For the last couple of minutes, Villin had been entirely focused on sabotaging his neighbor, he didn’t quite expect someone to target him while he was doing this.

When he turned around Villin saw a few foreign objects atop of his own small pile of stuff.

Right atop of the backpack that way laying in the middle of his area was a red stone, and just as Villin turned around, he could feel the magic within the object fluctuating.

He immediately knew what was going on, but it was too late to do anything against it. A moment later the red stone flashed brightly before exploding.

BOOOOOM!!

The explosion caused a small crater with a diameter of two meters to appear, since Villin was four meters off, he didn’t really get harmed, but he could still feel hot wind assaulting him from the front, as for the stuff he stole from his neighbor, it was laying next to his feet, and so it was safe.

He couldn’t help but curse at himself, his whole plan was to take the stuff from a distracted competitor yet he didn’t even keep an eye on his own stuff. When he thought about it, he felt foolish.

After a moment, he looked around for the perpetrator and was surprised to see Ruby looking back at him. She was sitting in the center of her own area and had one red stone in her hand, the same one his stuff was blown up with.

Villin closed his eyes for a moment as he composed himself, it made sense that Ruby could make these kinds of objects in this competition. Her entire style was about making things quickly, even though there was a chance the stone would’ve malfunctioned, it was relatively low.

There was nobody Villin could blame but himself, and well, he honestly didn’t think it mattered too much. The missions didn’t entail keeping the items he released, as long as he had his puppets he didn’t mind, and he had his neighbor’s stuff anyway even if it wasn’t so plentiful.

Villin continued on with his plan. For the last few minutes, he weakened the enchantments on the bowl he had stonen before putting it back into the guy’s area.

Yet even despite this, the person looked at him with a livid expression. If Villin knew this was the thanks he was going to get, he would’ve just destroyed the object.

Nonetheless, the given time was up and a moment later a loud voice could be heard from the spectators’ area. It was Kalo Lannister that was speaking.

“This marks the end of the first round. Everyone please stop drawing runes or you will be disqualified!” as he said this the few people that were still adding some last-minute runes immediately dropped their equipment.

“As everyone knows, each of the competitors was given three missions. This first mission was to breach as many of the wards we set up as possible. Depending on the contestant’s age the wards would be more complex.” the man paused for a moment as he cast a spell silently, waving his wand “For this mission breaching one ward will give you one point.”

After a moment it became clear what the spell that was cast did as small dots of light moved over each of the contestants’ heads.

They each formed numbers, over Villin’s head was a ten. The least that someone had was a two and the second place went to one of the purple robes who had a six above his head. Because Villin managed to cheese it he got a huge lead due to these points.

When he looked toward the spectating runemasters his happiness quickly went away though. Even though a few runemasters looked at him approvingly about half of the spectating runemasters were sneering.

Just an hour prior Villin had talked with several of these runemasters and they seemed kind at that point in time. Was it so bad to take the quickest path to victory even if it didn’t involve runemastery? When Villin deliberated on forcing his way through he thought he would be praised for it as one of the main skills a runemaster needed to have was being able to look outside of the box, it seems that he had missed something. Or perhaps something else had happened during the competition.

Villin noticed he was getting more and more nervous and calmed himself, if they had been offended in some way he was sure he would be able to mend the relationship somewhat by clarifying his intentions. At least, this is what he used to calm himself.

“The second mission was to enhance an item you got from the wards.” as Kalob said this the enhanced items from each of the contestants floated toward him. Kalob and another runemaster Villin didn’t recognize looked at them for a while before he continued with the scoring.

“The items will be graded for usefulness, not the difficulty of creation. The maximum number of points for this round is ten. Once more, age will be taken into account. We will assume the contestants only know the runes within the ‘runology’ schoolbook from Magnicus that corresponds to their year.”

Hearing what they were looking for, Villin's hopes instantly sunk, his puppet really wasn’t all that useful overall, he expected difficulty to be taken into account, but then again, this system wasn’t unfair in any way either.

The number above Villin’s head turned into a fifteen, a fair number if you took everything into account. When he looked to the left he was surprised to see Ruby’s score. She now had a large thirteen above her head, she had gotten nine points for this round. Her points now equaled the ones of the two purple robes in the competition and were only a few points away from Villin.

“The third mission was to sabotage your opposition. For disrupting another contestant or destroying their regular gear you can get up to three points per contestant. If you manage to destroy a contestant’s main project this can raise up to five. The maximum amount of points in this round is fifteen.”

Villin was nervous as he thought about all of this. As he nervously looked at the number above his head he saw it turn into a nineteen and he let out a long sigh, he was probably safe with this score.

Still, he couldn’t relax fully yet, he wasn’t sure what others were doing while he was making the puppet, he only paid attention to things within his own area after all.

Then, Villin looked behind him to see the scores of Ruby and the two purple robes and his eyes widened with surprise.

The purple robes had seventeen and eighteen, but as for Ruby, she had nineteen just like him. She had caught up to him despite his early four-point lead.

When he saw the scores even Kalob looked surprised for a moment “Eh, well, this might be a bit of a problem, we only prepared one prize. Please give me a moment.” After saying this he took a few steps back as he began talking to his wife.

As for Ruby, she noticed Villin’s stunned expression and couldn’t help but smile somewhat cockily. Even if she usually wouldn’t do such a thing, she got rather infuriated when she noticed that Villin had finished with ten wards while she was still on her second one. Even though she didn’t see how he did it, it made her think that he was actually better than her by an insane amount, able to dismantle a ward just by looking at it.

Yet now she caught up to him even when having way less time to actually enchant than him, obviously, she felt proud of herself.