Chapter 314 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

Currently, the tournament was in full swing, but it was hard for me to concentrate on it. The reason being a fight that happened about a week ago, basically at the start of the tournament. I often revisited the fight, and I think I needed to do it once again.

It wasn't anything special, at least not special enough for me to properly focus on it from the start. The alert, however, kept climbing up until a lot of me was focused on this fight—especially on one of the fighters and how he was fighting. He was one of the independents, someone not a part of the main competition but chose to join the tournament for the rewards it offered.

He was 14, yet already gold rank. I looked at his quest necklace's records, to find that he was granted permission to start delving at the age of 12. That was quite unusual. Usually, that was only given at age 16, but there were exceptions on how you could get access earlier, usually involving some quests to show your mental capabilities—mostly that you could make wise choices.

Not everyone aged and matured at the same rate. Some were going to be given access to delve well into their 20s simply because they weren’t properly mature to handle what that meant. The scales went the other way as well, and he was one of the youngest, although there were younger.

The second requirement was to have the strength to delve. He easily had enough, being what even I would call a martial prodigy. By the age of 10, he had learned from his adventurer parents all he could and well understood many martial arts—so much so that he started to create his own.

His story is not unique, although still impressive. But what’s really impressive is his latest development.

While he does use weapons, he more likes to do martial arts without them. The problem with that is getting through armor and being able to defend yourself against the longer reach of other melee weapons. It was something that had limited him for quite a while, but it seems no longer. He seemed to have something to prove and something to show.

The fight started quite normally. He was up against one of the clan members, which would normally mean a tougher fight. And it was at the start, but then it happened—the move that started the alert chain that finally made me almost fully concentrate on this fight. It was a simple punch. The effect wasn’t unique. How he achieved that. Well, I’ve been puzzling over it for quite a while.

There are many skills, even talents, that help you get past many defences. Many of my strongest talents in my library are just about that. They usually let you deliver an attack through something or project it further away from the hit point.

The way his martial arts worked was different, even if the end result was the same. This gold rank teenager—just 14 years old—managed to figure out how to affect something from the outside and project it inside, and the other way around.

It was a spell tied to martial arts—the way he moved and attacked—but it was so damn effective. Him hitting against armour would allow him to project that hit like it would happen inside your muscles.

It was easy to see that he was just a novice at using this newfound ability, as he couldn't project much strength as the opponent’s body fought those effects. Yet on his own body, he managed to do the same thing, yet opposite and a lot better.

Usually, martial artists don’t wear heavy armour. Basically no one after a certain rank uses heavy armour. But they do use medium, and he was as close to heavy as possible without compromising mobility.

The reason why was simple enough when you understood this power he developed. The biggest weakness of basically everyone was blunt damage. It would be exceedingly hard to get through his armour with slashing or even piercing. But his new power allowed him to transfer the blunt damage that should have gone into his body to just affect the outside of his armour.

There were negatives to this. I could already see some solutions—because projecting the damage outside meant that it would once again try to hurt him the same way, only weaker. So with some of the stronger attacks, he needed multiple rounds moving the damage outwards to successfully receive, at worst, minor damage.

In his bracket, he managed to get to the eighth spot before he was defeated, earning himself ample rewards, but in the end, this power of his was still too unrefined, and he could still get overwhelmed with too many attacks.

Still, I was going to remember Archer Viberdin for the rest of my existence, because unknown to him, he might have saved us all—because the technique he developed was so similar to what I needed: making things inside affect things like they were outside, and the other way around.

This discovery overshadowed everything even the tournament, but I was glad everyone was having fun—and more importantly, the younger generation had already shown that they will be a step above the old one.

There were so many young talents that have stepped up that if the older ones don’t continue to push forward, they will find themselves struggling to keep up, as the younger generations are just getting a better starting point than they ever had.

Now, some were bitter about that, but most were happy. It seems that in the future I will definitely need to do more of these types of tournaments, and I will definitely need to use more of my playrooms for rewards if this is the outcome.

This should also reduce war between the different worlds—because why fight and take from someone else if you could get something completely new, suitable for your needs, and without huge loss to gain it?

Ismael was having so much fun being the tournament master and in overall charge of the tournament. I was happy to let him take the lead, as now I had more important things to figure out.

While the technique was something that will help me a lot, I couldn’t actually use it directly like I could with most spells while making skills. It just wasn’t that simple.

It was a martial art—the technique combined with multiple spells to make the effects I saw happen. Now, I definitely couldn’t use martial arts, as I was just a shiny round big crystal that didn’t have legs or feet and could just kinda hover around at best.

But I had the key. I had seen how it was done— all that was left was to figure out how to actually do it. Before I knew it the tournament ended with their awards given out.

This time, the civilizations and organizations that were expected to do well did extremely well. So once again, the leaderboard was shuffled a bit, with the ants making up a lot of ground, and of course the Runner Guild extending their lead— although not by as much as they were expecting, because the clans were truly monstrous in this aspect.

The next phase was also announced. This was going to be the last one, even if no one knew it. It was about building a lasting legacy— to show the grandeur of what you have achieved and to keep achieving that generation after generation.

Empires had an expiration date, organizations the same, but there were exceptions which allowed some to well exceed the average and go down in history as something truly grand.

It’s nice and all for someone to achieve a lot of things, but to be able to do that generation after generation and keep a steady progress going— now that’s something truly impressive.

Stability was something often overlooked for quick gains, and I hoped I would be able to teach them the importance of building proper foundations, and then looking after those foundations, as so many just forgot and thought that those foundations would survive forever— when in fact, so many small and large things could and would slowly corrode or violently tear those foundations apart.

I was approaching my next breakthrough, but this time I didn’t think I would be ready to make the skill that I needed for survival. Instead, it was just time to improve one of my latest skills, to make sure they were at high enough rank to truly matter when it was time to leave this world behind.