The Protagonist Already Knows

Rather than having set roles like us, it seemed that everyone on the other side was an attacker...meaning they could easily outnumber us in direct fights.

Seeing the ground before me slowly turn green, I took a step forward to assist Grayson and Reed...however.

In the next moment, a pure ocean-blue sword slash flew directly at the two claimers kneeling on the ground behind me.

Looking forward, I found three students standing in the center of their semi-circle, simply...slashing their swords at the air and sending various colored mana sword slashes forward.

"..."

Their team didn’t have any archers...they had simply gotten all the students with the highest mana capacity and told them to slash at the air.

Raising my hand, feeling a twinge of pain as the mechanical armband took my blood, I sent a death-black sphere forward.

*BANG*

As the death-mana sphere and mana sword slash met, the ground in the area suddenly shook for a moment, a pitch-black cloud of smoke appearing.

Not hesitating any longer, I joined Grayson and Reed, easily pushing back the three swordsmen before us.

Grayson’s gift allowed him to immobilize a single opponent with vines for a short period of time, while Reed could shout, stunning another opponent with his voice.

Perhaps not wanting to be eliminated, the three of them retreated and ran back toward the center right before we cornered them.

"..."

Within the span of five minutes, we had taken over the right side of the border, and, even as time passed, surprisingly, no one came to challenge us.

Slowly moving forward along the coliseum’s right wall as the three girls behind us continued claiming, I simply watched the battlefield around me.

It was hard to even make out what was happening in the center, as clouds of smoke surrounded the area, occasional "booms" sounding as people stepped in and out of the shroud of smoke.

It looked like a light show; blasts of blue and red shining dots appeared with the smoke before vanishing a moment later.

I could only see a couple of elves outside the smoke cloud, shooting forward with their bows blindly...but as for the humans, there was no one beside the three magic sword slashers.

"..."

The six of us glanced at each other in confusion for a moment: it felt as if...the battlefield was empty.

Then, it happened.

An elf staggered out of the smoke, his clothes ripped and scars all over his body...before disappearing like the lights behind him.

Snapping me back to reality, Reed suddenly asked confusedly.

"Are they just gonna let us continue taking the right side?"

At this point, we had almost claimed the entire right side of their semi-circle, leaving only a quadrant of red land left for them.

As Grayson also nodded confusedly, gazing at the empty space before us, I sighed and answered.

"They don’t care about land, for now. They’re just trying to eliminate as many of us as possible."

Another elven body stumbled out of the smoke cloud, his face riddled with bloody scars, before being taken away.

On the middle and left fronts of the field...it was now 20 humans versus 12 elves, with six of us here on the right side and two eliminated.

And yet...the line between the green and red land in the center remained perfectly still as I looked at the ground.

Subtracting the four elves I saw outside the smoke with bows and three magic sword slashers...on the front lines, it was then a 17 versus 8.

"..."

Shaking my head, I glanced down and muttered.

"We aren’t going to survive the next hour of the game."

"What!?"

Reed’s surprised gasp immediately sounded from behind me, as Grayson and others looked at me oddly.

"We’ll be done claiming the right quadrant in less than a minute, then we can rejoin everyone and help fight. Anyway, now, we only have to play defense. We’ll be far ahead in terms of land. Stalling should be easy."

"Yeah, Grayson’s right, I’m sure they can ha-"

Two more battered elven bodies fell out of the smoke cloud with pained expressions and bloody wounds, their figures vanishing before they even hit the ground.

*WHOOSH*

Feeling a faint gust of wind slowly spread across the arena, I immediately activated Anubis’s Ferry...and stood completely still.

At that moment, a golden light suddenly shone through the smoke, instantly dispersing the cloud and revealing two familiar figures at the center.

Her thin sword surrounded by a golden-yellow hue, Charlotte stood across from Ner, who held a thick ocean-blue broadsword.

Behind Charlotte, the humans, not even bothering to claim the green land below them, were far into our semi-circle surrounding the remaining ten elves and overpowering them easily.

Beside Ner, who stood on the border and the three magic sword slashers behind him...every other one of the 16 humans was on our land.

However, my eyes were instantly attracted to a small golden orb...floating in the sky right above Angel’s head.

As I looked at it, the 5-minute cooldown on Anubis’s Ferry vanished.

Seeing the desperate situation back on our land, Grayson and Reed rushed backward, supporting the elves who were far outnumbered.

Simultaneously, the three claimers stood back up and immediately moved to nock arrows in their bows.

However, seeing them, I turned around and sighed awkwardly. After all...I had to tell them to basically ignore their dying comrades as an outsider.

"You guys should take more land...after all, they’re giving it to us."

By this point, we had already claimed more than three-fourths of the land and were on the complete opposite side of the circle, by the blocked-off tunnels that the humans had entered through.

The rest of the land was...free to take.

As the three female elves looked at me with hesitant expressions, their eyes darting back and forth between their overwhelmed comrades and me, Angelina finally said.

"b-but...we can’t just watch them d-"