In a video game, equipping a weapon that exceeds your character's physical stats results in a small, blinking red icon in the corner of your screen. It usually reads something like [-50% Attack Speed] or [Insufficient Strength Parameter]. It is a purely mathematical penalty.
Reality, I was quickly learning, did not use math. It used gravity.
The Tang Heng Dao I had just pulled from the Eastern racks was a slab of uncalibrated, standard-issue dead iron. It had no crossguard, no curve to displace kinetic energy, and absolutely zero balance. My F-Rank Strength stat was currently struggling to convince my wrist that holding it horizontally was a good idea.
Gravity was aggressively trying to dislocate my shoulder. My E-Rank circuit, still running on the fumes of the prime-rib I had eaten two hours ago, throbbed painfully in my chest.
I am not going to swing this thing.
I reminded myself, letting the heavy iron tip rest against the grass.
I am going to hold it defensively, let whatever random NPC I am matched against disarm me, and then take a highly dramatized fall to the ground. That is the plan. Dang it, I know I'm so smart!
Beside me, Raiden had already sheathed her Katana. She stood with the particular stillness of someone who had nothing left to prepare — every variable already accounted for, every contingency already filed. The ambient moisture around her shoulders was doing faint, unhurried things that I was choosing not to examine too closely.
I am going to stand exactly this far away from her and look at something else until the assignments post.
Out in the center of the crushed grass, Instructor Freya Siegel Romeo walked to the edge of the newly formed cyan barrier. She tapped her heavy brass command node.
"ODICIOS will now generate your sparring assignments," Freya's raspy voice cut through the metallic clatter of the remaining students, carrying effortlessly over the humming barrier. "These are randomized baseline assessments. There are no weight classes in the Fringe. There is no rank balancing. You fight who the system tells you to fight."
A sudden, nervous hush fell over the aristocratic cohort. The reality of the enclosed cyan dome suddenly felt significantly more claustrophobic.
"And pray," Freya added softly, exhaling a final plume of grey cigarette smoke into the pale sky, "that you do not draw someone who actually knows how to use what they just picked up."
Above her head, the massive crimson projection of the ODICIOS system shifted. A rapid sequence of names began spinning like a digital roulette wheel.
I leaned back slightly, adjusting my grip on the heavy iron sword, watching the names blur.
Just give me a random noble!
I prayed silently to whatever dead god oversaw this institution's matchmaking algorithm.
A generic N-Rarity mob character who faints when they see a sword.
The wheel ticked. The first pairing locked into place with a heavy, digital chime.
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
[ ODICIOS / PRACTICE SPARRING PROTOCOL — MATCH 01 ]
Arga Orlando [House Haldia] VS. Zee Kazrana Lestune [House Haldia]─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
I nodded slowly.
Match 01. Canon. The Exhausted Protagonist versus the Aggressive Brawler. The matchmaking algorithm isn't random at all. It is hard-coded to follow the novel's exact timeline events. The Plot Banner has guaranteed drop rates.
The wheel spun again. It skipped several background characters before chiming loudly.
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
[ ODICIOS / PRACTICE SPARRING PROTOCOL — MATCH 08 ]
Alya Pance Varine [House Glyphron] VS. Alistaire Baaldeus Argonaut [House Glyphron]─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Match 08. Canon. The Hidden Princess against her own brother. She is going to deliberately lose to maintain her cover.
The roulette ticked, skipping a handful of generic matchups.
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
[ ODICIOS / PRACTICE SPARRING PROTOCOL — MATCH 14 ]
Syevira Sinclair [House Symbiode] VS. Nova Celestine Melody [House Glyphron]─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Match 14. Canon. The Deadzone Girl versus the Pristine Mage. Nova is going to try a long-range barrage, step too close, and nearly suffocate on Syevira's passive anomaly pressure.
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
[ ODICIOS / PRACTICE SPARRING PROTOCOL — MATCH 22 ]
Shen Wei [House Haldia] VS. Kaiser William Hattore [House Glyphron]─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Match 22. Canon. The Vanguard Polearm against the Precision Rapier.
I let out a long, quiet sigh of profound relief, feeling the tension drain out of my freezing shoulders.
The script is functioning flawlessly. Every major character is being matched exactly as the novel dictated. The matchmaking seed is rigged. That means my safety is mathematically guaranteed. I just have to wait for the system to assign me against some nameless NPC from the background roster.
The wheel spun again.
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
[ ODICIOS / PRACTICE SPARRING — MATCH 31 ]
Killian Steel [House Abyssion] VS. Jace Vane [House Symbiode]─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Even my profoundly unremarkable neighbor is getting a perfectly ordinary, low-stakes sparring match. Beautiful. Just beautiful. Come on, system. Drop my 1-star Gacha pull so I can go to the infirmary.
The roulette ticked. The numbers climbed toward the end of the roster. The red projection spun one final time, slowing down to a crawl for the very last assignment.
And then, my brain, running on a decade of archived game data and novel text, suddenly stalled.
Wait.
I know Arga's match. I know Syevira's match. I know Alya's match.
But... who did Tsukuyomi Raiden fight on the first day?
My eyes darted toward the girl standing next to me. The undisputed Number Two of the cohort.
The novel didn't describe her fight. The author skipped it to save word count. It was just a single line of off-screen flavor text to establish how terrifying she was.
The line was:"In the background, Raiden Tsukoyomi effortlessly dispatched her unlucky opponent in exactly fourteen seconds."
Who was the unlucky opponent?The author never gave them a name.
The wheel clicked to a complete, final stop. The digital chime echoed across the silent amphitheater like a death knell.
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
[ ODICIOS / PRACTICE SPARRING PROTOCOL — MATCH 42 ]
Arzane Vornelius Astarte [House Abyssion] VS. Tsukuyomi Raiden [House Symbiode]─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
The cohort went silent.
Not the polite quiet of people waiting for something. The specific, total silence of two hundred people simultaneously arriving at the same conclusion and deciding not to say it out loud. Somewhere in the middle rows, someone made a sound that was almost a word and then apparently reconsidered.
Every eye in the amphitheater moved. Not to me. To the girl standing eighteen inches to my left.
Raiden had gone still in the particular way she went still — not frozen, just fully arrived, all of her attention collecting into one point. She turned her head and her winter-sky eyes found mine with the calm, unhurried precision of someone who had already known this was coming and had simply been waiting for the rest of the room to catch up.
I stared at the crimson letters hovering in the sky.
My brain, operating on severely throttled cognitive bandwidth, bypassed the terror and went straight to the arithmetic.
Two hundred students. One hundred matches. Fifteen active arenas. Match Forty-Two divided by fifteen is two point eight.
Wave Three.
I have exactly two combat rotations before I am required to step into the barrier.
I am the unnamed mob. I am the off-screen casualty. The author didn't forget to write my name. You don't give a name to the tutorial dummy.
For a long moment neither of us moved.
Then Raiden's gaze dropped to the Tang Heng Dao in my hand. She looked at it the way she'd looked at it at the weapon rack — with that specific, dense, entirely focused attention that I had already determined was significantly more dangerous than ordinary interest.
When she looked up again, something in her expression had shifted. Settled. The faint, reverent quality that had been there since the weapon rack had resolved into something cleaner and more absolute.
"No curve to yield," she said quietly. "No guard to hide behind." Her voice was soft enough that it was almost only for me, but the silence of the amphitheater carried it anyway. "You chose a blade that forgives nothing. Against an opponent who offers nothing to forgive."
I chose it because it was the last thing on the rack that wouldn't dislocate my shoulder.
"I want to ask you something," I said, before I could stop myself.
Raiden waited.
"In your assessment," I said carefully, "how long does a match like this take. Realistically."
Her eyes didn't change. "It depends entirely on the opponent."
"Roughly."
"Against someone who understands what they're holding?" She considered it with the seriousness of someone doing an actual calculation. "Long enough to be meaningful."
The novel said fourteen seconds.
Fourteen seconds is not long enough to be meaningful. Fourteen seconds is the duration of a bus door closing.
"And against someone who doesn't understand what they're holding," I said.
Something moved at the corner of her mouth. Not quite a smile. The ghost of one, considering the option. "Considerably less."
She just confirmed fourteen seconds. She essentially just confirmed fourteen seconds to my face.
I looked down at the hilt in my hands. Then back up at the winter-sky eyes watching me with that dense, unhurried attention.
The words came out before my central nervous system could file an objection.
"Fourteen seconds," I said. Flat. Empty. The tone of a man reading his own autopsy report.
Raiden went completely still.
The ambient frost around her shoulders crackled.
Her winter-sky eyes held mine for a long, unblinking moment — and in them I watched something happen that I had not intended to cause. The careful, analytical attention reorganized itself into something different. Something that sat in her expression with the specific weight of a person who has just heard exactly what they needed to hear and is now deciding what to do with it.
"You timed it," she said. Very quietly.
I quoted a novel.
"Fourteen seconds," Raiden repeated. Her voice had dropped into a register I was choosing not to assign an adjective to. "You have already calculated the window."
I have calculated nothing. I am holding a piece of pitted iron because it was the only thing left on the rack. The fourteen seconds is from a line of flavor text written by an author who did not consider my personal survival when drafting the scene.
"That's—" I started.
"I accept," Raiden said.
I stopped.
"You accept?" I said.
"Fourteen seconds." She adjusted her grip on the Katana with a small, deliberate motion. Her center of gravity dropped slightly, her posture reorganizing itself into something that was no longer merely correct but actively intentional. "If you have already measured the duel to its conclusion, then you are not afraid of it. You are ready for it." A pause. "I will not waste the window you have given yourself."
She thinks I challenged her to end it in fourteen seconds.
She thinks I looked her in the eye and said fourteen seconds as a declaration of terms. As a parameter. As a martial artist stating the exact duration he intends to survive against her before forcing the finish.
I was reading my own cause of death out loud and she heard a battle cry!
I opened my mouth.
The system didn't wait for me to figure out what to put in it.
"Wave One participants, please proceed to the barriers."
Raiden lowered the tip of her Katana toward the grass and offered a slow, shallow nod — the kind that meant something in her internal vocabulary that I was almost entirely certain I didn't want translated.
"I will not hold back," she whispered, the ambient frost crackling violently around her shoulders.
Then she turned and walked away. She moved with the serene, unhurried grace of an apex predator that had just been granted permission to take the safety limiters off.
I stood alone on the crushed grass.
I looked down at the heavy, Tang Heng Dao in my hand. My F-Rank strength was currently vibrating just trying to keep the dead iron tip off the dirt.
I selected this piece of uncalibrated scrap metal specifically so I could drop it immediately and fake a wrist injury.
Instead, I have just successfully provoked the undisputed Number Two of the cohort into using one hundred percent of her lethal capacity. I accidentally challenged a boss character to a fourteen-second speedrun, and she enthusiastically accepted.
And the absolute worst part?
I looked up at the massive crimson projection hovering in the sky. Wave One was just starting. I was Match Fourty-Two.
I am going to be brutally executed. But because of institutional matchmaking efficiency, I have to wait in line for some minutes before it happens.