Chapter 60: Chapter 57: The Lobby of Winners

Chad’s face grew beet red, veins surging from his neck up to his ears, his head almost exploding. But a split second later, he calmed down as though nothing had happened at all and he was at peace with the world.

“A pitiful attempt. My mental resilience has been trained to the peak over the last few months. Nothing you do will faze me!” Chad proudly proclaimed as the participants waiting in the lobby started to watch the weird interaction.

Ceres ignored Chad, heading straight over to the buffet table full of food, causing a few participants to snigger and making Chad even angrier.

Clenching his fist so tight his fingers almost left permanent wounds in his palm, Chad continuously muttered to himself, seemingly reciting some sort of meditation sutra to calm himself down.

It took him a good minute to finally settle down, before he headed off in the opposite direction, obviously thinking that talking with Ceres was an absolute waste of time. It was much better to spend his time recuperating and preparing for the duel.

Only will the results of him winning over Ceres be the final decider!

“Wow, looks like I’m not the only one who got an upgrade.” Ceres was surprised.

He realized that Chad was also growing and upgrading his skills at the same time. Most likely, Ceres would be unable to pull off the same running tactic ever again. Not that he could in a 1v1 duel either way.

Ceres immediately grabbed as much food as he could, seeing as he had never really seen such delicious food and that many in a single place. Not even the breakfast that was laced with drugs given by Senia was this amazing.

The best part was that it was unlimited!

Ceres sucked up his pride and munched on the food non-stop, mowing down plate after plate of food, while chugging water to wash the food down intermittently.

Many of the inners who saw this smirked, laughing at the obvious lack of manners and upbringing that Ceres had. Before Ceres could turn to address them, a sudden bright flash in front of Ceres caused him to flinch in response.

“Damn brother, I’m gonna send this picture to Lisa. Caption: ‘Everything here is better than your shitty steamed dumplings, from Ceres’. Sounds good?” Another ‘mountain’ of a human loomed behind Ceres whose mouth was still full of whatever mismatch of edible substances he could stuff in.

“mmffmfmff” Ceres replied with indignity, but Braton made a motion with his finger, about to hit the send button on the multi.

Swallowing hard, Ceres immediately started a mad scuffle with him for the multi, only being broken up when the guards finally got it into Ceres’s head that any further fighting will constitute as an immediate disqualification.

Ceres squinted at Braton, who laughed even harder and pointed to his multi. “Look I was joking, I didn’t send the picture! The message is still being typed out here, and I haven’t pressed this button...uh...”

Braton used his finger to point too closely to the screen of his multi, inadvertently clicking the button! The two of them stood there in an awkward silence as the picture was making its trip through the network to Lisa.

Participants did have a chance to call back home while waiting in the lobby for the next part of the competition, but Ceres decided to specifically not call anyone that could be at the dumpling store.

He silently walked back to the table of food, still eating but with a supressed manner this time.

Braton quickly sat opposite him, his posture in a concilitatory position.. “Let’s be real, Brother Ceres, she was going to find a reason to beat you up anyway regardless of whatever you did. All I did was shift the timeline a bit ahead so all’s good.”

After he had his fill of food, he finally talked to Braton about Erik. “Did you watch Erik’s stream, Braton?” Ceres asked.

“Sorry I was sleeping it off in the medbay, what happened to him?” Braton did not get out of his group stage completely untouched – it’s just that his huge body was able to withstand more wounds!

Ceres then explained to Braton that Erik was knocked out quite early on in the exosuit repair group stage, though he have not watched the replay himself either.

Pulling a holo monitor in the middle of the table projected by his multi, the two of them watched the replay of Erik’s actions during the group stage a few hours ago.

***

Erik was not in a good spot. For some unknown reason, right after the peace period, the group of outers that he had a temporary alliance with immediately turned on him alone! He had lost his exosuit case in the midst of the chase, leaving him with nothing but his body.

“How am I supposed to catch up to Ceres now in the competition? Why was I so dumb to trust them?” Erik kept mumbling to himself as he ran through a broken-down building, finding an abandoned room to hide in and recuperate.

“Can’t fight back without clinging on to Ceres huh? I guess your orphanage and zone isn’t all that jacked up like everyone else was saying.” A taunting voice echoed down the hallway, with Erik staying absolutely still in his hiding spot, which was in the panels of the ceiling in the room.

Though the taunt hurt him deeply, Erik played it safe and did not reply.

“Fucking rat, seems like Chad was right about you guys, all just sneaky little bastards who don’t dare to fight head on. Spread out and find Erik, and if you try to betray me you better be prepared to get used to a hospital bed for a few years.”

A series of echoing footsteps rumbled through the building as the group of inners and outers mixed together fanned out, checking every nook and cranny to find traces of Erik.

Their leader was Maddy Seras, one of the five families alliance.

He was the teammate of Chad Athen in the qualifier stage, controlling a flag all on his own and fending off attackers the whole way through. He wasn’t particularly strong or quick, but his technique was pristine, able to use the most efficient movement to achieve the upper hand in every fight.

It could be said that he had a talent for instantaneous planning in high intensity combat scenarios to utilize the precise amount of resources to destroy the enemy.

Maddy never had the chance to really fight any member of Ceres’ team but seeing them hyped up over the matches irked him to no end. The fact that he had been overshadowed by Chad was a given, but he could definitely not stand being placed lower than Ceres’s team.

He knew that the casino and announcer were in cahoots, trying to rake in the money for bets as much as possible by hyping up both sides. That was fine by him, because he had complete confidence that Chad was going to win regardless.

But he hated how Ceres and his group of friends acted like they were going to win the competition or even get into the semi-finals for each of their respective category.

It is due to this reason that he had it out for Erik, but it wasn’t the same for the other members of his group.

They were forced into it by coercion. In fact, most of the participants were determined to gang up against Maddy, but his sheer outright dominance in terms of fighting techniques completely demoralized many of the participants, swaying them to join Maddy instead.

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Erik couldn’t blame them too much, because he understood their viewpoint.

If there wasn’t much of a chance for winning, there was no other option to take. Why would they give up one year of their life to wait for a limb to regrow in a hospital bed, for someone they barely knew to win?

The decision was even easier to make for the inners than the outers, but for the outers some of them also hated Ceres and what he represented.

Many of them attended schools in the inner zones or had jobs there, making them an easy target for bullying due to the rise of Ceres.

Why would they let Erik, one of Ceres’ best friends from the orphanage get off easy then? In fact, Erik partly blamed himself for not thinking this far about the social repercussions that this competition was having.

No outer had distinguished themselves this much since Henry Lesion did sixteen years ago, and the effects were turning out to be exactly the same if not worse!

The divide between the two classes in society was more and more apparent, being brought to the forefront.

Maddy searched the building with his underlings, controlling them through the use of fear and intimidation.

Nobody could beat him in a 1v1 fight, and the threat of having one or more of your limbs broken was enough to keep many of them in-line.

Being of the Seras family also guaranteed that even if they managed to escape him now, they would not be able to escape his influence in the city. Not when his family figuratively owns the entire medical industry in New Saint.

None of the participants were willing to jeopardize their results or future in Athen especially when they know that they weren’t going to win the group stage.

The tense hide and seek carried on for a good ten minutes, leaving Erik slightly tired of the continuous anxiety that he was subjected to.

“Seems the sneaky bastard managed to evade us. Split up into the other buildings and find him! That’s what outers are good for aren’t you guys! MOVE!” Maddy bellowed as the outers quickly got to it, while the inners sniggered and laughed at their own group members scampering away.

“And you so called ‘inner’ guys, you don’t deserve to consider yourself above them. You’re all useless in my eyes. Go.” Maddy didn’t shout this time, but the simmering anger in his eyes caused any retort the inners had to be stuck right in their throat as they silently went to follow the others, cursing under their breath at being placed in the same category as the outers!

Maddy never really cared about ‘inners’ or ‘outers’ as much as others, being heavily influenced by Chad’s desire to just win.

In fact, he found it pitiful that he could stir so much emotions just by using this two words, when all of them were considered dogshit compared to the other citizens in the more advanced star system.

It was truly mind-numbing. Strength should be the only factor to lord yourself over others, and Maddy placed his entire being and trust into it. Who cared about Zones?!

That was the basis of his hate for Ceres’s team – they were obviously not stronger.

Erik heaved a sigh of relief, finally being in safety for once in this entire group stage. It’s been close to an hour worth of nonstop action for him, and he didn’t have an exosuit to augment his strength either. His case had been taken from him early on.

“I have to start planning what I’m going to do now, I can’t just give up like this! I’ll have to ambush one participant and somehow hijack their exosuit so I can use it myself. I can do this!” Erik thought to himself, still staying in the panels of the ceiling for a good two more minutes just to be safe.

Once he was absolutely sure that he was in the clear, Erik dropped down silently onto the floor, noticing that there were at least thirty in the group that chased him based on the distinguishable footprints on the floor and speed with which they search the building.

Still staying in the room, Erik began to contemplate how would an ambush work, using his computational skills to draw out a simple plan and location to execute it.

Suddenly, the building started to rumble, causing Erik to be frightened. “They can’t be coming back to this building, I never even left that many tracks here!”

The walls and floor started to shake and before Erik knew it, he was already falling through the collapsing floor two storeys down!

Covering his neck with both his hands, Erik braced himself for the fall, hitting the ground floor hard as random pieces of concrete and metal started to fall around him.

The whole building was toppling! Thanks to the forced bodybuilding sessions by Braton in the Gladius, he could withstand the pain a bit, but it was still far too much for him. The adrenaline kept him going for now.

Luckily for Erik, the direction that the building toppled in was not towards him, reducing the number of pieces of debris that could have knocked him out. He was still covered in dust as he stumbled out of the rumble, only to run directly into Maddy and a group of three outers!

“Sometimes to flush out a weak rat you got to flood the whole sewer, right Erik?” Maddy smiled wickedly, signalling with his hand as the three outers immediately dashed forward to grab Erik, arm locking him and forcing him to kneel in front of Maddy.

Erik struggled against the arm lock, almost managing to throw the three outers off before Maddy gave a swift kick to Erik’s thigh, causing him to wince in pain.

He was already hurting from the two storey fall, not sure how many ribs were broken, and most likely he had bruises all over his body. Yet he didn’t scream or ask for mercy, instead just glaring at Maddy who grinned widely.

“Your face looks great, so I’ll explain it to you as a show of goodwill. I’m very good at finding weak points, and this building is just full of them! How easy it is to collapse such a building, why would I even bother actually trying to search every single room myself?” Maddy laughed as he walked towards Erik, who continued staring angrily at him.

“You got more steel in your nerves than the other useless weaklings in my group, but its unlucky that you came across me in this stage. I really like your guts, so I’ll explain something special to you as a reward.”

Maddy squatted down next to Erik, grabbing Erik’s hand in his and forcing his fingers open. Erik tried to clench his fist but he couldn’t measure up to Maddy who was much stronger than him!

“Don’t bother trying to crush my fist, because you can’t, it’s a fact. The Loeric Empire respect strength, doesn’t it? Which means when we compare the two of us, you don’t deserve any of my respect. In fact I should treat you like an inanimate object.”

“Now, every participant has a special defense shield that is linked to their nervous systems and vitals. It monitors and catalogs certain data points to categorize what is considered a lethal attack. A lot of testing was put into this in order for them to achieve a 92% success rate.”

“But lucky for you, I know the exact amount of pain threshold and damage I can inflict before triggering the shield.” Maddy grabbed one of Erik’s fingers which was desperately squirming to get out and took out a sliver sharp needle from his pocket, aiming it at under the fingernails.

The sliver needle was as thin as a wire, but the sharp tip glinted dangerously in the light, causing Erik to panic and struggle even harder against the arm locks.

“Don’t worry, I’m just going to clean your dirty little hands for you and prove just how weak you and the rest of your team are.”

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