“As for the finale, it will be the old-school elimination tournament. If it works, don’t change it, am I right folks? Excelling in duels is one of the easiest ways to showcase individual greatness, and that’s exactly what we want in our phenoms; potential for greatness.
I’d promised that those who score high in the previous event shall receive a reward in the next one. In the first round of duels, those with the highest scores will be matched against those with the lowest ones, so if you’re the pair with the least accumulated points,”
Vex then glanced at two people who stood in our midst and she stated with a gleeful tone, “namely Duck and Tony, you will be up against the highest scorers… Good luck.”
Blood instantly left their features as they paled to a ghostly white while glancing in my and Wrath’s direction with horror.
The reason for their reaction was not necessarily that they dreaded being matched up against us but because it was in the very first round. Vex spoke up just in time to perfectly explain my thoughts: ” However, fear not. The candidates who will end up being selected as Phenoms are not the top 10 finalists or anything like that. The seven circle members leading the Consortium can select any number of candidates they think have the potential and are worth investing in.”
Exactly. This one-on-one elimination tournament is the perfect podium for everyone to display their competency to the utmost, which is why the two horribly named guys were horrified. It was okay to lose to the two of us because we were way above the others. What was not okay was to not have a few duels with other participants before facing us where they could’ve displayed much more of their prowess before getting destroyed by either Iris or me.
“Be that as it may, the one you will be facing will neither be Devil nor Wrath, for we decided to give our medalists a free round they can sit out. Thus, you will be up against either Massacre or his partner Pox.”
Your next journey awaits at empire
Some color returned to their faces, but their situation was still grim. A Wizard or an orc-human meat tank were still unlucky matchups to start with.
Since I was excused for the time being, I soon found myself plopping down next to Jasmine in the stands. By now, my mere presence was turning all the heads in the vicinity toward me.
I didn’t hesitate to rest my arm on Jasmine’s back by grabbing onto her shoulder that was further away from me with my hand. Iris was right, I was on a roll today.
She accused me of flirting with three women back to back, but even that was a lowball since I was flirting basically all the way to this location with my smoking hot elven healer and we even exchanged some telepathic lines after arriving to the arena.
The merchant girl in question looked like a doll whose soul had left her body. She turned her head to stare at me with big, disbelieving eyes but no sound came from her throat. She wasn’t even blinking or anything the human body should be doing, she was shocked into freezing like a scared deer.
I amusedly chuckled before deciding to check my gains so as to give her some time to come to terms with the fact that the random masked dude she was casually chatting with all this while was an Elemental Sovereign, the first to appear since the legendary Queen Morgana did 300 years ago.
I succeeded in achieving my goal of reaching level 26 thanks to the donated hordes of monsters by the Consortium.
[Name: Quinlan Noir]
[Race: Primordial]
[Level: 24 -> 26. XP 31089/70564]
[Primary Class: Primordial Villain 24 -> 25]
[Secondary Classes]
<Stormblade 26 -> 27>
<Elemental Sovereign 27 -> 29>
<Child of Agony 8 -> 10>
[Unused Skill Points: 3 -> 9]
[Unused Attribute Points: 0 -> 10]
I elected not to invest my attribute points into any of my stats because I feared that someone might notice me leveling up too much if I had to go all out in one of my fights since if they were observant, they could see that I had more stats than before even without a status window telling them that.
Leveling up once was one thing, but twice…? At my level that should not be possible without my 3 times XP multiplier because it costs just so damn much XP to level up.
Speaking of, my Primordial Villain class had finally reached level 25.
This was the class I technically shouldn’t have, according to my primordial mommies. Every primordial had only one Primordial-named, Unique-tier class and that class should be the perfect encapsulation of their entire being. Drangar with his berserker class and the slimy (and heavily deranged) Karl with his shapeshifter one.
I heavily disagreed with the Soul Records giving me Primordial Subjugator as it suggested that my predominant trait was that I was a slaver. I felt like an entirely innocent person who was getting accused of committing something vile he didn’t do.
The fact that I absolutely adore my slaver class should be left ignored.
All that is to say that while I might have some gripes with the greatest entity in the universe more or less calling me slaver scum, it was a normal class a primordial could get. Primordial Villain was not.
Primordial Villain only gave me two abilities thus far, but both of them were utterly broken.
First was its innate ability to assimilate all evil-oriented classes under it, giving me the opportunity to technically have infinite classes active at the same time. Assassin, Thief, and my Primordial Subjugator classes were leveling up very nicely under it.
I’d originally presumed that the Goddess was having some personal issues with me because I thought she gave me the Primordial Villain class, which would’ve been basically her telling me that I’m evil, but since then I’d learned that it was the Soul Records itself. The Goddess didn’t decide what class was good, neutral, or evil and neither could she bestow primordials with Primordial-style classes. From what I could tell, she could only bestow the Healer and Arch-Priest classes.
The second ability I got from the Primordial Villain class was probably my favorite spell, [Warp Gate]. In the world of Thalorind – or at least on the Iskaris continent – teleportation was extremely, extremely rare. I’d only ever seen Orianna teleport when she grew out of a small plant that rapidly expanded into a giant one in a few seconds, but even then I didn’t know how versatile that one was. Not only did it take some brief but important seconds for her to be teleported, but I didn’t know its range. Maybe she was close to us all that while.
This presumably Legendary-rarity artifact of the Consortium could also teleport people to safety, but it had many limitations, such as us having to wear armbands and having low range.
My Warp Gate didn’t have any annoying nuances to it. Due to my high Magic stat, I had a lot of mana, which in turn allowed me to teleport across an entire duchy by now, and the duchies in the Vraven Kingdom were ginormous as they were countries before being assimilated into one giant nation by the current ruling family.
Now that I was checking if getting my Primordial Villain class to level 25 gave me any new unlockables, my eyes suddenly lit up.
Oh boy. A new class was staring back at me with irresistible sultry eyes. Just the name of it gave me chills. I simply had to get this one.
[Harbinger of Ruin]
…
A/N: Dear free readers, please read the note below.