The Culling - 11

"Let me explain to you the rules, you will all be fighting one on one battles starting now and a win will help you rise in the rankings while a loss will make you go down in the rankings."

"It will work like this, the first and second people will battle it out, whoever wins gets the first slot, whoever loses gets the second slot. The third person will then fight the second person. If they lose, they will be placed third, but if they win, they will fight the first person. If they win they will take the first spot and the first person will move onto the second slot." As you can see, this will take a long time and it is already night time, but because you are battlemage students, you will have to battle throughout the night. Consider it your first test."

"At the end of it, the top 24 people will be admitted into the school, while the rest will be expelled and absorbed into the other 4 schools. Does anyone have any questions?"

No one answered her.

"Then we will begin!"

Not surprisingly, the nobles volunteered to go first, to show how inferior the commoners were, but Taiga was not impressed by their skills. The only person that truly got his attention was the 1st place on the rankings right now, because he could sense all of the other nobles reverence of her and how their legs shook when they faced her in battle. What was more interesting was that in each of these battles, the girl was able to completely demolish her opponent in the first minute of battle.

After all of the nobles went, the commoners started stepping up and, as expected, they couldn't even break into the top 15, which was all nobles, so that went and had to fight amongst themselves for the remaining 9 spots.

Because he wanted to be right in the middle, and also because he wanted to rub it into the nobles faces, he decided that he was going to take the 13th spot.

Before he began, he changed his mask color to pure white, so that nobody could recognize him from before and then pulled his hood down showing his hair to others for the first time, becoming an entirely different person.

As he stepped up, he easily beat all of the commoners and faced his first noble, ranked 15.

He could feel the noble's eyes on him, looking at him with pity and disgust. It was so profound that he could almost "see" the sneer on the noble's face.

When the match started, in less than 5 seconds, he had the noble groveling on the ground and won the match easily.

The arena fell silent, everybody was in shock with what he just did.

He then proceeded to do the same thing to the noble ranked 14 and again, everybody was too shocked to even move a muscle. Even those that thought the first round was a fluke quickly realized that Taiga was someone with true skills.

"Hmm, finally, another interesting person, I wonder how far he is going to make it" said the girl ranked 1.

He then finished the noble ranked 13 in under 3 seconds. As everybody had already seen what happened the first two rounds, they weren't that surprised anymore and were instead discussing his identity.

"His mask is pure white, with no extravagance, he definitely isn't some noble's bastard son because even they would have some extravagance on their masks."

"But he also has that pure silver hair that is characteristic of some noble families."

As everybody was pondering this, Taiga announced,

"I forfeit the match for rank 12"

Again, everybody was stunned.

The Headmaster stood up and asked,

"Do you truly wish to forfeit the match."

"Yes I do."

After this happened, everybody just that that he was a dumb guy as they thought that he would have easily gotten into the top 5.

After the rest of the commoners went, with none of them breaking the top 16, the people that got into the top 24 were sent into the academy while the rest were expelled.

As they walked into the main hall, the commoners all gaped at the extravagance of the hall and the hugeness of it. Although Taiga couldn't see the individual details of the extravagance, he could still "see" the enormity of the room.

The headmaster then said, we will now be assigning dorms.

"Number 1 and Number 13 will be sharing a dorm. She then gave us dorm keys and told a servant to direct us to our room.

Before leaving the main hall fully, Taiga heard "Number 2 and Number 14, Number 3 and Number 15, Number 4 and Number 16," coming from the main hall and realized that they used a system where ideally they were pairing the stronger students with weaker students so that they could learn from the stronger ones. he thought that that was an ingenious idea, but then lamented as he thought that even Number 1 probably couldn't teach him anything.

"Here are your schedules and welcome to the academy" said the servant.

Taiga opened the door to their room and immediately claimed the farther bed from the door, near the window.

"Get off of that bed, I want it."

"No"

"You dare talk back to a noble like me!"

"I do, because being a noble doesn't matter in this school, only with credit can you rise to the top."

Thinking that this shut her up, Taiga stopped talking to her and unpacked.

While he was thinking about how rude nobles were, Number one thought, 'This commoner really is interesting, not even fazed by a noble.'

"My name is Elaine, what's yours" she asked.

"It's Taiga" he said abruptly

"Okay, nice to meet you Taiga."

'What is wrong with this girl, first she acts like a snotty brat, but then does a complete 180 and starts acting nice?'

After settling down, he immediately went to sleep as he didn't want to talk to Number 1 anymore.

'Hmm, this kid is really cold, first off, any boy would want to stay up talking to a beauty like me and can he not see that I'm from a high ranking noble family or something, and why doesn't he respect the hierarchy?'

Her questions were all answered that morning when Taiga asked her to read him his schedule, as he told her he was blind. After revealing this fact to Elaine, she was dumbfounded, 'how exactly did he beat three nobles so easily when he is blind and how did he get into this school into the first place? This makes him even more interesting and mysterious' she thought while staring at his pure white mask.

She read him his schedule which he promptly memorized and then they both headed out to their first class.

[Taiga's Stats]

Strength: 821

Agility: 1026

Health: 666 Hp

Intelligence: 101,261

Mana: 537,223

Luck: -6

(Luck is always going to be in the negatives as the player is destined to be the Demon King)

Skills:

[Touch Enhancement (Level 98): Increases the user's sense of touch and feeling by 20 fold

(always in effect) - Epic]

[Weapon Proficiency (Level 3 - Sword): Lets the user quickly master the art of the sword more quickly*

(only effective with the sword) - Uncommon]

[True Insight (Level 5): lets you rapidly understand anything

(is turned on at any time by the user, infinite uses) - Epic]

[Large Mana Pool (Level 38): user has an abnormally large mana pool, user can cast more spells

(always in effect) - Mythical]

[Spell Creation (Level 61): the user is able to make new spells

(always in effect) - Epic]

Unique Skills:

[Remember (Level 100): lets the user retain all memories from their past life

(always in effect) - Godly]

[Sage's Eye (Level 100): the user is able to see all of the stats of any object including living things

(is turned on at any time by the user, infinite uses) - Legendary]

[Growth (Level 1): allows the user's skills to grow, becoming "Superior" skills which can then lead to "Godly" skills

(always in effect) - Legendary]

[Resilience (Level 86): gives the user mild resistance to all harmful attacks and statuses

(always in effect) - Legendary]

[Rascal (Level 0): gives the user the unique ability to steal any power skills that they have been affected by

(always in effect) - Godly]