Falling: How to Survive as a Cannon Fodder

HTSCF CH 043 It kills me now

The Arena competition and Monsoon Convention ended in an anticlimactic manner. Both Jun and Oriana were disqualified for being no-shows, and the rest of the matches weren't as interesting, except for the one between Feng Bingwen and Bai Changming, Feng Bingwen being the champion. As a result, Monsoon developers decided there would be a competition redo next month, but it would be held through VR instead. Those that won today still received their prizes.

Oriana and Jun ended the convention in a bitter mood but quickly got over it. They still had a chance next month, and it would be more convenient. After a hug goodbye, Jun returned to the apartment with Azazel and Elior. Although the kidnapping was a minor and brief affair, it seemed to have stirred up a strange but very plausible anxiety in the two men's hearts—that Jun could abruptly disappear one day.

That night, the two men updated their personal pages and changed their statuses from "in a relationship" to "engaged." Then they both posted an announcement regarding the date of their wedding, which was scheduled for the year Jun would graduate from college. Instinctively, they were obsessed with the idea of tying Jun to them through marriage. Once done, they again held him tightly in their arms to sleep, giving him only light kisses and lingering caresses.

A month later, the Arena competition redo arrived. This time, Oriana and Jun were able to participate and there were many upsets, but the important part was it came down to four people in the semi-finals: Feng Bingwen, Bai Changming, Oriana Silvie, and Fei Lan. The semi-finals consisted of three matches total. The first two matches determined who would go to the finals, while the third match decided the #3 and #4 spot between the losers of the first two matches.

The first two matches were Feng Bingwen versus Oriana Silvie and Bai Changming versus Fei Lan. Because Jun could do high damage, had good defense gear, and manually fought, he easily beat Bai Changming, a Paladin who mainly focused on defense and was a purely skill-based player. In the match against Feng Bingwen, Oriana Silvie lost, because her opponent was also like Jun, a manual player. The third match then became Bai Changming versus Oriana Silvie, both skill-based players.

However, Oriana was at a higher class because of her vast experience in the Arena and high damage output. As a result, she easily beat Bai Changming, bringing up the question of his #2 spot. Li Jie, who had been watching from the sidelines after losing badly in the first few matches, clenched his hands in anger as his two least favorite people managed to defeat someone like Bai Changming.

The final match was between Feng Bingwen and Fei Lan, and they were both manual players. While Jun practiced aikido in real life and had practical archery experience, Feng Bingwen also had real-life sword style skills. The difference was that one was a close combat type fighter and the other a long-range fighter. It was hard to tell who had the upper hand combat-wise since Feng Bingwen was able to fend off all of Jun's arrows, but he couldn't get close enough to use his sword until Jun decided to try a combination of aikido and archery.

Before, the use of his aikido wasn't an issue when facing dungeons or quest bosses, but because this was an Arena fight between players of various classes, using his aikido skills cost him the win. Feng Bingwen was able to win by default, but it wasn't an entirely unfair win, as he did have a slight advantage in terms of strength over Jun.

The competition ended like that, but it caused Jun to rise in popularity, which only further angered Li Jie. The animosity between Li Jie and Jun continued to grow in the following months, and Jun started to feel a little apprehensive. Nothing else had happened since the kidnapping, but his intuition kept telling him there was something wrong.

His fears proved to be true when he was accosted by Li Jie on campus, during a day when Azazel and Elior were back in A Country for an important meeting.