The next day as soon as sun rose, All the candidates assembled in the estate grounds where there was a stage similar to that of the southern star city's estate a man who has a sharp aura and looked around late thirties stood with hands behind his back.

He had a long sword hung on the waist.

His presence is as sharp as the sword he carried and it commanded absolute respect and acknowledgement. This aura cannot be born with, it was obtained with the efforts, failures and achievements.

He scanned the crowd and after some silence, he spoke.

"I am the Marshall general of the army of the empire of Orion. I am also known by the name Sword Marshall.

All of you are the candidates that are selected from the youngsters who are younger than twenty-five from all over the empire.

You all represent the talent, potential and future of the empire.

But this is just the beginning.

All of you will be facing the toughest of all the competitions you have been through all this while.

In all the competitions that you have been through, you have been protected by the rules and regulations which limited the usage of deceit, schemes and traps se by your opponents.

But this time, the competition is not going to be having that many rules that would protect you.

You can scheme, you can trap, but all that matters, is that you win.

For this challenge, do you have an army of followers who listens to your command? you can use them.

You can make the beasts do you bidden. Let them.

You cannot complete the task but can rob others of their fruits of labour, Rob them.

You can mislead all your opponents, do so.

For the next months, except for intentional kills and usage of the subordinates of superior level on your fellow competitors almost all bets are off."

He paused for a second and looked at the candidates who are now whispering and discussing in hush voices, they didn't even dare to talk out loud. They are subconsciously lowering their voices so that they wouldn't catch the Marshall's attention.

After a brief pause of ten seconds, Marshall continued his speech.

"Your competition will start from today for another thirty days, on the thirty-first day, the youngest daughter of the Emperor of the Orion, the Princess Natalie is going to turn eighteen and the winners of the competition will attend that ceremony as the guests of honour.

Now, for the competition agenda and rules.

All of you might have gotten the cards given to you by your Duke. Those cards are the vital to the competition.

You aim is to get your hands on the cards and try to transfer the points from your opponents' cards to yours.

Apart from that, there are many empty cards hidden in the city in various places and there are of many grades.

Starting from Bronze card, Silver Card, Gold Card, Crystal Card.

The higher the card grade, the higher the difficulty to obtain it and higher the number of points you would obtain from the card.

The information on where to obtain these cards will be divulged by some specially hidden clues in the city itself.

The third method to obtain the points is accepting the military missions, City Guard missions, some special missions which might require your expertise on the various professions etc.

There is a mission board in this estate and an office with a person in-charge who supervises the issue of the missions.

So, the final and main goal of the mission is that all of you have to obtain points and as many points as you can.

The ten candidates who has most points by the end of the month will be the winners and the rest of the candidates will be eliminated.

The ten candidates who are selected will undergo hand to hand combat on the birthday of the princess in front of all the esteemed guests to decide the rankings amongst yourselves.

This is the competition's goal and for the rules as I mentioned earlier.

You can do whatever you want. But you cannot use your subordinates of higher level to suppress a competitor of lower level.

You can steal the cards, and transfer the points from that to yours and the point transfer is processed by keeping both cards in contact and using your spiritual energy and spiritual sense to force points from one card to another.

The cards which are hidden in the city work in the same way.

You can work in teams and or you can work individually. And one more thing is you can use multiple cards.

You can buy the cards in the mission office and you can also form a team card in case you want to store the points in the card meant to be for a team. The points in that card cannot be transfer to any individual of that team directly, there are only two ways to transfer them and one is at the mission office and the other way is for the person who wants to transfer the points to possess the rest of the teammates.

The opponents of that team however, have no restrictions to transfer those points to their cards.

Remember that by the end of the month only the points inside the individual cards will be counted and that too a candidate should only have all the points in one card, otherwise the card with most points will be considered leaving the remaining cards.

As for those people who belong to the nobility and the imperial family, you cannot use any person who is working under any authority under the empire as your subordinate.

They cannot divulge you any information, give you any assistance in battle, assist you in hindering your fellow competitors.

Those people include, the officials, soldiers, city guard command etc.

If those people violate the rule and do help, the competitor as well as the person who violated the rule will be punished by the Military road to hell.

The punishment will be executed by my own hands and even the people from the imperial family are no exception."

As he made the declaration, he gave a brief pause and continued.

"Two hours from now, will signify the start of the competition. Until then, those who wants to buy the spare cards, team registrations can proceed. After two hours you are allowed to start your competition."

Saying that, the Marshall left the place.

Every candidate immediately started discussing with the members that are from the same dukedom as them to see if they can make a team.

Even the people from the southern start are trying to do so.

But Sam left the group and walked alone towards the Mission office.

"May I ask, how much does an extra card cost?"

He asked politely to the middle-aged man who sat at the counter of the office.

"10,000,000 spirit stones."

The middle-aged man said with a nonchalant tone, but he was observing Sam's expression to see any change.

The multiple card scheme is actually an extra lifeline for the candidates. So, the cost is quite high.

It is not easy to buy as 10 million is not an amount that anyone could fork out easily.

But the officer was disappointed and surprised at the same time, because, Sam calmly took a space jade ring and placed it on the table.

"Ten cards, Please."

The middle-aged man was stunned for a second, before he reacted. He took the space jade ring and looked inside to find the one hundred million spirit stones. He again looked at Sam's 'devil may care' attitude as he didn't even blink when pushing such huge amount.

But he came out of his reverie and asked.

"Do you want all cards to be registered under your name?"

"Yes."

After that, there is a process of attaching Sam's spiritual energy signature to the cards, within minutes, Sam came out and he saw Philip and Jack walking towards the entrance.

"You could have waited for us. Why did you run away that fast?" Philip asked as soon as they met.

"I am not interested in that pointless discussion on formation of team. They are going to talk all shit now and then fight to death among themselves on the last few days. What is the point of listening to it? I even thought, you two are interested in forming a team with them."

Sam replied.

"Nah, I just wanted to listen to all the highly righteous things they will say to each other, so that I could enjoy the fight at the end even more."

Philip said with a mischievous smile.

"I don't care about a psycho like you, you guys better hurry up if you want to buy the extra cards, I have to go into city to buy a house, I cannot stay in this place."

"Just wait a second." Both of them went into the office hurriedly.

After a few minutes they came out with five cards each.

Philip had a sulky expression on his face.

"All the earning I got from the business phase are almost over, Sam you are filthy rich, how about you buy us these cards?"

Sam rolled his eyes and said coldly.

"As if the money you spent belonged to you? You better remember, who is the investor for the business you did, I am already generous enough for not asking my capital back, don't day dream. Watt is waiting, I have to go."

This time he didn't wait for reply and simply walked away.

Watt is waiting for them at the stage, as soon as they came, he walked towards him and four of them went to the gate.

Any of them didn't mention anything about forming a team and team card, because they have enough trust to not need a team card for their cooperation.