Worldwide Class Change: Minimal Effort, Maximum Reward!

[Phantom Void Step]

His figure blurred, covering the distance between them in an instant, and he came in from the Minotaur’s left side, the Celestial Lord Blade angled toward the exposed spine point marked in the system prompt. The strike was clean and precise.

The Minotaur twisted with a speed that had no right to belong to something its size.

The bone plating on its shoulder intercepted the blade. The impact rang out like a struck bell, the golden light of the weapon flaring against the natural armor, and the Minotaur’s free hand swept across in a backhand that Lin Yi barely cleared, the displaced air from the swing hitting him like a physical blow and sending him skidding backward across the cracked floor.

He caught his footing. His arm registered the feedback of the blocked strike, pressure traveling back up through the blade into his wrists and shoulders.

*It reacted to Phantom Void Step.* He reassessed. *Either the vibration tracking is sensitive enough to predict my arrival point, or the floor pressure is slowing the skill’s effective concealment.*

Both were possible. Both required adjustment. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

The Minotaur roared. The sound waves alone carried enough force to crack the nearest wall section, and the suppression field in the room spiked again, pressing down with renewed intensity. Lin Yi’s next step felt heavier than the one before it. The floor wanted him to stop moving. The pressure aura scaled with proximity, and he was close now.

He pushed against it mentally the way he had pushed against the Executioner’s blade on floor twenty. Acknowledge. Absorb. Continue.

The chain came again, this time in a vertical overhead slam. Lin Yi stepped to the side and struck the chain itself with the flat of the Celestial Lord Blade as it passed, using the contact point to redirect his own momentum sideways rather than fighting the gravitational wake directly. The Minotaur overcorrected from the disrupted arc, its massive body rotating slightly past its intended position.

The spine was exposed for less than two seconds.

Lin Yi was already moving.

Phantom Void Step brought him directly behind the creature. The Celestial Lord Blade drove into the exposed point on the lower back with full force and full intent. The golden light detonated on impact, not a wide arc this time but a concentrated burst, focused through the blade’s point into the structural weakness of the target. The Minotaur arched backward. A sound like splintering stone came from within it as the bone plating around the impact point fractured outward.

It spun and swung wildly. Lin Yi took the full force of the chain’s wrap across his left side.

The impact was enormous. It lifted him off the ground and slammed him into the wall of the arena, stone cracking behind him on impact. He hit the floor and stayed there for a full second. The left side of his body was a single sustained note of pain. He checked the damage against his current endurance and concluded nothing was broken. Then he stood up.

The Minotaur was tracking him, the chain already spinning again, its eyes locked on the wall where he had hit. It hadn’t processed that he was back on his feet yet. The bone plating around the wound point was fractured but not gone. One more strike to that location. Clean and hard.

Lin Yi covered the distance at full speed, no Phantom Void Step this time, just direct movement. The Minotaur tracked the vibration and turned, the chain swinging down in a direct overhead slam aimed at his approach path. He didn’t stop. He twisted at the last moment, the iron ball driving into the floor beside him rather than on top of him, and rode the resulting shockwave like a push, the force accelerating him the final distance rather than stopping him.

He hit the exposed spine wound point with everything he had left.

The Celestial Lord Blade sank in. The golden light erupted and this time it didn’t stop. It consumed the fracture point, spread through the adjacent structural tissue, and the Minotaur went rigid. The chain fell from its grip. Its legs locked. Its head dropped. The bone plating across its entire body fractured simultaneously in a cascading series of sounds like a building coming apart floor by floor, and then the creature dissolved, the projection returning to the tower’s will in a wave of fading light that swept outward across the arena floor and vanished.

Silence.

Lin Yi stood at the center of the arena. His left side was registering sustained pain with every breath. His spiritual reserves had dropped below a threshold he was comfortable with. He stood there for a moment, not moving, taking inventory of himself honestly.

He was exhausted.

Not defeated. Not broken. But genuinely spent in a way that hadn’t happened once across the previous thirty-nine floors. He opened his system panel.

Total Score: 400 points.

He looked at the staircase to floor forty, stepped into the floor, Allocating him 400 points. Then he looked at his own hands. Then he activated the exit.

...

The monitoring hall.....

"That chain impact alone should have ended the fight! He took a direct hit from a Level 39 gravitational weapon and stood back up!"

"The Phantom Void Step was losing effectiveness in the suppression field and he adapted in real time, using the chain’s own force as a movement tool—"

"Did you see the final approach? No skill, no step, just direct acceleration. He used the shockwave from the Gravity Smash to close the distance faster than the Minotaur could track him—"

"He’s bleeding." A quieter voice. "Look at his left side."

The room fell slightly less loud.

"...He’s still standing."

"He cleared floor thirty-nine."

"With a Threat Level 39 boss and active suppression field."

Principal Zhou had not spoken since the fight began. He stood with his hands behind his back, watching the screen as the arena below emptied and Lin Yi’s exit was registered by the tower’s system. Then the score updated on the central display.

Everyone in the room saw it at the same time.

J45 — Lin Yi — 400points.

The principal who had bet ten million copper coins was very quiet.

Someone else said softly, "Han Yue exited on floor thirty-three. His final score was three hundred and thirty." A pause. "Lin Yi beat him by seventy points." The number sat in the room like something solid.

Principal Zhou finally spoke. "Wang Hao and Su Qinghan exited on floor thirty-nine," he said. "Three hundred and ninety points each."

He looked around the room at the other principals. "All three members of the Jianghe team are currently ranked first, second, and third in the overall examination." He paused for exactly one moment. "Jianghe City. Frontier city. Population six million." He turned back to the screen. "I trust no one has further observations about E-Rank Laborers."

No one did.

Outside the tower, the first day of the examination ended. Four hundred points. Wang Hao and Su Qinghan waiting at the base of the tower. Han Yue sitting in silence somewhere with three hundred and thirty points and new questions about the shape of the world. And somewhere inside the tower’s exit system, Lin Yi stepping back into the ordinary air of Celestial City with a score no one had predicted and an exhaustion he had earned completely.

The second day hadn’t started yet.

But the first had already said everything it needed to.