
“You’re not giving them much of a show kid,” said one of the staff members, handing him another mana potion along with the mushroom monster’s copper core and the coins it dropped.
“Give me a stronger monster to fight then,” said Max.
The man snickered. “Just you wait, kid. Your final match of the morning is about to start and that’s exactly what you’re getting.”
Max thought the man was trying to intimidate him, but he grinned just as happily back at the staff member.
The whole reason he came there today was to fight stronger monsters.
Bring it, he thought.
He swallowed down his mana potion and stepped back into the ring.
The arena staff removed the cage of the mushroom monster and returned with a much larger cage.
Max at first couldn’t make out the monster behind the bars.
It rattled and hissed in its steel cage.
Finally, the staff members placed it in the center of the ring. They opened it before rushing off.
“Let the match begin!”
A large creature the size of a grizzly bear stepped out of the cage, but it was no grizzly bear, but rather a monster made entirely of stone.
“Five hundred coppers on the silver-ranked monster destroying the boy!”
People cheered and took up the bets.
Max snickered. The audience really wanted him to die, huh?
He didn’t care.
He was just psyched to be finally facing a higher-ranked monster.
Here we go, he thought.
39
Max didn’t waste any time.
He stretched out his arm and triggered slice.
The golden blade of energy emerged in front of him and shot forward at the rock golem.
The crowd booed at that.
They were sick of Max decimating monsters with a single slice move. It was boring and made worse by the fact that they kept betting against him and losing more and more money.
But Max didn’t care. He wanted the silver monster core more than anything else.
He also had learned from his mistake with the mushroom monster. He couldn’t give the monster even a second of a chance to unleash a move against him.
The slice attack shot across the ring towards the massive rock golem.
The creature quickly pivoted and the energy blade went right through the creature’s arm rather than the center of it where Max had been aiming for.
The rock golem’s right arm fell to the floor.
“I hate this kid!” someone moaned.
“Kill him rock golem!” cheered another.
Max didn’t understand why they hadn’t tried to change their bets at the last minute in his favor. If they bet on him, they might actually win some money. They still seemed quite confident in the powers of the rock golem though.
What did they know that Max didn’t?
The rock golem crouched down and picked up its fallen arm.
The crowd cheered at the rock golem’s actions.
Max tried to figure out what was going on.
Was the rock golem going to throw the fallen arm at him as a projectile? Or swing it as a melee weapon? What the heck was this rock golem doing?
The monster did none of the things Max was expecting.
Instead, the monster shoved its arm back into its shoulder socket like it had never been detached.
The crowd cheered with more rage now than ever.
“Weren’t expecting that were you punk! The rock golem’s going to kill you now!”
Damn.
One of the rock golem’s abilities allowed it to rebuild itself.
That, however, didn’t make the rock golem invincible. It just meant Max had to be more cunning with his slice attack. He had only two more good shots left—after that, he’d have to spend the rest of the fight dodging until it was safe again to use his trait once more. He was sure the staff members wouldn’t like that and the gamblers would throw a riot.
So he needed to kill this thing with two slice attacks then.
The golem didn’t care about his internal strategizing though and went straight to work on killing him.
The monster placed its hands on the floor of the ring.
An aura of energy surrounded the monster’s arms and hands.
“Crush the punk!!” shouted the hecklers.
Whatever was about to happen, thought Max, this was the rock golem’s trait ability. The re-attachable arm wasn’t a magical attack and just a part of its physiological make-up. The incoming move was the real threatening power of the monster.
The floor began to rumble.
CRACKKK!!!
The ground cracked and rippled in straight zigzagging lines towards Max.
“The kid won’t survive this,” said one of the audience member. “The rock golem always crushes the upstarts.”
BOOM!
The rock golem’s earthquake ability had torn a massive scar of rubble into the ring.
Dirt and debris swirled around cloaking the ring momentarily.
Max coughed and got to his feet.
At the last second, he’d dove to the side to dodge the attack.
It had been a close call.
Max got to his feet.
The smoke of the arena cleared.
The audience gasped. “Unbelievable! The punk is still alive!”
Max smirked. He wouldn’t get beaten that easily.
It was time to finish the rock golem once and for all.
He stretched out his arm and triggered slice.
But nothing happened.
He pushed his arm out as far as it could go and triggered the ability once more.
But nothing happened. The mana inside him didn’t appear or transform into Sakura’s ruby-ranked slice ability.
Max didn’t understand what was happening. It was like he was trying to flick a lighter and only got sparks and no flame.
Was he out of juice? Out of mana? Had the mana potions not worked properly?
He then felt a sharp pain in his side.
He looked down and saw his leg was bleeding.
Uh oh.
He had been cut.
Which meant he had been hit by the rock golem’s earthquake ability.
Meaning he no longer had Sakura’s slice ability.
He had lost his trump card.
The fight was no longer in his favor.
40
Sakura Sato sat down at the late morning meeting for the joint-branch task force between the defense climbers and the police climbers.
The task force commander stood in front of a room of twenty or so climbers, going over the intel they had gathered over the last few weeks.
“Underground arenas have been popping up more and more,” said the task force commander. “They operate outside the jurisdiction of what is allowed in official sanctioned arenas and what’s worse they’ve been enrolling low-ranked and sometimes even student climbers...”
The whole room shuddered.
Sakura crossed her arms. These damn underground arenas. They promised young climbers power, but it was all a ruse to sell their deaths to the lowlifes who enjoyed betting on them.
It blew her mind sometimes. The tower granted humanity so much power and what did they do with it? They just found new ways to kill each other.
“We’re proposing we raid the arena in four days’ time,” said the
task force commander. “More details will be issued then to avoid any leaks happening before then.”
Everyone nodded.
BANG!
A young police climber swung open the door of the task force meeting room with such force it smacked against the wall.
“What’s going on?” said the task force commander.
The young police climber was out of breath and in shock.
“We just got contact from one of the underground police climbers at the arena,” said the young woman, trying to catch her breath. “A student climber was just killed by a silver-ranked monster in the arena.”
The whole room audibly gasped.
Sakura’s heart quickened. A student climber. What if it was Max? The kid wouldn’t be so stupid to fight in an underground arena, would he?
She stood up.
“Commander,” she began. “In light of this event, I think we should expedite the raid on the underground arena.”
The commander nodded his head. “You’re right, we can’t let any more of our new recruits be killed by these criminals and con men! How soon should we begin?”
Sakura clenched her fists. “Right now.”
41
Max could only think of one thing: that he was a goner.
He took a step back from the rock golem.
The crowd cheered and demanded to see Max’s corpse on the floor of the arena.
They had been on equal footing before, but the match had suddenly turned in the rock golem’s favor. It was now calling all the shots.
It raised its arms in the air and leapt towards Max.
The boy dashed away as the monster crashed down right where he had been standing moments before.
“Kill the punk! Kill the punk! Kill the punk!”
Max was in big trouble. The rock golem was a D-ranked monster with a silver core. That meant in all likelihood, all of its stats were quite a bit higher than Max’s. The only thing that had given Max confidence in these fights was having a B-rank ability which pretty much overruled any stat gains a D-ranked monster would have over him.
But now he no longer had that ability.
His whole strategy had flown out the window.
Max ran to the edge of the ring.
For the time being, he’d keep his distance as he figured out a new strategy.
The rock golem came at him and Max stayed quick on his feet.
“Stop running coward!” moaned the audience.
Max ignored them. He needed to think. What do you do when you’re weaker than your enemy?
The rock golem leapt in the air once more to crush Max with its fists made of stone.
C’mon, Max. Think!
“What are you working on, Max?” Sarah had asked him one evening, ten months ago.
Max had a floor plan of their high school along with all of the class schedules.
“Nothing,” he said, embarrassed. “You’ll think it’s pathetic.”
“No, I won’t!” she cried. “Tell me.”
Max sighed. “I’ve created a map of the school and the schedule that Seth has. I can then use this to know which floors and halls to avoid throughout the day to minimize my contact with him.”
Sarah didn’t say anything and just looked down at the paper.
“It’s pathetic, I know,” sighed Max.
Sarah began to tremble and tears filled her eyes. “It’s not pathetic. It’s just unfair. You shouldn’t have to do this. It’s not right that Seth can get away with so much.”
“I’m doing the best I can to get around that fact,” he shrugged.
Sarah sniffled and wiped the tears out of her eyes. “That’s why I don’t think this is pathetic. It’s pathetic that the world we live in means you have to do something like this. But since you had to think of something—I actually think this is pretty genius.”
“You really think so?” smiled Max.
“Yeah,” said Sarah. “You’re up against a stronger opponent, so you need to take advantage of everything else to stand a chance against them.”
“Well,” Max sighed. “I hope it works...”
BOOM!
Max leapt away from the rock golem’s attack.
The creature lifted its arm from the crater it made in the arena and waddled back around to face Max once more.
The crowd continued to cheer for Max’s death.
He got back to his feet and wiped the blood from his mouth.
He grinned to himself, thinking about all the times throughout his life he had to go up against opponents stronger than him.
He took a deep breath.
The audience who wanted him dead was about to face sore disappointment.
He had a new strategy up his sleeve.
42
Max placed his hands on the ground.
He took a deep breath and triggered his trait, intuitively unleashing the ability his mimic power had now memorized.
“What the hell is the punk doing?” shouted a member of the audience.
“Why won’t this kid just die already!?”
Max ignored them and focused on channeling the rock golem’s power.
His arms and hands began to glow with a new aura and the arena floor rumbled.
The ripple of broken arena and shards of wood and stone rushed in a blast right to the side of the golem.
“Is this kid an idiot?”
“What happened to his slice ability!?”
“Does he not know how to aim?”
Max kept his cool. Stage one of the strategy complete. He just kept thinking about that conversation he had with Sarah so many months ago.
“You’re up against a stronger opponent, so you need to take advantage of everything else to stand a chance against them.”
The rock golem huffed at the attack, not intimidated in the least.
“Finish him!” chanted the crowd.
They were sick of the back and forth. They wanted blood.
The rock golem swerved. It was going to rush Max head on.
SMASH!
The golem had turned to the right to get on clear footing to rush Max.
There was just one problem.
Max had triggered the trait again and this time sent the ability right where the monster was going.
The trait already doubled the ability’s original power, so in fact, Max’s version of the rock golem’s ability was even more powerful than an average D-ranked ability, arguably even tipping into low C-rank in terms of raw power.
If you then added in the fact that the rock golem was moving at a quick speed to get into better terrain and Max’s attack had hit it by surprise, the resulting level of damage was significant.
The rock golem crumbled on the ground into so many stone pieces it would be impossible for it rebuild itself.
“Incredible,” said the audience in awe.
Even the people who had betted against him—which was the majority of them—nodded in satisfaction.
“Good fight, kid,” they cheered. “I haven’t been so surprised in a while. Well done.”
Max smiled at their accolades and walked over to the rock golem who had now disappeared, leaving behind a silver monster core and some coins.
He picked it all up and placed them in his pouch.
He couldn’t wait to drain the cores he’d won today to increase his mana affinity stat.
He briefly daydreamed of the number jumping by ten points, immediately ranking him up, when a loud alarm went off.
RIING! RIING!
Max looked around in a panic.
What was going on?
Someone yelled out, “RUN! THE CLIMBER POLICE ARE HERE!”
43
Sakura rushed into the underground arena behind a squad of police climbers.
It was pandemonium as tamers tried to keep control of wild tower monsters and the gambling audience ran out the emergency exits to escape arrest from the police.
One police climber with an airbringer ability slammed the monster t
amer against the wall with the force of the wind.
“You pathetic fools,” said the airbringer police climber. “You use your powers for such base entertainment, making yourself complicit in the death of young climbers. You disgust me.”
Sakura looked around. This was an insane operation. This was what the people of the tower-zone craved. To watch climbers use their powers for mere entertainment? And yet it was these same people who complained about why it was unfair that the city was divided the way it was. These same people who craved the entertainment of death and destruction.
Sakura rushed through the throng of police and criminals, moving through the chaos.
She wouldn’t feel better until she’d scoured this whole place and confirmed that Max wasn’t here. That he wasn’t the student climber who had been killed earlier.
She entered a smaller arena from the main one. There were a group of police climbers standing in the ring over the corpse of a sixteen-year-old boy.
She hurried over to them.
“What happened?” she gasped.
“They put this student climber up against a D-rank thunder spider,” said the police climber.
A student climber against a D-rank thunder spider!?
What were the arena organizer’s thinking?
“They knew there was no way this kid was going to survive against it,” said the police climber. “They weren’t even betting on whether he’d win or lose. Just how quickly he’d lose. They put him up here with the sole purpose to watch him die.”
Sakura shook her head.
She felt horrible for feeling a sense of relief that the boy on the ground wasn’t Max. The sense of relief didn’t last long when she thought about how the boy was someone else’s Max, someone with a family who cared about him.
“Were there any other student climber casualties?” asked Sakura.
“There was one other death,” said the police climber. “One survivor. A boy named Harold. He said it was his idea to bring his two friends here to train.”
Sakura sighed. So Max wasn’t here after all. Thank god.
A police climber yelled down from the top of the room. “Found another arena here. Looks like another student climber.”
