Chapter 530: Stage 2 Begins!
Chapter 530: Stage 2 Begins!
Moon spent the remaining time walking through the venue, before the tournament started, his eyes scanning every corner and inch.
Selene stayed beside him without question. She didn’t ask what he was looking at, didn’t interrupt his thinking, didn’t try to fill the silence with conversation.
They navigated most of the venue together. The spectator stands. The competitor holding areas. The medical bays. The food vendors. The corridors that ran beneath the main arena. The vendor stalls that lined the outer plaza.
The only sections they couldn’t access were the restricted portions reserved for officials, Association personnel, and Surpasser security teams.
Moon scanned everything.
Eye of Truth was doing double duty. He was identifying competitors and gauging their classes for potential copy targets later. But at the same time, he was running a different operation entirely. He was mapping the venue’s security topology, looking for weak points, anomalies, anything that didn’t match the pattern he was building.
’There aren’t many places they could sneak in from.’ Moon thought as he walked.
’The east entrance has heavy traffic. The north side is bordered by the dignitary section, which means the Association has its highest-tier defensive arrays embedded into the structure itself. Both of those are nearly impossible to breach without triggering full alarm.’
His eyes drifted across the arena floor.
’That leaves south and west. The south side has the maintenance access tunnels that connect to the underground utility lines. They could theoretically infiltrate through there, but the tunnels were probably swept and sealed in the past forty-eight hours. The Association would have prioritized that route.’
He turned his attention to the west.
’If their entry method involves teleportation or spatial manipulation, the west would offer a better vintage point. But it’s heavily guarded...’
Moon’s mind kept building the model.
He wasn’t just using rule of elimination on the physical layout. He was also factoring in human behavior.
Where would the security teams instinctively cluster?
Where would they assume an attack was most likely to come from based on pattern? Wherever they were most concentrated, the dark organization would avoid. Wherever they were thinnest, the dark organization might risk.
The Association would have prepared for ground-level infiltration. They would have prepared for tunnel breaches. They would have prepared for orbital insertions.
But the dark organization’s signature method had always been untimely strikes that bypassed the Association defenses. Whatever they did, it usually involved an attack vector that hadn’t been considered.
’If I were them, I wouldn’t use the obvious entrances at all. I’d use something nobody expects, something I had never used before. This is an important attack, one of the most important attacks if it succeeds.’
He thought about teleportation. Anchor arrays that could be planted in advance, but that would require resources that went well beyond the billions, a third order runesmith and a treasure with spatial properties to allow for such teleportation.
Although the world had greatly changed after the great collapse, and some people like Alaric were strong enough to destroy mountains. That didn’t mean transports like teleportation was something that was common, it was beyond just rare, and the cost was never worth it.
’They’ve been quiet for two months or so. That’s plenty of time to prepare a paired-anchor system given their resources. If their teleportation works on a paired-anchor system, then somewhere in this venue, there’s a piece of their array waiting to be activated.’
His eyes drifted across the surrounding architecture, mentally tagging every location that could plausibly hide the anchor rune.
Unfortunately, there were too many places to check individually.
But he could narrow it down.
’Wherever the anchor is, it needs line of sight to a deployment area large enough to land their strike force. They can’t materialize inside a wall. They can’t materialize inside a crowd. They’d need an open clearing within their target zone.’
His eyes scanned the venue, landing on a specific area.
He didn’t have proof or any meaningful evidence.
But if he had to bet on where the anchor was, that was where his money would be.
Moon committed the location to memory.
"Are you done?" Selene asked quietly beside him.
He turned to her with a small smile, as if he had just been window-shopping the venue/
"Yeah. Let’s head to the holding area."
On his way to the holding area, Moon pulled out his phone and opened an encrypted channel.
His fingers moved quickly across the screen.
He drafted the message efficiently., providing a brief explanation of his reasoning for each conclusion.
He read through it once, made one small correction, then sent it.
The phone vibrated against his palm a few seconds later.
Alaric’s reply was a single word.
"Okay."
Moon slipped the phone back into his pocket without commenting.
Within ten minutes, Klein would step forward to announce the second stage’s format. The competitors and spectators alike were already being herded into position. The energy in the venue was rising by the second in anticipation.
Moon and Selene arrived at the holding area five minutes before the scheduled start. A portion of the qualifiers had already gathered, with more streaming in by the minute. Moon scanned each competitor with his Eye of Truth as they passed.
Most of the classes he scanned weren’t interesting enough. He skimmed through their descriptions quietly.
Then one figure caught his attention.
A lean young man, dark clothes that blended with the dark. His eyes were cold and unbothered.
Moon focused on him.
[Class: Silent Reaver]
[Order: Second]
[Skills: Silent Cloak II (Rare), Silent Step II (Rare), Killer’s Insight II (Epic)]
Moon’s eyes narrowed with interest. An assassin type class was certainly something he lacked in his current arsenal. Two Rare and one Epic skills of the assassin type was not bad, he was a good candidate to copy since he filled a gap that Moon needed to perfect his style.
He committed the young man’s face to memory and continued scanning the crowd for more potential copy opportunities.