Chapter 82. First Match
The crowd was larger than any crowd Rhys had ever seen before. All of Purple Dawn had turned out, along with most of the students from all the other schools. There were big blocks of white, green, and blue in the crowd, according to the schools’ uniforms, while a mishmash of every color of students filled another quarter of the stadium. Not all the schools had only sent their contestants; in fact, most of them had sent more students to watch the matches and gain insights from them. Infinite Constellation was one of the few schools too poor to send anyone but its contestants, so besides Ev and Rhys, there was no one else to cheer them on.
Aside from the schools, there were also lots of high-level mages from higher-tier schools, martial artists, and adventurers, either here to watch the spectacle or here to recruit good prospects to their programs. Rhys eyed that section of the crowd. Although he loved his trash school, he wouldn’t say no to getting recruited by a higher-level school… not that he thought that was likely. Instead, his eyes went to the adventurers. He’d wanted to be an adventurer, from the moment he’d arrived in this world. There were certainly adventurers looking for party members who’d be happy to have a party member with high impurity—ahem, poison—resist, and he was happy to explore the world and discover new and fresh sources of impurities. Hell, something like a cursed tomb would do numbers for him, given how he could safely absorb curses and curse power. Plus, adventuring parties were usually temporary, from his understanding, so he’d be able to adventure for a while, then return to his school with new trash, loot, and experience under his belt.
Of course, that all depended on if he caught the eye of any adventuring teams, and if the ones who were interested in him were worth travelling with. Not to mention that if the Empire attacked, all of that went out the door. There was a lot that had to line up, but nonetheless, he was interested in adventuring, one way or another. He’d keep his eyes open, all throughout the tournament.
The stadium surrounded a series of flat stone platforms, each one surrounded by a band of metal with twisting enchantments glowing in its sides. An exhibition match was going on in the center of the arena, and as Rhys watched, one of the opponents launched a blue, glowing projection of a horse, that rushed at the swordswoman they fought. She sidestepped, dodging the horse, and it rushed off the edge of the platform and slammed into an invisible barrier. The enchantments around the edge lit up, and the horse vanished, swallowed up into the wards around the platform.
Rhys nodded. That was good to know. He could let loose without worrying about hitting the people around him. Of course, most of his direct combat skills were either melee or defensive, so it wasn’t like he was at a real risk of throwing glowing horses into the audience, but in case he needed to use a splash attack, the wards would absorb the overrun damage. Likewise, he wouldn’t have to worry about protecting the audience if his opponent launched a huge attack. Not that he’d been planning on it; he was completely willing to let the higher-tier mages in the crowd handle any splash damage his opponents (or he) threw. But it was good to know that he wouldn’t even have to think about it.
What he did have to think about, was Ernesto’s champion. Rhys lifted his head, scanning the opponents to see if he could spot Ernesto in the crowd.
It wasn’t hard to find Purple Dawn Academy’s students. They grouped into a rough mob, all wearing the same purple-and-black uniforms that Ernesto’s students had noticeably not worn in Infinite Constellation, save the purple-lined black cloak some wore draped over their shoulders. Out of the students in the crowd, about half wore the uniform and half didn’t; either that, or the Purple Dawn students had a lot of guests in their section. Maybe it was like his high school, where kids had been free to wear whatever they wanted, but if they were on the sports team, they had to wear the sports uniform. Of course, his school hadn’t had a uniform except for the sports teams’ uniforms, and they were only the kind of uniforms they wore during sports, but it was the same idea.
There were several teachers mixed in with the students, the teachers usually hovering by groups of students that they seemed to be responsible for; unlike Rhys’s relatively free-flowing school where students were free to show up to any class they pleased, it seemed like Purple Dawn assigned students to classes, and teachers to those classes, so certain teachers were responsible for certain students.
Then again, Rhys reflected, I did kind of dodge any opening-year bureaucracy. Hell, he hadn’t even gotten assigned to a dormitory, and he was a hundred percent sure that one was some kind of oversight, exacerbated by the fact that he, as an adult, hadn’t really wanted to be assigned to anything, and had instead chosen to live in a cave. He was pretty sure he could’ve gotten a dorm if he’d made it known to anyone that he didn’t have one, but his mage body was durable and didn’t really feel the elements, so he preferred the freedom of sleeping where he liked. For all he knew, he had been assigned to a class, he just hadn’t bothered to ask anyone whose or where he as supposed to show up… because he hadn’t cared, and didn’t want to bow to anyone else’s idea of what he should learn. He’d had enough of that. Better to pursue what he wanted and nothing else, for the first time in his life.
He scanned the group until he found Ernesto at last, standing at the edge of the group of students. Ernesto leaned toward a mountain of a man, a teenager whose muscles strained the absolute limits of what his extra-large uniform could manage. He kind of reminded Rhys of a younger Cynog.
Rhys pursed his lips and nodded to himself. He’d dealt with that kind of thing before, so he wasn’t too scared.
A cloaked figure stepped up behind Ernesto and tapped his shoulder. Ernesto turned. The two spoke for a while, Ernesto nodding along. The figure was slim, but their exact figure was too obscured by the cloak for Rhys to see much. Heavy shadow followed them around, darker than the shadows around the other students.