"Teacher Lambert, your students have been eliminated."
Lambert, one of the team leaders from Vita Sage Academy, had only just fallen asleep when he heard the voice outside his tent. Still groggy, he climbed out of bed.
He stumbled over to open the door and asked, his words slurred, "Who did you say was eliminated?"
The other teacher leading the team stood outside, looking very anxious.
Unlike Saint Delro Academy, where everyone had a carefree attitude toward the competition, Vita Sage Academy took it quite seriously.
They had a pretty impressive record in the competition's history—dozens of times better than Saint Delro's—and had often used it as an excuse to mock their "friendly rival."
Students who placed highly in the competition would receive a whole host of rewards from the academy. Their instructors could also earn generous bonuses, which would count as a significant achievement in future faculty evaluations.
Raising a champion could be almost as impressive in an evaluation as publishing a paper in a top journal.
So when he heard that some students had been eliminated, Lambert might not have been fully awake, but his body still managed to haul itself out of bed on instinct.
He mumbled, "How many were eliminated?"
"All of them."
"All of them... All of them were eliminated?!"
Lambert let out a shriek—the anguished cry of a man watching his bonus vanish before his eyes.
"Was Hope eliminated too?"
The Hope he was asking about was the captain of Vita's temporary team and his most prized student. Although Hope had ranked only in the seventies during the preliminaries, Lambert expected him to make the top fifty in the final.
"Yes, he was eliminated too. All the students you brought along were eliminated."
"Wh-why... How could th-this happen?"
Lambert was already struggling to get