Haruto looked away from the leaderboard and locked his eyes dead on Kallen. The cold, mechanical panic from a few seconds ago was completely gone, replaced by the lethal confidence of a player who had just been handed the master admin keys to the server.
"Hey, Kallen," Haruto said, his voice dropping into a dangerously smooth, quiet tone that echoed perfectly across the arena's audio link.
"What's wrong? You look a little laggy. The party is just getting started."
In his mind, Haruto was already grinning: "Now watch me absolutely break this guy."
Without wasting a single frame, Haruto snapped open the Event Store, bypassed the low-tier inventory, and tapped the most devastating microtransaction on the screen: [INSTANT DELETION NOTE]. He dropped the 10,000,000 credits without even blinking, aiming the kill-command straight at Kallen's most powerful active asset—the Level 12 Queen.
But the moment the transaction cleared, a sharp systemic notification pinged at the bottom of his HUD:
SYSTEM MECHANIC: DATA BUFFER STABILITY
The Instant Deletion Note is a limited-run asset. It can only be purchased and deployed ONCE per candidate per match to prevent full server crashes.
Haruto blinked, analyzing the text. Ah, I see. The developers added a hard constraint to keep the pay-to-win mechanics from completely breaking the game engine. It keeps the loop stable, but that's fine. One shot is all I need to balance the scales.
Across the board, Kallen's Level 12 Queen unit—a massive, heavily armored mercenary bought with high-tier royal funds—abruptly froze. The weapon spirit didn't even get a chance to swing its blade.
BOOM!
A violent surge of crimson static detonated right inside the unit's coordinate box. The Level 12 Queen shattered instantly into millions of red pixels, completely deleted from the battlefield in less than a single frame.
PIECE CAPTURED
TARGET ASSET: QUEEN [Level 12]
STATUS: PERMANENTLY DELETED FROM THE SERVER
FACTION HP MODIFIER: Kallen's HP Pool drops from 937,500➡️ 8,75,000
Kallen gripped his hair, slamming his fists against the invisible grid barrier of his tile, his face completely twisted with rage.
"No! That's impossible! That asset cost millions of credits! This isn't fair! You can't just delete a top-tier piece without a proper combat engagement!"
Haruto slowly lowered his hand, his eyes flashing with a cold, predatory light as he thought of Toya's empty tile.
"Fair?" Haruto countered, his voice sounding completely relaxed, yet terrifyingly sharp.
"You didn't hesitate for a single sec when you deleted Toya with a cheap trick. You didn't care about a proper engagement then. So don't talk to me about what's fair. I'm going to wipe every single piece on your side of the board until you're left completely alone. Your grandmaster game is over."
"Who the hell is Gelli?!" Kallen screamed, his eyes darting frantically toward the VIP pavilion, his face twisted in a mixture of rage and panic. "And Princess Lilith... you too? Why are you backing this worthless glitch?!"
Receiving no answer from the high seats, Kallen snapped his gaze back down to the board, his teeth grinding. He looked at his remaining Level 9 heavy unit—the second Rook from his initial pincer trap that had survived Toya's counter-attack.
"Screw this! Just die!" Kallen roared, pointing his finger at Ivory's coordinate box. He commanded his remaining heavy unit to bridge the gap using his turn data. But as the massive armored warrior surged forward, Kallen yelled out a sickening, sadistic warning:
"Hey! Don't mess up her face! I want that pretty face left completely intact when we break her!"
The heavy unit lunged across the tile boundary, executing a sudden ambush strike straight toward Ivory. It was a terrifying, high-velocity surprise attack.
But Ivory didn't even flinch.
The moment the Level 9 warrior entered her coordinate box, Ivory's eyes flashed with a cold, divine light. She didn't try to cast a magic spell. Instead, she tightly gripped her casting staff like a physical spear, spinning it through the air in a single, flawless arc.
THACK!
With sickening speed and unadulterated physical violence, she drove the blunt end of her staff straight through the heavy unit's breastplate, embedding it deeply into his chest.
"Keep your disgusting mouth shut," Ivory hissed, leaning in close as the warrior gasped, his armor cracking under the sheer pressure.
"Your presence here is completely useless. Consider this your asset deletion."
BOOM!
With a final twist of her staff, the Level 9 heavy unit shattered into a million red pixels. The system banner flashed across the sky once more:
PIECE CAPTURED
TARGET ASSET: ROOK [Level 9]
STATUS: PERMANENTLY DELETED FROM THE SERVER
FACTION HP MODIFIER: Kallen's HP Pool drops from 8,75,000➡️8,12,500
The entire colosseum fell into an absolute, paralyzed stupor. The audience gasped, completely unable to process the frame data. How is this possible? a student in the stands muttered. Ivory was registered as a squishy, low-tier Level 6 Mage. How did a magic-class asset completely blitz and overpower a high-defense Level 9 Elite Warrior in a direct physical confrontation?
Kallen stumbled backward on his tile, his hands shaking violently.
"Impossible... This violates the baseline logic of the game! A Level 6 Mage cannot physically overpower a Level 9 heavy vanguard! What kind of cheat code are you running?! Tell me right now!"
Haruto slowly rested his enchanted steel sword on his shoulder, letting out a sharp, deeply satisfied laugh that resonated across the entire grid.
"You think it's a cheat code?" Haruto countered, his eyes locked dead on Kallen's pale face.
"It's called raw brute force, you idiot. You spent all your time looking at our digital level profiles, completely forgetting that physical metrics exist outside of your paid store modifiers."
Haruto's hand hovered over his tactical menu as the green light initialized over his faction's tiles.
"Now shut up and wait for my turn sequence," Haruto commanded, his voice dropping into a lethal, low frequency.
"Stop crying about the game engine and watch the board. Your vanguard is entirely wiped out, your capital is flatlined, and you just wasted your entire defensive line on a failed pincer move. Let's see how much your king unit can tank in the next frame."
While Haruto was analyzing the tactical layout for their turn, Bellona suddenly spoke up. Her voice didn't carry its usual battle-hungry heat—instead, it was flat, freezing, and entirely devoid of emotion.
"Haruto," Bellona said, her eyes locked dead ahead on Kallen's remaining pieces. "Give this turn's command interface to me. Let me choose the strategy."
Haruto blinked, caught off guard by the sheer density of the killing intent radiating from her. She's completely entered cold-processing mode, Haruto analyzed, watching her aura settle into a dangerous, static quiet. He looked over at Lustra and Ivory, noticing the exact same freezing shift in their expressions. Ah... I get it. Seeing Toya get deleted so casually right in front of them didn't just hurt their faction stats. It deeply pissed them off. They are done playing around with this guy.
Without a word, Haruto swiped his hand across his holographic terminal, dragging the tactical movement control window and mapping it directly over to Bellona's coordinate box.
"It's yours," Haruto said. "What's the play?"
"Buy 10 high-tier Offensive Magic Spells from the store right now," Bellona commanded, her tone sharp and mechanical. "And inject the data strings directly into my asset slot."
Haruto didn't hesitate. With over a billion credits sitting in his wallet, a transaction of that size didn't even register as a scratch on his capital. He opened the Amphitheater Event Store, selected the Tier-4 Magic Spell Engine, tapped the quantity to 10, and locked it in.
BZZZZT! A massive cluster of 10 glowing, volatile spell scrolls materialized around Bellona's tile, spinning in a tight, humming ring of high-density energy.
"Now buy 10 more," Bellona added, her eyes shifting toward the right flank.
"And route them directly into Lustra's inventory."
Haruto's eyebrow raised slightly in confusion. Wait... Lustra? Lustra is built for elemental control, not raw spell stacking. But looking at the cold determination on Bellona's face, he decided to trust his frontline data. He tapped the interface again, purchasing another 10 high-tier spells and transferring the data packets straight to Lustra.
Another 10 volatile magic circles erupted around Lustra's tile, illuminating her pale face in a harsh, bright light.
Bellona turned her head slightly, her voice cutting through the shared party link.
"Lustra. Are you ready to clear the grid?"
Lustra—who was usually the most playful, energetic, and talkative goddess in the entire group—didn't smile. She didn't shout or tease. She simply tightened her grip on her weapon, her eyes flashing with a terrifying, ancient divine light as she gave a single, slow nod.
Looking at the three of them standing locked in their coordinates, surrounded by 20 stacked tactical spells, Haruto felt a sudden wave of familiarity hit his gamer memory. This layout... the cold, overwhelming pressure radiating from them... it's exactly how they looked during my initial trial. They weren't acting like limited Level 6 academy students anymore. The playful masks were entirely gone, replaced by the lethal, uncompromising presence of absolute entities ready to force a hard reset on Kallen's entire army.
The system constraints didn't even get a frame to breathe. The moment Bellona took control of the tactical interface, she didn't just walk across the grid—she entirely bypassed the board's limitations.
Using two of the Tactical Teleports Haruto had purchased, Bellona forcefully warped herself and Lustra across the map. FLASH! FLASH! In two blinding pillars of neon light, they materialized directly on the two vacant Rook tiles on Kallen's side of the board—the exact strategic positions left wide open by the deletion of Kallen's vanguard units.
The moment their boots struck the marble, Bellona didn't look back. "Lustra. Buff me. Now."
Lustra didn't utter a playful word. She raised her glowing staff, and the 10 purchased high-tier magic scrolls floating around her shattered simultaneously into raw data. Instead of launching them as an attack, she funneled all 10 spells directly into Bellona's frame as a massive, concentrated stat booster.
At the exact same frame, Bellona activated her own 10 purchased spells.
Twenty high-tier offensive magic spells fused into a single entity inside Bellona's asset slot. The result was an absolute system overload. A violent, blood-red aura erupted from her body like an active volcano, scorching the air and sending massive shockwaves rippling across the amphitheater. The sheer physical density of her power became too high for Kallen's grandmaster domain to calculate.
CRACK!
With a terrifying roar, Bellona stepped forward. The invisible firewall meant to restrict her movement to turn-based logic violently shattered under her raw physical weight. She completely broke the game rules through sheer, unadulterated brute force.
She lunged toward the frontline row. Towering over Kallen's remaining assets, she gripped her enchanted steel sword with both hands and swung it downward in a single, cataclysmic arc.
She didn't just attack one piece. The physical shockwave from her blade didn't leave a single frame of safety. A massive, crescent-shaped wave of red energy tore across the horizontal row, obliterating the map's geometry.
BOOM!
In less than a millisecond, all 8 of Kallen's frontline Pawns were vaporized in a single shot. They didn't even have a chance to trigger a defensive animation. Their code was completely deleted from the server, and a massive string of system logs flooded the sky screen: [PAWNS 1-8: CAPTURED & DELETED].
8 PIECES CAPTURED
TARGET ASSET: PAWNS [1 to 8]
STATUS: PERMANENTLY DELETED FROM THE SERVER
FACTION HP MODIFIER: Kallen's HP Pool drops from 8,12,500 ➡️ 3,12,500
The sheer violence of the execution shattered the very foundation of the arena. The massive black-and-white marble tiles beneath the blast zone cracked and splintered into millions of flying fragments, reducing a massive section of the living chessboard to absolute dust. Realizing a fatal rendering error was occurring, the arena's underlying code frantically began generating blue static threads, desperately trying to repair and reconstruct the shattered floor.
Down in the backline, Kallen fell to his knees, his face completely pale as his collective health bar violently plummeted once more. The triple-Queen blitz had just entirely erased his frontline defense in a single frame, and the terrifying, freezing gods of the Player faction were standing right at his doorstep.
The momentum had completely shifted, and the server's data flow was now entirely in Haruto's favor.
Watching the absolute destruction of Kallen's frontline, Haruto let out a rare, genuine laugh. Up in the sky, the live betting ticker was updating at light-speed. The remaining nobles and high-tier merchants in the VIP pavilion realized Kallen's pay-to-win illusion had cracked. Desperate to salvage their investments, they frantically started dumping their funds onto the underdogs.
[TEAM HARUTO WALLET]: 1,002,057,687 Credits
[TEAM KALLEN WALLET]: 34,677 Credits
Kallen's funding had completely flatlined, dropping to a pathetic 34k with zero growth.
Haruto analyzed the mechanics with a sharp, victorious smirk. Kallen is completely bricked now, he thought. Even if he tries to spend his remaining pocket change on the HP Recovery Protocol, that microtransaction only increases the Max HP capacity variable—it doesn't actually heal current damage. And since healing is strictly banned by his own Rule 3, credits are officially useless to him. He can't buy his way out of this deletion loop.
The entire amphitheater was in absolute pandemonium. Tens of thousands of spectators were standing on their seats, stamping their boots and screaming at the top of their lungs. Even Haruto couldn't maintain his bored gamer persona anymore—he was literally jumping up and down on his locked tile, clapping his hands at the spectacular, rule-breaking performance Bellona and Lustra had just pulled off.
But his momentary distraction was exactly what Kallen was waiting for.
"Don't ignore me, you glitching trash!" Kallen shrieked, his eyes bloodshot as he grabbed a stack of 30 offensive magic spell scrolls he had covertly hoarded in his inventory during the opening frames. With a desperate swipe of his hand, he funneled all 30 data packets straight into his last remaining high-tier unit: The Knight.
BZZZZZT!
The Knight asset blurred across the board, bypassing the shattered tiles. Capitalizing on the exact frame where Bellona had turned her head to look back at Haruto, the Knight lunged from her blind spot, driving a massive, magic-infused lance straight through her shoulder.
"Bellona! Look out behind you!" Haruto shouted, his voice cracking over the party link as his HUD flashed a sudden warning.
CRACK!
The lance struck deep, and the immense physical impact caused a visible drop in their collective HP pool. But because of Ivory's high-tier reality enchantment on their cheap armor, the strike didn't shatter her frame. Bellona gasped, the sudden sting of the damage registering in her neural link.
She slowly turned her head back around, her expression dropping right back into that freezing, terrifyingly cold processing mode. She didn't scream, she didn't panic, and she didn't step back. With an unyielding grip, she reached over her shoulder, grabbed the shaft of the embedded lance with her bare hand, and forcefully wrenched it out of her own flesh with a sickening metallic screech.
She tossed the broken weapon onto the marble floor, locking her dead, emotionless eyes directly onto the trembling Knight unit. She looked back at Haruto for a fraction of a second, gave him a silent, cold nod of reassurance, and then readied her blade. The ambush had failed to compromise her metrics—and now, Kallen's last attacking piece was standing completely exposed within her execution radius.