Chapter 19: Learning all of the ropes of the Battle Arena

When Joshua walked out of the entrance and made his way over to the rest of his guild members they all took their attention away from the several screens in front of them and welcomed Joshua. "I'm surprised it took you so long to get here. I guess you must have found some interesting things at the auction house." Adrian said as a new chair materialized in the room for Joshua to sit in. He took the seat before responding.

"Found quite a few interesting things there. In fact I've got some new skills and spells for our new recruits." Joshua said peaking everyone's interest. Joshua opened his inventory and started take out the skill and spell books that he had bought at the auction house. "These should all help you guys fill your roles better in team combat. I'm sure there will be some uses you guys can find for them when you're doing things on your own, but I had team work more in mind when I picked them out."

After handing out the items Joshua turned his attention back towards all of the screens that were set up along the wall. The new recruits clearly liked the skills that Joshua had picked out for them based off the way they reacted after reading through the information. Robin liked it so much that she rushed to learn the spell right away. She knew such a spell wasn't cheap and for their guild leader to give it to her so easily even when she was a new member seemed to brighten her expectations of the guild.

Joshua gave out all of the skills and abilities on good faith, but he knew it would be worth it to keep such good recruits around permanently. He didn't want any of the larger guilds to try to come over and poach all of their new members. With Joshua's plans of showing off in the battle arena he was certain that he wouldn't be the only one grabbing attention from his group and he was hoping that wouldn't lead to losing out on any of their members. If anything Joshua wanted to gain some new members from fighting in the battle arena, not lose the new ones he had just gained.

After Robin and the rest had finished celebrating gaining new skills Joshua decided to focus on how exactly the battle arena worked. He knew that Henry had probably been there since it first opened which meant he'd have a pretty good idea of how things worked. "Well what do I need to know about the battle arena before we get started?" Joshua asked grabbing everyone's attention once more.

"It's actually surprisingly fairly straight forward." Henry said with a smile as he pulled up a screen that Joshua could see that was showing off the rules to the battle arena. "There are two forms of viewing when it comes to the battle arena. The first is the stadium seating. That's straight up just there for people that only come to watch the biggest matches. If anything most civilians will probably come to watch that way."

"So then getting rooms in the arena like this is the other way to view the fights in the battle arena?"

"Yeah for now that's the case, but from what I can tell the system will have other ways of doing it soon enough. There seems to be jobs at the battle arena that Civilians can take so there will probably be some major changes going forward as people figure stuff out." Henry explained with a thoughtful look. "Anyways if you want to actually participate in any of the fights you have to get a room beforehand. People in the stadium seating aren't allowed to join the fights."

"Yeah it's fairly easy to join a match as well." Adrian said jumping into the conversation. "Just pull up the arena menu, sign in with your system id, and pick either one on one combat or two on two. Then there will be a count down until your match."

"If you do join a match you have to pay a small fee beforehand and you have to put up a bet. The winning side takes the pot while the losing side gains nothing but the experience of the fight." Aito said as he watched one of the matches taking place on the screen.

"It's a fairly basic set-up for now, but I'm sure they'll add more things in the future. You got any ideas on what they could change going forward boss? You do meet up with that dwarf and elf from time to time right?" Jayce asked looking a bit antsy. Joshua was certain he just wanted to join in on one of the fights, but they all seemed to have been holding back until he got there.

"Well Thoren didn't explain too much about the arena since we've got the most basic form of it at the moment, but he did tell me a few things we can expect to happen in the future. The biggest thing we talked about were the tournaments that would start popping up in the battle arena." Joshua said.

"Tournaments? Something like a bracket based tournament of some kind?" Allen asked looking interested like everyone else. "If so then sign me up. It'll be great to test myself against the strongest this hub city has to offer."

"Well tournaments won't start happening for at least a few months. They want people to get accustomed to the battle arena before that kind of stuff takes place. There might be larger scale fights though in the arena soon enough. Five on fives, battle royal type confrontations, all sorts of other things as well." Joshua explained what he had heard from Thoren. "How have the fights been so far?"

"At this point it's been nothing, but lower level explorers involved. Still haven't really seen anyone appear yet that I would consider worth inviting into the guild." Henry said with a sigh as he turned his eyes back to the largest screen that the group currently had up on the wall. "So far we've bought viewing rights to about a hundred or so different fights. We haven't really come across anyone that catches our attention."

"So how exactly does this viewing rights thing work?" Joshua asked a bit confused. He was wondering if it was anything like renting a movie or something from back when things were more normal."

"Well you can either look up a specific person you want to watch fight and it will bring them up if they are in a fight. The cost for all matches are the same right now, but that might change once they start figuring out the battle arena rankings for different people. The other way to find a fight is just scrolling through the list and picking which looks interesting to you. Each fight tells you the combatant's level and job before they start fighting. It doesn't show the soul beast though so that's a surprise to look forward to if the combatants decide to show their soul beast off." Henry explained.

"The other more cost efficient way of viewing fights is through watching the main arena. That's free to watch as long as you've purchased either a stadium seat or a room. Most people focus on that since the system picks out the most likely high level fights to take place there." Julia said as she pointed towards the large screen in the center of the wall that at the moment had a timer counting down for the next match to take place.

"In the future you can expect any high ranked contender's matches to be placed in the main arena. So I'm willing to bet if any of you guys decided to go down there and fight then you'd probably immediately get put in the main arena." Robin said getting most of the group to agree with her.

Joshua nodded in understanding before he started looking through the information on how the battle arena worked so that he had full understanding of everything that went on in the place. He knew the rules could probably be a bit fluid for the moment considering how much of it might change going forward, but most of the core rules should be in place. The first rule that Joshua took notice of that he didn't already know from everyone explaining things to him was the fact that once you entered a match you couldn't back out of it. If you didn't show up you would forfeit and lose your bet along with gaining a loss in your records. That would affect your battle arena rankings which would eventually effect your overall power rankings as well.

The next rule that Joshua found that he hadn't heard of before was that a person could continue to fight up to five straight battles. After that they will be forced to take a break until the next day. In total you can only have up to five matches in a day. It didn't matter if you did them all in a row or broke them up into separate occasions throughout the day. As long as you participated in five matches then your quota will be considered fulfilled.

The next thing Joshua took notice of was how the battle arena would rank people that joined it. There were two ways that people were rated when joining the battle arena. The first way was through your level when joining. The battle arena wouldn't put someone that was level fifty-five against someone that was level ten and just starting out on exploring. The system did its best to keep people within a twenty level range of each other unless the fight is decided before hand by the two participates. Someone could also challenge someone that is already in the arena and as long as the person that is being challenged accepts, the fight can happen between them no matter the level difference.

The other way the battle arena ranked people was by their record in the arena. From what Joshua could tell the battle arena could keep a good track record of all the fights that took place. It even kept recordings of your fights that you can either put public so people can watch it for a fee or keep private to hold for yourself. The money earned from any recordings that are viewed is split evenly between the two combatants and the system.

Joshua knew that there was no way that the system expected people to keep fighting in the battle arena on a daily routine since explorers had to actually go out and well…explore. Even so fighting in the arena routinely would help your ranking go up and therefore help your actual phase two over all power rankings. So fighting in the battle arena from time to time could only be useful unless you ended up betting all of your money away.

After he finished reading through all the rules Joshua turned his attention back to the main screen that started to show a fight between a knight and a swordsman. The tank was a level lower than the swordsman being at level fifty-four while his opponent was level fifty-five, but the tank clearly had better gear. This came as no surprise to Joshua or the rest of his group since it was common for tanks to have better gear than everyone else at this point. A guild would spend more money on gearing up their tanks than anyone else since if a tank went down it was likely the rest of the group would soon follow.

When the fight started Joshua could tell right away that both of the fighters weren't used to fighting against other humans. The tank wasted his shield wall against a couple of energy slashes. He wouldn't be able to use it again any time soon and it was a skill that could probably block anything a normal swordsman could do. The swordsman however kept trying to go after the tanks limbs as if he was fighting a large monster instead of going for the gaps in the tanks armor.

In the end the tank won just from lasting much longer than the swordsman and both contestants disappeared. The tank was too tired to continue to fight and the same could be said for the swords man. Even though it was a boring match in Joshua's eyes he was excited to see what would happen when some of the more veteran explorers started to join in on the fighting.