The group finished their meal in the mess hall, ending the second day at the exhibition. We all headed back to the bunks for a night of rest. I really needed it. My body ached, creaked, and screamed in protest with every movement. I hadn't taken into account the individual attrition that the proximity of the rounds to each other would cause.
Tomorrow will be a test of will as much as individual power.
I pulled up my interface to take a proper look at where I was.
[TRUE-NOOSPHERE]
[CONNECTION THRESHOLD: 5.87%]
[LEVEL: 17]
[EXPERIENCE: 556 / 800]
[RANK: 0]
[RANK PROGRESSION: 17 / 100]
[STAT POINTS AVAILABLE: 0]
[BODY]
Strength: 28
Agility: 31
Vitality: 33
[ETHER]
Capacity: 1
Sensitivity: 1
Control: — LOCKED —
[MIND]
Willpower: 22
Intelligence: 17
Perception: 21
[Skills]
—Locked—
[QUEST: PROVING GROUND — ACTIVE]
[Sub-objectives:]
[■■■■■■ — COMPLETE]
[■■■■■■ — COMPLETE]
[■■■■■■ — COMPLETE]
[■■■■■■ — INCOMPLETE]
[■■■■■■ — INCOMPLETE]
Three sub-objectives complete? That's not bad. I think that the more I complete, the better the reward. But not knowing how to complete each objective is killing me.
The physical stats had climbed. Strength 28, Agility 31, Vitality 33, Perception 21. The improvements were clear. In just the few weeks I had access to the system, my ability to fight was improving rapidly. A single point, while not an obvious increase, gave a bonus of around three per cent, which in a fight was non-negligible.
But the Ether stats sat at the bottom of the screen like a locked door.
Capacity: 1. Sensitivity: 1. Control: locked entirely.
I'd been ignoring them since the True-Noosphere first appeared. Every stat point I'd earned had gone into Body or Mind because those were the stats that kept me alive in the gauntlet and the arena.
Ether was different. I had no active deviation. Though the True-Noosphere was doing something with the Ether — the connection threshold ticking upward when I cultivated suggested that much — but I had no framework for directing it. As such, putting points into Ether stats would likely be dumping resources into a system I had no way of using.
Rachel had been the opposite. Her shield deviation was pure ether application — reactive shielding that pulsed on contact, redistributing force through a mechanism that had nothing to do with physical stats. She'd built around it. Her Vitality was high enough to absorb sustained engagement, and her Ether capacity was clearly invested in because the shield pulsed consistently throughout the fight without fading. She'd stacked Vitality and Capacity together, creating a fighter who could absorb punishment physically and redirect it through ether. Her Strength and Agility were secondary — she was built to stand there, take hits, and make each hit cost the attacker more than the defender.
That was a stat build with a plan, every point allocated toward a specific combat identity. Her speciality in Rotation Three supported it. The constant cycling back into a defensive stance gave her time to reset the shield between activations, and the high guard protected the areas the shield couldn't cover during its recharge window.
I pulled up the Ether section.
Capacity: 1. What would increasing it do? In theory, capacity determined how much ether your body could hold and channel. For someone with an active deviation, more capacity meant more usage — longer shield durations, stronger bursts, and more powerful techniques before exhaustion. For me, with no active skills and a passive deviation that I couldn't consciously trigger, increasing capacity would be storing fuel in a tank with no engine attached.
Sensitivity: 1. Sensitivity governed how finely you could perceive and interact with ether in the environment. High sensitivity meant detecting ether-reactive materials, sensing deviations in use, and reading the ether signatures of other awakened individuals. For me, it would mean… what? Being able to feel skills more clearly? Detecting Rachel's shield pulse a fraction earlier? The combat application was there, but situational at best when compared to something like perception, especially when people are unable to make proper use of active skills.
Control: locked. The individual's ability to channel and manipulate Ether. A pretty self-explanatory attribute. Usually, it doesn't become useful until after a framework has been implanted. It directly influences the amount of Ether required to use skills and also the speed at which Ether skills are both activated and travel.
I considered putting my next stat point into Capacity, just to see what happened. If capacity affected how much ether the True-Noosphere could process, increasing it might accelerate whatever the system was building toward.
But that was speculation built on speculation. The physical stats were certain. One point in Agility meant measurably faster footwork, while one point in Capacity meant a possibility of faster growth in connection. But only if the theory I'd constructed from zero information happened to be correct.
I closed the interface and drifted off to sleep.
Day three of the exhibition opened with individual combat, and the bracket didn't waste time.
My first match was against Zhao Liling, seed twenty-eight. Levels in the early 30s and D-Grade, with a reflex enhancement deviation. Her physical stats were average for her level, but the deviation turned every exchange into a speed test — she could see and respond to strikes faster than her Agility alone would allow.
Yet she doesn't make full use of it, damn if I had that deviation, I'd be unstoppable. This 'Null' deviation has potential, but I'd prefer that straight-up strength right now.
She was fast — faster than anyone I'd fought in the exhibition except Jin during burst windows. Every combination I threw, her guard was already adjusting before the strikes landed. My rotationless approach gave her less to predict than a rotation framework would, but her deviation was compensated by reading the physical movement itself rather than anticipating the pattern.
Her reactions were sharp, but her strikes carried the weight of her actual Strength stat, which sat somewhere in the mid-twenties. I absorbed her combinations on my guard and waited for the openings her speed created.
Each time she committed to a fast counter, her positioning shifted into a rotational variant, which became easy to exploit. It was mid-way through these attacks that allowed me to slither in and attack, while she was locked into her strikes. Her reflexes could keep up with it, but by the time she was launching strikes she was already caught in my trap.
The finishing combination came after she'd burned through most of her deviation's stamina and her reactions had slowed from exceptional to merely good.
[XP GAINED: 142]
Sato's fight against Miller lasted forty-three seconds; the only reason why he lasted that long was that he immediately started to run from Miller as soon as the horn sounded. I had no idea what his strategy was, but it didn't work.
The whole fight must have lasted about two exchanges. Miller finally caught up to Sato and delivered a low leg kick, knocking him from his feet. Sato rolled away like the best of them but was unfortunately caught out before he could get outside of his range. Miller had mounted him, struck him in the face twice, before a hand immediately went up.
He walked into the staging area afterwards with his jaw already swelling.
"Forty-three seconds," Jin said.
"Mr Floor sends his regards," Hsu said.
"Mr Floor and I are no longer on speaking terms," Sato said.
"Was it at least close?" Andrew asked. He'd missed the fight watching Jin instead, who won.
Sato looked at him. "Andrew, he hit me three times. The first one I got knocked off my feet. The second one I almost blocked. The third one I didn't see." He paused. "I think I got a solid liver shot in when he mounted me, though."
"You did," Park confirmed, checking his datapad. "It registered on the damage metrics. Miller's Vitality absorbed it without visible effect."
"Miller mounted you? Mr Floor is going to be really jealous, Sato. I didn't take you for a cheater."
My second match was against Andy Wiggin, seed twelve. He had no confirmed deviation, but Park and Tomás had made a few guesses as to what it was. We theorised that it was a sort of copying ability or a mirror; he was able to mimic the fighting styles of other combatants. But with his combat skill levels being absurdly high, it allowed him to essentially out-technique just about everyone in their own game.
The fight lasted five minutes and was the hardest clean win of the exhibition. Wiggin matched my fighting style, mirroring it as closely as possible, but there was one thing that his deviation seemingly didn't account for: non-rotation-based fighting. His combat skill levels were rendered null and void as he fought against what the system usually prescribed.
The only thing that made this fight incredibly difficult was his stats. He was heads and shoulders above me in terms of raw output. But I knew my fighting style better than anybody, except probably Tomás, and as such, I eventually beat him.
I found the edge in the third minute. Wiggin's adapted style was reactive — he responded to my movements rather than initiating his own. When I stopped attacking and forced him to lead, his improvisation faltered. So I delivered a swift counter-attack that took him off guard, broke his rhythm and sent him for a nice date with Mr Floor.
They really are rubbing off on me.
[XP GAINED: 151]
The Quarter Finals - Dayo.
The crowd was louder this time around. They'd seen me lose to Dayo once, not officially, but I still counted it as a loss. The narrative was set — the F-Grade underdog facing Goliath for the second time, this time without a partner.
Dayo walked into the arena with the same air of confidence and surity that he had yesterday. His Rotation Four burned into my memory from the previous fight — the quarter-second gap that my Agility couldn't reach, the hips snapping back faster than my body could follow.
I was better. My reads were cleaner, my positioning tighter, my combinations more efficient. I found angles against his Rotation Four that I'd missed in the paired fight — approaches that used his commitment against him, entering during the extension rather than waiting for the recovery window, more so a typical counter. It was higher risk, high-reward, and I landed seven clean strikes across the three minutes. More than I'd landed in the entire fight in phase two.
On the seventh strike — a straight right to his jaw — his head turned three centimetres.
But three centimetres still meant my best hit was his warm-up. Dayo's counter-pressure accumulated each exchange, costing me more stamina, more guard integrity, more physical capacity than it cost him. The stat gap compounded every exchange we had, and by the end of the second minute, my reads were still clean, but my body was only running at seventy per cent. By the end of the third, I was running on pure willpower and fumes.
His finishing combination came through my guard like water breaking through a cracked dam. I blocked the first two strikes. The third found the gap that exhaustion had opened in my left side. I took a knee and raised my hand.
"Elimination — Ifáyẹmi, Dayo advances."
[XP GAINED: 83]
That's not a bad run, further than I thought.
Jin's run through the bracket was the exhibition's best individual performance from the lot of us.
She tore through the first two rounds, her varied timing from the paired phase carried into individual combat; it seemed her fight with Dayo had greatly improved something in her. Fighters who'd studied her standard three-second burst found themselves facing two-second bursts, four-second bursts, lateral bursts that circled behind them while their guard faced forward.
Her quarter-final fight was against Ripley. Osei's number two and the fighter who'd tested Jin in the squad phase. The rematch lasted four minutes and ended with Jin stacking damage the same way she'd stacked it against Dayo — targeted strikes to the same spot. Ripley went down on one knee, hand up.
The semi-final was Miller.
The mess hall had been divided on this one. Jin's speed against Miller's power. The third seed against the second.
Jin's burst windows connected. She tagged Miller cleanly during her acceleration phases — fast, precise strikes that found gaps in his Rotation Four cycling. But Miller at Level 38 had the Vitality to absorb burst-phase strikes from someone sixteen stat points below him in Strength, and he had the combat intelligence to time his pressure to her reset windows with mechanical accuracy.
Jin tried adjusting her burst timing, the same adaptation that had cracked Dayo's timing in the paired fight. However, Miller didn't crack. He absorbed the variation, acknowledged, processed and adapted.
The finish came when Jin's burst expired, and Miller was already mid-combination — a committed cross that arrived at the exact moment her acceleration dropped to base speed. The impact sent her into the barrier. She got up, and he came again. She fired a burst — two seconds, three strikes, all connecting. He took them. His counter-cross arrived between the second and third strike, interrupting her burst with raw force.
She went down.
Miller advanced to the final against Osei.
The final was Miller versus Osei, and it answered a question the exhibition had been asking since phase one: what happened when individual power met individual perception without a network to amplify it?
Miller won.
Osei's deviation gave him the same half-beat of anticipation that had dismantled everyone he'd faced. But Miller at Level 38 in a one-on-one had something the squad phase had denied him: no distractions, no secondary threats, no coordination to outthink. Just two people in a ring, and in that ring, the person who hit harder and could take more hits won.
Osei read every strike, but Miller hit hard enough that blocking was a losing proposition — each combination that Osei caught on his guard cost him stamina. By the sixty-second mark, Osei's guard was compromised, and by the ninetieth, Miller's cross broke the guard and landed clean into his chest, knocking him down.
The individual bracket belonged to Miller.