Lex had introduced the teams, and they were now in their place, so there was only one thing left to do before the match officially started...


    OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO


    Blow the horn!


    Now that that formality was over and done with, things were going to kick off for real. Deimos revved up his Grand Prix and shot straight at the talisman as this was a match that could potentially be decided by the time rule. As there was no Umbra member available to stop him, the best they could do was watch him take it. That didn''t mean Deimos was off Scot free and could just keep vrooming around at his leisure though as Scar took a second to pick Verv up and rattle him awake. With an outstretched finger, pointed firmly in the direction of the Grand Prix and tracking Deimos without a sweat, Scar said but a single word to Verv to get his own engine revving. "Fetch." To further encourage the beastly brother, Scar lobbed him in an arc towards Deimos before walking back over to deal with his own problem, Tyr.


    Verv, unfazed by his newfound velocity, rubbed his eyes a bit to get the sleep out before locating the target that had been set him for him by Scar. His chew toy today was a fast one but no prey was ever going to outrun him! The firefly hovering around him was a distraction that pacified him and that calm state wasn''t beneficial to him right now so he shoved the firefly inside the lantern and there was an immediate change in his general presence. His eyes flared up and the small white glow became a raging fire with an inky black outline. A small but striking black dot amidst the flames was the only indication of what direction his sights were set. Verv wasn''t fully berserk yet but he was damn close and any and all reason or fear had practically evaporated from his body. He was currently spiralling through the air at blistering speed? That wasn''t a problem, it was a thrill! Verv twisted so that, as he landed, his front two hands allowed him to leap frog forward and convert his forward momentum into a sprint on all fours like a crazed beast. The sheer speed he''d inherited from the earlier toss wasn''t lost and instead was combined with his sprint speed on all fours, allowing him to not only keep up with Deimos'' Grand Prix but also to start gaining ground on it despite the ginormous broadsword that was laying flat on his back right now and weighing him down.


    Deimos could keep the jig up for a while but Verv would catch him eventually and then the real fight would start. Still, Deimos had no obligation to speed up that process as he was in it to win it. Although he felt confident in holding out for a while against Verv there was no need to hasten the inevitable. If Verv was going to catch him, then Verv would have to put the effort in to drag Deimos off the bike. Was it cheap and cowardly to extend the timer like this by driving around the outer ring of the arena in a loop? Perhaps but winning was what truly mattered! The other members of the Legion clan in the crowd may not have been too thrilled to see Deimos take this approach, though, because it was somewhat shameful but Deimos had always been a little like Bellona. A ''black sheep'' of the clan that was less a role model and more so a wrench in the grand plan. Deimos stuck to himself for the most part though and wasn''t hated to the same extent as Bellona by Major. So, rather than anyone pestering him, he just kinda drifted around unimpeded on his bike like a motorised ghost.


    Just because this fight wasn''t the most exciting thing ever, that didn''t mean everyone else was taking it slow. In particular was the fight between Pele and Skyzo which was heating up both metaphorically and literally. Skyzo and Pele both specialised in the passive pillar, a pillar that, you guessed it, gave passive benefits that were generally useful almost all the time. Three aspects came under this pillar and were known simply as ''conditional reward'', ''toggleable boon'', and ''constant blessing''.


    The first of the three specialised in tasking a cultivator to complete a ''mission'' of sorts, after which they would be rewarded with a passive upgrade. Hitting an opponent ten times to gain increased strength for ten minutes, making a foe speak a certain word out loud to get a free, mana-less cast of any art no matter how powerful, or performing a ritual mid-combat to become invincible for a few seconds were all examples of potential conditional rewards. Anything was possible here and the demands of the pillar could get really whacky sometimes. There was even an art under this aspect that gave a random task and random benefit every time it was used. The applications of this art were wide and varied. Take, for instance, the free art mentioned earlier. Some people learnt Armageddon-esque arts that they couldn''t possible cast on their own and, yet, by tricking their opponent into saying a random word, like ''puppy'' for example, it allowed them to unleash chaos they had no business being able to usually. There was also mission types that had levels to them, I.E dodge five attacks, become 5% faster, dodge five more attacks, become 5% again, and so on so forth. Usually if you followed these series of missions to completion you would get one big benefit at the end. These took longer to complete, and gave smaller rewards in increments, but usually gave more overall when including the final reward.


    Getting the exact passive benefit you wanted was tough unless you knew a specific art that always gave the same reward. This was quite rare, however, which meant, for the most part, this pillar tended to be quite random... So random, in fact, that there was one art that literally randomised EVERYTHING about a person daily. The condition was to wait until the dawn of a new day, at which point a cultivator''s possessed artifacts, treasures, personal treasures, physique, pillar affinity and known arts, knowledge and expertise, and even weapon mastery were all randomised completely. Some days you were an umbrella wielding assassin who was slow as a snail, sometimes you were a hydra dragon breathing quadruple elemental fire with ten wings and laser cannon strapped to your back. The people that used this art were few and far between but typically swore by it. At the bare minimum you kept your rough cultivation and everything randomised was of equivalent value to what you lost. You may get an umbrella, sure, but it would be a treasure that was just as powerful as the legendary sword you lost which often led to hilarity in some form or another. Also you could revert back to normal by just not engaging with the daily randomisation so nothing was ever truly lost for good. It actually wasn''t terrible! In particular, weapon masters quite liked it as it forced them to use unconventional equipment they might not have considered otherwise. Dominus himself occasionally dabbled in the art which was what lead a lot of other cultivators to follow in his foot steps. Most gave up but a few found the appeal and stuck with it. As for the other two aspects...


    ''Toggleable boon'' guaranteed the user a passive benefit whenever they wanted it without any fuss but it typically came with a price. You could emit heatwaves intermittently at the cost of constantly draining mana when it was active, you could magnetise your body and steal weapons or repel bullets by lowering your speed, or perhaps you might want to cultivate quicker by putting yourself at risk and lowering your defences while you do it. Risk and reward was the interplay between negative and positive changes that occurred with this aspect. For every upside, a downside. The best part of the aspect, though, was that you could freely enable or disable these passives whenever you wanted. So yes the magnetise ability made you a sitting duck for any non-metal based attacks but you could easily turn it off and run away if you were clever with it.


    The passive pillar was generally considered a lazier pillar but this aspect had a bit of a skill requirement to it in order to not suffer too harshly from the downsides. Sometimes you would need quick thinking to decide when the downsides of your passive outweighed the good it was currently doing you and sometimes you needed quick reaction times to prevent anything catastrophic from happening by turning your passive off. It was definitely the most involved of all the aspects under this pillar and kept cultivators on the tip of their toes but the benefits were usually proportionately good. It was typically a toss up between this aspect and the conditional reward aspect on which arts were more powerful but it was mostly in favour of the toggleable boons. There were many precautionary tales about this aspect though, such as the man who forgot to turn off a passive that drained his blood before he went to sleep. He never woke up again but, on the bright side, his corpse was filled to the brim with mana! Trading life for mana was risky but great for people who chugged through it... Provided you remembered to turn it off. As a side note, entities without blood lost life force so, no, the requirement couldn''t be cheated! Although the negative passive was usually worded generally for the sake of clarity, it was safe to assume it would always effect you even if it didn''t seem like it theoretically should. For instance, if a person in a wheelchair magnetised themself, the wheelchair would roll slower. No amount of disability was going to disable your punishment. To that end, anyone who felt confident in themself and didn''t want to be affected negatively during combat, without any means of preventing it, shied away from this aspect as it was guaranteed self-hindrance compared to other magics that just worked.


    Lastly, there was the easiest to understand aspect and the one most people thought of when hearing the word ''passive''. Permanent blessing were... Well... Permanent blessings... They just existed 24/7 and were, 99% of the time, just very good. No downside and no activation requirement meant this aspect wasn''t plagued by menial tasks or the need to dedicate a part of your conscience to tracking multiple things at once. A minor increase to your mana regeneration speed that would stay with you from birth to death? Why the hell not! The ability to walk up walls? Could very well happen! Immunity to illness? Not the most useful thing ever but definitely appreciable! Now you may be looking at this aspect and wondering why everyone didn''t dip their toes in it but the answer to that conundrum was simple, it was HARD. Almost everyone who specialised in this aspect was born with an affiliation and a passive art already working away in the background. Being able to learn, say, the passive mana regeneration could take thousands of years at the very least and wasn''t worth the cost of doing business for a lot of people. Not to mention the fact that that was considered a basic art under the aspect to boot. Something like walking up walls would take maybe a few hundred thousand years if you were a quick learner AND found a scroll to impart the necessary teachings. Some of the more incredible passives were closely guarded secrets by those that knew them so, more often than not, this pillar was either left well enough alone or the cultivator actually had no choice in the matter and was forced to accept it because they were born with it. Skyzo and Pele were two examples of people that were ''forced to accept it''! They''d both been born with unique arts under ''constant blessing'' that were incredibly powerful and so focusing the majority of their attention elsewhere was a waste of their God given talents.


    Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.


    Skyzo had his Spectator''s Sanction, the effect of which has already been discussed, and Pele had her Feel The Heat! Pele''s unique art provided an in-combat buff to pretty much everything. Her magical power, her physical strength, speed, weapon mastery, and even her current cultivation all increased the longer she fought for. It had an upper limit but reached it fairly quickly, only taking a minute and half total to reach that point. Compared to Davey, her art reached the peak of its effectiveness sooner but had less of an upside over the course of a longer fight. The benefit never tapered off unless she ran away from the fight so it''s not like it stopped being useful after that point or anything, it was just functionally different to Davey''s infinite sapping.


    Currently, Pele''s art could raise her cultivation by up to five whole stages, even allowing her to cross into the next realm provided she wasn''t more than two stages away from it at the start as that would be excessive. Going from the sixth stage of a realm to the first of the next one was a ludicrous increase in power thanks to the benefit of gaining a realm compared to that of gaining a stage. If Pele was in such a situation, meaning she was more than two stages from the next realm but also less than five, she would just get more power gifted to her as compensation; just not enough to compete with the amount she would have gotten from an extra realm. Taking that into consideration, it meant that Pele actually had swings in power depending on how far along she was in her cultivation journey. She was at her summit when either freshly entering a new realm or on the cusp of leaving one she''d been in a while. It was a relatively unique situation but, seeing as how this was just a passive, it''s not like anything negative happened should she be caught out in the 6th to 8th stage. Just a minor loss in potential gain overall. She wasn''t overly reliant on this art, even though it was her go to in most cases, as she had plenty of auxiliary options to keep her afloat. Her finely-crafted spear was a treasure that could spit out lava and her soldiers were trusty backup so she was well equipped to tango with just about any opponent. Her biggest weakness, really, was range as she had no means of closing a gap other than brute forcing the matter by throwing lava soldier after lava soldier at the issue. If they could run down her opponent, great. If not, they acted as a wall of bodies that allowed Pele to sneak up to her foe from behind the waves of soldiers. It wasn''t optimal but it was the best she could do which is why, as of late, she''d been searching high and low for treasures that boosted a cultivator''s mobility in whatever fashion. Unfortunately she had come across no such thing before this match so that weakness was yet to be fixed. It didn''t matter too much against Skyzo, as he too was a melee oriented fighter, but if Pele had actually been forced to fight Venus she would have struggled greatly.


    Skyzo, on the other hand, had no such qualms about his current level of strength or any weaknesses he might posses. This man had never wielded a treasure in his life other than the flare gun with which he used to garner attention. Any and all weapons he''d used up to now throughout his life weren''t even artifacts, they were just cold, hard steel. Skyzo was lazy, and not particularly invested in cultivation as a whole, and yet he still managed to be quite a menace which was honestly incredible. Had he put in the effort he could have very well been the strongest of the Umbras, minus Ares, but due to his reserved and passionless personality it wasn''t in the cards. Still, when a fight came calling, he wouldn''t run away.


    Skyzo raised his scarf a little and fastened it in place so that it wouldn''t fall during what was about to come as he calmly walked towards Pele. She had no means of attacking him from range that he couldn''t dodge reactively so there was no need to waste his energy and rush. Pele did twirl her spear and thrust it a few times, firing off ball-sized globules of lava at Skyzo but he effortlessly sidestepped each and everyone. This grew more difficult the closer he got but Skyzo wasn''t fettered by the magic and pressed onwards. The lava that missed him sailed onto the ground and burnt chunks of the arena, leaving nothing but a smouldering pit by the time they were done melting everything in their path. Getting hit by even one of these attacks would be excruciating and you were liable to lose parts of your body entirely if you weren''t careful about where they hit you. A globule landing on your head was near enough guaranteed to kill you or, at best, leave you with irreparable bran damage and a lopsided skull after parts of it disintegrated into ash. Of course Pele preferred not killing others in such a gruesome manner but that was only something she could avoid doing up close. If she was flinging fiery sorcery from a distance there were no promises her aim would be accurate to her intentions. If she aimed for someone''s chest, which was still pretty rough to get hit by, and missed because the person charged forward head first... Well there was nothing she could do about that! Pele would just shrug her shoulders, say ''oops'', and walk away as the person in question screamed their dying lungs out. She was friendly and polite, sure, but if you got on her bad side you were out of luck as any and all care she had for you was gone. She still adhered to Legion tradition and tried to keep you alive but accidental deaths weren''t something she''d lose sleep over.


    Skyzo closed the gap and now it was go time. Skyzo, without anyone looking at him, was stronger than Pele without her Feel The Heat! It would slowly kick in and change the dynamic between them but Pele also had to actually look at Skyzo so the amount of time her art took to even out the gap wasn''t short. Pele would start to beat out Skyzo eventually, maybe after a minute or so, but even then it was based on the assumption that no one else would look at him. All it would take was for some of her other family members to accidentally glance at him and the increase in strength, although brief, would be enough for him to turn the tide in those short windows. Plus the lava soldiers needed to come out at some point so it was all a mess for her. Still, her best bet was to summon the soldiers now and bide her time until she reached her pinnacle, at which point she could be done with them and bring it back to a one on one. This would weaken Skyzo at the exact time he needed the support and could maybe throw him off his game so she raised her arm to the sky and yelled, "Volcanic Veterans!!


    Shortly after her call, the arena ground rumbled and cracked in various places with lava spurting out from underneath like miniature volcanoes. The ground around these spots became a colourful mixture of ashy black and brilliant orange as they rose into small hills and gradually shaped themselves into the shape of infantrymen. Although Pele would no doubt go on to create more during her cultivation journey, there were currently three different types of soldier amongst her ranks. The ''wall'', the ''standard'', and the ''shrieker''. The standard, as the name implied, was a basic foot soldier with one of two weapons, made from pyroclastic, in the form of a sword or a spear. They weren''t masterful in terms of technique, as that would be absurd had they the skills of an exemplar, but they were decent enough to do the job. You would sooner bet on one of these soldiers than a random back-alley thug at least. They weren''t incredible on their own but, then again, they weren''t on their own and it was the ''walls'' that allowed them to shine and show off their full potential.


    The walls were bulky soldiers with large frames and thicker chunks of volcanic rock clinging to their body. They could withstand more hits, and hit harder when they retaliated, but were slow as a snail. They either wielded a great hammer or used their fists, the latter of which moved somewhat faster but still slowly compared to a ''standard''. These oafish soldiers took up the frontline and acted as a meat shield to block attacks and distract the foe while the ''standard'' peppered them with quicker attacks from the flank or, if wielding a spear, from behind the ''walls''. The biggest hurdle was getting these ''walls'' into position but, once they were there, the effect they had on the fight was hard to ignore. Also, as an added bonus, when these ''walls'' went kaboom, they made the biggest explosion of all the soldier types by far. Staying as far away from these big baddies as possible was the best solution. If they got close to you they were lethal whether you ignored them, and let them attack you, or set them off by attacking them back. Or rather, for the most part, even if you ignored them they would still blow up anyway. See usually these Volcanic Veterans only ever detonated when they were defeated but there was one exception and that was when the ''shriekers'' got involved.


    The shriekers'' bodies were hunched, slim, and somewhat lanky. Their heads rolled to one side and their mouths oozed with gunky lava. They had no weapons and existed to serve one purpose, suicide pacts! They had the fastest speed of all three soldier types and were tireless as they sprinted towards you, at which point, BOOM. they could self-detonate. That was their one ability and they would hound you until the ends of the earth in order to use it by your side. A double suicide! How quaint... But not all ''shriekers'' took the direct approach. Occasionally, a shrieker would lie in wait until a ''wall'' closed the gap between itself and the foe, after which the shrieker would leap into action. It wouldn''t attack the opponent, no, it would commit friendly fire and blow up the wall to start a chain detonation and rock your world in a blaze of glory. More than being talented, the Volcanic Veteran''s worked together well and could occasionally use ''tactics'', limited in scope though they were. The spear wielding standards could force you to back up into walls that the shrieker would then set off. Or maybe the shriekers would corral you into the sword wielding standards who would occupy your time and allow the walls to get in close. All in all, getting swamped by these soldiers was the worst possible outcome as they were relentless in their approach, an approach that shifted as necessary to accommodated the tide of the battle. Even if you could beat them the main reason Pele even summoned them to begin with was because this counted as her being ''in combat'' for the sake of her Feel The Heat! She didn''t even have to square up against Skyzo for the one and a half minutes, her soldiers could do it for her!... Provided they lasted that long.


    A shrieker jumped head first at Skyzo. It was looking like it was about to succeed in its ambush as, by the time it exploded, from its perspective, Skyzo had yet to take even a single measure against it. The shrieker left the world assuming its mission had been fulfilled when, really, all that had happened was that Skyzo caught it in mid air, used his incredible speed as a result of his Spectator''s Sanction to bolt over to a large group of soldiers, and chucked the shrieker into the crowd milliseconds before it detonated. Skyzo''s speed, now that seventy or so enemies were staring at him, was probably enough to match Ares at top speed with regular enhancement or, at the very least, come close. The speed itself was obviously lightning fast but what really tipped Skyzo over the edge was the increase in general capability across the board. He wasn''t just quick, he was strong to boot. He''d caught the shrieker in mid air and chucked it with a half-hearted swing of his arm. Sure the shriekers were the lightest of the soldiers but they still weighed about as much as a normal human. Plus the ashes should have burnt Skyzo''s hand but he remained uninjured thanks to his improved resilience as well. As for the chain explosions that took place after the shrieker blew up, Skyzo stood amidst them all and didn''t move an inch. It was as if he''d calculated the spew of lava perfectly as he watched everything around him implode and miss him by a hair''s width. Of course this was just a small group of the soldiers and he still had a lot more to go but, thanks to his passive, it would be a walk in the park. Yes he was surrounded but, really, that just meant he was in his natural element! The shriekers had witnessed first hand the way in which their comrade was used against them so the rest were more cautious and hesitant in their approach. Unfortunately when one type of soldier was held back, the rest suffered as a result too. Skyzo exploited this and ran circles around the nearby walls to access the standards easier and there was nothing impeding him from doing so. In short, was was about to come next would be reminiscent of letting a fox into a henhouse.