A day before the Deathly Challenger's Cup would officially start, Leo found himself already staring down at the black sands of the arena.
"You're sh*tting me, right?" he asked with a raised eyebrow.
"Nope, Game Master, I am not sh*tting you," McCloud said in a straight-laced voice that told Leo the werewolf wasn't very good with detecting sarcasm. "There are indeed…"
He rifled through the note in his clawed hand.
"Three-hundred-and-twenty-eight applicants in total," McCloud reported. "That's much more than the hundred we need for the tournament."
"You don't say," Leo replied wryly. "I'm assuming they figured out the loophole in the Reaper's Curse and opted to switch out their favorite gear for something disposable…"
"That workaround has been floating around in the forums, I believe," McCloud admitted.
"I guess we'll have to change up this elimination round a bit," A smile was slowly forming on Leo's lips as he thought of something interesting. "You've been nagging me about wanting to test the Arena feature for the Coven update, right?"
Leo spared a sideglance toward McCloud and noticed that the werewolf's ears had just perked up.
"Here's the perfect opportunity to test it out," he said conspiratorially.
"I can certainly boot the feature if we need it, Game Master," McCloud nodded agreeably. "Although we can only access Battle Royal among the list of playable options for now…"
"You realize that's exactly what we need, right?" Leo chuckled.
"Um," Bront, son of Brontes, who was standing behind the two conspirators, raised a rather large finger. "there are a lot of bugs in Arena that we haven't logged in to the system yet, sir…"
"Don't sweat it, Bront," Leo said as he walked forward toward the edge of the raised dais reserved for the VIPs. "Have your QA team ready to record any new bugs that happen here."
He paused suddenly.
"Someone tell Agatha that I've decided not to use her script… I'll wing it," Leo insisted.
"Um, she won't like that," Bront warned nervously.
Leo waved off his concern with a hand. "It'll be fine."
Before he stepped into the light, Leo donned his Game Master robes. Afterward, he raised his arms wide toward the players gathered fifteen feet below him.
"Welcome, competitors!" he called in his pompous Game Master voice. "To the preliminary round of the Deathly Challenger's Cup!"
"What?" a player called from below. "We never heard anything about this!"
"That's right!" someone else agreed.
"Yeah!" another supplied.
Leo raised a hand to quiet the growing din of dissatisfaction.
"Unfortunately, there are too many substitute reapers who registered for the Cup," he admitted. "We need to whittle down your numbers by quite a bit…"
"Are you really just an NPC?" someone called from below.
Leo coughed. Then he cleared his throat.
"In any case," he said quickly less anyone else pick-up that specific question once more. Allow me to explain the rules of the preliminaries."
Leo spared a glanced over his shoulder to McCloud and gave him the signal for the go-ahead.
A happy bark and a conspiratory exchange of nods later, and a puff of white smoke exploded up from the ground at the edges of the arena only to give way a moment later to a familiar blue ring that appears to mark the space set for a duel.
The sound of notifications reached Leo's ears as three-hundred-and-twenty-eight windows appeared before each contestant.
[ARENA MODE: BATTLE ROYAL HAS BEEN ACTIVATED. ALL PARTICIPANTS PLEASE BE ON STANDBY.]
"Holy sh*t!" someone yelled from below.
A myriad of emotions exploded out of the contestants as many of them began to realized what was about to happen.
"It's a simple task," Leo said over the din. "A battle royal where only the hundred players who survive will be allowed to move forward to tomorrow's main event!"
Leo could hear clapping behind him and then the pattering of feet as they hurriedly crossed the stone-tiled floor of the dais.
"I'm glad I didn't miss this," Morgana said delightedly as she leaned down from the dais' railing to see what was happening below.
Leo inclined his head toward her. "Then maybe you'd like to do the honors."
He swiped the floating screen in front of him and passed it over to her so she could press the [YES] button that would initiate the start of the battle.
"Oh, Leo, you really know how to spoil a girl," Morgana said just before she tapped the screen.
A giant number ten floated above the center of the arena, forcing all eyes to look up and watch as the countdown began.
Ten… Nine… Eight… Seven…
"Oh yeah," Leo leaned over the edge. "Those of you who are about to die… I salute you!"
Three… Two… One… [BATTLE START!]
"Can someone get me a coffee… this might take a while," Leo called.
"I'm on it, Leo," Shannon called from behind him.
For the most part, the battle royal went the way Leo thought it would. It wasn't so much a free-for-all but a slaughter of those who lacked the connections to survive such a conflict.
Players who'd worked together before quickly joined up and formed teams. This led to the solo players getting targeted by the new parties, something that might not have happened if Black Howler had been present in the arena.
"Howler would have made things more interesting," Morgana whined just before she sipped on the straw attached to the extra-large soda cup in her hand. "Why'd you have to send him away now of all times?"
Leo winced as he watched a male wraith warrior slam the head of his two-handed war-hammer down on the face of a very petit female player with gossamer wings on her back.
"That guy does what he wants… he'll be back stronger than ever so don't worry your pretty little head about it," Leo shrugged. Then he pointed a finger down at the arena. "Besides, looks like your blood bard is about to get smacked down by my dusk knight."
To the left of the dais, a player in dark blue armor and a spiky helmet had his two-handed sword raised over a kneeling boyish looking figure in a brown padded jacket. But just before the knight could swing his sword down on the boy's frizzy-haired head, the boy yelled, "Sanguine Slander!"
The knight was seemingly paralyzed mid-swing, and as the boy screamed obscenities into his face, "You suck b*lls, you've got dragon breath, and your girlfriend left you for my big d*ck!" deep cuts appeared over the exposed flesh on the knight's face and arms.
However, neither the knight nor the boy would win their duel for while they were focused on each other, a bright blue streak zoomed toward them, and seconds later, relieved both combatants of their heads.
[You have slain Arturion Lv. 2 Dusk Knight] and [You have slain DontBendOver Lv.2 Blood Bard] notifications appeared in front of the blonde, blue-eyed female who'd zipped into view a few meters away from the two headless corpses.
Lyghtning, with her cats' slit eyes glowing a fierce blue, laughed out loud. "Cheer up, loves! I'm here to save the day!"
Then she was gone and running toward another pair of combatants while several shimmering yet nearly invisible blades circled around her.
"I'm surprised that she's the only Blade Savant in the entire player roster," Morgana said. "It's quite a powerful evolution… I should know as I adopted most of her abilities for myself."
"You and I know that, but most of the players don't. All they know is that she's become pretty bad*ss since she evolved," Leo explained. "She's been very secretive about her evolution and how to acquire it…"
"Didn't she just luck out though?" Morgana asked. "Out of all the stones that they'd taken from the Decapitator, she was the only one to receive that rarest of stones… the one that carried the murderous cyclops' will for battle…"
"Luck's a skill too," Leo replied. "And most players aren't aware that there are different types of rarities either as we haven't disclosed it yet… I'm waiting for more players to get lucky and figure it out for themselves."
As the pair continued to watch the battle, another interesting player caught Morgana's eye which she gladly pointed out to Leo.
He turned his gaze to the right of the battlefield where a man in a scale chest-plate was keeping several fighters at bay by blocking each and every one of their attacks with just his round shield.
"That one's quite skilled," Morgana noted. "And by the looks of the rune tattoos glowing on his face, I suspect he's one of those Eldritch Champions you keep raving about."
"He's the first of them actually," Leo corrected her. "Argonaut was the sixth player to evolve, and he did it after slaying a clan of hobgoblins solo... He's the real deal."
"Falcon Dive!" Argonaut yelled just before he leaped into the air. His body moved forward in mid-air and sent him crashing into the middle of the group attacking him with such explosive force that several of them were blown back. And as soon as Argonaut landed on the ground, he yelled, "Battle Stomp!"
He slammed the bottom of his shield onto the ground. A wave of air pressure exploded out of the point of impact, causing whoever was left to get knocked down. And it was only after his opponents were incapacitated that he drew his sword from its sheathe and proceeded to stab as many of them as he could.
[You have slain Balthus Lv. 2 Wraith Warrior], [You have slain NoFlyZone Lv. 2 Shadow], and [You have slain SilentMild Lv. 2 Totem Ranger] were written on the notifications that appeared before the Eldritch Champion.
He raised his sword in triumph, right before calling out to another small group of fighters and yelled, "Challenge!" to goad them into attacking him.
For the next twenty minutes, Leo's eyes would drift from one fight to the next, oo~ohing and aa~ahing as players mercilessly slaughtered their peers all for the chance to prove their worth in the Deathly Challengers Cup.
Eventually, the battle royal ended right after Ath3na decapitated the head of the tank who'd been blocking her path to Don Coyote.
The horns signaled the end of the match and the remaining hundred warriors, all of them evolved, breathed out a collective sigh of relief. Finally, after much blood, sweat, and tears had fallen on the sands, they had secured their right to compete in tomorrow's main event.
Among the survivors were several usual suspects such as Ath3na, Thorminator, Lyghtning, Argonaut, and Don Coyote — the only player who'd spent most of the battle surrounded and protected by his underlings, most of whom had fallen prey to Ath3na's Red Death.
One of these contenders, a tall, Asian man with arcs of electricity streaking up and down the blue skin of his arms and face, glared up at the dais where Leo sat watching and yelled, "Are you not entertained?!"
Leo returned the man's wide grin for he knew that line had come from the classic nineties movie, Gladiator, and thought the Stormchaser, Narukami, was being very cheeky.
"Don't these guys look cool," Leo said in satisfaction. "There you have it, kid… ten among these challengers are going to win the right to kill your enemy for you."
"Let's hope so, Leo," Morgana answered as she too gazed down at the survivors with a skeptical eye. "Let's hope so…"