Upon arriving at the stage, their opponents looked at them with determined looks on their faces. Their first opponent was Archelion Adventurer Academy who's one of the lowest-ranked academies in the entire Valenzia Region.
After finding out that Colzen Academy was their first opponent, Archelion Academy dared to hope that perhaps, they would get the win against Colzen who started to rank lower and lower in the competition in the past few years.
This batch of students was the golden generation of Archelion Academy so they hoped to at least achieve a top 128 finish in this year's tournament which would give them the capital to start growing and at least become a mediocre academy.
Currently, people think that Archelion Academy is utter trash so they wanted to change that impression this year by defeating a fairly known but mediocre Colzen Academy.
The format of each match was two rounds of one-on-one matches followed by a two-on-two match, then a three-on-three match.
In the event that the two academies get two wins each, the substitute representatives will fight in a one-on-one match which will decide the winner of the match.
In addition to this, an academy can choose one representative to fight twice but the one marked as the strongest representative can only fight once.
The reason why substitute representative matches were rare in the mediocre and low-ranked academies was because the battles were usually one-sided and ended with a 3-1 or 3-0 match record.
On the other hand, top-ranked academies usually engage in neck-and-neck battles which always comes down to the battle of the substitute representatives.
This is the reason why the top-ranked academies didn't dare to put third-year students or below as substitute representatives.
In addition to this, the approach of the top-ranked academies was different from the mediocre academies such as Colzen Academy.
Things such as "get experience to get a higher ranking next year" aren't acceptable to them because they were already at the top.
What's important to these academies was to get the rank 1 spot for their academies every year so they couldn't afford to risk losing a match just for the sake of "preparing the younger generation for next year's tournament."
In their opinion, that mentality was the mentality of losers which is, in their case, true to a certain extent because why do they have to prepare the younger generation to achieve a higher rank next year when they can take the number one spot this year?
Failure is not an option for these top-ranked academies because all that's acceptable to them is a victory.
Finally, after a few minutes of preparation, the first one-on-one match began.
First up was the beauty, Allyson Blaire who easily beat the crap out of her opponent in just fifteen exchanges.
The Archelion Academy group consoled themselves by thinking that Allyson was already the strongest representative of Colzen Academy so their next representative pumped himself up to get a win for Archelion Academy.
It was a scout vs scout battle where Ren Beckmann defeated his opponent in a single hit.
Archelion Academy's scout representative didn't even realize that Ren was already behind him so he was knocked out by a single blunt blow to the back of his neck.
After realizing that Colzen Academy's representatives this year weren't pushovers, the light in the eyes of the Archelion representatives dimmed and their hopes were extinguished.
They couldn't do anything but blame their bad luck for getting matched up against a strong batch of Colzen Academy representatives.
As expected, since the Archelion Academy had already given up, the two-on-two battles were also easily won by Colzen Academy.
Shye and the companion students loudly cheered after finally seeing the prowess of their seniors.
They knew that their seniors were strong but they were utterly shocked upon actually witnessing how strong they were.
They estimated that they would be beaten just as quickly as the Archelion representatives if they fought against their seniors right now.
"Hey, did you see that? Colzen Academy's representatives seem way stronger compared to last year…"
"Yeah, especially the scout, who would've thought that he would be able to defeat his opponent in less than ten seconds?"
"I've heard that Shadowglade Academy's representatives were also strong this year. Seems like there would be quite a show to watch in the fourth round of matches!"
The people who tuned in to Colzen Academy's match enthusiastically chatted about Colzen Academy representatives' current prowess as Shye and the other senior students returned triumphantly to their academy station.