Prepare

----Nora--------------------------------------------------------

I was stressing out, I had joined the school thinking that the focus would just be focused on learning our powers.

I was only a week in and I was swamped with homework, turns out that when your school doesn't belong to any country but still wants to be recognized you need to learn a shit ton of stuff.

On my schedule, I had: 6 Languages (Martian, Atlantean, Russian, English, French and Japanese), 8 hours of maths, 4 hours of Geography (2 for Earth, 1 for Mars and 1 for Atlantis), 10 hours of PE (a hero should stay in shape is what Strongarm said) and a lot more.

It was ridiculous. I hadn't been a good student before I got here but now I would have to be otherwise I'd get kicked out.

I think I hadn't slept for 3 days straight, could also be 4 but my memories of my first week are a little blurry.

You know why I said first week? Turns out I had to choose what I wanted to do so they had put me in every class to have me get a feel for it (the PE was mandatory though).

I got a message on my ID and then I just asked Rachel and Emily what they did and found out that Emilia did something that focused on calculations and magic and Rachel just did everything because she wants to die.

I chose a more linguistic route, taking al of the language classes in sacrifice of a lot of math and science hours.

The next morning was a Saturday so we didn't have any lessons, Rachel, the madwoman, had already finished all of her homework and had asked me and Em to go to the mall in the Lobby.

We had just gotten ready when Strongarm entered. "Okay, little ones, are you all here?"

He quickly counted us and we seemed to all be here so he continued.

"In two days time, the Tournament will open again, because we have a few people who joined after the last Tournament took place.

The Tournament is the way a hero increases in rank. You may think this is unfair for those who don't have a fighting ability but the fight itself is dependent on the abilities of the contestants.

You can fight for as long as you want although when a hero increases in rank, they get a recommendation depending on the difficulty of the missions they've cleared and the amount of missions they've done. so if someone of the D-rank has only done D-rank for the entire time he'll be recommended to ascend to C-rank regardless of the amount of missions they've done, now if someone say, has only done two missions but both were demigod-rank then they'll be recommended to rise at least two ranks.

That's how it works for normal heroes. for you, it goes a little differently. You can join a fixed amount of battles and they won't give you a rank, instead, they'll give you merits points with which you can buy certain privileges ot items, also once you lose, you can't join anymore, although the same rule applies to heroes.

Joining is entirely by choice, so I'll send you all a message on your ID's and you can choose to accept it or not." With that he left, after sending us the message.

I looked to Rachel and Emily, they both accepted without hesitation.

"Nora you should accept to. They may not give you a rank now, but they do decide your rank when you graduate and give you a position in the rankings. Also merits are just really useful."

I thus accepted and started preparing for the Tournament in 2 days.

PE had us train weapons and I had found out that I was really good in hand to hand combat so I took some gauntlets out of the school armory (I could also have bought some if I had money) and I went to the main armory to put together a suit.

I went for a black leather jackets, a black top, a mask depicting a fox (Yes I was copying Leo in this aspect, no judging) and black jeans.

Although I said leather and jeans, all of these clothes were reinforced in some way or another making them way stronger than they looked.

I started training, destroying most punching bags in the training hall and drawing the attention of an old man who had been supervising the hall.

"Little girl, you've got helluva punch. I think you might have serious potential. You got enhanced strength?"

I nodded, 'I have so much more' I thought but it wouldn't hurt to make him think that strength was my only ability.

He started explaining some flaws in my movements, turns out there were a lot of them.

And so I started a crash course in punching really hard so I could fight in the Tournament.