The first thing anyone noticed about Competitor #4 was that he wasn’t wearing any armor.
Not a single plate. Not a layer of mail. Just his broad frame, his wide sword, his unusual shield, and an expression that said he didn’t think he needed any of it.
He looked Leo up and down slowly — the kind of look designed to make the other person feel small.
"I’ve heard about you," he said, voice steady and unhurried. "Two days. Two matches. Both won using nothing but Storing Power." He tilted his head, almost bored. "Don’t use that pathetic skill against me. If you do, the loss is going to hurt."
Leo looked back at him with that same easy expression he always wore.
"There are no weak skills," he said simply. "Only weak people."
The arena went quiet.
Competitor #4’s eyes narrowed. Then slowly, one corner of his mouth curled. "Bold words."
The referee for this match was different — a seventh-stage Saint Knight assigned specifically because a fifth-stage participant was involved. He was a broad-shouldered man whose stillness came not from peace but from surviving things that should have killed him. He stood between the two like a mountain between rivers, and when he spoke, his voice had no patience in it.
"Save it for after. This floor is not a stage for speeches." He stepped back. "Begin."
The golden mist rose around Leo before the word had even finished echoing.
Storing Power. Again. Exactly what he had been warned not to use.
Competitor #4’s expression curdled. His eyes went flat and cold. Without another word, without calling his mount, he slammed his wide sword against his shield with a single thunderous *clang* — and charged.
This was not a standard Charge. Spiritual energy surged from his core and liquefied along the surface of his skin, spreading outward like a second layer — hardened, dense, radiating pressure that made the air itself feel heavier. His feet barely seemed to touch the ground. Thirty meters of arena stone disappeared in a single breath.
[Assault] — a fifth-stage skill that pushed Charge to its absolute limit, adding speed, stability, and raw destructive force that no fourth-stage technique could match.
The wide sword came down at Leo’s head like a falling wall.
*CLANG.*
Leo’s Radiant Shield caught the blow dead center. The impact shuddered through his arms, shoulders, and spine — and he was shoved hard backward, one foot scraping a pale streak across the stone floor.
But he didn’t fall.
His Light Sword was already moving. Bright Vengeance blazed out from his blade, force multiplied by his accumulated Storing Power, cutting hard toward Competitor #4’s ribs.
Competitor #4 had expected it.
His wide sword pivoted and caught Divine Obstruction at the flat. And even as Leo’s counter was still in motion, the shield was already swinging — that heavy, pointed-bottom shield hammering into Leo’s sword arm with the full force of Shield Charge behind it.
The impact hit Leo like a runaway cart.
One moment he was standing. The next he was airborne — tumbling backward — and then the stone floor came up hard. He hit shoulder first, skidded several meters, and came to a stop near the arena wall. His Radiant Shield spun out of his grip and clattered to rest halfway across the floor.
A thin line of blood at the corner of his mouth.
Competitor #4 didn’t follow up immediately. He turned his head toward the competitors’ lounge and held the moment deliberately — long enough for everyone watching to understand exactly what they had seen.
His expression said everything without words:
*This is fifth-stage power. Look at it.*
---
In the lounge, Mira was on her feet before she realized she’d stood up.
She grabbed Kessel’s arm. "Teacher — stop this. That guy is going to seriously hurt him. Leo’s already—"
"Let go." Kessel’s voice was quiet. His jaw was set like iron and his eyes hadn’t moved from the arena floor for a single second.
"But he’s bleeding—"
"Mira." Just her name. The certainty behind it stopped her cold.
She stared at him.
"Trust him," Kessel said quietly. "He will win."
Mira stood frozen for a moment. Then she let go, turned back to the arena, and gripped the railing instead. Her knuckles went pale. She didn’t look away.
---
On the arena floor, Leo rolled onto his side and pushed himself upright — one knee, then both feet, using his Light Sword planted in the ground as an anchor. His chest was heaving and his left side ached deeply, but he pressed his free hand against his ribs and let a quiet white Healing Light bloom between his fingers.
His eyes never left Competitor #4.
Across the arena, the fifth-stage knight watched him rise and began walking forward. No Assault this time — just slow, deliberate steps, each one landing with the full weight of his confidence. The holy light on his blade pulsed steadily.
"Still refusing to accept it?" His voice was almost calm. "Fine. I’ll help you understand."
Three meters. Two.
The wide sword rose. The holy light on it intensified, building toward a finishing blow aimed at Leo’s shoulder — enough force to fold him to the ground and end it cleanly.
Leo watched him come.
He didn’t move back. Didn’t flinch. His eyes tracked the wide sword, the shield, the weight distribution across Competitor #4’s forward foot — and all of it was calm. Not the blankness of someone who had given up. Something deliberate. Something that had been waiting.
One meter.
And then something in Leo’s clear gold eyes shifted.
Subtle. A deepening — like a fire that had been burning low suddenly finding more air. The warmth and openness he usually carried stepped quietly aside.
What remained was something serious.
Not afraid. Not desperate.
Serious the way a blade is serious when it’s finally drawn.
It was the second time this expression had appeared. The first had been yesterday, in a brief encounter with the young man in black robes — a moment no one had understood. Now it was here again, and this time, the arena would understand exactly what it meant.
*BUZZZZ—*
Light erupted from the stone floor.
Not from Leo’s sword — from the ground itself. A blazing column of brilliant energy burst upward and outward in a perfect ring, so sudden and sharp that knights in the lounge actually stepped back.
[Heavenly Battle Array].
The wide sword met the outer edge of the formation mid-descent — and slowed. Not stopped. Slowed. Like a blade driving into deep water. The fifth-stage force behind it was real and undeniable, but the Array had its own weight, its own resistance, and for one crucial moment, the descent became something that could be managed.
In that same moment, the second preparation detonated.
[Holy Mantle].
A shell of radiant white light sealed around Leo’s body — not a physical shield but something woven deeper, distributing the impact rather than absorbing it in one place. The wide sword finished its arc. The force still hit. Leo’s knees bent slightly, his teeth came together hard — but the light held.
Leo was still standing.
Competitor #4 blinked.
The competitors’ lounge had gone completely silent. Knights who had been leaning back were sitting forward. The young man in black robes, who had been watching with composed dismissiveness, had gone very still, his dark eyes fixed on the arena floor with something unreadable moving behind them.
Leo exhaled slowly and pulled the Light Sword free from the ground.
He had been preparing those two skills since the moment he picked himself up off the floor — carefully, quietly, while Healing Light worked on his ribs and his eyes tracked every step Competitor #4 took. He had known from the beginning that a straight exchange of power wasn’t something he could win. The gap between fourth and fifth stage in raw spiritual energy was too wide.
So he had done something harder.
He had taken the hits on purpose.
He had let himself be launched across the arena. Let himself bleed. Let Competitor #4 believe the match was already decided — because a fighter who thinks they’ve won stops watching carefully. And the moment they stop watching carefully, the gap opens.
Kessel had drilled this into him back in Hao Yue City. Daily sparring against a seventh-stage Airborne Knight had taught him how to endure, how to read a fight from inside it, how to find the moment when the other person’s confidence became their weakness. Surviving one round against a fifth-stage opponent was something he could do. What had taken patience was not letting on that he could.
That patience had just paid off.
Competitor #4 stood less than two meters away, wide sword still in hand — and for the first time since this match began, something in his expression wasn’t quite right. The contempt was still there. But underneath it, pressing upward, was the first hairline fracture in the certainty he had walked in with.
Uncertainty.
Leo looked straight at him.
And smiled — not his usual easy grin, but something quieter, something with an edge to it. Like the first light before dawn when the sky is still mostly dark.
"My turn," he said.