Overpowered Wizard-Chapter B4 Ch47: The Tournament Ends

“You do know there are easier ways to die?” Zarian leaned against the wall after letting himself into Slim’s private room.

It was small and simple, very egalitarian, with uncomfortable stone benches and no cushions. Zarian’s private room was a hundred times better, and he didn’t even stay in it longer than it took to check it with his own eyes.

Let’s have this conversation over there then. Before the young man from the Shifter System could get a word in, Zarian teleported them to his private room. He let the kid drop onto a highly enchanted sofa while he parked himself in a luxurious recliner.

Ah, nothing but the best for Zarian. It helped soothe the colossal headache he was suffering from igniting his aura like a brute.

“Dark Emperor, milord!” The raccoon-like guy somehow lost all of his grace and fell off the sofa. Then he picked it up again and lowered himself to the floor, head down to prostrate himself before Zarian.

“Get up, kid. Look me in the eye.”

The child struggled to do so. Zarian waited until Slim Caper’s eyes stopped darting everywhere else and settled on his face. The black mask on his fuzzy face really resembled a raccoon’s mask. The boy’s tail was twitching nervously as he waited on his knees for Zarian’s judgment even though it wouldn’t be wrong for him to question what was happening.

The shifter kid, an Abyssal Knife of the Master Rank, was nobody truly important to Zarian. Slim could’ve been if Zarian hadn’t dodged the mentor role that had been set up with the teenager’s arrival.

What was his request? For me to head over to his universe and break the dragons oppressing his people?

That was so outside of Zarian’s concerns, it was almost comical. The easiest thing to do would be to empower Slim. They both had abyssal powers, too. It almost seemed fated. Granted, Zarian was more suspicious of the machinations of fate these days.

“You’re going to die for no reason against Para,” Zarian said, ignoring the dimming glimmer in the boy’s eyes. Good. That foolish hope had to die. “There’re no ifs or buts. There’s no last-minute power up that can save you. Your death is immutable if you do not forfeit the fight against Para.”

“My last fight against Simian Lox had the odds against me, but I still turned it around and won! I know if I try hard enough–”

“There is no trying hard enough.” Zarian leaned forward. His meta-magical and consistent headache throbbed deeper, stroking the embers of his irritation.

The room grew darker, the air heavier, and the boy felt it like a growing pressure from being submerged deeper into depths he wasn’t ready to delve into. He would know this as an effect from the abyss, and he would know he had no power over it compared to Zarian.

“She remembers you, Slim, just like I remembered you. You’re the little guy we shooed away to the Final Round. You wouldn’t have made it without us. I can already see her laying claim to your life and going about it in a twisted and ceremonial way. And she’ll do it while looking directly at me. It’s so predictable, I almost want to laugh.”

Zarian wasn’t laughing.

“She might play with you. She might let you strike her and get some moves off. Or maybe she’ll go straight into the ceremony and be done with it. Don’t get me wrong. She’s not unbeatable. She’d already suffered a nasty humbling from someone considerably weaker than her. But that person had the power and a chance. You don’t. You have no chances. Not even a shot in the dark. She will eat you up, strip you of everything you had once been, and trivialize your life until you’re just another one of her victims who’d soon be forgotten.”

Once Zarian finished, he expected the raccoon boy to take a minute to absorb all of that. He only took three seconds.

“Will you help me against the dragons of my universe?” Slim asked meekly.

“That’s not in my sphere of attention as of now.”

“Can you make me strong enough to do it myself?”

“There’s a long list of people who want my help to make them stronger. It’ll have to be later.”

“I will fight her then.”

Zarian blinked his dark eyes slowly. He opened and closed his mouth, hesitant for the first time in a while. It wasn’t a powerful look for him.

He was doing all he could to keep from twisting the kid’s personality and enforcing his will via stats and godly presence. Maybe he should, but he felt Lion Prince and causality threatening a cosmic reaction that would backlash against him somehow.

Do I want some resentful kid running about in my backyard with a class called the Abyssal Knife?

No, he didn’t. So, Zarian kept his overt charm to himself. The other option was to kill the kid, but then that begged the question of why he was trying to help him get away from Para. Why not let him earn his Darwinism Award?

“You do know you’re going to die, right?” Zarian asked.

“I won’t die!” Slim said, chin raised, body tense under the pressure.

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Zarian wanted to scoff. He stopped himself and wondered instead if there was something he was missing.

By that point, the second to last match was about to begin. There wasn’t much more he could do.

Zarian teleported the kid to the tunnel where he’d enter the arena across from Para. As for Zarian, he went over to the last working cafe of Carrowmore – the Ender’s Final Mug.

They had a barrier that covered the cafe and large scrying orbs that played the tournament on their illusionary surfaces. It was there that Foodie and Ekri waited with another drider Zarian hadn’t met before. He was a young lad based on how short he was compared to the adults, and he looked up at Zarian with eyes so focused, they boarded on glaring.

“This is one of my distant relatives from a cousin’s side,” Ekri introduced. “Okry, say hello.”

“Are you sure they will not eat me, Grand Uncle?” asked the little tyke.

“Do you prefer yourself served in a cauldron of soup or in the oven? Or maybe held over the fire? I’m more into roasting my little spiders for the extra crunch,” Foodie joked, flashing her sharp teeth at the young drider. 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

Okry glared even harder.

“The last living entities you may consider somewhat sapient that I ate were Level 300. Still Champion Rankers, but they were on the cusp of becoming Paragon Rankers. I have exquisite taste.” Zarian also flashed the boy a smile, showing off his longer canines that were as abnormal as his lion tail.

The boy’s glaring became even harder while turning upon his grand uncle. Ekri busied himself with the menu and said aloud his favorite treats from the cafe. A server came over to collect their orders, and once that was done, the fight between Para and Slim was about to begin.

“Why isn’t he surrendering?” asked Okry. “He is clearly outmatched, is he not? He is facing a terrible Darkrun.” It took a second for Okry to remember that two out of those four terrible Darkruns were at his table. “He is facing the more terrible Darkrun.”

He sounded pleased with his minute correction.

Zarian pretended to watch the fight through the cafe’s equivalent of a TV. He was paying attention far more directly with his greater senses, counting every particle in the air, physical and magical. There was nothing parasitic in the air. Para was going to break the kid the old fashion way.

As Slim darted in with an abyssal construct shaped as a knife, Para stood there and waited for him. There were a thousand and one ways for her to kill the boy, and instead of taking any of those options, she coated her hand in void energy and lightly tapped it against his knife.

Then she engaged with him softly, just on the edge of his capabilities, her void hand and claws against his knife and skills.

Slim darted around with magic dashes that blurred his outline with the power of the abyss. He used abyssal snares to snag at Para’s ankles, slowing her down a smidge, before using another skill. He released a short-ranged and quiet blast that spread in a cone, leaving disturbing disorientation and debilitation effects.

Overall, his profile was unique enough where Zarian could realistically see why he’d climbed up so fast at a young age. And when it came to shifters, they lived up to their System’s namesake.

Slim shifted into a smaller and fuzzier form that was still humanoid enough to handle a knife with. He moved with more deftness while taking advantage of his smaller body to slip into tighter windows of opportunity. By that point, he could slip past Para’s guard and leave her with a few scratches.

The audience was cheering. The announcer spoke in favor of the young raccoon boy. The mandibles in Okry’s complex drider mouth clicked as he bared them and his more humanoid teeth.

“Amazing!” Okry shouted. “Maybe the boy can do it! Maybe he can overcome a terrible Darkrun!”

“Child, stop disrespecting our company. We exist at their mercy,” Ekri scolded.

Okry stiffened before sagging into his seat. “But it’s because of them that everything bad is happening.”

Zarian and Foodie were going to ignore the comment, but Ekri didn’t share that sentiment. “No, child, it is because of Carrowmore that Carrowmore suffers.” The old drider waved his hand about. “We’ve schemed. We’ve backstabbed. We’ve tortured, enslaved, and made games of the lives of many. We’ve reveled in being evil to no end. Perhaps that’s what the Dark Era is truly all about. Coming to terms with the end of what we are and entering a new era blind, as if in the dark.”

“Is that why Mom and Dad are gone?” the child asked sadly.

“Gone, but not forgotten, because you are here, my boy. You must continue their legacy and see what’s beyond this place. And I shall help you and others like you with our new place in life.”

Well, this is weird to see from the other side, Zarian admitted to himself. There would be more orphans and refugees at the capital, and how his empire would adjust to the influx of driders would be interesting. We will have the lesser realm’s greatest scene for art and fashion, that’s for sure.

Bianca would go ballistic over it.

“Okay, here it goes. Para’s done toying around.” Foodie sounded clipped and harsh. Their orders had arrived and other than the first few samples, everyone at the table was focused on the fight that had been so one-sided in the betting odds that Para herself was doing everything she could to make it more interesting.

She didn’t crush Slim right away. Instead, she allowed herself to move faster and strike a little harder. She cast no more spells or sorceries than required. She continued to use the void energy she coated over one hand as she clawed and swatted at the little raccoon boy while he scrambled around her counter offensive.

Para turned up the difficulty by forming extra arms and tails, each coated with void energy. Void magic was weaker than abyssal magic, but it didn’t seem like that as Para batted Slim around the moment she caught him. Even then, she held back, letting him have a fraction of a second to recover and slip away, which pushed him against the barriers, cornering him.

As she stalked after him, Para revealed another ability. She grew herself, revealing the hidden depths of her mass. She easily reached ten feet, then fifteen, then twenty, and didn’t stop until she was thirty feet tall. She kept her feminine shape while expanding her monstrous side by sprouting multiple tails, arms, and horns.

She loomed over Slim and waited.

The boy looked up while breathing ragged breaths. He dropped his knife, and the abyssal construct faded. Then he did the one other thing Zarian had considered but dismissed as unlikely.

He prostrated himself at Para’s large feet. It would take only one flick of the toe for her to shear his head off. But of course, she didn’t, and Zarian could see why. This was what Para wanted. Her first true supplicant.

“I can help you,” she said. “I can provide what you want.” She crouched and extended her large hand to him with all the bearing of a goddess. “Believe in me. Give me your everything. Then I will share my power with you.”

“I accept, milady.”

“Of course you would, my first child.” Para smiled, all teeth.

And that was the end of the match. Zarian turned most of his attention away and wondered if this could’ve been preventable. It would’ve required him to be dishonest with the kid while putting him off to the side.

“Father, I thought she was nothing but anger and impulses,” Foodie said softly. “Has her anger gone away?”

Zarian frowned. “No … she’s still very angry. It’s just that she’s gotten better at funneling it.”

He might have to take the final fight more seriously. Or he would’ve if there was a final fight. The next day came with surprising news. Para forfeited the tournament. And she left the lesser realm, taking Slim with her.

The marathon to Level 500 was on, and Para had the lead.