The final round of the tournament was going to be a hurdle race. It would check a mage's ability and talent to the limit. Everything they had done in the previous rounds, they would need all those skills for the final round too. This was going to be the hardest challenge for them yet.

And there was also a catch. It was said before that the people who had ranked high in the previous stages would have an advantage in this round and that was truly going to be a big advantage. The mages who had managed to rank higher would be able to somewhat choose the order of their obstacle.

The people who had managed to get even a single first position would be able to choose the order number for three obstacles, second position would get to do that for two obstacles and third position holders could only do for a single obstacle. As for the others, all their obstacles would be assigned randomly, except for the first three rounds which were the same for everyone.

There would be a total of seven obstacles in their way. In every obstacle, the competitors needed to perform a certain task that would need skillful use of magic. Only after finishing the task, they would be able to move on to the next obstacle. This was a race but the main thing of this race was not running but instead how quickly and efficiently they were able to accomplish various tasks.

So now what was the advantage in getting to choose the position of a certain obstacle. Everyone still needed to do the same number of obstacles and the same type too. Then would changing the number create any difference ? Yes, it would.

If the mages were able to do the tasks they were best at doing at the beginning, then they would be able to enter a good state and would be able to challenge the harder tasks with a focused mind. But if they got a hard task at the very beginning, then they would already be troubled and tired when challenging the other easier obstacles and would not be able to give their best to those works too. That was the reason why getting to choose the position of their obstacle was a big deal for these talented young mages.

...

Soon everyone was done with the prematch preparations and were ready to start the final round. As Mekina had managed to get first place in one round was very useful for her and she was able to choose the position for three of her obstacles.

The first obstacle they faced also had the easiest task to clear it so no one changed its position. What they needed to do was to just repair a low grade magic item. Repairing magic items was not really something that all the mages would be capable of doing. But in this city, repairing and understanding magic items was a mandatory subject that every student needed to take. So, all the top participants were generally good at doing this kind of work.

Dorothy finished the task first, closely followed by Mekina and the boy with glasses. The two of them almost finished at the same time. Even though Ganyu was very good at multitasking, her speed in finishing a single task was not very great, she was actually the ninth person to finish which was not a good start.

For the second round, everyone needed to find a special piece with special magical frequency among a lot of pieces which were also releasing magical frequencies. This was going to be a test for everyone's magic sense and how accurate they were at sensing things.

Mekina changed this round with the fifth round, which was to replicate and modify a certain magic formula. It was one of the things she was best at and even though her magic sense was not bad, it might make her stressed if she was not able to find the particular piece quickly so she decided to do this round later on.

Just as it was expected of her, she was able to both replicate and modify the whole magic formula in a very short amount of time. No one else had managed to find the needed piece even then and she was the first person to clear the second obstacle.

In the third obstacle, she needed to overwrite the circuit of a magic item with a new circuit and she needed to do that without harming the item at all. It needed a lot of precision, magic control and understanding of the magic sequence to do it properly and Mekina was also good at this type of thing.

It was actually supposed to be the last round but she put it here for the same reason as before. Normally she would need to solve a magic puzzle here and Mekina thought that doing it later would be better.

Now after the third would, her final change stated. The fourth round was also changed by her to become a round where she needed to focus on reading and understading a grimoire and later needed to answer questions asked from that same grimoire. It was actually one of the hardest rounds but Mekina out it here as it would help her in concentrating hard for the upcoming rounds where she might face some problems.

She was able to finish this round properly without making any mistakes in answering questions. It did take her a lot of time but her pace was steady and most importantly she was completely focused.

In the fifth round she needed to find the piece. As now she was super focused, she was able to find the piece without any problems at all. It did take her some time and she was most probably not the fastest to clear this round, she would still be in the top three, which was way better than what Mekina had expected.

After the fifth round she only had two more rounds left to clear. In the sixth round she needed to do some alchemy and material handling. Again not every mage was knowledgeable about alchemy but this subject was also on the mandatory list for the magic academy so every participant here should know about this at least a little bit.

This was actually not a hard round as the task the participants needed to do was easy. They were mostly giving this task to check how quickly they were able to do it. As it was a simple task, Mekina handled it perfectly and was soon ready to face the last round.

The puzzles of the last round were really quite hard and troublesome. So even though Mekina liked magic puzzles quite a bit, she was having a hard time with them. But she did not give up and logically solved the whole problem and reached the final line. As she was immersed in her puzzle solving and the other obstacles, she had no idea about the present state of the competition. Was she able to win or not ?

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