The first few matches of the third event were projected to be boring. That projection was not wrong. And Theodore, as expected, found himself quite bored even if it made him chuckle when there was a huge imbalance between the participants.

  Well, it was bound to happen.

  The first two events weren't really "fair" or made with "balance" in mind. They were made for entertainment in mind, one which they provided plenty.

  Thus the early brackets were invariably filled with fodder.

  Freya seemed to enjoy the hilarity of some of the matches.

  Theodore, however, did not.

  Sitting in the VIP box and watching these matches was simply not an efficient use of time.

  "I'm going."

  Freya didn't even look up from the conversation she was having with a minor duke from the southern territories. She just waved a hand dismissively. Getting back home, a step through the spatial tear took him to the Hunting Grounds and he took in a breath.

  This was better.

  It was as quiet as it was productive and fun, and recently, it had presented a puzzle.

  Most things in this forest when killed left behind a corpse. The Wyvern was proof of that; its bones were still bleaching in the clearing where they had eaten it. But some beasts didn't leave corpses they disintegrated instead. That in itself wasn't too strange.

  The anomaly was what happened during the disintegration.

  Not always, and definitely not consistently, but it definitely did happen and it'd caught his attention. He found a target three miles north of the entry point. Imagine a wolf, and wrap it up in mismatched limbs and too big a shoulder and a head far too small for its size and you'd get what he was looking at when he stopped.

  The white beam of life slammed into the beast and it just unraveled not even given enough time to make a sound. The creature lost cohesion turning into grey flakes, and there it was: for exactly four ish seconds after the beast 'died' a strand of golden light remained suspended in the air where the creature's heart should have been.

  Then it burned away.

  Why?

  He needed to catch it.

  The "spawn rate"— if he had to put a name to it— of these specific 'ash beasts' was lower than the biological ones so it took him nearly an hour to track the next one. This one was quite larger in comparison and resembled a bear if a bear had been drawn by a child using only charcoal.

  He killed it instantly. Piercing shot to the core.

  The beast collapsed into ash and as expected the golden strand appeared. Theodore reached out with his mana and attempted to wrap his mana around the golden light to create a vacuum seal to isolate it from whatever was causing it to decay.

  He clamped down.

  The moment his mana touched the gold strand, the strand reacted violently. Instead of stabilizing as expected it treated his mana like fuel, and the gold light expanded turned white-hot and then fizzled out of existence in a microsecond.

  He stood there, staring at the empty air.

  "Motherfucker."

  He had spent nearly an hour finding this thing, and he had ruined the sample in less than a second. It made him angry but what he learned was valuable enough so he moved on and the hunt resumed. These things were annoying to track because they didn't leave footprints or scents and the forest was large as is, so Theodore had to spend some time again. A long, boring time of walking and scanning, ignoring the normal beasts because he'd rather not incinerate them.

  That'd lost its charm quickly enough.

  Regardless, it took less than an hour to find the next one thankfully which was frankly annoying. This one was a small serpent coiling around a tree. The previous failure was due to aggressive containment. He had tried to crush it into submission. This time, he needed to be a heat sink. He needed to be a cage, so to say.

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  When the thermal lance pierced the serpent and it dissolved into that familiar grey ash, the golden strand remained. It was reacting to the environment, burning itself out. If the degradation was a combustion reaction, then lowering the temperature should theoretically slow it down. So instead of trying to grab it, he flooded the area immediately surrounding the strand with mana.

  There was a moment of resistance. It felt less like holding an object and more like wrestling with a very angry, very small live wire. The strand wanted to burn away and it pushed against the containment. A brief battle of wills that required a surprising amount of mental focus to win. But then it stabilized.

  Theodore watched as the golden light settled, suspended in the center of his mana construct. Interesting. Upon closer inspection, it didn't look like energy anymore.

  It was… a string?

  He observed it for a good minute running every analytical process he could think of but the results were largely inconclusive: it was magic, clearly, but it didn't match the signature of the ambient mana nor did it match the mana of the beasts that dropped it.

  Without a way to break it down further, there wasn't much else he could do with it right now. Freya might know what it was. He'd just ask her later. For now, he let the sample burn away as he couldn't really store it for an extended period of time and looking at the time, he had a tournament to get back to. Leaving the Hunting Grounds was always a bit jarring, but there was no time to linger.

  ***

  The arena was loud, which was to be expected. People really seemed to enjoy watching two people throw magic at each other. The announcer was screaming something Theodore didn't care enough to give attention to as he waited in the, well, waiting room. When his name was called out with a lot of fanfare and applause much to his amusement Theodore tuned out the noise as he walked into the ring.

  It seemed like his fights had caught some attention in the first two events.

  A tall guy with a greatsword, heavy armor, that was his impression of his opponent. He was bouncing on the balls of his feet, looking pumped.

  "I won't go easy on you just because you're a prince!" the guy shouted.

  The referee raised his hand. "Ready?"

  The opponent roared, flaring his mana.

  "Begin!"

  The opponent charged, he was slow. Well, objectively speaking he was probably moving quite fast for a human, but to Theodore's eyes, the approach was filled with inefficiencies. Heck, he didn't need [Mind Division] for this much less a complex thermal construct.

  He just raised a hand and queued up [Mana Bolt].

  It was a basic skill, one he hadn't really touched for a while, especially given that he'd had to basically forget it back when he was training under his teacher because of how much it attracted enemies. And afterward, he hadn't had a use for it either. Last he tried it a [Mana Bolt] was just a bolt of mana but since then his [Mana Manipulation] had leveled up significantly, and his understanding of mana had evolved as well.

  He compressed the bolt and stripped away the excess thermal bleed. Tightening it up until the projectile was less of a bolt and more of a needle, he fired.

  The bolt crossed the distance instantly. The opponent was lifted off his feet and thrown backward into the barrier with enough force to probably bruise a few ribs, sliding down the energy wall in a heap. He didn't move.

  Silence.

  Match over.

  Theodore didn't really want to hurt the guy so he'd held back a lot. The referee blinked. He looked at the man then looked at Theodore.

  "…Winner! Theodore!"

  As the referee stammered out the victory announcement, a notification popped up in his peripheral vision.

  [Mana Bolt] has leveled up! Lvl 9 -> Lvl 16!

  Theodore paused for a moment before continuing on as if nothing had happened, even if his finger twitched a little.

  He whistled softly.

  Seven levels for one use was absurd. Usually, skills leveled up incrementally. But he had neglected [Mana Bolt] for a long time, relying on his custom thermal spells. In that time, his fundamental understanding of magic and his other control skills had skyrocketed.

  The system was catching up. It realized that his execution of the skill was vastly superior to its current level, so it bridged the gap in a single use.

  He had to admit, seeing the numbers go up was doing something to his brain. He dismissed the notification. It did raise a question about his skill list, though. His skill list was getting cluttered. He had [Mana Bolt], [Mana Barrier], [Mana Manipulation], etc. If [Mana Bolt] was just a specific application of [Mana Manipulation]—which it was—why were they separate?

  Was it because [Mana Bolt] was easier to learn than something like [Mana Manipulation]? Hmm. Maybe he should merge them. It shouldn't be hard. If he could merge all of them into the main [Mana Manipulation] skill, it would clean things up. Task for later, he decided.

  ***

  Returning to the Hunting Grounds that night felt like routine. Now that he had a method for capturing the strings, he needed a sample size. Theodore moved through the forest, settling into a rhythm: locate the ash beast, engage, kill, isolate the string, stabilize, analize, let it disperse.

  Theodore was back in the grind.

  He stopped looking for the beasts visually and started feeling for the specific mana signature the strings created. He did this for hours and it was repetitive but there was satisfaction in it as he could just practise his skills mindlessly. After all he wasn't really going deeper into the forest where he knew stronger things awaited. He caught a few more from the wolf-like creatures, and one from a bird.

  When he killed one more of these creatures, he heard something:

  "…Thanks… be careful…"

  Theodore froze.

  His concentration slipped but he snapped right back in with [Mind Division] activating, quickly isolating the string of the creature he killed but alas it just like the other ones. He couldn't get a lot of information from them but he'd figured out that it wasn't a quite a string and that it came from a singular source.

  Regardless… That was new.

  "What the hell?"

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