152 The Saint Division

[Side Quest 9: Save Tristan!!! (Incomplete)

Difficulty: S/SSS

Objective) Stop Tristan from commiting suicide.

Optional Objective 1) Prevent his Dantian from exploding.

Optional Objective 2) Restore his Dantian and heal him completely.

Description: Wowzers. P really wants you to save this Tristan guy. Just look at the Quest's title; you've gotta be desperate for there to be three exclamation points...

Deadline: Approximately 15 seconds (Before Tristan dies)]

"Huh?" Reading through the message, Elizabeth was visibly confused. 'Save him? Hmph! Why should I?! Because he thinks I'm his benefactor? Because he's had a change of heart? What a joke! He tried to kill me!'

'Just do it! He's… He's… Fuck! Come on, just do the side quest and I promise it will be worth your while! I can't explain things because you've yet to earn the right to get Divine Transmissions from me. But what I can tell you without fearing the consequences is that you'll regret it if you miss this chance.' P sounded desperate as the time was ticking and Elizabeth was evidently committed to letting Tristan die.

Though she was a very powerful Goddess, with the means to sneeze planets out of existence and punch galaxies into stardust, one of the few things she was unable to do was interfere with the rules of the Cataclysm. With things still being relatively early in the grand scheme of things, Elizabeth had yet to mature to the point where she could get special information from P.

"Mhmm..." Elizabeth thought about it and reluctantly she casted her accumulated negative impressions of Tristan to the side as she made her way over to him. 'So far, everything she's suggested I do has been for my own good, so...'

With her sword and pistol already being withdrawn into her Transillusionary Return Enchantment, a stack of acupoint needles appeared in her hands as Elizabeth said, "You… your coming with me..." She had the tone of a disappointed mother scolding her son, looking like she wouldn't take "no" for an answer.

"W-what? I'm going to die soon… You should probably get away from me, else you'll get caught up in the explosion..." Tristan had already accepted his fate and though he would momentarily cease to exist, he didn't want for even the chance to hurt Elizabeth; the person who rescued him.

"Tsk. Tsk. I can stop your impending self-destruction with but a single acupoint needle! Just shut up and follow me... We can sort out what happened later." Then without his consent, a single acupoint needle was inserted into his chest. For a split second, it looked like Tristan had seen a ghost as he felt his Dantian really stop accumulating energy, successfully stopping the process of self-destruction. He looked up from his chest to Elizabeth and nervously asked, "How did you..." But before he could finish, he blacked out as all the pain receptors in his body awakened at once; effectively sending him into a state of shock.

In that very same moment, the same man who screamed for Tristan to stop during his battle with Elizabeth, got up and left the spectator's area. He shook his head all the while, as he made a call to the head of Tristan's faction and left the Tournament Square and then the Island,.

Shaking her head, Elizabeth caught Tristan's body before it crashed onto the floor and after giving the judge a knowing look, she was allowed to leave the arena. Making her way over to her usual resting spot beside Sun and Jane, who were still in disbelief after watching her battle, she could still be challenged by someone for the champion's position so only her rank changed.

Setting Tristan aside and gauging that he would stay alive for a couple more minutes, Elizabeth first used her Acupoint Healing technique on herself as she would soon need to fight again; if not to defend herself from a King Stage combatant, than to prepare for the Saint Division. Disregarding her energy reserves which were running on less than 10% of their full capacity, Elizabeth first healed the large cuts that Tristan had landed on her limbs before revitalizing her body and getting rid of all the bruises and scratches that had accumulated as their fight progressed. Luckily, though she was grazed a couple times by the bloody whips, none of the weaponized blood droplets Tristan shot her way managed to directly hit her.

Slowly one minute after another passed and only the people in the top ten had yet to solidify their final rankings. Not every fight was as long as the one between Elizabeth and Tristan, in fact, their battle was an extreme outlier taking well over eight seven minutes to complete, whereas the majority of fights didn't take longer than one minute to end.

In the end, Sun and Jane managed to make it pretty high up in the rankings. With Jane taking fifth place and Sun taking ninth, though the two of them had defended their positions and could move forward, they had both fought no less than five battles up the rankings to get where they were. Unlike Elizabeth, who could almost instantaneously recover, because they lacked a Seamless Qi Connection, while they could ask Elizabeth to heal their physical wounds, there was no getting around the slow process of galvanizing Qi. With most of their energy already used up, they would be asking for a beating to request fighting against the bag of treasures that made up the rest of the top nine Kings. As for Challenging Elizabeth? Not only would they look extremely foolish after she beat them easily, but it would also be an act of bad faith to challenge someone of their own faction who was also much more powerful than them during a tournament as serious as the Wushi Tournament

"Ranked three, Abigail Reem and ranked one, Elizabeth Ultimatia, please take to the arena." Hearing the announcer call her back to the stage, Elizabeth sighed. She had only managed to recover about 500,000 units of Inner Strength after healing all her bodily wounds and was hoping that perhaps the competitors in the King Stage would leave her alone after understanding the distance between her and them. Alas, there was certain to be people that thought she would be easy pickings after exhausting herself against the battle against Tristan.

Putting her acupoint needles away and taking out only her sword, Elizabeth's eyes held a bit of annoyance as she jumped back onto the arena. 'What the fuck? With most of my strength being shown in that last battle, why are there still people in the King Stage trying to challenge me?! I played along with the stupid rule to hid my score because it didn't bother getting a bit more experience along the way. But now I'm kind of pressed for time...'

Eyeing the "little girl" who dared to think she could give her, Elizabeth, a reasonable fight after watching her last battle, Elizabeth smiled as she bowed before the match was announced to have begun. Immediately casting [Fast], [Slow], and [Spatial Contraction] to increase her speed to the utter max as soon as possible, Elizabeth made a beeline for Abigail.

In absolute horror, seeing Elizabeth run up on her as if she weren't at all wounded, Abigail panicked internally as a handful of talismans appeared on both her hands. Squinting at the sight of the talismans, Elizabeth didn't give Abigail the chance to use them as a heavy Grandmist Pressure aimed specifically at her hands caused her to sink and bring her almost to the ground as she was caught off guard.

By the time Abigail began to use her bodily strength to resist the pressure and hold up her talismans, Elizabeth was already before her, sword aimed at her heart; only a small push away from death… Though she had seen Elizabeth in combat against Tristan before this battle, Abigail, like most practitioners, couldn't see most of her abilities, much less understand them. Unless one was a practitioner of Time and Grandmist, only Elizabeth's [Spatial Contraction] might be detected as the rest of her active skills were too difficult to understand; that remaining the case, even if one was subjected to the skills.

So easily defending her spot as number one, the person ranked second felt like he had dodged a bullet for not challenging Elizabeth when he had the chance. Elizabeth quickly put away her sword after consolidating her position and returned to her spot in wait of the King Stage to be over and done with.

There were still up to two more fights scheduled to take place, which then turned into three battles total after one of the challengers succeeded, elevated his rank, and had to defend it. In that time, because Tristan would soon die if she kept wasting her time by recovering energy as she had previously, Elizabeth clicked her tongue in sadness before taking out five King Stage monster cores and savagely crushing them whilst activating her [Talent Stealing Blood Seal]. Since the skill was being used on cores that had already solidified for a long time, she extracted even less energy than normal and it took all five cores to be absorbed before her energy reserves were replenished.

In that instance, a deep seeded pain hit Elizabeth in her very soul as she calculated that this little stunt had robbed her of over 20 million units of Inner Strength. She used the cores of five Peak Phase King Stage Beasts and thought it would be beyond easy to recoup these losses later, the degree of this "pitiful" waste was still unbearable.

With three or so minutes for the King Stage Division to finish and another two minutes for the results to be displayed on the arena's TV to be celebrated and for the challenging Saints to settle in to the spots the Kings left behind after vacating the arena, Elizabeth succeeded in restoring Tristan's body to a relatively healthy state. He no longer looked like someone who had been tortured, with all the cuts and gunshot wounds sustained from his battle with Elizabeth resolved, but the most critical wound had yet to be healed; his Dantian.

Alas, the Saint Stage Division would begin soon and Elizabeth needed at least a couple minutes to concentrate on Dantian surgery. She could only postpone healing Tristan's self-destructing Dantian for later, as just like her time in the King Stage, she was put to the very back of the line at the lowest rank of 150, meaning her fight would be the first one in the Saint Division.

Now, unlike her time in the King Division, because there were only 150 competitors in the Saint Division in total, Elizabeth could only challenge those twenty ranks above her. Moreover, when she asked, "Judge! Now that I've made it this far, can my score in the Testing Formation be revealed? I'd also like to know where that score puts me alongside these guys..."

Though the judge gave her a surprised look, he quickly got word through his earpiece from the higher-ups that were paying close attention to all things related to Elizabeth, that her score could be revealed and to give her an answer. The judge said, "Yes… With your score of 781 Billion, that would put you around rank 75..."

At that level, some of the Mid Phase Saints began to outclass Elizabeth in terms of total combat prowess as their martial skills and Qi abilities would allow them to get more "Perfect Phases" in the Testing Formation and score more double points.

With that said, Elizabeth turned to her opponent in dismissal of the ever-shocked crowd only to witness a real Saint Stage practitioner wave his hands and shake his head. Surrendering before even engaging in a fight, most people looked at the Saint like a coward, but to the man in question, he could care less about bystander opinions. He guessed he would lose to Elizabeth after a hard-fought battle after personally seeing the pristine state of her body and the outcome of her last battle in the King Stage. As a result, he would much rather conserve his strength to challenge someone else and have a winning chance. Thus, Elizabeth's rank increased to 130th place in the Saint's Division at no cost to her stamina or energy.