A familiar voice and appearance appeared above the arena while descending downward with snowflakes falling underneath her dress.
A dress as colorless as snow befitting for her magnificent snow white hair.
With roses made out of ice surrounding her waist, it shone brilliantly blue like her sapphire eyes.
The imperial crown with blue diamonds on her head was a sign that she is either a queen or an empress.
After all these years, her beauty still remained exactly the same as when I last saw her.
But since she was wearing a crown, I needed to behave properly in front of her.
When she laid her eyes on me, I bowed toward her.
"What is the Empress doing here in this unladylike area?" Sapphire spoke nicely to the Empress.
The Empress landed inside the emptied arena and observed her vicinity, smiling with elegance.
In that moment, I noticed she was acting quite odd toward the angels.
Usually, she would frown whenever an angel was in her sight or expressed great disgust in front of the angels if they spoke to her.
But now, her smile that would always be directed toward my comrades and me, was now given to the angels with ease.
Then I had a thought which made my blood boil whenever I think about it.
The Empress lifted her dress a little when she bowed. "Excuse me for coming here uninvited, however I only came here to oversee the King Candidates from my own eyes."
"We're sorry but we don't even have any seats for you. So wouldn't it be better to leave instead?" Ruby said, purposely wanting the Empress to exit this battle stadium.
On the other hand, I couldn't let the Empress leave just yet, because I needed her to fight against 'that' in Stage #10.
"Your majesty, why don't you have my seat?" I smiled, offering my seat to her.
Last time when I talked to the angels, they could easily hear my voice because they were using 'Enhanced Hearing' to aid them.
Even though it was a bit far for the Empress to listen to my voice, I knew that she would clearly hear it because she had extremely good hearing.
"Oh my. What a gentleman. Then I shall accept your offer." The Empress gave me a grin but this grin carried a bit of disgust toward me.
She was totally different in the past and I knew why she is like this.
Because of those fucking bastards ←(refering to the archangels) using their powers to make her into the Empress, forced her to forget everything about herself.
And implanted the idea that she was just the Empress of the 'Kingless' kingdom and nothing more.
The Empress soon showed up in front of me and passed me to sit on my seat.
I didn't want to turn back to have a single look at her because I was frustrated.
With how angered I was, I leapt off where I stood and landed on the arena.
It caused the angels to be surprised by my sudden action and bawled at me like dogs barking at unwanted trespassers.
I bellowed at them, pointing my katana toward their faces. "Why don't you shut up and send all the players here to fight me?"
Inflamed by my provocation, Ruby lashed out with pure rage, teleporting all the remaining players inside the arena that haven't participated in the match yet.
Sapphire was enraged by provocation but she kept her stern expression, glaring coldly in the eyes before bellowed at Ruby. "What do you think you're doing?"
Ruby growled with sparks flashing around her figure, shouting while pointing her finger toward me. "That jerk started it! He deserved to be beaten up for acting such a fool in front of us!"
While those two 'Helpers' were arguing with each other, I had a glimpse at the Empress's expression.
Her face had a smile that meant she would be entertained by me losing to these players but luckily, I was glad that she didn't wake my comrades, HwanGi and Alaine up from their naps.
Since I didn't want to cause more troubles for them, I wanted them to sleep until I finished this by myself.
I smirked toward the players that were teleported here, taking a stance to ready myself for an attack.
I pondered if that young girl with the amulet was teleported here, thus I dashed into the swarm of players to locate her quickly.
In this situation, I intended to attack as little as possible to save up all my energy for Stage #10.
A bombardment of attacks and skills rushed in on me as I was looking for the girl.
With incoming skills heading toward me, I hopped over a player to use him as a shield and when the skills damaged him, I kicked his head the moment I landed back on the ground before continuing to evade all the other players.
[Hidden Skill, 'Simulation' has offset the Hidden Skill, 'Mindscrew'.]
[Hidden Skill, 'Simulation' has offset the Skill, 'False Vision'.]
[Hidden Skill, 'Simulation' has offset the Hidden Skill, 'Disorientation'.]
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A couple of them must be stunned by how their skills are being blocked off by my hidden skill.
Honestly, I should thank them for using their skills on me since..
[Your Hidden Skill, 'Simulation' has gone up a level!]
Thanked to the players using mentality skills on me, my skill was able to level up.
I was a little happy by this, so I grinned which kinda caused the players to think I was toying with them or something.
Out of a sudden, a wave of projectiles flying in from all directions, carried insane magical energies that were traveling through the trajectories.
In this kind of dilemma, I stood there, waiting for the projectiles to come closer to me.
[Imitation of 'Portal' Lv. 3 has activated.]
And when it almost reached me by an inch, I generated a whole bunch of portals to receive all the attacks.
This scene was the reason why everyone was in an amazed state, staring at me in pure shock.
However, I didn't want to let them idly watch, thus I opened a medium amount of portals on top of the players, repelling all their attacks back at them.
Without a moment of realization, the attacks killed off the most of the weak players, leaving only a ton more remaining.
The players who were murdered by this, got teleported immediately back to their seats.
This made the angels bewildered by how much the players came back to their seats, resulting in their argument to be forcibly paused.
"How in the..?" Ruby had a moment of shock but was soon angered after having eye contact with me.
"Pfft." I chuckled, having Lucifer transformed into a sword.
Lucifer asked me. 'A sword. So it must mean Master doesn't want to wield other weapons for now?'
'I would rather want to use different weapons, so I could level up my skill, 'Weapon Mastery'. However, in this kind of situation, let's just use a sword for now.' I told Lucifer while gripping my sword's hilt.
'Understood.'
It seemed Sapphire and Ruby had enough of me, and so they both cast a spell.
Soon after, everyone that was still in the arena, got buffs while I got nothing.
"Woah. How cruel can angels like you be?" I shouted loud enough for those 'Helpers' to hear me.
Ruby ordered the players as if they were her puppets. "Kill him!!"
I really needed to find that amulet and that girl, thus I couldn't waste my energy on fighting these people.
On the other hand, I still had no process in locating her. 'Just where the heck is she?'
I spawned a portal underneath me and closed it off when I went in.
Afterwards, a portal generated behind all the players and that was where I went out of.
'Sorry, Lucifer. But I need to use the Mist.' I mused, talking to Lucifer inside my head.
Lucifer gave me his response. 'This is an unavoidable circumstance.'
"Right." I pulled out the Mist's core from my inventory before yanking the angelic feather from the core.
Without a moment to waste, I quickly tossed the core in the middle of the crowd and with that, the core bursted out with its own mist, enclosing those who were near the core.
There was a short moment of screaming but it was long gone when a few minutes passed.
Fortunately, I wasn't caught by the mist since I was at the near corner of the arena.
There were even those who were lucky enough to not get captured by the mist.
Not only that, the mist acted as a wall to block off the players from the other side, making it easy for me not to overtired myself.
At that moment when I thought I was alone on this side of the arena, I perceived vines sprouting from below me and it grabbed hold of my legs.
I looked around to find the person responsible for these vines and when I did..
The good news was that I found the child with the amulet but the bad news was that the amulet had given nature type skills to the girl..