The fourth representative for the school was a fourth-year girl named Venessa, who Kain was the least familiar with. He hadn’t had much opportunity to interact with her in the past and even during the beast-tide she was consistently located at a further distance away from them, therefore he’d only gotten a sense for how strong she was within the past couple of months.
The reason that Venessa kept a distance from them all during the beast-tide was due to her contracts all being poisonous—likely the poison-attribute being a necessary requirement of her affinity.
Not to mention she herself rarely stays within close proximity to others due to the nature of her gift.
Honestly, when Kain had first heard about her gift, while he admired its powerful abilities, he also couldn’t help but feel extremely sorry for her.
She has the unique ability to purify and strengthen her contracts’ poisons so that they are several times more deadly than their wild counterparts. However, the method by which she does this requires for her contracts to first inject their poisons into her.
However, she doesn’t immediately have immunity to all poisons, when encountering a poison for the first time, while her gift ensures that it won’t kill her, she has to suffer through all of the effects of the poison as at it brings her to the brink of death before her body can resist it.
However, after her body assimilates the poison it then becomes like a natural component of her bloodstream and she is able to recover normally.
However, as the poison, now a normal part of her blood, cycles through her body, her organs help to purify and strengthen it. If this blood is then fed to the original creator of a poison in her blood, its body will inherently pick up on the improvements and strengthen its poison to match the fed poisonous blood—even if said poison includes poisons from other spiritual creatures.
Therefore, unlike other members of their species, all of Venessa’s contracts have the same deadly combination of poisons that flows through her veins. Moreover, due to having to assimilate all of these poisons within her, Venessa herself is extremely deadly to most humans.
If some of her extremely poisonous blood, spit, or tears somehow lands on an unsuspecting classmate, they’d be done for.
While much effort had been made by the top researchers within the college to develop an antidote so that she could participate in the competition, the poison is still so strong that it could cause some side effects for up to a year, even with a cure.
Therefore, Venessa is doomed to leave an extremely lonely life, with only her immune spiritual creatures able to keep her company.
Finally, the last representative of Dark Moon was between Theo and Dmitri in the third-year, and Edward among the fourth-years.
Up until mere weeks before the tournament the final spot was constantly rotating between them since the gap in strength among them wasn’t significant.
However, eventually it was decided, that the fourth-year Edward would be the final representative by the staff. However, it was unknown if they thought he was actually stronger, if it was because he was more emotionally steady, or if it was because this would be his final opportunity to represent the school as a fourth-year.
Therefore, Jade was confirmed to be the only third-year in the lineup.
With three blue-grade spiritual creatures, the same amount as Jade and Venessa, Edward didn’t stand out within the lineup The most memorable thing about him was his impressive hulking figure that would even dwarf Bridge.
He was relatively slow in cultivating spiritual power, surprisingly being even slower than most of the third-years in the top 5 at breaking through to 5-stars.
However, this was because it was found that he had a unique constitution that would absorb part of his spiritual power while cultivating and use it to strengthen his body. Therefore, despite being a human, his physique wasn’t weaker than many blue-grade spiritual creatures even without the use of a relevant gift.
Thankfully, he was able to keep his spot within the top 5 despite being among the slowest fourth-years at cultivating due to the diligence of his contracts who, knowing the weakness of their master, trained twice as hard.
Therefore, while he was still a four-star beast tamer he was able to defeat most 5-star beast tamers who had 5 contracts at uneven levels of strength, with 4 peak, heavily trained green-grade spiritual creatures.
Following this pattern of diligently making up for his weaknesses, within a weak of him advancing to 5-stars, three broke through to blue-grade, almost as if they were just waiting for their lagging master to catch up….
The other two could also probably break-through within the next couple of months and instantly bring him to one of the top 3 of the school, if the tournament was held a little later.
After the top 5 was settled they began the battle strategies targeted at their opponents for the upcoming rounds.
Only colleges that placed within the top 16 in Phase One are eligible to participate in Phase Two, therefore they didn’t need to collect information on all participating colleges.
However, all top 16 colleges would be participating in a round-robin format to get the most accurate ranking of each college.
Therefore, despite some teams within the top 16 like Nebula Taming getting lucky enough to scrape through to the top 8 for a single year due to good luck in the match-ups, no such thing would be occurring in Phase Two.
However, despite the fact that all colleges would eventually face one another, it has been arranged for fights between members of the top 5 colleges to be arranged for the last two days of Phase Two.
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The way in which Phase Two works is that 5 students from each school will fight against the opposing school individually, with all of their spiritual creatures being allowed to be summoned. Therefore, in Phase Two, the numerical advantages of 6-star students will be more clearly highlighted.
Since it is a “King of the Hill” format, the winning participant after each battle can choose to remain on the stage or give up the stage to a teammate after each round. But once they step off of the stage, they are not able to return.
As a result, every year has the humiliating example of a single person managing to defeat an entire team of 5 on their own.