Chapter 2005 Pearl's Plans
The day of the tournament.
Sam went to the Apollo Academy at the dawn. The main gate of the academy is flooded. Not with just participants, but with hundreds of participants who registered for the tournament.
Even before they could enter the gate, one of the Elders came out and said.
"This year, the number of participants has increased by many times compared to the previous years. So, we made special arrangements. The preliminaries are going to be held within the Hub's simulation area.
All the participants will be given the same simulation. In an environment where they need to fight beasts of a very special kind. The more beasts you kill, the higher your score is going to be and the top 16 participants will enter the final tournament.
Now, all of you please collect your participation token in the academy and go to the Hub."
The Elder announced and left.
The participants swarmed the academy and started collecting the participation tokens from many special counters arranged for them. Everyone who took the token went to Hub.
As they come, they are immediately allotted to a simulation room.
There are around a hundred and fifty simulation rooms within the hub and all of them are filled instantly. Pearl who also came for the tournament didn't go with the first batch of students, instead, she is busily communicating with her team members.
She is on the look out for all the marked targets and gauges their performance. She is fine with going last as long as she establishes her goals. There is no point in trying to hurry since the playing field will be equal for everyone.
To her surprise though some of the candidates on her list didn't appear for the tournament.
They registered for the tournament, but they just didn't show up. This made her a bit stumped as she didn't understand why they even registered if they weren't coming. The confusion ate her up a bit.
For a control freak, unpredicted moves from the target is a nightmare.
Sam who is keeping an eye on her himself, saw her confused and frustrated expression and smiled.
After some time, the participants who entered the rooms in the first batch started coming out one by one. When the person came out, the spot was immediately taken away by someone else. The tests are going out pretty quickly.
After around an hour, all the members in the first batch came out, except for one.
Five elemental king. One of the marked candidates in Pearl's list.
He is the last member in the first batch and he stayed there even after some of the participants who went in later came out. When he came out, he looked pretty beat up. He looked like he was carrying the mental and physical fatigue of over a thousand battles.
The only good thing about it is that he didn't have any actual injuries on his body.
So, the recovery would be good.
Five Elemental King took the support of some of his classmates and walked over slowly while taking some medicine. Pearl locked his eyes on him, trying to get any information from his body language.
But to her surprise, halfway through to the exit he changed his direction and walked towards her.
He stopped right in front of her. Even when her lackeys tried to stop him from approaching, Pearl herself let them be and looked at Five Elemental King curiously.
"Do you really think you can have everything under your control? You can keep an eye on me and my peers in my own academy and you try to record every single detail of our lives and you even arrange things so that we would be disturbed mentally and we wouldn't know a thing that it was you behind all of this?
What do you think of yourself as?
You might be smart, but not as much as you think you are.
Make sure that your lackeys don't cross the top sixteen and have to compete with me in the tournament. If I meet one of your lackeys, I will snap them in half."
He walked away, ignoring the shocked expression on Pearl's face.
Her body shuddered uncontrollably. Five elemental king just dictated her whole plan, the whole secret plan that she had been working on from her secret room for more than a month in just five seconds.
When he thought of how she believed everything was in her control and the look of ridicule the five elemental king gave her, she felt like her whole world was crumbling.
The competition went on with her still in shock and panic.
Her mind worked at an insane speed as she thought of how Five Elemental King might have known about her plan. He is looking for flaws in her execution. And while she stayed in those thoughts, it is finally her turn to enter the simulation room.
She is one of the last few that are left there.
By the time she came out the preliminaries would be over and they would be ready to go to the next and final round.
Pearl entered the simulation room in the same daze. She finally woke up when a gust of chilly wind hit her face.
The area simulated looked like a Tundra region, but the whole thing was dark. Even with her heightened senses as a divine plane cultivator, she could barely see far in that darkness and her spiritual senses were being hindered by some force.
Then only she realize that that mysterious force is not just hindering the spiritual senses, but her mental will as well as her physical state.
She could feel this weird force trying to enter her body and disrupt her circulation.
The feeling is also very weird. It is like her energy's purity is being compromised. It is very similar to corrosive effect.
And the cold, if not for her water elemental affinity she would have had a hard time from shivering. The atmosphere is surprising to think that Divine Plane cultivators would feel this much cold. The simulation effect is indeed beyond her expectations.
But that is just the start.
Because the next moment she saw a pair of ice blue eyes appear in front of her.
A cat-like figure appeared from the darkness. It was barely twenty meters before her and Pearl wasn't even able to sense it until then.
When that cat came closer, she got a better look. It looked like a leopard. It has white fur with ice blue colored hue and black spots.
The leopard looked menacing with its mouth wide open. And that mouth is glistening with blood-red color. Ice energy roared around the leopard as it jumped at Pearl.
Pearl hurriedly created a water shield in front of her.
The leopard's strike crashed the barrier and pushed Pearl back. The attack is much more powerful than she initially thought and she noticed one more thing. When the claw made contact with the water barrier, the water froze before it broke and turned into smithereens.
The leopard didn't stop.
It leaped at Pearl and for the next few seconds all she could do was dodge, finally, she regained some of her sense and started fighting back.
As the leopard leaped at her, she created the water barrier once again, just when the cat was about to hit the barrier, it turned into a water spear and drove straight into the belly of the cat.
Since the barrier disappeared, the claw almost hit Pearl on her face, if not for the spear driving the leopard away, she would have been hit.
But the leopard didn't die. The spear didn't manage to penetrate its skin. It barely scraped past the upper layers.
The leopard showed excellent agility as it used some weird movement techniques to attack Pearl. But after a few exchanges, Pearl managed to nail down the Leopard with water spears stabbing it in the eyes, mouth, and nose to the rear of its body.
The leopard lay down on the ground and blood spilled out while the water spears solidified and became ice.
Pearl heaved a sigh as she looked around and the next moment, she felt a stabbing pain on her left heel.
She looked down and saw a giant snake with ice-blue skin which acted as a perfect camouflage in that land of ice biting into her heel.
The bit is so strong that her boots which would put a high-grade armor to a shame were easily penetrated. Even the formations inscribed on it were of no use.
She started losing the sense of feeling in her leg and felt an ice-cold sensation creep up her knee and thigh.
He hurriedly jumped up.
The snake still held on as it injected ice elemental poison into her body.
Pearl slashed it with a water blade and killed it off, before taking a potion that was specially made for her.
She once again regained the feel on her leg. But there is no relief because this is just the start.
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