[Be advised! Another training bout is going to start in a minute! Anyone who wants to watch, you are free to do so.]
[Challenger Nikolai Ivanovich from class 2-F with sword arts, VS unarmed mastery Mayaro Shima from class 2-S!]
There was a huge uproar.
"Another challenge? And it's the same person as before?"
"Looks like it. This time he is challenging an S-class student! Oh, I can't wait!"
"An S class indeed, but it's no one famous. I would love to see someone battle Kuki Hideo or Kokoro Fushikawa. They seem like they are hella strong."
The students of other, much less significant classes immediately gathered on the schoolyard.
Meanwhile, in the class 2-S.
"Haah...Aoi. Oi, Aoi, wake up! Are you really not going to do anything to stop this?" A tall bald man from class 2-S nagged at his best friend.
"Jun, everything is fine. She brought it upon herself, and she will suffer because of her own stupidity." A handsome brown-haired man whose hair reached down to his neck replied while he wiped his glasses with a cloth.
"Alright, if you say so. I just don't want to see the reputation of our classroom diminish just because of this fight. I can already tell she will lose in a few seconds. Haven't you seen him fight? People are gonna be taking the S-class lightly now."
"Hm, why does it bother you? The class is full of themselves anyway. Someone needs to put a stop to it."
"Err...do I have to remind you that we are also part of that class!?"
***
Mayaro stretched her legs and arms. It was a basic exercise before every fight.
She glanced at her opponent and couldn't help but sneer.
'He is not even warming up, so much for the big talk. He will go down in a second.'
"Mayaro! Forfeit it! It's not going to end well!"
"It's not worth it!"
"He is really powerful! Just give up while you still have a chance!"
Her classmates were worried.
Mayaro glared at them.
'What are they saying!? Me? Forfeit? Bullshit!'
The opponent in front of her was only tall. She could clearly tell he possessed no sword techniques as he was just standing there motionlessly. Coupled with his sunglasses, he looked stupid and weak.
Tesshin walked up on the stage and announced, "The fight will begin five seconds after I announce its beginning!" He never would have thought that a day would come where he would have to prepare two spars in a single day.
Technically, if the person wanted, he could spar an unlimited number of times. The rules stated, he could challenge anyone in the second year roster. He couldn't under any circumstances challenge anyone from the year below him, but he could attempt to challenge someone from the third years if they accepted.
First years could challenge any other first years and second years.
But unfortunately, third years could only challenge other third years, unless someone from the second year challenged them, but that was highly unlikely.
The students from the class 3-S were a peaceful bunch. They were all mature enough not to fight amongst themselves or fight at all. Everyone, but one person, and that person was Momoyo.
Momoyo was pissed off at her classmates, because they didn't want to spar at all, and some of them were even strong, but they just ignored her complaints as that was an everyday routine for them.
Lazing around the classroom, Momoyo had almost given up on living.
'These stupid classmates are one of the most boring people I've ever seen.' She glanced around the room, and most of them were either reading, eating and reading, walking, and reading...
'Reading, Reading, Reading! Bunch of smartasses!' She was going insane. She couldn't challenge anyone whatsoever. She just wanted to fight with someone so badly. Her old man left her hanging and ran away in the middle of their fight with an excuse to heal Kazuko.
'Stupid old man, just you wait, one of these days I will break the rules, and you won't be able to stop me.' She sat down on her chair and plopped her face down on her desk like a blob, feeling dejected.
And that's when she heard it.
A voice of her savior.
A broadcasting radio turned on, and the announcement woke her up from the land of the dead.
[Be advised! Another training bout is going to start in a minute! Anyone who wants to watch, you are free to do so.]
[Challenger Nikolai Ivanovich from class 2-F with sword arts, VS unarmed mastery Mayaro Shima from class 2-S!]
"Finally, something to do!" She raised her arms high and shouted. She couldn't care less about the looks those nerds gave her. Doing nothing but reading all day, get a life.
She darted out of the classroom with excitement in her eyes.
***
"Well, it seems like we are here again." Yamato mumbled.
"Where are others?" Kazuko looked around but couldn't see anyone.
"Well...Gakuto said he doesn't want to see the handsome foreigner win again so he didn't come, who knows where Captain is, Miyako wasn't interested in seeing the match either, I don't have Chris's phone number and Moro is watching anime with his friends."
"What about Nee-san?"
"She said she will be here any minute now."
"Don't worry, I am already here!' Momoyo was so eager she used instant transmission to teleport here. Being stuck in the classroom with her gloomy and weird classmates annoyed her to hell.
"Nee-san, who do you think will win?" Yamato asked.
"Without a doubt, Nikolai, there is simply no way he would lose to anyone in this school but me." Momoyo stated while looking around to see whether there was any cute girl around.
"So you are saying you can beat him?"
Momoyo absentmindedly nodded and replied, "I can tell you that the way he is right now, he has a small chance of beating me, but if I use my Ki and ultimate abilities, his chances are pretty much zero. I also have instant regeneration I can use thirty or so times, so while I don't know the extent of his full strength I am pretty confident in beating him right now. I didn't notice a single web or even a strand of Ki aura around him, which would put him at a huge disadvantage when fighting me."
"I see." He looked at Nikolai's sunglasses and asked, "Do you by any chance know why he wears those sunglasses? It's been bugging me whole day."
Momoyo shook her head and replied, "Who knows, maybe image? Power limiter? Something he doesn't want anyone to see? How should I know. I met him this morning. All I know is that he is really fucking blind right now. If I wore those sunglasses I don't think I would even be able to move without spending my Ki."
"What do you mean?"
Momoyo put both of her hands in front of her, forming a rectangle. She infused Ki into her white hands and her beautiful eyes, and used it to zoom in on his glasses, "I can tell you, they are hella tinted. Like super densely tinted. You could barely recognize shapes with that on. I can't even see through it with my Ki."
"Seriously!?" Both Kazuko and Yamato exclaimed. Both of her knew her as a perfect woman samurai that knew how to do everything, and now she is saying she couldn't see through his glasses?
***
Some minutes have passed after that precarious exchange of words with Tesshin. Nikolai was standing on top of sandy soil. He looked at the ground and remembered how the terrain changed when Momoyo and Tesshin fought here, and that was only for a few minutes.
'...'
Nikolai didn't notice it before, but the area was pretty big, providing plenty of space for running around and fighting.
"This is gonna be a quick public execution." Mayaro snickered.
"Yes, I agree. It's going to be a public execution, but it won't be quick." Nikolai brandished his wooden sword, earning himself a laugh from her.
"Yeah sure, stupid foreigner!"
Nikolai tested his footing and was good to go.
Tesshin raised his hand, "The second match of the day...begins!"
Mayaro didn't waste her time waiting for the five-second rule and rushed towards Nikolai, full of hate. Her plan was to defeat him before the match could even officially begin.
She despised every person who was uncultured and this person not only met her criteria but was also a foreigner.
"Honestly speaking, it would not be strange for someone like you to be cut down into pieces and thrown into a lake in a plastic bag if you were from my country, but I guess Japan sure is lenient, to cultivate such a disgusting piece of shit." He dodged her first strike and hit the back of her head with the hilt of his sword.
Mayaro fell to the ground while holding the back of her head in pain.
"Argh!"
The audience became silent. The match seemed to be over sooner than it began.
Although Nikolai had to admit she was fast, she didn't deserve praise for anything else. To him, she was just a piece of shit.
Nikolai's preferred weapon was a katana, a long one at that, so this kind of small sword was not to his liking, but even then, he grasped the sword hilt firmly, as if he was used to it.
Mayaro was still squirming on the ground, "Y-You bastard!"
"Is this all the class S has to offer? Where is the challenge? Why did you accept the match when you were this weak?"
She gritted her teeth but then showed a creepy grin. She quickly stood up and threw a punch, squarely at the tip of Nikolai's chin. Simultaneously, her left hand thrust straight forward, tossing the sand she has cowardly picked up from the ground a second ago and threw it towards Nikolai's eyes.
Of course, she saw he wore sunglasses, but she did it to create an opening and confuse her opponent. It was a classing blinding, surprise attack you would use on a battlefield.
'Got you, you bastard!' She thought, smiling with a malicious satisfaction at her little trick. The next moment, however, she heard a voice right next to her ear.
"You are saying I am a vulgar creature, correct? Then what exactly was this attack? Is this how 'Nobles' fight in this world? Do you think I can't see through this beginner's diversion? My world is twenty times darker under my sunglasses."
Simultaneously, a hard blow struck her solar plexus, emptying the air from her lungs and making her stomach acid travel to her neck and her mouth, leaving a disgusting burning sensation behind.
"Something like this might have an effect on a lowly animal or someone who has zero sense of battle awareness."
The shock of her torso spread through the rest of her body. She felt weightless, just after her feet left the ground, her face slammed hard into the earth. Sand and dirt had smeared her face, mixed with vomit forced out by the blow to her solar plexus.
Pain and heat struck her brain at the exact same time. It struck her brain with a deadly force. The next instant, the audience erupted in boisterous cheers at how an S class student, one of the stuck-up elitists of the school, received what she deserved.
"Get her! Those S class bastards were getting annoying lately!"
"Yeah! Beat her up! She put worms into my food last year! She deserves it!"
"Don't stop! Don't stop!"
The girl curled into herself on the ground as the pain caught up, screaming at the roaring audience in hate.
"Shut the! Shut up! Shut the fuck up, you worms! All of you! Are worms! Die!" She didn't care about anything anymore and pulled out a real dagger from her uniform and stabbed it towards Nikolai's neck.
"Die!"
"It seems like students have a very easy way to carry weapons into this University. At first, it was a maid with a gun and a knife, and now it's an incompetent animal with a dagger."
Nikolai aimed the tip of the wooden sword at her, and just simple contact with her forehead was enough to make her drop the weapon and fall on the ground again.
However, Nikolai didn't leave her any time to rest and kicked her back up, making her body fly in the air for a few seconds and the next instant, the centrifugal force of his attack immediately blew her away. She felt the sky and the ground had been swapped as she wrapped her arms around herself, trying to cushion her fall.
She fell to the ground with a loud *thud* and performed a well-formed roll to negate the damage, but she was already in a terrible condition from his earlier attacks.
Nikolai looked at the spectators, his frown deepening.
"Let this be a lesson to you, a lesson, you would never forget. You people, talk about others as if they could influence where they have been born to. You talk about them as if they could affect whether their parents are going to be multimillionaires or a poor family from slums!"
He pointed towards her and continued, "This thing here, is the very definition of arrogant, and conceited trash who judges others based on their family standing! Don't you think you are a bit too egoistic? You talk as if you've done something great in your life, but you haven't. You just rot here, on this sandy ground, and getting shit on by a person whose strength you will never reach in a lifetime. What have you done in this life?"
Mayaro clenched her teeth and shouted, "Why should I care about that!? I was born privileged! You are just a gutter rat foreigner!"
"And what have you done? You are living like this, just because of your parents. Just because your parents are rich and have a high social standing, you are where you are. You are a novice, and your movements are rough and dull. You don't seem to have studied any kind of martial arts, and you certainly have no techniques. Your strength is weaker than that of an average person in this university. I had hoped to have squeezed wisdom out of you, but you lack that too. What are you doing in class S? No, what are you doing in this University?"
Mayaro was lying on the ground, gazing up at the sky in a daze as she faced reality head-on.
Blood was seeping into her eyes from her head. She hastily wiped her eyes to clear her red-tinged vision.
She had already lost count of how many times she has been knocked to the ground. Her right eye was already swollen. She tasted so much blood she wasn't able to tell if it was from her own lip, or from some internal injury.
What was driving her at this moment, was pure anger.
At first, laughter was heard from the audience and everyone wished to see her lose. People laughed each time she was ground pounded. Sighs began forming when the number exceeded twenty and by the time everyone has lost count, they just wished to avert their eyes.
Anyone could see who won and who lost, and this fight had no meaning whatsoever. To their eyes, it was purely a grudge against hate and the boy with a grudge on his face was clearly winning.
"Nee-san....why isn't the old man principal stopping the fight? He disappeared from the stage the moment the fight began."
Momoyo stayed silent. She activated her Ki, searched around the buildings and immediately found him sipping on some black tea, aloof to what was transpiring outside.
She grinned at his irresponsible behavior, 'This old man sure is my family.'
***
For a lot of students it might have seemed brutal and pointless,
but Nikolai was different, the issue was personal, as both of his parents are gone.
"Your parents don't define who you are and their accomplishments and failures are not your own. My mother died giving birth to me, and my father ran away unable to cope with finances and stress. But that's just normal. Something like this happens everywhere, all around the world and yet I am here, the leach, the monster, the gutter rat, beating you to death. Say something for yourself."
No one knows who started, but one by one, everyone started clapping, every person, even some students from class S.
"Very well said! Amazing!"
"Beautiful! This is exactly how a human being should be thinking!"
"Yeah, take that! Brilliant speech!"
Yamato smiled and glanced at the crying Kazuko.
"What's up Wanko? You've got something in your eyes?" He jokingly said.
"N-No...I am just sad for his family. He grew up pretty much the same way I did..." Yamato widened his eyes and looked at Momoyo, who was also clapping along with other people.