The Ranking Tournament opened three days after the last mercenary report reached Roy’s desk, in a stone arena large enough to seat every noble house in Bria alongside thousands of common spectators who’d traveled for weeks just to watch the kingdom’s brightest younger fighters test themselves against each other.
Before the first match began, the tournament’s head cleric, a calm, unhurried woman named Sister Odile, level eighty and the only soul in the arena permitted to cast the tournament’s signature safeguard, walked the length of the competitor’s line and laid a single glowing hand against each entrant in turn.
**Extra Life** settled over each of them in the same quiet, golden pulse, a skill built specifically for exactly this purpose, granting its recipient a second, hidden reserve of vitality that activated automatically the instant their true health finally ran out.
A fighter struck down in the arena did not die.
They simply collapsed, spent, their Extra Life consumed in the process, and the match ended the moment that second reserve emptied rather than the moment a heart actually stopped beating.
It was the only reason Bria’s nobility allowed this tournament to run as violently as it did, year after year, without ever losing a single one of its rising talents to the spectacle.
Only souls below level one hundred could enter, a rule meant to keep the spotlight on rising talent rather than settled power, and this cycle’s roster was, by the court’s own excited estimation, the strongest the tournament had produced in a generation.
The early rounds moved fast, the way they always did, gaps in raw talent making themselves obvious within seconds of the opening bell.
A dagger specialist from the southern provinces ended her first match in a single blurred exchange, her opponent’s Extra Life flaring and extinguishing almost simultaneously before the crowd had even settled into their seats properly.
A boy with earth affinity magic buried his first round opponent up to the shoulders in solid stone and simply walked away, the fight over before either combatant had broken a real sweat.
A pair of swordsmen locked in a technical, grinding duel that stretched past twenty minutes, each combatant reading and countering the other’s forms with the kind of patient precision that had the entire arena holding its breath through the final exchange, decided at last by a single perfectly timed riposte that finally burned through the loser’s second life and left both fighters bowing to each other in mutual, exhausted respect.
Carlson’s first three matches ended faster than almost anyone else’s in the entire bracket.
He fought with a sword saint’s economy, no wasted motion, no theatrical flourish, closing distance with a burst of speed the crowd came to recognize as **Phantom Step** by his third appearance, a technique that let him cross the arena floor in something close to a blink.
He finished his second round opponent with a single upward thrust that carried a visible ripple of concentrated force behind it, a skill the arena’s announcer eventually learned to call **Heaven’s Edge**, piercing straight through a raised guard as though the defense simply hadn’t been there at all, the strike burning cleanly through the opponent’s Extra Life before the crowd had even finished gasping at the opening.
A soft panel bloomed silently above him after that second match, visible only to Carlson and the officiating judges close enough to confirm it.
**Heaven’s Edge used in live combat.
Proficiency 4 → 5.**
There was no level attached to it.
Carlson understood that as clearly as every other soul in the arena did, the same hard rule that governed every awakened fighter on the continent.
They never fed the number sitting quietly behind a person’s own eyes, no matter how decisively a fight was won.
Only monsters offered that particular currency, and the crowd’s appreciation swelled anyway, entirely unbothered by the distinction, cheering for the growing precision of his technique rather than any climbing number they couldn’t see regardless.
His semifinal proved the first real test of the tournament, an opponent nearly his own level, a spear user from one of the northern noble houses who fought with a discipline that matched Carlson’s own move for move through the opening exchanges.
The crowd rose to its feet as the match dragged past the ten minute mark, neither combatant willing to commit fully to an opening the other hadn’t clearly earned, both of their Extra Lives already flickering low from a handful of hard exchanges neither had fully avoided.
Carlson broke the stalemate with his signature skill, the one the entire capital had been buzzing about since the roster’s announcement.
His opponent’s spear thrust forward in a committed, powerful strike, and rather than parry or dodge it, Carlson simply activated **Disappear.**
The spear itself vanished from the air mid strike, wrenched instantly and forcibly away from its wielder’s grip and hurled somewhere beyond the arena’s walls entirely, relocated, by the skill’s own design, to wherever the strongest nearby threat happened to be waiting.
The northern spearman stood stunned, weaponless, and Carlson closed the remaining distance with Phantom Step and ended the match with a single measured strike to the shoulder, more mercy than force behind it, enough to finish the opponent’s last reserve of Extra Life without drawing it out any longer than necessary.
**Disappear used in live combat.
Proficiency 2 → 3.**
The crowd’s roar at the finish shook the stands, and somewhere high in the noble boxes, Lord Baldrik Reinhart allowed himself a rare, unguarded smile watching his son walk off the arena floor toward the final round that waited for him the following morning.