Fight or Flight (4)

The two persons who came up to Darius and Arnold was Dominic and Jonah. This was actually to quite a disadvantage to both of them as there were many shadows within the building for Jonah to hide, while they still had no knowledge of Dominic's powers. They also don't know the esper powers of either of them.

Actually, Elliott and Lucas did not know the esper powers of any person from the opposing team. As esper power abilities was a closely guarded secret of each person once they had obtained one, knowledge about one's power would not be spread unless said person purposely perpetuate information about his or her own esper powers. In fact, before Commander Lewis had left Arnold, he had Arnold sign a non-disclosure agreement, which said that he was not allowed to tell the details of his esper powers to anyone.

Therefore, people would at most ask if a person had any esper powers but would not ask what kind of esper power he or she had. Even when a person got knowledge of another person's esper power, he or she is expected to keep the other's esper power a secret, or else it would be breaking the law.

*

Darius and I both waited close to the only flight of stairs that headed up towards the 8th floor. We had both assumed that our opponents would head up this way. However, before knowing what was happening, I seemed to have been pushed straight from behind!

The push must have been infued with spiritual power, as I instantly flew out of the building at a high speed.

"Arnold!" Darius shouted as he saw me fly away in dismay.

In order to stabilize myself, I placed a lot of spiritual energy on the lower part of my body. As my body continued flying, I noticed that I am about to crash land onto the adjacent building's roof. Taking advantage of this, I managed to land on the roof with both my feet. At the same time, I generated some resistant force using my spiritual energy in front of my body in order to slow myself down as I hit the floor. Therefore, after landing on the ground and doing a few barrel rolls, I managed to come out of this attack unscaved. However, it seemed that we have played right into our opponent's hand!

*

From the beginning, the plan of Dominic and Jonah's was to separate the two of them and to battle them two-on-one one after the other. As Arnold was an unknown variable within this battle, they decided to deal with the person they are familiar with first. Therefore, when both of them arrived on the 7th floor, instead of continuing upwards by climbing the flight of stairs, Jonah had instead flipped himself forwards close to the edge of the building and managed to jump and land on the floor above in one go. The flexibility of his body had allowed him to curve his body around in time to land nicely on the edge of the 8th floor without either of the boys on the opposite team noticing. Therefore, when Darius finally saw the shadow of Jonah running towards Arnold, it was already too late. By the time Darius managed to shout, Jonah had already used the right amount of spiritual energy to push Arnold away.

One may ask why didn't Jonah just generate more energy and assassinate Arnold instead of simply pushing him away? It was because that Jonah had managed to see a rather thick layer of spiritual energy that was wrapped around Hunter. The energy was as thin as a film, however, this was precisely a trap. Once a fatal amount of energy impacted against the thin film that wrapped around his opponent's body, the spiritual energy would instantly rebound against him. However, if Jonah were to exert a lower amount of energy, such as one that was able to push his opponent but not kill him in one go, the energy rebounded would also be much lesser in size.

Jonah was surprised that Arnold was able to use such a high level technique despite only just arriving at the military academy. He thought that there must be more to the opponent's background than he seems. Although, in reality, the technique was simply taught to him by the AI chip within his brain. However, Jonah is never going to know that, thus giving him a false assumption instead.

*

While Jonah rebounded against Arnold and was forced a few steps back, Darius finally reacted and immediately placed a burst of spiritual energy on his feet, quickly running towards Jonah while he was still being forced backwards. However, he was immediately blocked by Dominic, who instantly appeared in front of Darius in no time.

As Dominic was much faster than Darius, before he was able to react, Dominic had alraedy used his palm and made a strong impact against the other's abdomen, forcing him to fly backwards.

The force exerted was so great that Darius flew back and didn't even manage to stop as he crashed through a pillar of the building. Luckily, he was able to manage to place a hand on the edge of the 8th floor, otherwise, his entire body would have plunged all the way to the ground. Even with spiritual energy, he would be heavily injured in that scenario.

Using the remaining force that was exerted against him, he managed to change the course of his fall through that one hand. By gripping onto the ledge of the 8th floor, he swung himself downwards and landed himself on the 7th floor after doing a few barrel rolls. Afterwards, instead of trying to fight his two opponents, he decided instead to go find Arnold, since fighting two-on-two would level the playing field.

However, just as he was about to enter the staircase, Darius heard a voice coming from behind, "Where do you think you're going?" The person behind asked in a slightly mocking tone. His voice was deep and rough, completely different from his stature. Before Darius could do anything, he was instantly kicked towards the ground. The impact was so great that Darius instantly penetrated through the ground and only managed to stop when he landed on the 3rd floor, completely destroying several ceilings on the way.

Since Darius managed to cross his arms in front of his face before the impact, his injuries were not that great. However, before he even had the chance to get up, Jonah had already came up behind without a sound. Using much of his energy, Jonah sliced the back of Darius, instantly causing the sensors on his uniform to react. Darius was immediately tasered until he lost consciousness.

"Phew! One down, one to go." Jonah wiped the sweat from his brow and said in a nonchalant tone.

"Senpai. You should have simply let me handle him." Dominic protested as he appeared before Jonah a moment later.

Jonah simply turned around and replied while shrugging, "Even I didn't expect for the opponent to be this weak." Then, his face immediately turned solemn. "Why don't you focus your attention on the next guy. From my assault just now, not only ded he managed to dodge a fatal attack, it seemed that I had only managed to let him escape with a push. The technique of that person seemed not bad."

"You mean Troy?" Dominic asked. He turned around and looked in the direction of where Arnold fell just now. "I'm seriously doubting whether or not he's going to be a threat. After all, there's two of us."

"We still need to hurry. If we idle about for too long, our prey would have escaped before we know it." Jonah replied, giving an insidious smirk.

It was Dominic's turn to shrug. He said, "We can simply use the tracking ability again if we can't catch him this time. Besides, it's more fun when they run."

"If Captain heard that you wanted to waste one of his precious tracking abilities, he's gonna hit you!" Jonah gave a slight laugh as he spoke, "Remember that there's always a limit to such a power. The more powerful a esper power, the more limits there are for its usage."

"Tsk." Dominic simply replied without any respect for his senpai. Without anything, he made a huge jump, directly flying towards the adjacent building, causing Jonah to shake his head in dissatisfaction.

"This kid always do whatever he likes." Jonah gave out a sigh before following him. "However, he does makes things more interesting sometimes."

After awhile, the teacher that was responsible for this arena, after making sure everyone was well off from this place, arrived to retrieve the body of the unconscious Darius. He stared at the large burly body and shook his head, "Academic students are really different than those specially trained students. I didn't expect one to fall this quickly. It's only been a few hours since the start of the game. I wonder how his team is going to survive now that they were one person short this early in the game."

As the teacher contemplated, he grabbed Darius' body with one hand and jumped off the building with one go. Then, he started running off with Darius to who knows where.