Chapter 146: Preliminaries Start

After being teleported Joshua found himself standing in the middle of a small waiting room with nothing but a chair, a table, and a screen on one of the walls that displayed what Joshua assumed was going to be other matches that were going on whenever he was in the waiting room himself. It was an interesting to see that each individual person got their own waiting room instead of large areas that could hold several people, but such a set up did avoid any unnecessary conflict between matches.

After looking around the empty room for a minute Joshua took a seat and closed his eyes waiting for whatever would be the signal for the start of the tournament. He knew from the news program that he had seen earlier in the morning that there was a big production going on to hype up the tournament, but since they didn't know who was fighting who at this point they were mostly sticking to hyping up the big names instead of certain fights. Hell Joshua wasn't surprised when he found out that someone was already starting up a bidding service to bid on who will go the furthest. Once the brackets opened up Joshua was certain that would create even more gambling.

While calmly sitting and waiting for things to get kicked off a system message appeared in front of Joshua with a soft ringing noise that grabbed his attention and got him to open his eyes to look it over. This time around the message was much shorter and to the point.

[The preliminary matches will begin shortly. You will be teleported to the arena whenever it is time for your match. The time between each match will last at least an hour to give contestants plenty of time to rest up in preparation for their next match. Losing a match will not disqualify you from going further into the tournament. However if you lose more matches than you when by the end of the third day then you will be taken out of the tournament. Those who are near the edge of winning more than losing will have to participate in a final duel on the fourth day to decide if they will make it into the tournament. The timer until your next match will be set on the wall of your room. Good luck to all participants.]

After Joshua finished reading through the message he had a better idea of how the preliminaries would work out. The only people that would even have a chance at making the final part of the tournament would be the ones that won at least eight out of fifteen matches over the next three days. Anyone who did better than that would automatically make it into the bracket portion of the tournament, but those who were just on the edge would be given some sort of special challenge on the fourth day of the tournament to try to make it into the brackets. This type of design would greatly thin out the number of participants for the later portion of the tournament. Seeing as how there would be several people that would have far more wins than losses the amount of people that would be just on the fringe of making it in would be enormous.

Even with this new information Joshua still didn't know how the system would decide the seeding for the brackets when several people would have the same battle records. He was sure there was more to it than just simple wins and losses so he planned to win in the most one sided fashion possible. Joshua didn't plan on showing off any of his major skills early on but he wasn't going to give his opponents any chances to show off during the preliminaries. It would be a waste of time and might affect his seeding if he wasn't careful.

When Joshua looked over to the side of the large screen that was displaying the battle arena's television channel he could see a clock with a count down on it. There was thirty minutes left before his match would begin so Joshua decided to just calmly meditate as he waited for his fight. The time passed by rather quickly as the clock started beeping loudly when there was ten seconds left before the match. Joshua simply rose up from his chair and cracked his neck to remove any stiffness before the upcoming match.

The moment the countdown ended Joshua disappeared in another flash of light as he was teleported to the battle arena. He arrived no more than a second later in a normal tiled fighting ring that was the usual size for the battle arena. Around the ring there were several people there to watch the match. Joshua didn't know how the crowd was able to decide which fights they were able to go to and watch, but it was likely that the contestants that would be put in front of them to fight would be random. The crowd seemed excited for the match to start and by the way they were cheering, Joshua could guess that this was probably the first match that they would be able to watch.

After getting a good look at his surroundings Joshua turned to look at his opponent for this match and he was met with the sight of a rather short man that had most of his body covered up in black garb. From the two daggers that the man held Joshua knew that he was either a dagger specialist or a thief job class. Both classes would rely on their speed and dexterity in a fight, but all the thoughts of what kind of challenge the man could put up against Joshua went out the window the second he looked at his level. Joshua's opponent was only level fifty-two. He was over thirty levels lower than Joshua and there was no chance that there would be any surprises in the outcome of the battle.

When the man looked at Joshua's level his eyes widen with traces of fear as his arms shook a little bit and he held up his daggers to defend himself even though the countdown for the start of the battle hadn't even finished yet. There were still thirty seconds left until the start of the match and the man was already panicking. Joshua just shrugged and didn't even bother to hold his scale blade or any of his other weapons out at the ready. He planned on finishing the match quickly in a way that would both be quick and wouldn't show off any of his skills to future opponents.

When the countdown got to the last ten seconds Joshua's opponent started backing away to create some room between Joshua and himself as he took out what looked like some sort of bomb that he planned to use in the fight. It was obvious that the man had some hopes of using his speed along with long ranged explosives to attack Joshua from a distance, but the man was finished the moment he was paired up against Joshua. Joshua wasn't exactly a slow moving fighter himself even if he didn't have top speed like someone like Madalyn. The massive level difference though would make it so that Joshua was far faster than his opponent even if speed was his opponent's specialty. There was just no way the nervous man was going to be able to make up for the sheer difference in stats between the two of them.

Once the countdown had ended and the battle had started in earnest the man leaped back trying to create as much space between himself and Joshua as possible. With that simple movement he had already lost the match, after all, he didn't have to wait until the start of the fight to create some distance. The moment Joshua was free to move towards his opponent's half of the arena he blitzed forward in what looked like a blur to the man as he headed straight for him.

The man panicked and tossed the grenade towards Joshua while pulling out another one that looked to be a smoke bomb as he was planning to break the line of sight for Joshua and hide in the smoke while thinking of his next plan of attack, but Joshua never gave him the opportunity. Joshua batted the grenade aside with the back of his hand causing it to explode a bit of a ways away from him as his speed was too fast for the small explosion to have any effect on him. Before the man could even use the smoke bomb Joshua was right in front of him towering over the man that didn't even come up to his chest in height.

Before the man could react he was knocked clean out with a heavy punch to the chin. The force of the blow was controlled by Joshua in such a way that his opponent wasn't knocked over or away from him at all. He simply fell forward completely unconscious as his body vanished from the arena declaring Joshua's victory. The crowd erupted into cheers after seeing such an amazingly quick take down and Joshua had gathered some new fans. At the start of each battle the crowd was able to see the name and level of each of the contestants and even more if the information was known during the scanning process to register for the tournament.

After a victory notice and a short period of time where Joshua was allowed to wave towards the crowd or act like a big shot if he wanted to, he was quickly teleported back to the waiting room that he had been in prior to the match. For the most part the room was the same as how Joshua had left it, but now there was another small screen on the wall that kept a record of his matches. He could see the name and information of his opponent, the time of how long the match took which was only five seconds, and a replay feature that would allow him to watch his previous matches on the television screen if he wanted to.

The other thing that was different was the fact that there were actually other matches that were currently being broadcasted on the television that Joshua could watch during the one hour break between his matches. He could even look up names of others in the tournament to watch their matches if he wanted to. At the moment there was a very one sided match between a level seventy-three knight and a level fifty-eight swordsman being shown on the television. It wasn't quite as much of a beat down as Joshua's match had been but it was still obvious who was going to win. Joshua took a seat and started to flip through the different matches on display while he waited for his next match.