Chapter 205: The Tournament

The following week, they all returned to the academy. It had been a while since they last saw each other, so the atmosphere was filled with excitement. Students greeted one another warmly—laughing, hugging, and catching up on everything they had missed.

The corridors felt alive again. Voices overlapped in the common areas, stories traded back and forth about breaks spent training alone, visiting family, sleeping too long. Jelo spotted Atlas near the eastern archway, and they fell into step together without a word, the kind of comfort that only came from time earned. Mira was already waiting at the entrance to the main hall, arms crossed, pretending she hadn’t been watching for them.

“You’re late,” she said.

“We’re exactly on time,” Atlas replied.

She didn’t argue. Just turned and walked inside, and they followed.

Soon, things settled back into the usual routine. Classes resumed, lessons were taught, and light training sessions took place throughout the day. It felt like any normal day at the academy—familiar and steady.

Tongen ran them through fundamentals in the morning. No system access, no ability activation—just footwork, positioning, breath control. The kind of work that felt small until the moment it wasn’t. Jelo moved through the drills without complaint. He had spent part of his break running the same patterns in the yard behind his house, alone, in the dark before sunrise. He hadn’t told anyone that.

The afternoon brought sparring. Light contact. Controlled exchanges. Sherlock’s group trained in the adjacent space, and every so often Jelo caught a glimpse through the partition—flashes of movement, the sound of impact, someone laughing after a clean hit landed. He kept his focus forward.

By evening, the academy had settled into its familiar hum. The kind of rhythm that felt permanent, like it had always been this way and always would be.

But that sense of normalcy didn’t last long.

Everything changed when Olmo made a major announcement to the Class 1 students.

The hall went quiet before he even spoke. Something in the way he carried himself into the room—deliberate, unhurried—told everyone that what was coming wasn’t procedural. Olmo rarely addressed Class 1 directly. When he did, it mattered.

He stood at the front. Let the silence hold for a moment.

A tournament would soon be held.

Not just any tournament—but one that would bring together multiple academies from both near and far. The goal was simple: to determine which academy produced the strongest students.

The announcement instantly sparked excitement across the class.

Voices broke out immediately. Questions layered over each other—when, where, who, how many. Jelo didn’t speak. He stayed still and watched the room the way Tongen had taught him, reading the current before moving through it. Atlas leaned forward in his seat, jaw tight, already calculating. Mira’s expression didn’t shift much, but her eyes moved—scanning, assessing, same as always.

Olmo raised one hand. The noise died.

He explained the structure simply. Multiple institutions. A bracketed format. Elimination rounds with no restrictions on ability type or tier, provided conduct fell within the safety parameters the academies had jointly agreed on. The roster hadn’t been finalized yet, but selection would be based on standing performance records and instructor recommendations.

Jelo heard his own name somewhere in the back of his mind. Not spoken aloud—just present, like pressure building.

This wasn’t just a competition—it was a test. The academy authorities had deliberately agreed to it, eager to measure their true strength and expose their weaknesses. They wanted their students to experience real battle conditions—facing unfamiliar opponents with different abilities, strategies, and ways of thinking.

That last part was the part that stayed with Jelo.

Unfamiliar opponents. Different systems. Different logic.

Inside the Arena Nexus, you learned to read the people you trained beside every day. You memorized their rhythms, their tells, the slight drop in the shoulder before they committed to a strike. Fighting someone from another academy meant starting from nothing. No data. No patterns. Just reaction and instinct and whatever you’d built into yourself when no one was watching.

He thought about the hours in the yard before sunrise. Hoped they were enough. Suspected they weren’t.

At the back of the hall, Tongen stood with his arms folded, saying nothing. Jelo glanced at him once. Tongen didn’t look concerned. He looked like a man who had already been thinking about this for some time.

They refused to let their training remain limited within the walls of their own academy.

Sherlock’s voice carried from somewhere to the right—a low comment to one of his students, something Jelo couldn’t fully make out. A few of them laughed quietly. Jelo filed it away without deciding what it meant.

The hall began to stir again as Olmo finished speaking. Students shifted in their seats, turned to each other, started forming the early shape of opinions. Who would make the roster. Who wouldn’t. What other academies might show up. Whether any of them were ready.

Jelo didn’t join those conversations. He stared at the floor between his boots and let the noise move around him.

Atlas appeared at his side. “You’re already thinking about your first fight.”

“I’m thinking about everything.”

“Same thing.”

Mira came up on the other side. Neither of them said anything for a moment. The three of them just stood there while the room moved and buzzed around them, and something passed between them that didn’t need words—an acknowledgment that the shape of things had just shifted, that whatever came next was going to demand more than what had come before.

Jelo thought about the dragon system. Thought about how carefully he had kept it buried. A tournament with outside observers, unfamiliar opponents, higher stakes—every round would apply new pressure to the walls he’d built around it. He would have to be precise. Controlled in a way that left no room for slippage.

He would have to win without letting anyone see what he was actually capable of.

That was its own kind of fight.

Around him, the class was already sorting itself into the version that competitions created—louder students getting louder, quieter ones going quiet. Someone near the far wall was already listing academy names, speculating about which programs had the strongest rosters this cycle. Someone else pushed back. The argument that followed was the kind that only time and contact would resolve.

Tongen moved through the hall without drawing attention. He crossed the room, said something brief to one of the other instructors, then stopped near the door and turned his gaze toward Jelo’s group for just a moment.

He didn’t signal anything. Just looked, then moved on.

Jelo turned back to where Olmo had been standing. The space was empty now—announcement made, shift complete. The academy was the same building it had been this morning. But something in the air had recalibrated. The students who had walked in thinking about routines were now thinking about something else entirely.

Selection. Preparation. What it would actually mean to stand across from someone who came in with no assumptions, who would test everything in ways familiar training partners no longer could.

Jelo exhaled slowly.

“We should talk to Tongen,” Mira said.

“Tonight?”

“Tonight.”

Jelo nodded. The details still resolving. But the core of it was already clear, had been clear from the moment Olmo spoke.

Everything they’d been building toward had just found a stage.

This tournament would change everything.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep