Chapter 55: Chapter 52: King of the Jungle!

“You know, examinations shouldn’t be like this. I feel like we’re just a circus act for the viewers instead of being graded seriously.” Erik mumbled, not expecting the examination format to be by votes now.

The last time it was by vote was four years ago, and it was by far the most brutal examination ever, with close to 80% of the participants requiring intensive medical care.

Most of the viewers who were merely betting on odds didn’t care, knowing that the Seras Family had sponsored all the medical bills incurred by the participants during the battle.

This didn’t include chronic diseases or injuries however, and the hospital earned more with every disabled participant in their waiting list. Some even speculated that the hospital was trying to gain more revenue by doing so.

Ceres slightly nodded, but he knew the reasoning behind such an examination. In fact, this was the norm across the Loeric Empire.

The empire was under the continuous threat of border raids by the slovesa, high criminal activity across the border with the Beyond, and the consistent wars and skirmishes with the Chenum Republic. Without throwing the participants into dangerous scenarios, how could they grow?

Loeric Day had reinforced that notion into his brain, and the ideology of the empire!

Strength was the main currency of the Empire, and whoever wanted to climb to the top had to prove themselves.

Top graduates had to be both stubborn and adaptive in life-threatening scenarios, and such a voting scheme would push the participants to their current limits, showing their true innate talents and morals.

However, there was naturally a safety net for the participants – a defensive shield that only triggered on life-threatening damage. It was weak, but the weapons and tools provided in the competition had their power reduced to compensate. This reduced the amount of deaths to a near minimum.

[The voting is done. With an overwhelming majority, and the ruined Zone 31 as the main area of the competition, the format has been chosen: KING OF THE JUNGLE!]

A large symphony of pre-recorded orchestral music and fanfare from audience erupted as an introduction video to the playing field emerged on all holo-monitors, showing a devastated aboveground city that was close to 200 kilometres wide in every direction.

[This year’s exosuit repair category will be held inside Zone 31, which was abandoned due to a terrible accident sixteen years ago involving a ship crash followed closely by a wildlife invasion.]

[It’s current state acts as a good training ground for our city defense force and for visiting military battalions, which means it is absolutely safe for our participants too!]

The announcer conveniently left out the fact that the entire zone was infested with wildlife that had come to call it home since the fifty years that it had been abandoned.

It used to be an aboveground mining district where there were quite a few residences and a simple commercial district to facilitate the stay of the miners and their families, but now the weathered buildings only serve as good shelter for the various species of indigenous wildlife that were more than happy to take over from the humans.

The buildings were made out of the same materials and layout similar to that of the ‘safehouse’ that the orphans raided before, being one of the most common types out in the outer zone

Over the various years, the Zone had almost developed its own ecosystem, with several types of wildlife adapting much better to the city-like environment, unlike animals who previously were accustomed to the large expansive dusty savannah-like plains that dominated the surface of Athen.

Variants of small canines, bats and rodents dominate the city, which had a typical habit of swarming their enemies with large numbers, while alien insectoids also roamed the underground crevices, slowly eating away at the innards of pipes and the sewage system.

[With the format set, all 16 groups will be held at the same time at different locations within the Zone! The match ends with a single participant holding the crown for more than 3 hours, or when the timer hits 6 hours! That’s that for the exosuit repair category! Moving on to the melee category...]

Without much surprise, the melee’s group format was literally survive on a floating square that continuously shrunk, while the ranged group’s format was a death race!

Each of the participants had the same budget and access to the same list of weapons, exosuits and components.

The budget was set up in a way that the participants would have to weigh the pros and cons of each equipment and item they bought, not having enough to get everything they wanted!

[The group stage format will start in less than 30 minutes for the melee category! For the other two categories, they will be held one after the other right after the melee group stage is done! Don’t worry viewers, you won’t have to split your attention between the three group stages, you can watch all of them in a single day!]

It was still early in the morning then, meaning that they had more than enough hours to play out the group stage today. After today, the elimination tournament began proper, with each day running simultaneous duels of each category!

Ceres just had to reach the semi-finals to fulfil the training contract’s goal, where he would be able to sign an additional patron contract with Cardenia in the future!

But of course, his main objective which he set from earlier in the year was to win the whole damn thing! It didn’t matter if started as a passing statement with Erik, or motivated by the parade in Loeric Day, he was in it to win it.

His entire focus was on the prize now.

Earning the right to use that highly advanced training complex again was just yet another side-goal for him that would be extremely useful to him in the future. Such a patron contract with the owner of the planet didn’t sound too bad either.

The participants on the floating arena platform were led off in droves, while the melee groups were herded to their respective squares that lit up with a glowing border, the arena being divided into 64 equal squares of about 50 meters wide each.

Braton smiled and waved to Ceres, Erik and Trissa who were guided away. The three of them were led on to different transports, this time onto separate hoverbuses that would take them to their competition zones.

Due to the different areas allocated for each group in the exosuit repair category, the hover buses were split accordingly.

This meant that as soon as Ceres got onto the bus, he was met with a good amount of death stares as he navigated to his seat. Unfortunately, all the seats were two-seaters, as though the examination council truly believed in the pure spirit of competition and sportsmanship that all the participants had.

Ceres chose to sit next to an outer, not wanting to suffer the continuous harassment from some aggressive inners, their disdain for him apparent through their stares.

What he soon realized was that a good amount of the killing glares was coming from the outers too!

“Look at you, walking like you’re the king of the outers, the only one good enough to get a training camp to fight against Chad. Some hotshot you are huh?” The outer next to him spoke with a simmering fury, as though he had been holding it in ever since Ceres entered the competition.

Being absolutely confused, Ceres just looked at him strangely. “What do you mean? I never placed myself as king.”

The outer just laughed mockingly as he continued ranting. “I guess you’re not that smart after all huh. Never thought to think about what your little upheaval of this competition did. Maybe you didn’t foresee all the inners shitting on us even more in our daily life? Maybe being in your ‘secret training facility’ made you all high and mighty?”

”Outers are suffering because of the symbol you represent, and you still think you’re some kind of ‘role model’ for future outer children. All you’re doing by fighting so hard in this competition is just making life harder for every other outer out there, so please just stop acting like you’re the hero.”

“I don’t see how you’re suffering because of what I’m doing.” Ceres blurted out, to which the outer just laughed even harder, mockingly.

A few outers around Ceres just shook their heads in silence while the inners treated it as a good show of how dumb the outer’s ‘champion’ was.

Ceres knew that the rumor had been leaked, and it was put forth as though he was the only one capable in their year of undergoing the experimental training scheme. But how did that play into affecting other outers?

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The outer who sat next to him clenched his fist. “Listen here, ‘hero’, you may not have wanted to be a symbol of future hope, but for both the outers and inners, you don’t have a choice right now. Innocent outers who don’t know any better and live in their own zones like you may think you’re the shit, but inners absolutely hate your guts, and outers like me and my parents who must work for a living in the inner zones get fucked harder for each day you keep rising.”

“Maybe you think you live in a closed world with just you and your friends, and that someone else would solve this problem, but please stop fucking trying so hard if you actually want to help the outers.”

Ceres was stunned. He obviously didn’t agree wholeheartedly with the outer, wanting to lash back out. And he had his fair share of discrimination too! But it was a fact that Zone 17 was fairly closed off, living in its own world as an external town.

He also didn’t know that his simple action and focused goal of winning the competition was having so many repercussions in the city, only thinking that people outside of Zone 17 didn’t really care if he won or not.

Did he not see them cheering for the parade during Loeric Day too? Why was there such a huge divide?

Having been stuck in the training center since the end of the qualifiers, he had been cut off from the outside world completely apart from Loeric Day, which skewed his vision of the city into a society that welcomed him instead despite all the past discrimination.

“Seems like people only cheer for us because we fight as part of the military while they live their lives out in peace…” Ceres thought to himself, the reality hitting him.

Not knowing the amount of oppression and suffering that other outers were enduring because of his continued rise to fame; he felt a bit guilty for not considering his actions better.

However, that didn’t mean Ceres thought that he was to blame for them being oppressed! It wasn’t him who created the class divide in the first place, nor was it him who told the inners to bully the outers even harder.

He was just doing what a normal competition participant would try to do: win!

Would he succumb to the pressure and decide to just take a normal life just because other people had the propensity to bully?

It’s like blaming and criminalizing a fireman for killing the people he didn’t have time to save, despite not being the one who started the fire.

Despite the rationalization of Ceres, a small part of him started to burn in fury after thinking about the outers who were continuously getting harassed just because someone completely different to the inners was threatening to win the competition.

How bad did the class divide between the inners and outers get since he entered the training camp? What happened to everything during Loeric Day?

Harmony between the citizens was only surface-deep, and Ceres with his naïve mind couldn’t see it before, being sheltered in the orphanage and training centers.

Ceres shut off the outer’s speech, focusing on the part of fury. Ever since the nerval jack installation, he had been having a severe spike in extreme emotions, most notably the boost in strength that he got during the fight with the middle-class slovesa in the spawner.

He deduced during the long training camp that he was somehow able to unlock his inner strength by channelling these strong emotions!

Keeping the fury stored away and ready to burst out at any time, Ceres didn’t continue listening, instead running simulations in his head of the area’s buildings and revising types of monsters that lived in Zone 31, the playing field!

“What’s the matter, ‘hero’? Too dumb to speak? Lost for words now that you know the truth? Good, stay that way and just drop-out of the competition.” The outer smirked as the hoverbus neared their destination.

Almost everyone on the bus laughed at Ceres, who was still deep in thought, unwilling to waste even a second more on things beyond his control, such as the politics within the society.

Could thinking about that help him to achieve his goals? Ceres did not think so. Instead he became even more apathetic and focused.

Throwing things such as morals, politics and feelings into a nice little black box that he buried far away in the deep recesses of his brain, he focused his full attention onto his computational ability as he ran the possible exosuits that he could be given and what he can achieve with it.

Now he knew that with the amount of hate against him from both the outers and inner, he was sure that he was the main guy to be targeted regardless of whether he had the crown or not!

They will gang up on him from the very start, despite their own inner desires to win. Only after eliminating Ceres would the ‘real’ game begin!

The hoverbus landed in an open rooftop in their designate area of the city. They had a 25 kilometres square which served as the boundaries for their game. As they got off the rooftop, a holo-monitor appeared before them while the hoverbus immediately left.

The other 63 participants started to distance themselves away from Ceres, forming a few temporary alliances with continuous glances at Ceres.

Ceres smirked to himself as he sat down in the very edge of the rooftop, looking over the entire region while memorizing the landmarks, advantageous battle locations and possible locations for the wildlife.

Why should he worry that much? Who cared about politics or what society feels? Strength is the only currency!

“These weaklings who care about feelings and dumb shit like politics instead of training think they have the right to kick me out and win the competition?”

***

In the private viewing pod of Oliver Athen, Doctor Wu broke out in a chill after seeing Zone 31 on the screen. “Sixteen years ago…” he muttered to himself.

“I recall from the records that you personally were there helping out the injured. In fact, you were there for an entire year.” Oliver said casually, tapping his chair’s holster.

He had noticed the bleak and scared expression on Doctor Wu’s face after hearing about Zone 31. Oliver was a guy who hated loose cannons, so he tried to keep close tabs on everyone he worked with, especially those critical to the university plan.

A sudden clarity erupted in the eyes of Doctor Wu, before he stood up abruptly. “I’m going back to make sure everything is perfect. I don’t have the time to watch insignificant ants fight over such meaningless things. It’s a complete waste of resources in my opinion. Outers should not even have the right to compete.”

Oliver glared at Doctor Wu. “Regardless of which ‘Zone’ someone comes from, all should have a right to prove themselves in a competition of strength. Do not forget your roots, Doctor Wu.”

Doctor Wu smirked. “You say that and you always ramble on about how you only judge based on your precious three criteria – proficiency, spirit and luck, but deep down I know you don’t actually think any of these outers are worth your time!”

“Even the champion from sixteen years ago, Henry Lesion, was rejected from being promoted too fast thanks to you! Did he not have all three criteria? He even made it to the Alpha Legion! You can stay hypocritical all you want, but I’ll stay true to myself. At least I have the guts to come out and say it.”

Oliver was left alone in the private viewing pod, the doctor leaving simply by his anti-grav clothes. He chuckled to himself quietly.

“You don’t understand, Doctor. I am the one who decides if someone is lucky. If they are on my side, then luck is with them. Otherwise…”

 

 

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