The moment Hosk's voice faded, the forest came alive.
Footsteps scattered in every direction, the rustle of movement through undergrowth, the distant crack of something being struck, a spell going off somewhere to the left, another somewhere ahead. The festival had started and apparently everyone had received that memo at the same time.
Everyone except one.
Leon stood where he'd materialized, white hair catching the broken light filtering through the canopy, sapphire eyes moving slowly across the treeline. One hand in his pocket. The other occasionally reaching into a small bag that contained chips nonetheless.
He chewed one thoughtfully.
The forest was interesting. Dense in some places, more open in others, the kind of terrain that rewarded patience over rushing. He could hear the festival happening around him, distant sounds of combat, the occasional flash of light through the trees marking where someone had used a skill or a spell.
Three minutes passed.
He hadn't moved significantly.
He also hadn't encountered a single monster.
He tilted his head slightly, genuinely unsure whether that was good luck or bad. The beasts had probably scattered the moment the competitors materialized simultaneously in their habitat. Reasonable, honestly. He couldn't fault their instincts.
He tapped the band on his left wrist.
The leaderboard flickered up in front of him, translucent and sharp.
He looked at it.
Three names at the top, all in green.
**RANK 1 — CEDRIC ARDEN — 500 pts**
**RANK 2 — LENA SILFORD — 400 pts**
**RANK 3 — SERA VORN — 200 pts**
**RANK 4 — TALIA ARDEN — 200 pts**
He stared at it for a moment.
Then looked at his own name sitting considerably further down the list with a perfectly clean zero beside it.
He ate another chip.
'Cedric's already at five hundred,' he noted internally. 'Did he defeat a B rank monster ?.'
He glanced toward the direction the leaderboard indicated Cedric's green marker was sitting, then at Lena's, which was in a completely different direction.
His sister was already at four hundred. Of course she was.
Leon stared at the leaderboard for another second.
Zero.
He'd been standing in this forest for over ten minutes and hadn't encountered a single monster worth mentioning. Meanwhile Cedric was already past a thousand and climbing.
Then it hit him.
He blinked.
'...How stupid had he been.'
He hadn't even thought to use it. He'd been walking around like any other participant, relying on what his eyes could show him, when he had something considerably better than eyes sitting right there, completely unused.
He exhaled through his nose.
Closed his eyes.
[Ki Sensory] .
It expanded outward from him like a slow tide, invisible, silent, moving through the forest in every direction simultaneously. Through the trees, through the undergrowth, over the canopy, beneath the roots. It reached further and further, painting a picture of everything within its range in perfect detail.
What it showed him made him open his eyes.
His section of the forest, the entire stretch where he'd been wandering for the last ten minutes, was nearly empty. A few low ranked beasts scattered at the very edges, nothing that would generate meaningful points. The spawn density here was almost nonexistent compared to everywhere else.
He'd been placed in the dead zone.
'Figures,' he thought.
The nearest concentration of beasts worth hunting was well over ten minutes of running away. At that pace, by the time he arrived the better targets would already be picked clean by whoever got there first.
That wasn't how he wanted to play this.
He looked down at his hands.
Then looked up at the canopy above him.
A slow grin spread across his face. Small at first. Then wider.
'Alright then.'
A strong wind rolled through the area suddenly, bending the surrounding trees, scattering leaves upward in a spiraling rush. It hadn't come from the weather.
He breathed out slowly.
And the ki came.
Azure.
It rose from somewhere deep and settled over him like a second skin, coating every inch of him in that pale blue glow that had no business existing on a child standing alone in a forest. The air around him cracked faintly with the pressure of it. The grass beneath his feet flattened outward in a perfect circle.
Then his feet left the ground.
Slowly. Unhurried. Like gravity had simply decided it no longer applied.
He rose above the undergrowth. Above the lower branches. Above the canopy itself, breaking through into open sky, and for a moment he just hung there, azure light curling off him in slow drifting tendrils, the entire forest spread out below him.
He'd never felt so alive.
He looked at the horizon. At the dense zones his ki sensory had mapped out, the clusters of high ranked beasts sitting in sections of the forest that nobody had reached yet.
He picked a direction.
And then he moved.
It was not the movement of a child running through a forest.
It was a blue streak across the sky, there and gone before the eye could track it properly, a comet burning azure against the morning air, there one moment and three kilometers away the next, the shockwave of his passage bending the treetops below into a wave that rolled outward in his wake.
On the ground, two participants who happened to look up at the same moment stood frozen.
One of them pointed.
The other one didn't say anything for a full three seconds.
"...Did you see that ?"
"I don't know what that was."