"This is the standard method in the Spar arena," the gold spirit master picked up clues from Lucas' words, and started to explain in haste, "with this, I can teleport anyone away from danger and save your life. So, hurry up and place them on your body."
"Thanks," William was curious to study this little thing, but he knew he got no time to do that. Like everyone else here, he exposed his right arm and placed the totem there.
Like what happened with Lucas, the paper vanished and merged with his flesh, leaving behind this weird symbol that William didn't recognise.
William tried to inspect it using his spirit power, yet he failed. There was some sort of a higher spirit power inside that symbol, strong enough to crush his spirit power on the spot.
'A dark gold spirit power... Interesting,' William's eyes shone with realisation as he recognised the grade of this spirit power.
"Let's begin!" and just before he'd have time to do more tests, the judge of this battle said. And the next moment, everyone started to move.
The first to move on William's side was that big dude named Dorf. Even when he spoke in such a harsh and mean way about protecting William, Dorf was the first to move to shield him.
The others started to move all out, releasing their strongest techniques right from the start.
"Tsk! They are adamant on consuming their spirit power before the second minute kicks in," William saw this and couldn't help but shake his head in disappointment.
Everything pointed out that the teams here were pretty much experienced and very professional. However, they still fell into such a low mistake.
"Stop daydreaming, this isn't your place," and while William was watching the two sides exchanging attacks, Dorf shouted, "let's keep moving! Staying in one place is a death bringer."
William didn't hustle and kept following Dorf wherever he went. That dude might have a harsh tongue sometimes, tough attitude at other times, but he was quite dependable.
He kept using his earth based techniques to save the other team members or stop any incoming attacks towards him or William.
The two kept moving around the battlefield, while William was feeling no pressure at all.
If Dorf left him behind, it wasn't going to be that bad for him. What surprised William was the fact that the enemy kept attacking him.
'Didn't they say there is such an unspoken rule about not touching people like me?' William felt much weirder when he recalled what Dorf did.
He didn't move out to help others, he first stepped up and protected him.
'It's just an informal rule, one that can be ignored by anyone,' William didn't feel any bad towards the other team for targeting him.
If that team didn't do all their best to win, then they'd be morons!
After the passage of one minute, and as William expected, few started to struggle to keep using their techniques.
The other team got five water and five wind spirit masters.
They didn't get anyone who could be described as a defensive spirit master. And that made William know this battle was the red falcon's win.
The other team seemed to fear the strength of the red falcon fire spirit masters. Or perhaps they didn't get enough members to select from.
Having water spirit masters to stop the fire spirit masters on the red falcon side might be considered a good set up.
However, depending too much on that, to the extent of having half of the team members do such a task, and the other half were just aiding from the side was a very bad idea.
At the first minute, the two sides couldn't decide who was going to win. But just when their spirit powers started to falter, the difference between the two teams' tactics and line up started to show up.
"It's our win, hahahaha!" Dorf who kept acting stressful and nervous all the time laughed out loud the moment half of the other team members got pulled away using the rescue totems.
William didn't find anything unusual about such a result. And even when the red falcon team members kept cheering and celebrating their win while going back to their rest place inside the Grand arena's main building, William kept his silence all the time.
"When is our next battle?" William used a moment when Lucas was watching his happy friends celebrating their win and asked this question.
"In one hour, at most," Lucas looked at William, mistaking his meaning, "don't worry. This team was known to be a bad one. They have a long record of breaking the rule of not touching the tenth member, and that's why Dorf stepped in to defend you."
"Oh, thanks for letting him protect me," William didn't mean any of that. He was truly capable of defending himself in the last battle.
"Don't mention it. The next teams we are going to face are all good ones. Even that jerk, Garlend, didn't reach yet to such low point."
"Thanks," William didn't ask this fearing for his life. But even so, Lucas stepped forward, patted on his shoulder as he added:
"We are going to protect you, make sure of that. And you don't need to worry about any battle, we will handle everything."
After saying these words, Lucas moved to join his celebrating and joyful team. As for William, he just shook his head, and started to move back inside the arena again.
He didn't ask to hear such words from Lucas, he just wanted to go back and observe the different battles going on out there.
The short battle he just went through didn't tell him much about the real situation in the entire competition. To William, this battle might be considered a low level warm up for him and his team.
The two teams committed many mistakes. They might have pulled a few tricks here and there, but the entire battle was chaotic and didn't satisfy William's high standards.