Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 2068: Ning’s Gambit

After a while, one of Ning’s throws finally caught the instructor beside Lorna squarely in the leg.

The cadets on the floor exploded into cheers, but Ning barely had time to register the hit. He had thrown the ball at the far end of a swing, with the rope pulled taut and Naysha already moving in the opposite direction, and the force of the throw sent both of them spinning.

They tumbled together through the air, the rope wrapping around them, with nothing to slow their rotation and no wall close enough to catch.

Lorna did not hesitate.

She threw, and the ball flew straight toward the two of them as they spun. With their bodies rotating so quickly, there was no telling which of them it would strike, and it might just as easily have been Ning as Naysha. In the end, it caught Naysha on the shoulder as she came around.

It was more luck than skill, and Lorna probably knew it, but a hit was a hit.

The fields began releasing Naysha, and gravity started drawing her slowly downward. She untied the rope from her waist as she sank and let the end drift free, and when Ning caught it, she looked up at him with an expression that was half frustration and half encouragement.

"Win," she said before she drifted out of earshot.

Then there were only two of them left in the air.

Ning and Lorna.

For a long while, they went back and forth across the chamber without either of them landing a hit. Lorna threw with the calm precision of someone who had played this game for years, and Ning dodged with the ease of someone who had no reason to worry about being caught, while every ball he threw in return was avoided just as smoothly.

Ning eventually decided that this could go on indefinitely if he let it. He needed to try something else.

He drifted toward the wall, caught himself against the padding with his feet, and began to run.

The chamber was roughly spherical, with walls that curved gently around its center, and as Ning ran along the inside of that curve, his speed pressed him outward against the padding. The faster he went, the more firmly the force held him in place, until he was racing around the inner wall of the chamber as though it were a floor, his body held against it by nothing but his own momentum.

The cadets below stared up at him in confusion.

Lorna turned in place at the center of the chamber, tracking him as he circled around her, and threw ball after ball toward the wall where he ran. None of them hit. Ning simply kept running.

What none of them could see from where they were was what Ning’s hands were doing.

As he ran, he caught two of the balls that had rebounded from the wall near him. Without breaking stride, he tied one end of the rope tightly around the first ball, and then he tied the other end around the second, leaving the length of rope stretched between them.

Then he jumped.

He pushed off the wall and launched himself out toward the center of the chamber, toward Lorna, and at the same moment, he twisted his body so that he was spinning as he flew.

Lorna’s eyes narrowed as he came toward her. She clearly did not understand what he was doing, but she did not need to understand it in order to react, and she threw a ball straight at him as he approached.

Ning had kept a third ball in his free hand, and he threw it hard to his side.

The force of the throw pushed him sideways, out of the path of Lorna’s ball, and in the same movement, the spin he had built up running along the wall passed into the rope in his other hand. The two tied balls whipped around him in a wide, whirling circle, and Ning let the rope out to its full length and spun it once, twice, three times, building speed until it was a blur.

Then he let it go.

The rope flew through the air toward Lorna, with the two balls spinning around each other at either end.

Lorna saw it coming and tried to move, but it was spinning too wide and too fast. The rope struck her across the middle, and the two balls at its ends whipped around her body in opposite directions, wrapping the rope around her arms and torso in several quick loops before tangling together.

For a moment, she hung in the middle of the chamber, bound tightly and turning slowly in the air.

The balls tied to the rope had touched her, but they were wrapped around her rather than striking her, and Lorna seemed to recognize at once that they would not count as a hit. She began twisting at once, working her arms against the loops, and Ning could see that she would free herself within seconds.

But Ning was already on the other side of the chamber.

The throw that had pushed him out of the path of her ball had carried him across the open space, and he caught himself against the far wall, snatched a drifting ball from beside him, and turned.

Lorna looked up just as he threw.

The ball crossed the chamber in a straight line and struck her squarely in the chest while her arms were still tangled in the rope.

For a moment, there was complete silence.

Then the fields around Lorna began to release her, and she sank slowly toward the floor, still partly wrapped in the rope, wearing an expression of utter disbelief that slowly gave way to a reluctant smile.

The cadets on the floor erupted.

They shouted and cheered and laughed, several of them jumping up and down on the padding, and even the instructors who had been eliminated earlier were clapping. Jason was staring up at Ning with his mouth hanging open, and Naysha stood beside him, shaking her head with a grin she was not even trying to hide.

Ning floated alone in the middle of the chamber, the last one left in the air.

He had won.