And it isn’t even for my own tournament this time. “Alright Brian. As a punishment for keeping this a secret, you are only using Foxflame today.” Unika told me. It was the day after her birthday and she had once again dragged me to the training room. But this time, she was making sure I could use my racial Fox skills. I had two, Fox Instincts and Foxflame. … also, System. Why is the skill Foxflame and not Fox Flame? Just asking. Foxfire is also written as one word and not Fox Fire. Just wondering how you name your skills. Also, Unika isn’t actually angry with me. I think. I think she just would have preferred I would have used the skill yesterday during our spar, instead of keeping the reveal of the fact that I have it until the evening. Admittedly, it was always meant to be a birthday surprise for her, so I could have shown it at that time. And maybe using both Fire and Ice against Unika’s Fire and Light would have been more fun. But better day late than never. … and by the end of our training, I’d gotten my ass burnt. By light, not fire. I could defend against Unika’s flames fine with my ice, but without Space Magic, I couldn’t really stop her Light Magic. Ice isn’t good against light, as I learned yesterday. And neither is fire. It does make me think of magic attributes and which ones counter others. And which are good against others. It isn’t just ‘Water puts out Fire’, but there are other interactions as well. I mean, Fire can easily cause Water to steam, so you can defend against Water Magic with Fire Magic, so the two kind of counter each other. As is the case with all opposing attributes. Dark can … darken light, but Light can brighten up darkness. Wind can scatter earth, but solid enough earth will stop the winds. In these cases, the stronger and more skilled caster wins. But when it comes to some other attribute matchups, they aren’t nearly as even. For example, Fire is quite a good counter to Dark. Fire produces light, but it is much more difficult for darkness to put out. Same with Earth against Water. Earth can absorb water spells with relative ease, and you need quite a bit of pressure behind a water spell to get through an earthen wall. And good luck trying to use Fire Magic when someone comes at you with Wind Magic. Or defending yourself with Wind against Light. And the Earth won’t defend you from the coming darkness. Space and Time are different in that way. They are kind of the ‘omni magics’. They are just good against everything, except maybe each other and Gravity Magic. I can, with a relatively simple spell, produce an artificial space that is ten kilometers deep on the inside, while what we see is just a simple wall. Most spells will never get through all of that space. And even if they do, their power has been weakened and it will take some time. Light Magic is basically the only counter to this, and most Light Magic doesn’t move at the speed of light. Time is the same. Altering time in a small area can stop most spells in their tracks. You can’t fight time. It affects all things. Be it Light, Fire, Earth, Water or Wind. The only real weakness is Dark, and even that can be slowed down by Time. Sadly it can’t be fully stopped because no matter how slow things get, Darkness will always take over if there is no light. Man, I got philosophical. Well, whatever. Now, let’s talk about something else I preluded to. The upcoming adventuring tournament. As I already said, Wendy had gotten me involved because she and the other organizers wanted to use the Factory for the preliminaries. This year's tournament will be just the ‘strongest adventurer’ tournament, which means single combat. And testing an adventurer’s combat skills isn’t that easy. With the team competition, strategy and planning was more important, so they could come up with ways of doing that using the Castle Dungeon. I asked them how they’d done in years past, and it was quite the convoluted mess. Basically every adventurers’ guild guild master could send one adventurer to take part in the preliminaries. They could either do this by ‘feel’ or by holding a tournament in the town or city where their guild was located. But this causes massive problems. Everything from random C-ranks who happen to be the strongest in some small town getting in, to something like the Hero’s country, who still only got to enter 1 adventurer. And they have over ten S-ranks living there. So it basically causes massive problems with the ‘who should really enter the later stages of the tournament’. But, we have a solution. Every guild in the three Kingdoms has at least one Factory VR station. So, we can just hold the preliminaries in the Factory. And as long as none of my girls will take part, it is a fair fighting ground. Out of everyone, only Unika wanted to take part, waiting to defend her title. But we were able to talk her out of it by giving her the opportunity to take part in the exhibition match. A bit of a shame that I don’t get to do it, but Unika will show off for the both of us. So the only thing left to figure out was the test. And it was actually going to pretty simple. But not too simple, as I still wanted strategy to be a part of it. See, the first idea given by one of the organizers was to just have the adventurers fighting my monsters. Defeat one and you’ll face a stronger one. Keep going until you lose. Simple as anything and I could put together the list of monsters in an hour. But I wanted to offer something a bit more strategic. So I suggested that the adventurer be able to pick their next opponent. Not fully, but like they could pick between fighting a Spellcaster, Warrior or a Beast-type monster next. That will allow those who specialize in man to man combat to fight a warrior, those who specialize in slaying beasts to take on them, and those who want to fight a magic caster to take on one of them. This will also allow for specialized equipment to shine. And to make sure all equipment is on an even level, the adventurers can’t use their own. … well, not like they could in the first place as the Factory VR stations can’t scan equipment. Should have added an analyzer to them. Instead they will be using Factory equipment. And for that, I asked if the organizers would know some smiths who’d be willing to design some for the tournament. Sure Wilma and I could do it, but the tournament is a great place for artisans to advertise their wares. They promised to look into it as soon as possible, since they wanted to announce the qualifiers as soon as possible. I mean, traveling takes a long time and while there are still well over 50 days until the tournament, some adventurers might already be making their way towards the Hero’s country. Or a town that has a small population of adventurers. So while the organizers went to work finding people to design the equipment the adventurers will use for the preliminaries, I got to work on sorting my monsters and how people will face them. Wonder how quickly I can have someone face Yubel? I mean, she has 0/0 stats. Okay, I won’t sort my monsters based on stats alone. I’ll actually go by a combination of stats and level, I think. That will make for a more even difficulty curve. But still, you better believe Yubel will be an opponent at some point. And the way you defeat her is by showing her love and compassion, not by violence. As long as she agrees. But I’m pretty sure she will. Oh, and one more thing. Before I call it good, I do have some new skills, like the racial Fox skills, so my status. Oh. One last thing. You may have noticed that Multi-Tailed is a modifier race. Well, it is one. Doesn't work all that well with most races, but some of them do use it fine. Sadly there is no skill related to that modifier race. In theory I can pick how many tails I want to have, but I can't yet. Currently it is just 2, but once I get higher numbers unlocked, I'll be able to have more. It is kind of an interesting one with Mermaid and Mer-folk, as I'll just grow a second tail. Sadly the second tail isn't that great, because while it does increase my acceleration, it also adds a ton of drag, so it actually slows me down when swimming. I can turn faster though. ... and as an additional downside, it looks a bit cursed. But I'll experiment more with the Multi-Tailed modifier race and report back to you on that at some point.