They meet up outside the Lotus school, and as they call a car, Sen notices that Xue’s usual cold look actually seems to have a bit of nervousness in it. They don’t talk on the way to the arena, but once they get there Xue is a bit twitchy, either from nerves or excitement, while Sen is just feeling comfortable to be back in the area he considers his second home.

They go up to one of the many terminals surrounding the large cylindrical building, with arches throughout it, and a few spires sticking out the top, listening to cheers echo from behind the walls.

The terminal has a large splash screen on the front page, advertising the tournament that’s going to happen tomorrow, and both Xue and Sen decide to participate, while sending a short message to the others to sign up. The registration is simple, just put in the name you want to be known by, and press the join button. Sen chooses his usual username, AncientSword, while Xue goes with her usual name of BladeDancer, which Sen feels really fits her very mobile fighting style.

Once they’ve signed up, they open a private arena to fight against each other. They decide to enable spectators on a whim, but don’t expect anyone to watch. Once they arrive in the arena, they square off. Around see the stands are empty except for one person, which amuses Sen, as he is used to massive crowds whenever he would fight in Gladiator.

Their focus then turns to each other, and Sen takes his usual position, his sword held over his head, while Xue stands in what is almost a fencing posture, one foot in front, but with her sword pointed more to the sky.

“No skills?” Sen asks. Xue replies with a small nod.

Sen starts the fight, stepping forward and slashing down in a testing motion. Xue easily avoids it, and parries when he turns his sword from a downwards slash to one coming from the side. She jumps slightly as she does so, allowing him to push her to the side to reduce the force she has to block.

Sen grins, it’s always nice having a good opponent. Sen draws his sword back, holding it in front of his body this time, as too large motions will leave openings for Xue to take advantage of. He does a short half stab, half chop forward, and Xue dances backwards out of range before retaliating with a sweep from Sen’s top left. Sen catches it on his crossguard, and twists his sword to dislodge it off to his left before returning a slash of his own.

Xue sways to her right, but is forced to back off more as he commits more to the slash, pushing it towards her ankle. They’re back to facing each other from a distance, and this time, Xue initiates, stabbing forward to his thigh. Sen takes a step back, switching which leg is in front, and slashes down again with his sword to return the favor. As she steps back, he steps in with a stab towards her stomach. She jumps backwards more, seemingly floating over the ground, but Sen commits to the stab, pushing his sword past where most people would stop committing, so as to keep their sword in position.

Xue is clearly caught by surprise, and barely manages to shove his sword to the side, but still takes a cut on her arm. She winces, and Sen steps back for a moment before asking, “what is your pain setting at?”

“Thirty.”

That surprises Sen, most people, even when they reach the adult age of sixteen, will keep their pain settings at the lowest ten percent. Pain is one thing that other immersion games have gotten right, and when you get wounded, it hurts just as it would in real life. Some games have actually incentivised setting the pain at higher levels, though over fifty percent is banned after a few people had heart attacks.

Sen gives her a nod of respect, and the fight continues. This time, he goes in with a wide sweep from his right, and Xue is forced back yet again. She quickly tries to take advantage of the seeming open guard he has, but he pulls in his sword, and diverts the momentum up, then back down to slash at her from his upper left. Xue is forced to twist her body to get her sword in between her and the attack, and is knocked slightly off balance as the weight of the strike impacts her.

Sen shows no mercy, slashing his sword again, which is barely caught by Xue. He slashes one more time, and her sword is driven completely out of position, and Sen positions his sword at her throat. They pause, and then applause starts to sound. Looking around, the once empty arena now has a good hundred people.

Xue pulls up her menu and presses the surrender button. Her face is covered in sweat, and her impressively large chest is heaving with exhaustion as they exit the arena. She breaks her cold expression for a bit with a small smile. “Thanks for that. I wanted to see the sword skills of the infamous AncientSword in person.”

Sen lets out his own smile in response. “It’s always nice to fight a strong opponent, we’ll have to do this again sometime.”

“Why not now?” Xue says, back to her usual cold tone.

Sen grins. “Because for now, I want to pick on the other players to get the reward for your first five wins.” The reward is only a few health salves, but considering he hasn’t remembered to buy any, and is currently all out of crystals with which to do so, it will be quite the nice windfall to get them.

Xue checks the terminal on the outside of the large arena, and sees that yes, there is a prize for winning your first five battles, but after that you only get a reward for every twenty wins, though the reward is an E ranked energy crystal. While that will be nice for people just starting out, or people who simply want to PVP from the very beginning of the game, it will quite quickly become useless for people trying to grind up their stats.

Sen wonders for a bit if they’re going to add higher prizes later on, or if they’ll simply run more tournaments for better rewards as he enters the matchmaking. He’s excited for a while, but as the search goes on, it isn’t finding anyone.

“Hey Tir, why the hell haven’t I found a match yet? With how many people are playing this game I should have no issues finding a match.”

“It finds a match based on your stats. E ranked stats are quite rare at this point, and are not likely to come to the arena, as they are currently trying to get their stats even higher.”

After a full minute of waiting, he’s finally matched, and his vision switches form outside the arena to within it. Looking over, he sees an opponent using a longsword, and Sen raises his sword to match the opponent. Unlike when he was fighting with Xue, he waits for the enemy to come to him.

The man makes a clumsy slash with his sword, which is quite fast, the man clearly using body enhancement, but with Sen doing the same, it’s easy enough for him to simply divert the sword to the side, then strike down with weight of the mountain to see how it fares in real combat.

The sword slices entirely through the man, and the blue line formed is a good two inches thick at the top before he dissolves into blue light. A window pops up in front of Sen, asking if he would like to continue, and he presses yes.

His next few opponents aren’t any harder, and Sen is quite disappointed. The average gamer without active skills isn’t able to be much of a challenge. Especially considering most other immersion games will actually have an “automatic guide” function for your sword strikes, correcting errors you make in your strikes for you. While anyone serious about PVP will disable it, a majority of the people don’t, and in a game like this which doesn’t have that function, their swordsmanship is terribly sloppy.

His fifth fight matches him with someone slightly better, who uses an odd movement ability to avoid Sen’s strikes for a couple minutes, though he isn’t able to get in a blow on Sen, and eventually he runs out of energy and is easy prey for Sen to finish off.

Once people start getting more active skills, Sen may actually have some trouble, but with the most basic skills taking an hour or so to learn for the average person, the higher level skills probably aren’t going to be learned by anyone for quite some time. Sen grins, he’s going to have a massive advantage over others in the tournament with his swordsmanship he learned as Damien.

As Sen finishes his fifth bout, he presses no when asked if he wants to continue fighting, and is soon back outside the arena. After not seeing Xue, he searches for her name in the ongoing fights category, and presses spectate. When he arrives, he’s greeted by far more people than had been watching him, which makes him a bit jealous. Her opponent is a beautiful girl with blonde hair and blue eyes, and she seems to be just barely hanging on against Xue.

She manages to deflect a few strikes, and stabs forward, using a skill that seems to make her sword teleport towards Xue, but Xue calmly uses her own skill, which makes her sword twist in the air to deflect it, and then twist back into the girl’s neck. The look in the girl’s eyes is filled with shock, clearly confident her skill should have won her the fight as she fades into blue motes of light.

Once the fight is over, he opens his menu and leaves the spectator area to meet Xue.

“Get your salves?”

Xue nods in response.

“Want to fight some more or go practice some more skills?”

“I need to learn a footwork skill, it’s impossible to keep up with some of those people,” Xue replies.

Sen thinks back to the one opponent who had managed to keep away from him for almost five minutes. “Yeah, learning a simple footwork ability is probably the best thing to do. Shame not a single skill dropped from all the mobs we hunted.” Sen would have questioned the one percent drop rate figure his sister had given him, but his luck is… questionable at best.

Sen and Xue are soon back in an automated vehicle heading back to the school district of the city. Once they arrive, they say their farewells, and each goes into their individual schools to learn a movement ability, something that will be key towards doing well in the tournament the next day.