"Hehe... hehe hehe... hehe hehe hehe... We won, we won!"
Humming softly in her clear, adorable voice, with a slight lilt to her tune, Hada Anna skipped up the stairs.
We won, we won!
Anna had made a huge contribution to the village!
What kind of reward would she get?
She would ask Long Yan later.
And Kazuha too.
Her heart, like the little tune she hummed, brimmed with joy.
Clearly, the little girl was thrilled by her victory in the preliminaries. As for how meaningful that victory was, she did not care.
Nor did she care about—or rather, notice at all—the subtle atmosphere around her or the strange looks directed her way.
She also failed to realize that those looks were not the looks people gave a victor.
"Anna, are you all right?"
After she came upstairs, still humming her slightly off-key tune, her childhood friend, who had been waiting upstairs for some time, immediately came over and began checking her from head to toe.
He was clearly worried that she had been hurt.
"I'm fine. Anna isn't hurt."
Seeing her childhood friend inspecting her injuries, Hada Anna immediately flashed a sweet smile and said so.
"That Ikeda guy is really good at hitting people, but it doesn't hurt when he hits you."
Seeing how worried her childhood friend was, she hurriedly added that.
And indeed, although Ikeda Ichiro's attacks had all struck at the openings in the little girl's attacks—the moment an attack began, when her defenses were weakest—his timing had been precise down to the finest margin.
But for Hada Anna, while his timing had been flawless, the power behind those attacks was nothing to worry about.
Although she looked rather miserable now, as though she had exploded out of a pile of burning charcoal, black soot