This Beast-Tamer is a Little Strange

After the Stormhammer Bear dispatched its opponent, the remainder of the battle went as expected.

Using the newfound numerical advantage, it assisted its allies to gradually clear the rest of the opponents remaining on the field.

Although much of his contracts' energy was consumed, Edward still chose not to step down and instead managed to at least drain some of the energy of the second opponent sent out so that the next individual sent up had an easier time. Additionally, the longer he could remain on the field, the longer the staff could observe the next opponent and decide to send next in response.

Originally, Venessa as rank 4 in the team should have been the second to take the stage. However, the next opponent sent by First Celestial had to advantageous an attribute over her.

All of the opponent's contracts were rare undead spiritual creatures—particularly immaterial ghosts. Therefore, Venessa's ability to deal damage or poison them was greatly reduced.

Most ghosts are immune to physical attacks, and unless she improves her poison further to be able to attack the soul, then it is useless against them.

Therefore, Jade was sent in response. While not as effective as skills that can directly attack the soul, most elemental attributes still have some effect on undead spirits. Therefore, with the help of the energy consumed by Edward, Jade was able to defeat her opponent.

However, it was truly not the best matchup for her, and 2 of her contracts (one blue-grade and a green-grade contract) were incapacitated in the battle and didn't last long in the next match-up—not even serving a role in draining the opponents' energy.

Therefore, the match was once again brought to an even standstill of 2 beast-tamers on each side having been eliminated. Funnily enough, the ranks of the individuals eliminated on both sides also happen to be equal—with the 5th and 3rd rank of each school now out of commission.

Almost as though it was agreed upon, the two individuals on the stage currently were the fourth-ranked individuals of each school.

On behalf of First Celestial was a fourth rank student who quickly dispatched the drained and battered Jade.

He was another third-year student and had dark brown skin, hazel eyes, and dark curly hair. He had an affinity related to the fire-attribute. Additionally, Kain wasn't sure about the details of his gift, but it seemed as though it was able to drastically increase the temperature of his contracts' flames and even add a slight corrosive effect.

Therefore, both Venessa and him ended up in a. standstill for quite some time. Her spiritual creatures weren't able to get close enough to bite or sting his, without sustaining serious injuries due to burns.

When poison was occasionally ejected by her contracts, the poison was also quickly burnt by the hot flames into an incredibly noxious gas.

Alternatively, the opponents' spiritual creatures couldn't get too close for similar reasons, and when flames were released to target Venessa's contracts, she either used an identical method ejecting poisonous liquids that would cause the flames to fizzle out, or dodging.

Due to this pattern persisting for a long time, an interesting phenomenon occurred.

Gradually, the toxic gas released by the combination of the poison meeting the corrosive flames began to build up more and more within the arena. Since the wards around the arena activated to prevent the gas from spreading to the audience, the gas was trapped on the stage and got more and more concentrated.

Due to majority of the gas' toxic properties being from Venessa's contracts who has immunity to their own poisons, the opponent was more quickly feeling the negative effects of the gas.

However, his gift also applied some toxic properties to his contracts' flames that were also released in the resulting gas—a toxin that Venessa's contracts don't have an immunity against.

Therefore, before long all of the First Celestial Contracts were collapsed on the stage, breathing heavily. Only their beast-tamer remained standing, likely equipped with some anti-poison enchanted equipment in preparation of facing Venessa.

Meanwhile Venessa's contracts' legs began to tremble faintly. However, they all held their heads up high in feigned bravado to not let the enemy know.

Unfortunately, if Kain could tell their poor condition from the stands, there is no way that the experienced First Celestial staff standing right next to the stage wouldn't be able to see that they were in bad shape.

Indeed, instead of immediately sending the next opponent, First Celestial cunningly drew out the time it took for them to fetch the bodies of their students' contracts. Instead of him just collecting them into his star space, they'd even made the excuse that they couldn't be sure that there was no component of the poison that was capable of escaping the star space to infect his body.

The tournament organizers had no choice but to concede to their time-consuming method of body collection due to their extreme "caution" and "care" for their student.

And so an almost comical scene was staged where a few staff volunteers bumbled around the stage trying to lift the heavy spiritual creatures from the stage, wasting time staggering and dropping limp limbs on the floor as they took frequent breaks.

Never mind that they could have summoned some stronger contracts to swiftly carry them down…

All those minutes that they were "clumsily" trying to carry the contracts from the stage Venessa was forced to remain inside the toxic gas permeating the stage, since once she stepped down she'd be out of the competition for good.

The staff at Dark Moon couldn't help staring coldly at the staff from First Celestial as they continued with their performance.

"I hadn't expected the top-ranked college to be so shameless…" Ranya muttered stunned.

"It's because they could be so shameless that they've probably managed to keep the top rank for decades. You don't think there weren't the odd years that another school had a stronger lineup? In such cases, they'd need to resort to tactics like these" Kain said.

Personally, he didn't see anything wrong with First Celestial's spirit of doing anything for the win. It was just irritating when they were the victim of it…