Chương 505: 240.Individual Events Concluded 1

The next morning, I didn't waste time on anything that wasn't strictly necessary. Armed Combat. Opening match. Us. That alone said everything. The organizers clearly had no interest in giving anyone a warm-up, and no intention of letting us do what we'd done yesterday in Precision Shooting — stand on the sidelines, watch the venue and the rules work together to take someone apart, then file away their cause of death as reference material. No observation window. No buffer.

None of that unspoken professional courtesy of letting someone else step on the landmines first. Our opponents were the Orion Iron Guard, out of Orion. My first reaction to that name wasn't impressive. It was arrogant. Other teams at least bothered to stick a school name on the front — kept up the fiction that they were here for an inter-school tournament and hadn't simply dropped in from some frontline trench by transport shuttle. Not this lot. They hadn't even bothered with the pretense.

They'd slapped on something that read like a unit designation and called it a day, which amounted to a very clear message: this is the system that made us — take it up on the field if you've got a problem with it. And they had the record to back the arrogance up. Orion was one of the sectors closest to the Empire. The Federation kept forward bases there; the Empire held the Hohenzollern fortress guarding the corridor on the other side.

People who grow up in a place like that don't usually come out looking like ordinary students. They come out looking like a breed that treats universal conscription and regional high-tension as background noise and keeps living anyway. The match proved they hadn't come here for the free food. Our Vanguard and Second went down back-to-back the moment it started. No polite way to phrase it. They just went down. The opener was brutal — not the technically refined kind of brutal, but pure Orion Iron Guard.

They cranked the tempo up from the first second. Every weapon impact wasn't a probe; it was raw weight and shock aimed at scrambling your heart and lungs before anything else could happen. No clean opening. The observation window was suspiciously short, like a group of people who'd gotten used to putting someone on the ground first and asking for their name afterward. Our Vanguard held out for less time than expected.

Close-quarters pressure drove her off her footing; the instant her stance broke, a heavy weapon came in from the upper diagonal and smashed her guard open. It wasn't a failure of skill. The forward pressure coming at her was simply too vicious — vicious enough to say clearly that they had no intention of treating this as a school match. The Second's fight was uglier. Because he was ground down alive.

His opponent moved like a machine-beast with half its output limiter ripped out — steps that weren't large, but every one of them heavy. Every clash wasn't just about angle; it was a test of whether your arm and shoulder joints could survive the next one. After two exchanges, our man's cybernetic dampers were visibly failing. His defensive timing slipped half a beat. That half-beat was all it cost him. When the scoreboard lit up and I watched us drop two matches straight, something in me went quiet.

Not because I wasn't anxious. Because past a certain point, anxiety stops being anxiety. It just turns cold. Three matches left. We had to win all of them. Lose one more, and the overall championship could go ahead and say its goodbyes now. It wouldn't matter if we swept every point back later in the Long-Range Endurance Obstacle Course — if Armed Combat collapsed here, trying to patch it afterward would be like bailing a flooding compartment with a spoon. Personally, I didn't care about my own standing.

But Maki would lose face. And Maki losing face was never just a team-scoring problem to me. Yes, I'm biased. Call it favoritism, call it mixing personal and professional business — I have no interest in pretending otherwise. If someone throws garbage at Maki's face, they've thrown it in front of mine too. And once it's in front of mine, I have opinions. Third match. Center. Dwight "D" Barkley walked onto the field.

He carried the same lazy air he always did — like the kind of bastard who normally leaned in a doorway with a drink, watching other people train and offering commentary nobody asked for. But anyone who actually knew him understood: when D's shoulders relaxed that far, it meant he was finally taking things seriously. This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. Because the truly dangerous thing about him was never how intimidating he looked.

It was how much punishment he could absorb, and how deliberately he turned that into tactics. The opposing Center was textbook Orion Iron Guard. Tall. Solid. No wasted expression. Short-hafted heavy axe, auxiliary forearm shield. Cybernetics concentrated in the shoulders, elbows, knees, and spinal drive. His stance was rock-steady — steady like a piece of frontline fortification. One look told you everything: he didn't treat his weapon as a weapon. He treated it as an extension of his own body.

The start signal sounded. He moved first. Not a sprint. A crush. He ate the distance in his very first step — forearm shield leading, axe held low, the whole frame driving forward like a breaching ram completing its lock-on. That kind of opening is infuriating, because it isn't really about landing a cut. It's about forcing you backward, making you surrender the tempo before anything's even begun. D didn't retreat far. Half a step, angled. The heavy axe swept across.

The sound it made was short and dense — no theatrical whistle of displaced air, just raw, solid mass. D fought with a single-hand long blade and an off-hand short baton, a loadout that was never meant to meet something like that head-on. He met it head-on anyway. When the metal connected, I felt the impact from the sideline. Not a bright, clean clang. Closer to a blunt thud. Two pieces of steel with kill intent, using each other as an excuse to get scrapped. D's arm jolted. His boots slid back nearly half a step.

The Iron Guard didn't pause. Pressed. Shield. Struck again. D didn't take this one head-on — he angled his body clear, the long blade skimming toward the opponent's ribs. But the Iron Guard fought like he'd already known D would go for that gap. The shield contracted and dragged, knocking the blade line off course. Then the knee drove forward, the whole body leaning in, shoulder and shield together shoving D clear. This wasn't a duel. It was closer to an industrial accident.

I genuinely wondered if these people trained close-quarters work with door-breaching rams. D didn't counter right away — he reset his balance fast. The Iron Guard gave him no room to breathe, coming in again with a diagonal chop. A dirty angle — not aimed at the head or chest, but straight at the shoulder-lock and weapon arm. Land that, and it might not end the match on the spot, but it would be enough to wreck an entire side's rhythm. D took it on the baton, reversed the long blade toward the outer thigh.

The Iron Guard didn't even try to pull back. He ate the cut and drove the heavy axe all the way through anyway. That was the worst thing about fighting someone like him. He knew he'd get hurt. He also knew you'd break first. Irena hadn't said a word the whole time. She just stood there watching, her eyes carrying a steadiness that had nothing to do with a school match — more like someone checking whether one of her own machines could hold its rated load. I could see it clearly too.

Those early exchanges weren't failed counters. D was sampling — testing the weight, testing the drive, testing how the opponent's cybernetics recovered power. Because for all his trash talk, D almost never fought on pure adrenaline. On the third heavy collision, D deliberately took the hit. Genuinely deliberately. The shield came up. He had room to pull back clean. He didn't — he retreated just short of safe and let the strike land flush on his left side. His whole body twisted from the impact.

Someone on the sideline let out a low gasp, certain the follow-up combo would end it right there. The Iron Guard pressed exactly as expected. Axe up. Axe down. Halfway through the downswing, D shoved himself inward. Not a clean entry. An ugly, forced jam — like a man who'd been hit hard enough to stop caring about fairness and simply threw himself into the one range where the weapon had no leverage left. The axe was too heavy, committed too deep.

Once someone glued themselves to your torso, there was no time to pull it back into a proper arc. D's shoulder took the axe shaft across the edge — his face visibly twisted with the pain — but his right hand was already driving the long blade up from close range, into the seam between shield and breastplate. His left brought the baton down, again and again, on the cybernetic joint node at the outer knee. Once. Twice. The third wasn't a strike at all. He simply put his full body weight into that single point.

I could almost hear the metal stress screaming. The Iron Guard let out a low growl, the knee joint visibly buckling. He didn't fall — instead he swung the shield edge back toward D's face. Crude. Vicious. No technique at all, just the raw intent to knock him out cold. D turned his head half a beat too slow. The edge opened a bloody line down the side of his face. He didn't back off. He even smiled. Not with pleasure. With the look of someone who'd finally found what he was after.

The next second, D kicked straight into the same outer knee that had already taken three heavy hits. It was an ugly kick. No form, no clean angle, not even a stable base under it. But it worked. Because it wasn't kicked for the judges to score. It was kicked to scrap the joint for good. With a harsh, wrong-sounding metallic shriek, the leg finally gave. The Iron Guard sank half an inch to one side. Just half an inch.

D threw his whole weight forward, twisted the long blade to wrench the shield-chest seam wider, drove his shoulder into the breastplate, and slammed the baton straight into the opening. Close range. Heavy strike. Dead center. Not elegant. But ruthless. The Iron Guard staggered back, the heavy axe nearly leaving his grip. D didn't give him time to reset — he closed again with a diagonal slash, this time not at the body but the weapon wrist.

The opponent tanked it, his wrist dampers absorbing the shock, but his whole frame had slowed. The scoring window lit in that half-beat. Result confirmed. D won. But it was close. Genuinely close. Not the kind of win that lets anyone relax — the kind where, watching the whole thing back, you know that ten more centimeters, three-tenths of a second later, one fewer hit absorbed, and it could easily have been him on the ground. Only then did anyone on the sideline let out a full breath.

I realized my own shoulders had locked tight enough to ache, as if I hadn't just watched someone fight but taken a few of those axe swings myself. D walked back with blood still at the corner of his mouth, his left shoulder plating visibly wrecked, his steps not entirely steady. His expression was exactly the same as ever — infuriating, like he hadn't just come out of a fight that had rattled his bones loose but had won himself a free lunch in a casual scrap.

"What are you staring at?" He wiped the blood off with the back of his hand.

"Did I stun you with how good I look?"

"I'm checking whether you left any parts on the field."

"Nope." He snorted.

"Still all attached." Irena stepped up and looked him over for exactly two seconds.

"You held."

"That's a pretty stingy review, Captain."

"Because those swings were ugly." D actually laughed.

"A win's a win."

"Now that," she said, "sounds almost like a person talking." I stood there, and the weight that had been sitting on my chest since the first two losses finally shifted. Not gone. Just loosened.