No! I don't want to be a Super Necromancer!

Ten minutes passed.

Then twenty.

Then forty.

With a hundred students, the forest was alive now, shifting with the rhythm of chaos and strategy.

New waves of students appeared on both sides of the field, blinking into place through shimmering transport glyphs. Orders were shouted. Strategies formed. Zones fortified.

Most teams followed the same doctrine: expand outward, claim ground, fortify choke points, and wear down the enemy line inch by inch.

Not Jiang Xiao Yu.

She arrived with her team at the forty-minute mark and immediately broke convention.

No wide scouting. No zone-by-zone advancement.

Instead, she ordered a single, focused movement.

"Go straight for the enemy flag."

"Are you serious?" one of her teammates asked, glancing around as others began fanning out in traditional formations.

"Completely," she said calmly. "We're not here to play tower defense. We're going to bait, misdirect, and bleed their attention dry. Don't aim to hold ground. Instead, aim to create noise."

Her tone was quiet, but unshakable.

"And if we run into a squad?" another asked.

"We don't fight them. We go around. Or through. Strike. Fade. Reposition. Again and again." She tapped at a squad symbol on the map. "And then, our real attack, this one, will strike."

The others widened their eyes and sighed in admiration.

"Excellent plan. Let's do it."

And just like that, the fluid war began.

Her team split into three small strike cells, each one moving fast and light, leaving only twenty to guard their flag.

One harassed an outpost. One broke through the forest perimeter with illusion mist and noise spells. The third, hers, disappeared entirely.

At Damien's base, his outpost alarms were lighting up in all directions. Mana alerts flickered red as low-level illusions and mana decoys tripped ward after ward.

"West perimeter's under attack!"

"Wait, now it's the eastern ridge!"

"They're coming straight through the north too! How many teams did they send?!"

"Wait… they're not pushing. They're just hitting and falling back! These are feints! Watch out for their real attack!"

Damien stood at the flag post, perfectly still, arms crossed, eyes closed.

He ignored the rising panic and noise around him. He could feel the rhythm, chaotic on the surface, but beneath it all… a pattern.

And then he felt her.

A shift in the mist. A silence that cut through noise.

Damien opened his eyes.

"Jiang Xiao Yu."

Suddenly, from the shadows between tree roots, a column of water surged upward. It didn't attack, it distracted.

A barrage of wind needles followed, not aimed at vital points, but at his squad's eyes, their hands, their spellcasting gestures.

Damien's defense line stuttered.

Then a blur of motion sliced through the chaos.

Her cloak rippled, water trailing from her fingertips as she slipped through the confusion like a wraith. A single step brought her within ten meters of the flag, and ten meters of Damien.

He was already there.

Their eyes locked.

She didn't stop.

Damien lunged forward to intercept, only for her to pivot mid-stride and vanish into fog.

A feint.

"Left!" one of his squad members cried.

"No, she's behind us!"

"Wait, what? She's gone again!"

Damien spun, tracing her mana signature.

But it wasn't there.

Then a warning flare fired from the south outpost.

And then… Boom.

A loud, magical pop echoed through the forest. Smoke. Screams. Glitter. Jiang Xiao Yu's team had detonated a confusion spell near Damien's secondary defenses.

Except… that hadn't been a feint.

That had been the real push.

The earlier push?

That had been the feint for the feint.

Damien narrowed his eyes.

She was playing him.

And she was good.

There.

Movement in the mist.

He moved fast.

His palm shot forward and just missed the trailing edge of her robe as Jiang Xiao Yu launched backward in an elegant spin, the flag only meters behind her.

The next exchange was pure precision.

Water strikes. Shadow dashes. Fog-based decoys. Each one layered to cover her approach or shield her retreat.

Damien countered with calculated positioning, shadow binds, and precise strikes meant to disable.

She was relentless.

And fluid.

And fast.

And Damien, for the first time in a long while, found himself forced to adapt again and again.

He smiled with satisfaction.

Who would've thought Jiang Xiao Yu could command the battlefield with such precision?

But alas... for her, he was a much better tactician.

"Too bad. I would have liked for the others to join the game before ending it. But I guess they can make their own game after I end this one." Damien reasoned to himself.

While she had weaved feints within feints, distracting squads and pulling focus toward the flag, Damien had made his move long before the match even began.

From the start, he had quietly reduced the number of students in each five-man assault and defense cell. Instead of ten per squad, he'd assigned eight.

The remaining ten students, his secret sixth squad, were split and scattered across the map. Highly mobile, highly aware, and extremely excited for their upcoming role.

Their orders had been clear:

Move independently. Avoid detection. Advance in separate arcs until the signal.

And now, the signal had come.

A brief mana pulse flickered against his skin.

Damien's eyes lit with that quiet, calculating glint.

Every member of his team, across the battlefield, suddenly burst into motion.

His frontliners, who had been maintaining formation with stoic discipline, exploded into wild, aggressive assaults.

Their colourful spells lit up the forest, blades flashing, war cries rising. Their job now wasn't to break through.

It was to cause chaos and grab the defenders' attention.

Meanwhile, his defenders, those guarding outposts and fallback zones, abandoned their positions and began sprinting straight back toward their own base.

It looked desperate.

It looked panicked.

It looked like a full retreat.

And Jiang Xiao Yu's teams reacted exactly as expected.

"Push!" one of her lieutenants shouted. "They're collapsing! Go, go, go!"

From her hidden vantage, Jiang narrowed her eyes, unsure.

But the message from her side teams confirmed it.

Outposts abandoned, defense lines withdrawn, Damien's team scattering.

"It doesn't make sense…" she muttered.

But the pressure to capitalize was immediate. Her squads surged forward in pursuit, thinking this was their moment to crush the flag and end the game.

Only…

It wasn't a retreat.

It was bait.

And the moment her teams pushed past the halfway mark, Damien's sixth squad emerged from the shadows.

Ten directions. Ten strikes. Ten coordinated blitzes converging on her now-vulnerable base.

One of her defense captains barely had time to shout before a concussive spell slammed into their wardline and sent it flickering. Another got tangled in illusion wire and tackled to the ground. The remaining few scrambled to respond, but it was already too late.

Her entire formation had been pulled forward.

And the trap had closed behind them.