Tier 3+ - Accidental Champion (Book 8) - Chapter 14 - There’s That Overconfidence Rearing Its Beautiful Head…

Sovereign Rewke Fouran disappeared in a flash of speed.

At least, he tried to disappear in a flash of speed. The instant Xavier had seen the man arrive he’d altered his time dilation field. It would be obvious to Fouran and anyone else watching in the seats that he had such a field around him—there was no hiding the time distortions from people this powerful—but Fouran clearly didn’t know how fast that field actually was.

One thing that Roln had helped Xavier practice was moving at what appeared to be a “normal” speed while he was in fact sped up to a dramatic degree above those around him. Fouran hadn’t even seemed to notice something was amiss. He would have seen the field, yes, but he didn’t really think of Xavier as a threat. He must have simply dismissed the time distortions as not a problem for him.

For Xavier, the conversation that passed between the two of them had taken several days.

Time dilation fields weren’t perfect. There were ways to get around them. But even so, they were a fascinatingly powerful tool.

A tool that far too many Denizens overlooked.

Xavier didn’t want to become overconfident, however. Just because he could move so much faster than his enemy and didn’t need to worry about spell cooldowns didn’t mean he had the fight in hand. The man before him hadn’t become a powerful sector ruler by chance—he was a true B Grade that would have made The Collector look like an insignificant weakling. He had no idea if he was ready to face such a man.

Such concerns were no longer worth thinking about. He was facing the man. He couldn’t change that.

Xavier released a long breath and cast several spells. He created a dozen drones around him. Every single one of those drones had the Time Prison spell—something he knew would come in handy.

I must move with caution. Take every measure I can.

Sovereign Rewke Fouran was a mage. A powerful one. But there was little public information about what spells the man possessed. In fact, there was very little information about how the man fought at all. Xavier had entered the Orin sector assuming he would never encounter the man. Then, when he did, he hadn’t exactly had an opportunity to do his research.

And though he’d had time since that meeting, Rewke Fouran hadn’t been at the top of his mind.

The man wore the same purple robes he’d been in when they’d first met. Only now a staff was in his hands. Like the robes, the staff looked innocuous and simple. It certainly didn’t look like the type of weapon a powerful B Grade sector ruler would wield. There was nothing ostentatious about it.

All part of his image.

The one thing Xavier did know about the man’s powers was that they related heavily to the elements. Perhaps that was why the air was now shimmering in the about the mountaintop. Xavier could see the energies of the spell the sovereign had just cast as he began moving and clearly identified it as a fire spell—though he didn’t have much more insight than that.

Xavier expanded the time dilation field so it could encompass the dozen drones he’d made.

Another spell the drones had at their disposal was Strike Out. Strike Out allowed them to reach through time and space and place their hands directly onto the sovereign. This would let them to instantly cast Time Prison on the True B Grade.

Xavier was itching to get started on his preparations. He didn’t know what to expect from the sovereign, but if his plans went as he hoped—plans he’d been perfecting for the last few days as that short exchange had happened between him and his new opponent—Xavier would never even get a chance to see the man fight.

There’s that overconfidence rearing its beautiful head…

With how easily he’d overpowered Nalthair, an assassin sent by Jhanku himself to deal with The Collector, he knew much of his confidence was entirely warranted.

Even so, he wasn’t about to allow it to let his guard down.

Xavier was about to have one of the drones cast Time Prison on the sovereign when he noticed something, something that a quick scan through his memories told him he should have noticed before.

One of the Denizens in the stands was moving differently to the others.

While he’d been keeping aware of the sector rulers observing the matches, he hadn’t been focusing on them all that attentively. Then, when Sovereign Fouran arrived, Xavier shifted 99.99 percent of his attention toward his opponent.

That .01 percent of attention was what had caught the anomaly.

One of the masked Denizens, a Denizen that had remained in their seat since the first match, was moving ever so slightly despite the strong time dilation field Xavier had active. The movement was so subtle he hadn’t caught it with his Farscope. Though his Farscope was useful, useful being a tremendous understatement, his normal vision far outstripped its precision abilities these days.

Xavier had only caught the Denizen’s subtle movements—man or woman, he couldn’t tell—from sheer dumb luck out of the corner of his normal vision.

He made a point of not actively focusing on the Denizen. The fact he’d looked at them before meant he already had a detailed memory of them, so it wasn’t necessary to covertly get another full-on glimpse.

That the Denizen could move in such a way only distracted Xavier momentarily. Whoever they were must have a strong dilation field of their own, however, for the subtle way in which they moved showed they weren’t simply moving incredibly fast in “normal” time.

I wonder who that is, Xavier thought, directing it at the mental construct.

Someone powerful.

Though Xavier strongly suspected the Denizen had a time dilation field, he couldn’t actually perceive one. He might be able to perceive one if he placed enough of his spiritual sense’s focus on the space around them, but that would risk his sense being identified. Besides, the observer’s time dilation field couldn’t interfere with the fight. Whoever the masked sector ruler was, they weren’t Xavier’s immediate problem.

Xavier returned his full focus onto Sovereign Rewke Fouran. The man still looked frozen outside the time dilation field, but there was no telling if he’d be able to counter it. The man might not think of Xavier as a threat, but he would have come here with the knowledge that he had the power to manipulate time. The sovereign was certainly underestimating him, but that didn’t mean he was a fool. It also didn’t mean he hadn’t made certain preparations.

Preparations Xavier was fully ready to stymie.

Xavier released a breath. This was one of those moments that were a risk. Not a huge risk, but a risk nonetheless. He had one of his drones cast Strike Out from within the time dilation field. Both of the drone’s hands were placed on Sovereign Rewke’s shoulders. The instant the drone’s hands touched the sovereign, the B Grade ruler was encompassed by the same time dilation field as Xavier.

There would be a moment. Barely a fraction of a second, as the Time Prison spell had been primed by the drone, where his enemy might be able to use this to his advantage.

Xavier was prepared for that eventuality.

In that moment, the burgeoning spell Sovereign Rewke had cast was unleashed.

Only, it wasn’t.

The spell—a fire spell, as Xavier had suspected from reading the energies that had been forming in the air—was prevented from fully coming into being by the constraints of time and space. While the energies flowed from the sovereign’s hands at a tremendous rate, those energies didn’t go very far.

They couldn’t.

Time stopped the energies from flowing farther than where they were produced. They came from the head of the man’s staff but did not go farther, collecting about the staff to the point where the energy came to look like an extension of it. No physical wall stopped the energies. No telekinetic or opposing energies controlled the flames that struggled to come into being. In fact, the energies moved at the exact same rate as they had before.

But time didn’t flow the same outside the field the man had been encompassed in—and that encompassing didn’t go farther than himself or anything he touched.

Xavier watched in fascination as the energies were dammed in one spot. More and more of them gathering in a single space in the air where they should have been released in a constant flow forward. The energy reacted in a unique way, the friction between the bunched-up energies becoming more and more intense. From what Xavier could read…

He smiled.

Yes. This is working out better than I expected.

An explosion was forming. A big one.

This all happened fast. The energies were only being produced from the moment the drone had touched the sovereign to the moment that Time Prison was cast and came into effect.

The energy flowing from the sovereign was abruptly cut off. The man was now properly frozen in time, his physical body connected to another time stream, unable to interact with this universe other than being observed.

Xavier sighed. The explosion the energies looked to produce would take an awfully long time to come to pass from his perspective, but from the strength of those energies, the way he read them…

That would do a lot of damage, even to someone like me.

Hell, it might even be enough to take Xavier out. Which made him wonder—how much damage might that do to someone like Sovereign Fouran?

His first important task complete, Xavier turned his attention to the next one. When he’d entered this arena, seen the sector rulers appearing in their seats, he’d been wary about showing too much of his power. He knew there was a balance he needed to strike. A balance that would show he was too weak to be a true threat to them, but not weak enough to be easily dealt with. The Collector had walked that line for a long time—walking that line, and the other sector rulers in the vicinity being too preoccupied fighting amongst themselves or holding their own territory, were the only reasons he’d lasted as long as he had.

Xavier had fully intended to play things safe. To walk that line himself. The more boring he was, with the rulers constantly leaving the arena, the better he figured he must be doing.

But with the arrival of Sovereign Rewke as his final challenger, all those considerations had been thrown straight out the window. He wasn’t willing to surrender to the sovereign. And there was no way he could make these people think him weak by defeating a sector ruler like Rewke Fouran.

No. The plan to walk the line? That had been thoroughly and completely scrapped.

Right now, Xavier couldn’t concern himself with what those watching were thinking and plotting. Making the sovereign surrender… That might very well be the best course of action. That way, the Orin sector would not be thrown into the same chaos that the Ventorin sector had just suffered from.

But Xavier didn’t think such a thing would be possible. He’d been lenient, merciful, going to great lengths to avoid unnecessary bloodshed.

But Sovereign Rewke Fouran had come here looking for a fight. He’d come here with the full intention of killing Xavier. There was a chance the man could be convinced to back down. A chance he could be convinced to surrender. But Xavier was sure telling him about the end of the universe wouldn’t be enough to make that happen. He was sure the man wouldn’t see logic. Wouldn’t see reason.

No. Xavier would need to beat Sovereign Rewke Fouran to within an inch of his life. He would need to destroy him in every way. He would have to break him to make him surrender. And that… That would only cause a war. Either the sovereign would return to the Orin sector feeling as though taking revenge against Xavier was the only way to regain his honour, or the observing sector rulers would see the weakness in the sovereign and bring war to that sector.

Either way there was no good and easy resolution here.

Besides, Xavier couldn’t take the risk of allowing this man to live long enough to surrender. He couldn’t take any chances in a fight like this.

He needed to finish it as fast as possible.

With all those things in mind, Xavier started drawing spell patterns in the air. He had his conjured drones to the same. The Denizen in the stands he’d seen move strangely earlier shifted in their seat. The movement would have been imperceptible if Xavier hadn’t been looking for it.

Xavier was showing more of his hand by using spell patterns in the arena. But there was no way he could keep abilities like this a secret for much longer, not when he intended to introduce them to the entire Ventorin sector.

Let whoever is watching see what I can do. By the time they bring war on the Ventorin sector, we’ll be ready for it.

As he and his drones worked, Xavier kept a close eye on his opponent. Time Prison wasn’t a perfect spell. How long it lasted was heavily reliant on the strength—or rather, weakness—of whoever it was cast upon. Someone as powerful as this man would, in theory, be able to shrug it off rather quickly.

Except the true B Grade was already outside the time dilation field. If Xavier was right, this would mean he had days to prepare what he needed.

Even so, he watched and waited, hoping the spell wouldn’t wear off before he’d calculated it would. The Denizen in the stands watched Xavier far more closely than Xavier watched the sovereign. Whoever it was clearly couldn’t help themselves, as they’d leant forward in their seat and even narrowed their eyes slightly. They still seemed to be pretending to be in a slower time stream, but they weren’t being near careful enough.

When Xavier’s preparations neared their completion, two hundred spell patterns surrounded his enemy. Xavier’s breathing had become heavier somewhere around one hundred and fifty spell patterns. This was by no means the most spell patterns he’d drawn at one time—that feat still went to the day he’d slain the Arakashinai queen.

Xavier felt the weight of the universal pressure pushing down on him. The mental construct, Roln, had appeared about a dozen spell patterns ago to cross his arms and raise his eyebrows. He didn’t say anything, but the meaning was clear enough—Are you sure you know what you’re doing?

Xavier admitted, at least to himself, that he was pushing his limits. He’d learnt a great deal about universal pressure—like what the hell it was in the first place—since it had shattered his body, mind, soul, and every single one of his cores so thoroughly back in that queen’s chamber. He was a much, much, more powerful Denizen—not to mention Cultivator—than he had been back then. His energy channels were significantly more robust and efficient. Nowadays he was rather sure he wouldn’t have even suffered a bout of unconsciousness from use of those three hundred spell patterns.

But the spell patterns he’d just drawn? They were far more powerful than the ones he’d used back in that cave.

Xavier stood at the centre of the time dilation field he’d created and let out a long breath, holding once his lungs had been completely emptied, then he inhaled deeply, simply standing there experiencing that universal pressure.

He could have done this in a hundred different ways, but none of those ways were as powerful as this one.

Roln stepped over and stood beside Xavier, giving him a sidelong glance. “I don’t have to say it out loud, do I?” the dead Wanderer asked.

Xavier prevented himself from glancing up at the single Denizen in the stands unaffected by being outside his time dilation field. Only he could see Roln. He generally spoke aloud to the man when he appeared like this, but with others watching that was a part of his hand he didn’t wish to reveal.

I can handle this.

Roln raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure? Because I can see everything inside your—”

I know what you can see, Roln. You prevented the Old Man’s interference for a reason. You’ve seen the things I’ve done. The things I’ve managed. I’ve done all that because I’ve pushed limits, not because I’ve stayed safely in the zone of what I know I can do.

Roln pursed his lips and remained silent for a long moment until he finally dipped his head. “For the record, I don’t think this”—he waved at the spell patterns—“is entirely necessary. There are other ways you could defeat this man without going to such great lengths. But… It’s your choice.”

He vanished into thin air before Xavier could reply that yes, it was his choice. Roln felt his response nonetheless.

Xavier didn’t allow the mental construct’s words to put any doubt in him. Universal pressure was something he’d been working on resisting for a long while.

He could handle this.

And if I can’t? a traitorous little voice asked somewhere in his mind.

We’ll cross that bridge if we come to it.