(to be honest, I wrote this and the next chapters days apart, bits and pieces everyday. So the consistency might not be ideal. Although I hope that I have caught everything while edit, some may pass the detection of a tired filter, and I apologize in advance)
Before the referee dropped his hand, the league made everyone listen to the rules again, because nothing in professional combat apparently counted as real until it had been explained in a voice designed for broadcast clarity and sponsor confidence. The arena screens brightened with a bracket graphic showing sixty-four teams advancing from thirty-two groups into the double elimination stage, and the referee stood at center ring while both teams waited in their starting zones beneath a wash of white arena light.
"Unlike the group stage," he announced, his voice echoing across the stadium and through every Diver App stream, "the double elimination team format will score each match by standing members. Each selected roster contains seven fighters, and each fighter represents one point. A team that wins with all seven members conscious and inside the ring advances with seven points, losing one point for each member who is rendered unconscious or eliminated by ring out during the fight." The screen displayed examples while the crowd murmured, some fans cheering at the harsher scoring structure and others already calculating bracket implications. "The losing team falls to the lower bracket and receives no standing-member points from the loss. Accumulated points become relevant in the event of a draw later in the stage, where the team with the higher total automatically advances. Both teams have confirmed understanding. Combat continues until surrender, incapacitation, field elimination, or referee stoppage."
In the locker room, Phong watched the broadcast from the edge of his seat while Emma's tablet mirrored the arena feed with extra tactical overlays. The rules sounded simple on the surface, but they carried the ugly elegance of a system built to reward dominance and punish costly victories. Winning mattered, but winning clean mattered more, and every lost teammate could become a future noose in a bracket tie. It also meant the organizers had found another way to monetize pressure: every moment of danger now affected not only spectacle but standings, every near ring out became a commercial-worthy crisis, and every coach watching from a private room had to care about whether victory came with seven people standing or with three bodies barely conscious on the floor. Phong could almost admire the efficiency if he did not dislike everything it encouraged.
Rico, in his commentator window, leaned so far toward his microphone that Maribel Cho gently placed one hand near his armor as if preparing to catch him. "Translation for normal people," he said, speaking around a mouthful of roasted nuts with heroic confidence, "win with everyone standing and you get big shiny seven. Win after your friends take floor naps or get yeeted out of the rectangle, and your shiny seven gets holes bitten out of it. Lose and you go to sad bracket jail with no points. Draw later, math goblin judges you." Grant Ellis attempted to redirect the commentary toward professionalism by noting that high-point wins could shape late-stage advancement, but Rico raised a paw and added, "Also, do not underestimate math goblin. Math goblin ruins dreams," which sent the live chat into such visible frenzy that the Rico Cam expanded another centimeter on Phong's screen.
The referee raised his hand again, and this time the arena's mood changed from explanation to impact. Gia Định's Saviors stood across the field in a crescent formation, with Andrew Nguyen at the center and half a step forward as if the arena had been built to showcase him specifically. Their shield fighter and heavy striker held the inner front, their spear user angled toward Dominic's lane, their youngest speed fighter bounced lightly near the side with dyed hair, restless hands, and a face that still carried the memory of spitting near Phong's boot.
Team Nemean's chosen seven answered with Dominic and Alexei at the center, Séline slightly behind and between them, Joanne on the right-side elevation with her revolver low, Ron Takeyama near the left flank with one hand resting on his sword, Tanya Holston beside the lacquered dueling puppet she had summoned from personal space, and Alex at Dominic's left with her storm held so tightly it barely stirred her hair.
"Begin!" the referee shouted, and Andrew moved before the echo finished crossing the ring. Psychic mana erupted around him in violet-blue sparks, then condensed into spheres that multiplied with sickening speed, one orb becoming ten, ten becoming fifty, and fifty becoming nearly a hundred floating psychic grenades suspended across the battlefield like a field of hostile stars. They did not drift randomly. They spread with intent, filling the spaces between cover points, hovering over ramps, hanging near waist-high barriers, and clustering in lanes where a team trying to advance would have to either detour or detonate them. Each orb pulsed with Mind Blade mana, which meant every explosion threatened not only damage but pain amplification.
Emma's eyes narrowed in the clubhouse. "He front-loaded too much," she said, though her tone held respect for the danger. "He wants dominance on camera immediately, and he is using the minefield to make Team Nemean look trapped. If Dominic advances too fast, the orbs punish the tank line; if Joanne fires freely, Andrew can use the grenades as interception points; if Alex shows large-scale control, she reveals more than we want." Phong nodded while watching Dominic take one slow step backward, then another, apparently forced by the expanding psychic field. It looked like retreat, but Phong knew Dominic's body language too well by now. That was not panic. That was invitation.
Gia Định's Saviors took the bait because they wanted to be baited. Their spear fighter swept wide to threaten Ron's flank, while the heavy striker pushed toward Alexei with a grin that suggested he thought shield users were all the same once pressured. The dual-blade skirmisher darted along the raised middle lane, creating a cutting angle toward Tanya's puppet, while the young speed fighter shadowed Andrew and looked for a chance to humiliate someone smaller, weaker, or distracted. The fire mage was absent from the seven, but one of their selected support-adjacent fighters carried a short-range burst skill that ignited the air in red arcs, while their binding specialist sent threads of mana crawling along the ground to tighten Team Nemean's retreat corridor. Andrew hovered behind this advancing shape with psychic grenades orbiting his shoulders, smiling as if he had already turned the match into a lesson.
Dominic glanced once at Alexei, and Alexei nodded back with the quiet confidence of someone who had been waiting to show the world something. Together, they let the formation compress. They gave ground in measured steps, enough to convince Gia Định's Saviors that the psychic minefield had won the opening. Séline stayed close, hands loose, eyes moving from Andrew's fists to the binding threads crawling along the floor. Joanne fired two test shots from the right platform, each bullet clipping a psychic orb at the edge of Andrew's spread, and the resulting explosions flared bright enough to make the crowd cheer because the blast looked larger than its tactical value. Tanya's puppet advanced three steps, took a psychic orb detonation on one lacquered shoulder, and retreated with smoke curling from its carved armor, a neat little demonstration that she was useful and not yet suspiciously useful.
In the commentator booth, Rico smacked one paw against his tiny desk. "Ah, the classic villain funnel. Many boom balls, much smug face, very 'please stand in the middle so I can say my technique name.' I respect the drama while condemning the smile." Maribel, who had been trying to provide actual analysis, said that Andrew's Psychic Bombardier class excelled at controlling space through explosive threat saturation, especially against teams with strong defensive anchors. Rico nodded solemnly and replied, "Yes, yes, fancy words. He put angry grapes everywhere and wants Team Nemean to step on them." Grant tried to note that Team Nemean was indeed giving ground, and Rico leaned toward him with terrifying seriousness. "Dominic Torres has never accidentally walked into the center of danger."
On the ring, Gia Định's Saviors believed the same thing Andrew wanted the cameras to believe: Team Nemean's defensive line was shrinking. Their fighters flourished attacks at Dominic and Alexei, spear thrusts and heavy strikes hammering against Eyeless Heaven and Alexei's shield aura while psychic grenades pulsed overhead. The binding specialist sent red threads snapping toward Séline's ankles, only for her to step once and break them with a Soul Fist tap that looked too small to matter from the stands. Tanya's puppet caught the dual-blade skirmisher in a brief exchange, blade arms moving with precise dueling patterns that revealed good control while carefully hiding the upper limit of its durability. Ron parried the spear fighter twice, once with the sword and once with a brief manifestation of a tengu-like wing along his forearm that turned a thrust aside in a flourish elegant enough to make the crowd cheer for the wrong reason.
Andrew lifted both hands as Team Nemean reached the center of the stage. The psychic grenades around the ring trembled, then angled inward, and his smile sharpened into something broadcast-ready and personally vicious. "You thought turtling would save you?" he called across the battlefield, loudly enough that the arena mics caught every word. "You should have stayed on the weak coast if you wanted opponents who freeze when you hide behind shields. This is what happens when you underestimate real attack power." His mana flared, and a custom skill prompt flashed briefly in the arena's detection overlay as the orbs brightened together. "Starfall."
Nearly a hundred psychic grenades descended.
The attack was beautiful in the worst possible way. Violet-blue stars rained toward Team Nemean from every angle, curving through the air with telekinetic guidance, bypassing obvious shield lines, and converging on the center where Dominic, Alexei, Séline, Tanya, Ron, Joanne's firing lane, and Alex's restrained storm all overlapped. The first impacts struck the air above them and exploded into psychic shockwaves, followed by the second layer bursting along the ground, the third detonating against shields, and the fourth folding pain-amplifying mana into the blast cloud. The audience rose to its feet as light swallowed Team Nemean's formation, and Andrew spread his arms like a man presenting proof of destiny.
Phong's fingers tightened around the tablet.
Emma remained very still.
The psychic smoke glowed for several seconds, thick enough that even the enhanced broadcast feed struggled to resolve figures inside. The commentators began talking over one another until Rico slapped his desk and shouted, "Hold your beans, we have shield nonsense incoming," which made Maribel glance at him in disbelief an instant before the smoke parted.
Alexei stood at the front of Team Nemean with wings made of aura spread wide from his back.
They were enormous, layered, and bright in a way his usual defensive skills had never been on public footage. The wings curved around the entire team like a living cathedral of shield-light, each feather formed from overlapping plates of defensive aura that had caught Andrew's Starfall and bent the explosions away from the bodies behind him. The psychic blasts had scorched the outer layers, leaving cracks of violet pain-mana crawling along the feathers, but the wings held. Behind them, Dominic stood ready with Eyeless Heaven raised, Séline uninjured and coiled, Tanya's puppet smoking but intact, Ron smiling with one eyebrow lifted, Joanne kneeling on the right platform with revolver aimed through a gap in the aura, and Alex calm enough to make Andrew's dramatic announcement look increasingly unfortunate.
The crowd's reaction rolled from shock into roaring confusion. Public analysts scrambled through Alexei's known profile because he had unlocked the skill after reaching level 40 yet had never had a clean chance to showcase it during the group stage. Against Yeak, the legacy boss's raw firepower and relic pressure had made a stationary wing-cover too risky, since any defense that held the team in one place risked being cracked by force beyond normal divers' logic. Against Yuan Zheng Zi, the instant formation master had been worse, because his formations could manifest on the ground inside the cover of the wings and turn shelter into a coffin. Against a normal diver like Andrew Nguyen, even a powerful Psychic Bombardier with a custom field bombardment skill, Alexei's aura wings became something profoundly irritating: mobile mass protection against splash damage, large enough to shelter the team, strong enough to preserve standing-member points, and visually spectacular enough to steal Andrew's dominance moment.
Rico rose slowly in his commentator chair, both paws pressed to his cheeks. "Wing shield! Paladin has wing shield! The angry grapes have been denied! This is why you do not spend all your mana on fireworks before checking whether the other guy brought a roof." Grant Ellis recovered faster than most of the booth and began explaining that Alexei's aura manifestation appeared to be a post-level-40 defensive evolution, likely unsuited to certain boss fights but extremely effective against wide-area projectile saturation from a peer-range diver. Rico nodded along as if this had been his point all along, then added, "Technical summary: Andrew yelled 'Starfall,' and Alexei replied, 'umbrella.'"
On the arena floor, Andrew's face changed.
It was subtle at first. The smile remained by habit, but the eyes lost certainty. His psychic grenades had consumed real mana. The surrounding formation had committed momentum. His teammates had pushed inward expecting a stagger, a collapse, or at least visible pain spreading through Team Nemean's line. Instead, they had advanced into the center because Dominic and Alexei wanted them to, Andrew had fired his showcase skill into a shield designed to embarrass exactly this kind of attack, and now the minefield had thinned.
Dominic lowered his shield by half an inch, just enough for the arena cameras to catch his face. He did not look angry. That was probably worse for Andrew. "Our turn," Dominic said, and the sound carried through the nearest field mic with the calm weight of a door closing.
He punched the back of Eyeless Heaven.
God's Roar Cannon erupted from the shield in a white beam of compressed destructive force, crossing the distance before Andrew could fully re-layer his psychic defense. The blast struck him squarely through the residual haze of his own Starfall, smashed through a hurried shell of violet mana, and threw him off his feet so violently that his body bounced once against the arena floor before rolling toward the boundary line. Gia Định's Saviors' formation broke in a heartbeat. Their spear fighter turned too late, their heavy striker shouted something useless, the binding specialist lost control of the red threads, and the young speed fighter's eyes widened as he realized his captain was about to be eliminated from the match by ring out less than a minute after boasting about dominance.
The youngest diver moved.
To his credit, he moved fast.
He blurred across the lane and threw himself between Andrew and the boundary line, bracing both feet against the floor while wrapping his arms around his captain's armored torso. The God's Roar Cannon's remaining force hit both of them like a second impact. Andrew's momentum drove the younger diver backward, boots carving twin lines across the arena surface, and the boy's face twisted with the effort of keeping his captain inside the ring. For one instant, Phong saw him as he had been in the handshake line: stupid, cruel, eager to spit inherited hatred near a stranger's boot. Then the battlefield stripped him down to something simpler and perhaps more honest, a young fighter spending his body to keep his captain from defeat.
The boundary barrier flared inches behind them.
Andrew stopped inside the ring.
The young diver did not.
The recoil snapped him sideways, and his shoulder struck the boundary field with a crack bright enough to register on every screen. He was eliminated instantly, his limp body stopped outside the active ring where medical staff rushed forward under the referee's signal. He had remained conscious just long enough to shove Andrew forward, then collapsed beyond the line with his dyed hair plastered to his forehead and his earlier arrogance gone slack across his face.
The arena scoreboard changed.
Gia Định's Saviors: six standing.
Team Nemean: seven standing.
In the clubhouse, Phong let out the breath he had been holding.
Joanne's voice came through the broadcast as she smiled down her revolver sights from the right platform. "Should've aimed for the boot when you had the chance," she said, and although the line was too quiet for most of the arena, the close mic caught enough for the replay team to flag it immediately.
Andrew pushed himself upright, one hand pressed to his ribs, humiliation burning across his face more brightly than injury. Alexei had erased its spectacle, Dominic had not only survived Starfall, but answered with a single cannon, and the teammate who had publicly disrespected Phong was now the first point lost from Gia Định's Saviors. Across the ring, Alex watched Andrew with the same controlled stillness she had worn since the interview, and for the first time since the match began, Andrew Nguyen looked less like a man leading an ideological reckoning and more like a diver realizing Team Nemean had allowed him to step into the center because they intended to close the trap around him.