The duel did not go according to plan.
That was okay.
Neither Ves nor the Dark Apostle harbored an obsession about following a plan to the letter.
Anyone with enough experience in life would know that the future could never be completely calculated.
Perhaps the Polymath might disagree, but Ves never assumed he could predict with 100 percent certainty how a sequence of events would play out over time.
That did not mean that plans had no value, but people needed to be adaptable and ideally have contingency plans in place to account for accidents and the like.
Ves and the Dark Apostle entered the dueling ground knowing that the Unshakeable King was the second-strongest member of the Phase Lord Department.
What he had demonstrated so far truly exemplified his combat power.