Due to the utter chaos, the second warm-up match was delayed by half an hour.
"Is this… also friendship?"
The little angel's confusion only deepened with every exchange she witnessed in the waiting room. She couldn't help but ask again, hoping that the wise and dependable Dean could illuminate her.
Li Fei and Grace, both apparently overcome by emotion, had already begun forging the crystalline bonds of friendship.
But why did it involve slapping each other across the face, with demands to "cry for me"? Wasn't that the sort of thing enemies did?
"Every friendship is unique," the Dean replied patiently, with the indulgent air of someone who loved to teach. "They have their own way of getting along that others might not understand. Aren't they both clearly enjoying themselves?"
The divine markings in Chloe's golden eyes trembled faintly. Her understanding of friendship had just reached a new all-time high.
Nicole's water-blue eyes, meanwhile, had grown a little moist. She stroked her collarbone absently, crossing one leg over the other.
She wanted to dunk both of them in a pot of red tea.
With a long, unhurried exhale, Nicole's pale fingertips slipped into the braid draped over her shoulder, idly winding through it. At the same time, she sent a mana-message to Gneia — she was in the mood to visit the Golden Kumquat Tavern tonight, for the first time in ages.
Before long, the Dean sighed with regret. Gneia's reply had come back: the star of the evening had already been reserved for tonight.
"Dean, how did you come to know Li Fei?"
Nicole asked, seemingly out of nowhere.
"I… don't really have a knack for socializing. I wanted to learn how to make friends, and a senior told me…" Chloe repeated the advice with complete sincerity: "The girls at the Golden Kumquat Tavern all love making friends with pretty strangers. They say lovely things and make you feel right at home."
She paused, then added, "I'll be going to see her tonight as well."
Ah — so you're the one who cut in line…
Nicole straightened in her seat, her smile growing even more gracious. "Oh? And which senior gave you such… groundbreaking and revolutionary advice?"
Chloe answered honestly:
"Melodia."
The culprit had been identified.
The moment the name left her lips, Nicole's warm gaze turned toward a certain golden-haired female instructor whose cheeks had gone rather pink — she was apparently still lost in replaying the unexpected turn the exhibition match had taken.
Melodia had clearly not noticed the large, blood-red character for "DANGER" that had just appeared on her forehead. Under the Dean's gaze, she flashed a bright, sunny smile — cheerful, a little silly, blissfully unaware.
Nicole gave her a benevolent nod, every inch the gracious superior encouraging a subordinate.
The next second.
A drawer in the Dean's office slid open on its own. Melodia's personnel file floated out on its own. A quill moved on its own — and in the column for professional conduct evaluations, already dense with overlapping red X's, it added a fresh new layer on top.
…
The waiting room bench really was no match for the big bed back home.
Li Fei had resumed her model-student demeanor, responding to her classmates' stares with a polite, modest smile.
Five minutes before the second match was set to begin, Nicole's voice sounded in her ear.
If she didn't walk out of the waiting room within one minute, every second over the limit would cost her one hundred academic credits.
Having gone so long without dressing herself, she fumbled a little with the buttons — but she was perfectly practiced with the potions: the safety tonic, and the one that erased the alarming quantity of suspicious marks on her neck.
She made it out with one second to spare, narrowly escaping the deduction.
Now, she sat like an expensive and exquisitely crafted porcelain doll, placidly allowing the female classmates surrounding her on all sides to fuss over her slightly disheveled hair. There was a saying, after all: it wasn't scarcity that caused resentment, but inequality. In the interest of class harmony, the very popular special-recruit student did not assign this affectionate task to any one classmate in particular — instead, she let them each take a lock of her long hair, combing through it with fingertips or wooden combs at their leisure.
"Fei-bao, Fei-bao — what happened with that… incredibly audacious person, after everything?"
One devoted fan couldn't hold back any longer.
"That's a secret."
Li Fei gave a playful wink with her right eye, and the fan was instantly sunk.
"Fei-bao, what perfume do you use? It makes my heart race…"
One girl held the tip of Li Fei's hair up to her nose, cheeks flushing pink — like a cat that had gotten a trace of catnip.
— Sweetie, stop sniffing, you'll get sick. The illness is called Witch Dependency Syndrome…
Li Fei suppressed the urge to bury her face in her hands and spread her palms helplessly.
"It's a homemade shampoo a friend gave me."
A witch's bodily fluids — even her natural scent — naturally carried the ability to transmit Witch Dependency Syndrome, and this effect was amplified significantly after intense physical exertion. That said, a low-Sequence witch's infectious potency was limited; unless exposure was prolonged or the dosage substantial, inducing dependency typically required supplementary arts, rituals, or potions. Mid-to-high Sequence witches, by contrast, could actively regulate the strength of their infectious aura to avoid accidentally ensnaring people.
"Fei-bao, how do you learn spells so fast? Tell us, tell us."
Finally, someone whose mind was actually on studying.
Li Fei looked genuinely gratified, and asked in all seriousness:
"Have you ever seen Loxibrook at four in the morning?"
"?"
The bookish little mage pushed her glasses up with a puzzled look. "I… think I have, a few times."
"I haven't — because I'm always busy at that hour. I've never even had a free moment to glance out the window. Even with a Transcendent item that compresses sleep down to under an hour, I still feel like there's never enough time."
Li Fei smiled.
"Genius, they say, is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."
So this was the legend made real — the person already ahead of you, working even harder than you.
Amid the admiring and awestruck gazes of her classmates, the second warm-up match began.
The two combatants this time were representatives from the War Academy.
Alex wore light golden armor, handsome and composed, one hand resting on the hilt of his sword — like a young pine with its roots sunk deep into the earth, steady yet full of vigor.
His opponent appeared to be a woman of about twenty. Her short hair was clean and sharp, she wore a simple vest of leather armor, and ten finger guards wrapped her hands, giving her an air of hard, keen intensity.
Shoulder-length hair could generally be called short, but this woman's hair was barely a finger's width long. Her skin was fair enough, but covered in a lattice of faint scars — many of which would have been permanent disfigurements on an ordinary person. Her muscles, though not exaggerated, were full and defined enough to be described as swollen, stripping away any trace of the softness one might expect and leaving only a fierce, martial energy in its place.
A note on the world: because Transcendent power existed on the Continent of Enlos, any female Transcendent who cared to maintain herself could simultaneously possess the strength to shoulder mountains and churn seas, while keeping skin as delicate as silk and a waist as slender as a willow branch — with no fear of turning into a protein queen.
But this particular warrior from the War Academy clearly had no interest in Charisma. She had devoted herself entirely and without reservation to the pursuit of power.
Li Fei looked at her, and found herself drawing an involuntary comparison to a certain Lady Zhihua:
Fake warrior — hair too long and inconvenient in a fight, a waist she could circle with both hands, arms that looked like they'd snap in a breeze, skin so soft and white it looked like it would seep water at a pinch, eyes full of tender sentiment, a spotless white dress, and the ethereal, otherworldly air of a jade immortal.
Real warrior — short hair that was practical and couldn't be grabbed by an enemy, dense and powerful muscle, thick and solid leather armor that wouldn't restrict movement, thighs broad and muscled with clearly defined lines, eyes full of sharp ferocity.
"Kova. Commoner genius."
A female classmate stepped up to provide commentary right on cue. "I've heard about her from friends at the War Academy. She's the type who… goes all out. Always."
"Apparently she has barbarian blood. She's a fanatic for real combat — goes home with new injuries every single day."
Li Fei nodded, turning her gaze back to the arena, planning to get a proper look at how a truly excellent warrior fought.
"After you," Alex said, calm and confident.
"Hmph."
Kova's lip curled in a sharp sneer. She cracked her knuckles against each other, the rust-colored finger guards clinking crisp and bright. Then, like a tigress launching from a crouch, her legs exploded into motion — she surged forward with savage, blinding speed and launched a thunderous kick, trailing a howling wind in its wake.
That speed — that force!
Alex's pupils contracted. He realized, in an instant, that in just half a month since their last exchange, she had gotten even better.
Clang —
He drew his sword halfway and braced it across his chest, deflecting the fierce, vicious kick with precision — but the sheer weight behind it far exceeded his expectations. With a dull, grating impact, Alex's center of gravity buckled, his body staggered, and he was pushed back half a step.
Kova did not press the advantage. She fixed him with a feral, unruly gaze, then extended her thumb — and with a slow rotation of her wrist, turned it pointedly downward at him, sneering her contempt for the very concept of "sportsmanship."
Alex rubbed his nose with a touch of embarrassment, then drew his sword fully from its scabbard. His eyes lit with fire.
"I'll be going all out."
"Hiss… are War Academy students all this intense?"
In the audience below, new students were already gasping in disbelief.
The two figures on the arena seemed to have forgotten this was supposed to be a warm-up match. They had long since abandoned restraint, drawing real blood across the stage.
Kova's fists moved like crashing storms — finger guards aimed at temples, metal-clad knees snapping out at vulnerable points without warning. Alex gave up on holding back as well, his two-handed sword sweeping in great, open arcs, the blade flickering with the glow of battle-qi.
They moved like humanoid mammoths — like the young of titan giants — every motion kicking up violent gusts, every step laced with the sharp crack of displaced air. The rare moments their bodies collided produced the brittle sound of snapping bone, yet somehow each of them simply launched a more lethal assault in response, raining down blows like gales and sudden storms.
Most of the little mage girls had never witnessed combat this brutal. They pulled their arms tight across their chests and pressed back in their seats, unable to look away, equal parts thrilled and terrified.
They had come, very clearly, to understand the vast gap in raw combat power between mages and warriors at low Sequences — especially in those first two years after stepping onto the Transcendent path.
Crack.
The fight finally reached its conclusion. Kova drove a fist into Alex's jaw; he stumbled back, bleeding off the force to keep his skull intact — and in the same motion, swept his sword through and severed Kova's arm at the elbow. Blood poured in a torrent. Had the angle been even slightly off, the blade would have split her skull.
"I lost."
Kova, her body a crosswork of bleeding wounds, drew a deep, rasping breath. She bent down to pick up her still-twitching severed arm, then turned and walked off the arena with quiet composure, leaving a trail of bloody footprints behind her.
An instructor versed in life-attribute magic stepped forward immediately to tend to her wounds.
She seemed to feel nothing of the pain. Her gaze was still fixed on Alex.
— This is the thirty-first time I've lost to you.
— But next time may be different.
Down in the stands, the students snapped back to their senses and let their applause come freely, sending up cheers for the savage, thrilling bout.
By contrast: the War Academy students were fired up and exhilarated, completely unbothered by the blood-soaked arena and the brutal injuries; at the Magic Academy, the veteran students held their composure well enough, but the first-years looked shaken, clapping distractedly while exchanging uncertain glances with each other.
"Are all the opponents at the exchange tournament going to be like that…? At least the teams are randomly mixed between the two academies. Otherwise…"
Some of the new students were already losing their nerve, their fighting spirit deflated.
"Relax, let them have their moment for a year or two. Once our spell systems are fully built out, we can toy with these brutes who only know how to charge all we like…"
Others were talking tough.
In truth, even mages who had entered the mid-Sequences — who had mastered a complete spell system encompassing displacement, crowd control, damage output, and protection — still lost to warriors more often than not in direct combat.
Because among the nine branches of Transcendent knowledge, the Combat branch was born purely for battle. It pursued the absolute pinnacle of fighting power. Even when faced with the endless variety of spellcraft, a Combat Transcendent could break through it all — riding an indestructible physique, exceptional resistances, and earth-shattering explosive force straight through the torrent of magic to force a kill.
A mage's strength lay in breadth and versatility. Warriors might be able to punch through mountains and stop rivers in their tracks — but the moment a friend or ally took a wound, they still had to humbly go cap-in-hand to their healer, begging the esteemed life-attribute mage to please, please save their companion.
Looking through the warfare case studies in the textbooks, the pattern was almost universal: high-Sequence warriors would target and kill high-Sequence mages first. If the decapitation strike succeeded, they'd turn their attention to the mid-and-low Sequence soldiers below, cutting through them like vegetables, rampaging back and forth across the battlefield on pure martial might alone to decide the outcome. But if they failed to neutralize the mages — if the mages were left free to pour their full mana into area-of-effect spells that slaughtered the allied army wholesale — then the warriors would end up pinned down by a blizzard of single-target kill spells and curse magic, battered to death under an endless pile of enemies.
The silver lining, however, was this: while mages were broadly inferior to warriors in a one-on-one fight, only Combat Transcendents truly counted as warriors. Scouting-branch Transcendents were generally on par with mages. And the Noble-branch and War-branch Transcendents — at least among those without deep enough pockets — tended to sit firmly at the bottom of the pile.
Worth noting: this conclusion had been compiled by powerful organizations such as the Thieves' Guild, the Mercenary Guild, and the Magic Academy, after gathering and cross-referencing enormous volumes of data.
Even more amusing: while "in a duel, a mage's overall win rate is lower than a warrior's" had become practically universal consensus across the Continent of Enlos, most organizations' statistics showed only a modest discrepancy — generally within five percent. The data published by the Magic Academy-led coalition of mage-dominated factions, however, had undergone "reasonable, fair, and rigorous correction" — and somehow managed to nudge that seventy-thirty split all the way to sixty-forty…
One could only say: the esteemed Lords and Ladies of Magic had their esteemed pride to maintain, heh.
Oh, right — and what about the Noble-branch Transcendents with sufficiently deep pockets?
On that subject, every organization's data was in perfect agreement:
As long as a Noble-branch Transcendent had enough money and a thick enough family fortune, they were basically unbeatable in a one-on-one fight — at least until crossing into the high Sequences. "Strategic relocation is advised."
"Fei-bao, feeling confident?"
The girl beside Li Fei poked her in the ribs, looking a little anxious on her behalf.
"I will uphold the glory of the Magic Academy."
Li Fei smiled with serene, effortless composure.
At the same time, a quiet urgency gripped her chest, and her fingers curled into a hidden fist —
Before the exchange tournament begins, she had to advance to Sequence 8!
____
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