Chapter 172: How Do You Beat That?
The clip that spread fastest was not the ending.
It was the first five minutes.
Every platform. Every stream. Every guild channel. People were not sharing the moment Kai won. They were sharing the moment Kai walked into a dungeon that was already waiting for him.
Sora went live and her audience was already enormous before she said her first word.
She rewound to the opening of the fight. Kai stepping through the gate. The sky filling with hundreds of magic circles before he had taken three steps. Gravity doubling. Spears firing. The laser cutting through a stone pillar like it was paper.
She paused the video.
She looked at her chat.
"I would’ve surrendered," she said.
The chat exploded.
She laughed. "No, seriously." She rewound it again. "Gravity doubled." She clicked forward. "Three spears." Click. "Laser." Click. "Chains." Click. "Construct." She looked back at the screen. "What exactly was Kai supposed to do?"
The chat slowed. Even the fastest viewers were thinking about it.
She smiled. "I would’ve just accepted defeat and walked back out."
At a training hall in the eastern district, a group of rookie hunters had gathered around the wall screen to watch the replay together.
One of them said, "I would’ve died."
Another one: "I would’ve died before the chains got me."
A third: "I would’ve died walking into the room."
They all looked at each other.
Their instructor nodded. "Correct."
Everyone looked at him.
He pointed at the frozen image of Elden sitting on the boulder with thousands of prepared spells floating behind him. "That," he said. He paused. "Is why preparation matters."
He let that sit in the room for a moment. Then he moved on to the next slide.
In a different part of the city, a group of hunters was going through the footage frame by frame. One of them pointed at a specific section.
"Look at this," he said. "Every spell forced Kai somewhere specific. The gravity wasn’t the dangerous part. The laser wasn’t the dangerous part. The construct wasn’t the dangerous part."
The room was quiet.
"They were dangerous together," he said.
Nobody disagreed.
One hunter at the back muttered, "I don’t think I could’ve gotten close." He was looking at the opening sequence, the part where the dungeon itself was attacking before Elden had done anything personally. "Not even close."
Another hunter folded his arms. "Think about that for a second."
Everyone looked at him. "Twelve hours."
"Yeah? What about it?"
He pointed at the screen. "We all know what it’s like to do just an hour of preparation... Now imagine, twelve hours! And this wasn’t done by just anyone but one of the top 5 hunters in the city. A mage!"
Then everyone shivered.
"And Kai swept through all of it in fifteen minutes."
Nobody spoke.
Suddenly the victory looked even more ridiculous.
One of the veteran members folded his arms. "I’m glad we were never on the other side of that."
Nobody laughed.
Everyone understood exactly what he meant.
...
At Titan Forge, Mira was watching the replay on the compound screen with several guild members.
She smiled when she saw the full scale of what Elden had prepared.
"I knew he’d come ready," she said.
One of the members beside her shook his head slowly. "I didn’t think it would be this much."
Mira laughed. "He probably started setting it up the day before."
Silence.
"Actually," she said, thinking about it. "He probably started the day before that."
...
At the Mage Association guild, several researchers had gathered around a projection of the Grand Arcane Array.
One of them adjusted his glasses.
"...That’s impossible."
Another researcher looked over.
"The spell?"
The first researcher shook his head.
"The control."
He paused the replay on the thousands of glowing runes.
"Most mages struggle maintaining three active spell circles."
Silence.
"He maintained thousands."
Nobody spoke for several seconds.
Finally someone quietly said, "...No wonder he’s one of the strongest hunters."
...
A group of guild masters was watching from one of the coordination offices. The room was mostly quiet while the replay ran.
One of them said, "If Elden ever prepared a dungeon to defend against a Territory attack."
Another finished the thought. "The boss would walk into a fortress."
A third one shook his head. "No. He would make the Territory fight itself." He gestured at the screen. "Look at how he used the dungeon’s own monsters. They all died to his traps without him touching them."
Everyone in the room nodded.
One younger guild officer watched the replay again. "I always thought talent beat preparation."
An older guild master smiled. "Preparation is talent."
The room became quiet again.
...
The forums had shifted completely. The thread asking who was stronger between Kai and Raze had been pushed down. The top thread now was a simple question.
How would YOU beat Elden?
It had thousands of replies.
Someone suggested long-range attacks. A reply said he prepared for that. Someone suggested destroying the battlefield before he could set it up. A reply said he prepared for that too. Someone suggested rushing him immediately. A reply said Kai did that and look how that went. Someone suggested bringing twenty hunters to overwhelm the trap count.
A reply said that just gives him more targets.
The most upvoted comment in the entire thread was three words.
I would lose.
It had twice as many upvotes as the second place answer.
Some of the highest-rated replies were much shorter.
Step One: Don’t fight Elden.
Another simply read: Alternative strategy: Cry.
A third said: Can I surrender before entering the dungeon?
It had over six thousand likes.
...
At an academy, an instructor had paused the replay at a specific moment.
"When did Kai start winning?" he asked his students.
Hands went up.
"The final combination," one said.
"No," the instructor said.
"When he broke through the Grand Array," another tried.
"No."
"When he figured out how the battlefield connected together."
"No."
The room went quiet.
The instructor smiled. "He started winning when he understood that Elden was not trying to beat him directly." He let that sit. "Elden was trying to delay him. To exhaust him. The entire battlefield was built around buying time, not delivering a knockout."
He looked at the students.
"The moment Kai understood the objective, the fight changed. He stopped trying to fight the dungeon and started moving through it."
The students started writing things down.
...
Mayor Ko watched the footage from his desk. Quiet. One of his advisors was standing near the door.
"We should consider recruiting Elden into city planning," the advisor said.
Mayor Ko smiled. "I already planned to."
Another advisor at the table said, "If that is how he prepares a battlefield, I want to see what he would do designing evacuation routes."
Mayor Ko nodded. "So would I."
...
Sora had been live for two hours when someone finally asked the question everyone was building toward.
"So who is the strongest?"
She laughed. Actually laughed, the full version, and shook her head. "I have absolutely no idea anymore."
The chat immediately split into factions. Kai. Raze. Mira. Elden. Lily. Sera. Every name appeared simultaneously, each group making their case, none of them convincing the others.
Sora looked at all of it scrolling past.
Another viewer asked,
"When did Kai figure it out?"
Sora rewound the footage.
She stopped at the exact moment Kai smiled.
"I get it."
She froze the frame.
"Right here."
The chat waited. "This," she said. "He stopped trying to withstand everything and just focus on beating Elden."
The chat exploded with Sora nodding at some of the comments.
"I think everyone’s asking the wrong question," she said and the chat slowed. "They’re all monsters. The question of who is strongest stopped being interesting after the second fight."
...
The news stations were running a segment that kept repeating.
Not the ending of the Elden fight.
But the preparation they had gotten from Elden himself. It showed him walking through the dungeon before the challenge began, placing runes, setting up the trap formations, building the gravity fields and the laser arrays and the construct positions one by one over twelve hours.
The narrator’s voice came over the footage.
"Elden spent twelve hours preparing a battlefield," the narrator said.
A pause.
"Kai Rosefield solved it in under fifteen minutes."
The screen changed to the candidate standings.
[Victor Hale: Crossed out.]
[Mira Solt: Withdrawn.]
[Raze: Withdrawn.]
[Elden: Withdrawn.]
Three names remained.
Kai.
Lily.
Sera.
The city looked at the three remaining names and the conversation changed. The strongest hunters in Mythal were no longer fighting monsters. They were fighting each other. And somehow, the battles ahead looked even harder than the ones already behind them.
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