Xel did not say any comforting words to Xue as she went back. He knew it was no use. No matter what one could say, a loss was a loss. One might phrase it nicely, and say things like ‘Failure is the mother of success’, but ultimately, one could not change the fact that she had lost. Instead of saying things which were of no meaning, he would do something practical.

‘Look closely at how I fight my next fight, and I will use that to teach you something,’ Xel told her.

Xue nodded. As Xel went down the stairs, he accidentally tripped over someone’s leg and rolled down the stairs to where he was supposed to stand.

‘Is that idiot really better than Xue? He looked totally like a moron who does not know what is going on. He does not even have a hint of a fighter’s look,’ Lin thought, as she watched him.

On the other hand, Kelf thought, ‘Nice attempt to hide your abilities and for opponents to underestimate you. For that purpose, you even forgo your pride and respect which many others of your level could not bear to let go.’

There were 2 impressions people sometimes give to their opponents. Either they let the opponent overestimate them and let their fear restrict them so they could not give out their full potential, or they let their opponent underestimate them and take them down by surprise.

Apparently, Xel was doing the latter. But if he did indeed managed to beat Lin, then it only shows there was more to him than it looked. He also suspected that Xel was like him, who did not use his primary powers, instead he used only his secondary power, which main purpose was to provide support to the primary powers.

Lin took out her daggers.

Xel simply stood there and scratched his head, ‘Your daggers are too scary. Can you keep one away?’

Lin did not bother him. She had enough of his nonsense. The referee started the fight. Lin ran towards him with the daggers. But suddenly one of the daggers changed into a spear with a chain behind and with that added range she threw it at Xel.

At the instant Lin transformed her weapon, Xel’s eyes showed a frown. The transformation was so quick that he could not catch it. It was like this moment it was a dagger and suddenly it became a spear with a chain. It was so fast the eyes could not catch it, which meant one thing - one could only guess what the weapon would change to instead of predicting it, because the prediction was supposed to come from the transformation.

Judging at how the weapon transform, one might be able to guess what was the end result and prepare for a counter-attack. If the process of change could not be caught by the eye, then one would have at most an intelligent guess. But a guess was afterall a guess. In situations where the opponent knew what she was doing, she too would have made an intelligent guess about her opponent’s prediction about her next step, and came out with another weapon to counter it.

Unpredictability. That was one great advantage the teenage girl had. He had not expected this. But just as the spear came flying towards him he made himself acted like he tripped and fell flat. In the end, for all the thinking Xel had done, Lin was not as good as he thought. He had overestimated her. She had transformed too early and given her opponent enough time to react. If her weapon’s speed of transformation was so fast, she should have waited at the very last instant, at the fraction of a second where the critical hit should take place. But she did not. It seemed that she was either not confident of herself or she had no patience to wait.

The spear missed and shot past him. Then with a slightly above average human speed he ran and took hold of the spear which was still in the air before Lin could pull it back. He gave the spear a hard pull and Lin lost her grip on the chain. Xel had her weapon now.

Lin became angry and shouted at him, ‘Return my weapon!’

But Xel said, ‘No. I don’t have a weapon to fight with, and to fight an armed combatant is not fair to me.’

He took the spear, waved it around and charged at Lin. Lin got pissed, jumped up into the air and turned the dagger into a long whip and lashed it out at Xel. It actually was aiming at Xel’s body but he blocked it with the spear. The whip coiled around the spear. Lin pulled hard in an attempt to take back the spear.

Xel raised his hand up in mocked surprise and released his grip on the spear. This disrupted the momentum and balance of Lin in the air. She had thought she would need to drag Xel along with the spear and used all of the strength she had to pull. Lin began to fall. When she fell and was trying to regain control she turned the whip into a very long big broad sword like that of Xue's to shield her from any possible attacks from the ground.

Xue, who was still moody but still watching the fight, was so surprised she stood up from her seat. But in actual fact Lin only copied the weapon’s appearance and form. There was nothing else which was similar.

As Lin was falling and before she took out her ‘shield’, she was open. It was a very grave mistake. All could see that she was open for that one moment. Xel formed a bow in his hand and shot out an arrow. That was the end of her.

Wrong.

His accuracy was so lousy he missed.

Kelf thought: Damn that man! What is he trying to do? Humiliate Lin? Or trying to prove he is good? Is he trying to tell people he doesn’t even need his primary powers to defeat Lin?

Kelf’s face had become stonier as he watched Lin got played around and there was nothing she could do except to move exactly like how Xel had wanted it.

But Xel on the other side thought: Watch and learn, Xue! You don’t get this sense of battle every day. In fights, it is where people put their real efforts in it and fight. In real battles, this involves lives. In a normal fight, it involves pride, as well as all sorts of things. Stakes are involved. And losers sometimes may not afford the consequence of a loss. And this, is also a fight, which stake although much smaller, still involves pride. This is where you have to adapt and react fast because you do not know the level and type of power your opponent is using. But just as you did not know what kind of powers your opponents have, the same goes for your them. Learn this and get stronger!

Lin managed to land safely while Xel held his bow there and ‘watched in awe’.

Then he clapped his hands and said, ‘Wow’.

Lin stared at him and was thinking hard: How can he act like an idiot and be so good? His moves were not outstanding. They were all basic moves, as if it was how a non-combatant would act. It looks all flustered to me. But how is it when I fight him I get this feeling I cannot win at all? Why? Why do I feel that I am moving and acting exactly like how he wanted it? Is this what a person can do? Or were my moves all a bad co-incidence instead of his planning? No more playing around. I will just use my next move and see if I can get him.

Lin got back her two daggers. She turned them into chains. She flung them towards Xel, the two chains. They just kept extending in length. He dodged the two chains but as they go past him they began to turn back. Controlling the chains like it was part of her body, making them do what she wanted, that was the form she was able to fight best – when the daggers were in chains.

As the chains turned back and rushed towards Xel, Xel did not even turn back to defend or to escape. Instead he aimed an arrow at Lin and shot her. Lin did not expect this and moved away. As she did so the chains missed the target and went by the side of Xel, with him in between the 2 chains. The tip of the chain was actually a sharp pointed tip like that of an arrow. The chains however had actually crossed each other behind Xel’s back so when they returned to Lin they had wrapped around Xel instead.

Xel let it wrapped around him. Lin thought this time he got to be down. Kelf was wondering why that action. Why did he not take out Lin when he had the chances? If he was serious Lin should have lost a long time ago.

At first, Kelf was thinking Xel was trying to prove something or to play around with Lin, but somehow something was not right somewhere. His deduction should be wrong. Xel should have another reason for doing that.

The chains completely wrapped themselves around Xel. The tips of the chains (the chains just kept extending, depending on Lin’s mana and power) were now going towards Xel. But Xel smiled an idiot smile and told Lin to look up. Lin looked up and saw the arrow Xel had shot earlier coming down at her.

Just before the arrow hit Lin shifted one side. But the arrow changed direction and was going towards Xel himself. The arrow hit the chains and broke it, freeing Xel. He jumped out. Lin was really angry this time and the chains rejoined and flew everywhere, destroying everything in its way. Xel had pissed her off too much.

He gave a childish smile and told her, ‘A pretty girl like you should not be so angry.’

Then he took out a bunch of arrows and shot it at random. They flew everywhere. The arrows and the chains clashed and there was smoke all around.

Why was there smoke? There should not be any smoke at all! Lin could not see him. No one had an idea what was going on in the scene. When the smoke cleared, everyone gasped. There, behind Lin, was Xel. He was holding an arrow with his hand instead of setting it at the bow, and the tip of the arrow was lightly pointing at the back of Lin’s neck. Lin was stunned. She could not believe it. She had just lost. To that idiot guy.

But then suddenly she had a thought and was shuddering at that thought: By playing dumb, by using only simple moves that used only a minimum power, he is able to defeat me easily after giving me so many chances. What if…what if he was serious?

To fight like that just now, to normal people it was just an idiot playing a fool and got lucky. But to those who knew it, to fight and win using the most basic of moves and not creating a high profile, only the real elites could do it. Who was he? His mastery and foundation of basic moves was so perfect he had no need to use higher level powers. He not only knew how to use them, he knew what moves to make at the correct time at the correct situation. That fight was not a fight where one had the luxury of sitting down and calmly think of the next move. It was a fight where one had to make a correct decision in an extremely short span of time.

Lin had trouble taking in that reality. If that was the case, then, he was at least on the same level as Kelf? Or higher than him? Naturally, she realized that he was too far away for her to reach, for her to defeat.

It drove into her one lesson she should have learnt long ago: that appearances got absolutely nothing to do with fighting. As Xel went back, and talked with Xue, Kelf saw and understood immediately why he played a fool down there. He realized that he had just used Lin as a sparring partner so he could teach Xue, the girl who lost to Rif.

Fantastic. With just that little time, he had saw and understood all the critical mistakes Xue made and came up with a near perfect answer for her under unpredictable conditions.

‘You really are more than just an idiot,’ Kelf said, to no one in particular.