After Noa was taken away to the Fukushima healer, Arlo ascended the platform. His opponent was Jon.
Jon swiftly summoned his White Dearth Weasel, which stood imposingly on the platform, brandishing its blades.
"White Dearth Weasel! 9.0, Lord tier!" The referee couldn’t even finish as Arlo summoned a Golden Time Sidewinder, a large, golden-scaled snake that slithered around him after emerging from the portal.
Its size wasn’t aggressively large like Percival’s Leviathan, but its golden rhombus scales gleamed softly, a sign that its defence factor wasn’t low in the slightest, just like the Leviathan’s.
It seemed more like an adaptive skill, since sidewinders did not naturally have such tough scales to begin with.
"Golden Time Sidewinder! 10.4, King tier!" the referee announced. His voice made the excited Manhattan students quiet down.
"A King tier? Can Senior Damien fight a King tier?"
They began asking themselves questions. Lucy looked at the terrible expressions on the faces of Rick, Snow, and the others, but Isolde was quite composed.
"Wow! That’s my first time seeing a King tier summon right before my eyes," Isaac said excitedly, while Godfrey could only show his reaction after lowering the water bottle from his mouth.
"It’s obvious Jon will lose. But at least this fight will show the others what the Sidewinder is capable of."
Arlo’s summon was the first to move. Jon already knew the Sidewinder was fast, but the moment it moved, everything changed. It suddenly became a blur, while his weasel slowed almost to a halt.
Time had accelerated for the snake and decelerated for him. The snake didn’t just use time to make itself faster; it also took another cautionary step by slowing down the weasel, which was also a summon with a great speed factor.
Slowing down to a halt also gave the weasel no time to turn into smoke, giving the snake the opportunity to bite into its shoulder in what seemed to be an instant.
Jon reacted quickly as he fused with his weasel and manifested a projection that swung its blades into the snake, but those blades bounced off the scales of the snake, which gleamed at the exact moment the weasel projection struck it.
Jon used that time to burst into smoke, but as he reformed, his mind felt foggy. Since he was fused with his summon, both summoner and summon felt the same effect. Even slashing his blades at the slowly approaching snake, which watched like a dying prey, only produced sparks, leaving the scales in their pristine state.
"The poison my Sidewinder secreted has drained twenty-four hours of your life. It cannot be recovered. I counter your speed and offence. You’ve lost," Arlo said coolly.
A sudden red shade fell on both Arlo and Jon. Arlo was confused for a second before noticing that the same shade was on everyone, and it made him look up.
Right there, about a hundred and fifty feet above this huge arena, with hundreds of students and broadcasting groups, was a massive red mass spiralling with dark clouds at its edges.
"A red gate," Arlo gasped, the three words leaving his mouth as a whisper.
"No... it can’t be." Edwin rose to his feet as screams broke out. Students began to run helter-skelter, their hearts pounding so hard that it felt like they would leave their mouths at any moment.


VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABEL
Comments
The readers' comments on the novel: Others Summon Dragons, I Summon Legendary Knights