As soon as the voice finished counting, Long Tian and all the other hundreds of thousands of participants disappeared from the waiting area.
The light barrier then solidified and became a wall from the same metal that the building was made of.
For Long Tian, there was no bright light or feeling of discomfort. It was exactly like when he used the teleporter to enter the sanctuary. One moment he was in that waiting room, the next inside the arena.
The new space everyone teleported to was a giant room.
As one would expect, the place they teleported to was a massive arena, with a large pit in the middle and grandstands all around it.
Everything was made of metal, from the floor to the ceiling. There were those mysterious lights everywhere to light the enclosed space.
The pit where Long Tian presumed they would fight was a flat ground that was over a kilometer long and some hundred meters wide.
Long Tian and the other competitors were teleported to the stands, close to the pit itself. They were on one end of the rectangular shaped pit.
Around them, there was a light barrier again, separating the area that only participants could stay from the rest of the stands, where spectators would watch the tournament.
There was also a light barrier all around the pit, forming a dome-like structure that was probably meant to stop anyone from going in or interfering with the fights.
As Long Tian was taking in all of that new space, the sanctuary voice sounded again.
{First Phase of the Tournament, the Shelter Phase started.}
Suddenly, there was a light tremor, as multiple areas of ground of the pit suddenly started rising, creating elevated platforms, that each also became enclosed in a light film.
{Generating the matches for the first stage.}
A screen then appeared above the participants delimited area. It showed over a hundred squares, each full of names.
After looking at the screen for a bit and remembering what he knew about the first phase of the tournament, Long Tian understood.
Each column was named as a small arena, starting with Small Arena 1, Small Arena 2, etc.. So probably, each of these vertical columns represents one of the elevated platforms on the pit.
There were five or six blocks containing names in each of the columns. Long Tian estimated there were 1000 names in each, so, knowing that the first stage of the tournament was a battle royale involving 1000 people, he was confident these blocks represented one round of battle.
So, there would be 50 simultaneous fights, and each time one of the small arenas had a winner, the next group of people would go in to fight.
Long Tian was searching for his name when the sanctuary voice sounded again.
{Opening the arena for spectators. The first participants will be teleported into the Small Arenas in 10 seconds. Be prepared.}
Sure enough, people started pouring in on the stands all around the arena. And ten seconds later, fifty thousand people from the participants area vanished and appeared on the small arenas.
Immediately, people started fighting, those who had beast souls summoned them, and it was chaos.
Long Tian ignored the action on the pit for a bit and finally found his name. It was on Small Arena 32 on the fourth row. So he would be fighting in arena thirty-two after three battles happened there.
He then turned his attention back to the pit, seeing that quite some people had already been defeated on the Small Arenas.
When the participants had been teleported, some had been lucky and appeared on the center of their platforms, while some were less lucky and ended up on the edge.
Those unlucky ones were either pushed out or were strong enough to not fall even with three or more people attacking them at the same time.
Now, on the two platforms closest to the participants area, over a hundred people had already been eliminated. And not just by being thrown out either.
Long Tian saw someone stabbed through their stomach before being slashed across the neck. The person fell on the ground, and when they stopped moving, their body disappeared.
Long Tian knew that those that died on the tournament, differently from those that died anywhere else on the sanctuary, had their bodies sent back to the alliance, appearing on the teleporter they entered through.
Long Tian continued watching the battles. They were not that interesting, as the great majority of people did not even have mutant points and their weapons were weak. Long Tian actually saw many people using martial arts, as the military distributes their own arts to the enlisted.
But the grade that common people have access is extremely low and the people he was seeing here clearly were not well practiced in them.
So, it was mostly a competition of who had the highest fitness.
About 30 minutes after the first batch of people were teleported in, a Small Arena had a winner.
As the number of people in each arena became smaller, Long Tian noticed that each one had a massive number engraved on their center, representing the number of that small arena.
The closest ones to the participants area were arena 1 and 2.
The small arenas were arranged in a 2 by 25 grid, and the one that had just decided a winner was the number 13, a bit far from him but he could still see it.
After 5 seconds of the winner standing alone on the small arena, he disappeared, and 1000 more people were teleported in.
As time passed, more and more arenas ended their first fights, and more people were teleported in. Interestingly, every time a fight ended, anything left on the arena, be it a piece of a weapon to blood and even limbs, disappeared.
The arena itself was never damaged, as the metal that made it and the rest of the shelter was considered indestructible to anything in the first sanctuary.
Each year, many people in each shelter decide to participate in the tournament. It is not only a very good form of training, if you last long enough, but it is also a matter of pride and can decide one's standing within their gang or group in the shelter.
However, the dangers were always there. Death is always close-by, as demonstrated when a fight in small arena 27 ended and another thousand people were teleported in.
There was a lot of noise in the arena. People battling in the pit, screaming and clashing against each other, and the spectators on the stands, that numbered almost 500 thousand already, caused a great amount of noise.
But suddenly, there was a wave of screams from small arena 27 that caught Long Tian's attention.
At first, he could not understand what was happening, but suddenly people started jumping off the arena, clearly frightened by something.
As more and more people left, Long Tian finally understood. A massive area on the center of the platform was covered in blood.
Hundreds of body parts were strewn across the sea of blood that had rapidly became the center of the platform.
A giant man, almost 2.5 meters tall, stood there. He was holding someone by their waist. One hand the abdomen and one on the legs.
There was a stir from the participants area, and a man in all black military clothing suddenly shouted.
"DON'T YOU DARE, HAN FEN!"
Then, the massive man turned towards the military man that shouted at him, smirked and suddenly, a grotesque scene happened.
The man exerted force and the person he was holding, a young man also in black military clothing, was ripped apart. Legs to one side, torso to the other.
Han Fen, the massive man, then threw the two halves on the ground and stepped on the head on the upper half.
Immediately, the head exploded, and the torso disappeared, the lower half not being teleported as it was disconnected from the head.
The man that had shouted earlier instantly became enraged.
Han Fen, having massacred a great number of people and scared the rest, had been the last one on the platform after killing the young soldier, so he teleported back to the participants area.
The military man immediately tried to dash towards him, but someone he actually knew appeared in front of him and held him back, telling him something.
It was Qin Ling. Her appearance fully caught Long Tian's attention, and he finally identified the man that was going to attack Han Fen as a captain, indicated by the three silver lines on his shoulder, the same as Qin Ling.
Qin Ling managed to make the man stop, but he clearly was not happy, looking at Han Fen with hatred in his eyes.
Long Tian turned towards Han Fen and saw that he was smirking while standing at the front of a group of people. Long Tian did not recognize anyone except the one that seemed to be their leader.
It was the man that had taken over the shelter for the Long Clan, Chen Ning. The man was a bit tall, slightly above two meters, had black hair, black eyes. Basically, he looked average in every sense of the word.
But his strength was not average. He had defeated Qin Ling and taken over the shelter, now, he had formed a group around him and was suppressing the military for some reason.
He just stood there, looking bored, ignoring the captain that was shooting daggers at his group with his eyes.
Long Tian decided to ignore the situation for now, although he did not like that someone under the command of his clan just had someone rip apart a soldier, he could not do anything about it.
He was in the Dragon Test, and he could not use his name as the young master. So, he could only ignore it and maybe punish that Han Fen guy if he encountered him later.
The tournament continued, and an interesting phenomenon happened. Every time someone from Chen Ning's group entered a small arena, a massacre followed, with them specifically targeting anyone in military clothing.
Then, the military started fighting back, anytime a military that was strong enough encountered someone from Chen Ning's gang, they immediately killed.
People started to see this pattern and started talking about it.
Through these conversations, Long Tian learned why this was happening.
Almost 4 months ago, Chen Ning took over the shelter from Qin Ling, injuring her in the process. Then, the other captains in the military gang all grouped up and tried to take down Chen Ning, but a group of people appeared and stopped them.
These people, that were discovered later to be followers of Chen Ning that he cultivated for years, formed the 'Shelter' Gang, which many people tried to enter but only the strong could.
Over the next few months, tensions between the military and the Shelter gang continued high. With people from both sides dying almost every day.
One side had the military behind them, the other had one of the strongest clans in the alliance, so neither could pressure the other with background nor make the other submit.
Some time ago, while another fight between the two gangs was happening, the Shelter gang promised to make the miliary suffer in the tournament. And this conflict in the small arenas seemed to be them fulfilling the threat.
Many people died from both sides, and whenever a captain from the military entered the platforms, they would hunt whoever they thought had a connection with Chen Ning.
This continued for over an hour before finally, a voice appeared in Long Tian's head.
{Round 3 of Small Arena 32 ended, you will be teleported in 5 seconds.}
This immediately made Long Tian alert, he looked towards the far away Small Arena 32 and saw that there was only one person standing.
He counted on his head the exact moment, and as soon as the time he would be teleported came, he summoned the Green Beetle Super Armor.
Long Tian had been seating on the stands, but he appeared standing up on Small Arena 32. His armor finished covering his body before anyone could react.
This was his plan so others would not discover his true appearance, so he would only have to continue covering his eyes in the shelter.
He teleported five meters from one of the corners of the platform. There were people all around him, and they had already started fighting.
He sensed an attack from his left side and turned to look. A young woman was thrusting an Ordinary Beast Soul Spear at him.
Long Tian barely gave her a look, only sidestepping her thrust and throwing out a punch. He controlled his force, and the woman was only sent flying. He threw the punch so it landed on her stomach, in a way she would be thrown up and backwards.
She fell outside the platform. She would be hurt but not dead, and that was what mattered for Long Tian.
Another person then came slashing a sword at him, Long Tian once again dodged and punched the guy out of the platform.
A bizarre scene then followed of a green armored figure punching people out of the platform. People started taking notice and distanced themselves from him, allowing Long Tian to stay still, having only punched 15 people out.
He decided to not go after these people and just fight whoever was left of them in the end.
Two minutes later, when the people around him had already thinned out a little, someone that had not seen his fists sending people flying approached him.
Long Tian, who was still paying attention, did not miss the slashing of the sword coming at him and dodged again, punching the person.
However, the man attacking him did not go flying, he just skidded back.
A little surprised, Long Tian approached him in a speed he could not react to and punched with a little more force, and this time the man went flying out of the platform.
Long Tian was a bit surprised, that man had almost 10 of fitness.
This pattern continued for more than 20 minutes, with more and more people that had not seen his flying punch behavior attacking him.
When there were less than 100 people on the platform, people stopped attacking him.
After all, besides sending people off with a single punch, he was wearing a Super Armor, so anyone that could recognize the differences between the ranks of beast souls would realize that he was not to be messed with.
Finally, there were only two people on the platform, and Long Tian was surprised he knew one of them.
It was…