The moment Haruto finished speaking, the world blurred. A sharp static sound hummed in their ears, and before anyone could blink, everything vanished.
Haruto felt his body drop, his boots hitting a solid surface with a heavy clack. When his vision cleared, he looked down. He was standing directly on a massive, glowing white marble tile. The entire arena had transformed into a giant Living Chessboard, spanning as far as the eye could see.
Suddenly, a sleek, neon holographic interface materialized right in front of his face, flashing with text:
[ REGISTRATION PHASE: ASSIGN YOUR UNITS ]
Choose up to TWO piece roles for each player to initialize the Dual-Core system:
PLAYER 1: IVORY [Slots: 0/2]
PLAYER 2: BELLONA [Slots: 0/2]
PLAYER 3: LUSTRA [Slots: 0/2]
PLAYER 4: TOYA [Slots: 0/2]
PLAYER 5: HARUTO [Slots: 1/2]
Haruto tried to lift his foot to step forward, but his leg wouldn't budge. It felt like an invisible, high-density firewall was locking his boots down to the square. He looked around to check on his team, but he noticed a crucial layout anomaly: he was completely alone on the grid. Toya, Ivory, Bellona, and Lustra were all standing just outside the boundary lines of the giant board, frozen in a waiting state. They couldn't step onto the tiles yet.
"Ah, I see how it works," Haruto muttered, his fingers tapping against his chin as he analyzed the interface.
"Because I'm the Leader, the system dropped me into the grid first as the 'King' unit by default. I'm completely locked into this single coordinate box until the setup phase is complete."
He looked back at the floating screen, a sharp, tactical gleam entering his eyes. Thanks to his counter-rule—The Dual-Core Component—he didn't just have to give everyone a single standard role. With 5 players and 10 total slots available, he could stack roles, combining movement sets to create broken, multi-class hybrid pieces that Kallen's rigid system would never expect.
He glanced over at his team waiting outside the line, then looked across the board at Kallen's side, where dark, glitching silhouettes were starting to take their formations.
Haruto's bored smirk widened into a confident grin.
"Alright, team. The lobby is open, and it's time to assign the builds. Let's break this grandmaster's logic."
He raised his hand toward the holographic interface, ready to input the data.
Haruto stared at the screen, his fingers hovering over the glowing keys as his gamer brain calculated the optimum build.
If I give Toya the Queen and Knight combo, he'll have zero blind spots as a frontline attacker, Haruto analyzed, his eyes scanning the rules. But wait... look at Kallen's Rule 4. The endgame forces a 'Duel of Kings.' When it comes down to the final frame, the King can only be harmed by the opposing King. If I'm stuck as a standard, slow-moving King with a basic 1-tile movement radius, I won't have enough mobility to dodge or execute a one-shot deletion.
Haruto's smirk widened. "If the system allows an exploit, you use it."
He tapped his own profile slot and selected [Queen + King]. By merging the ultimate royal piece with his default King slot, Haruto retained his win/loss condition but gained the infinite multi-directional movement grid of the Queen. He was now a mobile boss.
Next, he looked at his physical powerhouses, Toya and Bellona. Instead of making them separate pieces, he gave them both the exact same broken hybrid combo: [Rook + Bishop].
Rook (straight lines) + Bishop (diagonals) = A Second and Third Queen. For the mid-range mages, Lustra and Ivory, he assigned them the [Knight + Pawn] combo. This gave them the unpredictable, obstacle-jumping 'L-shaped' movement of the Knight to position themselves anywhere, combined with the steady forward pressure of a Pawn.
With a final tap, Haruto locked in the class selections:
Player
Assigned Roles
Resulting Class Asset
Haruto (Leader)
King + Queen
The Sovereign Nexus (Infinite Grid Mobility)
Toya
Rook + Bishop
The Iron Vanguard Queen (Infinite Linear Strike)
Bellona
Rook + Bishop
The War Goddess Queen (Infinite Linear Strike)
Ivory
Knight + Pawn
The Reality Grid Knight (Jumping Artillery)
Lustra
Knight + Pawn
The Elemental Grid Knight (Jumping Artillery)
The moment the builds locked, the screen glitched and shifted into a tactical overhead Spawn Point Map. The display showed their side of the chessboard with two horizontal rows highlighting active spawn tiles, alongside his teammates' names blinking in the queue.
"Perfect. It's a textbook tactical shooter setup phase," Haruto muttered. Without wasting a single frame, he dragged and dropped their icons onto the grid, creating the ultimate starter synergy:
He placed Toya dead center on the frontline row. Toya was their primary spearhead, built to shatter Kallen's defenses through the middle channel.
He placed Lustra and Ivory directly to the left and right of Toya. From these coordinates, their Knight movement allowed them to leap over Toya to provide instant mid-range magical buffs, creating an aggressive zone control.
Finally, Haruto placed himself and Bellona on the baseline row right behind the team. They were the ultimate defensive line—ready to clean up any units that bypassed the front or intercept flankers.
The moment Haruto finalized the coordinates, a blinding pillar of light shot down onto each selected tile. One by one, Toya, Bellona, Ivory, and Lustra materialized inside their locked boxes, their enchanted armors humming with the raw power of their combined chess roles.
Across the alternating black-and-white tiles, 50 paces away, Kallen's dark, glitching 16-piece army finished loading into the server.
Haruto closed his hand around his steel sword, his eyes fixed on Kallen's coordinates as the holographic barrier between the two rows began to translucent lock.
As the grid lines settled and the opposing army fully rendered on the opposite side of the board, Haruto's eyes scanned Kallen's formation. For a second, he blinked in surprise.
Kallen hadn't just brought a standard 5-man party. Standing in locked coordinates across the black-and-white tiles were all 16 pieces. A complete, traditional chess army—8 Pawns lined up in the front row, with Rooks, Knights, Bishops, a Queen, and Kallen himself acting as the King in the back.
But the initial shock vanished from Haruto's face in less than a frame, replaced by a cold, pitiful smirk. What an absolute idiot, Haruto thought, nearly laughing at the screen. He's a literal smooth-brain.
Haruto's gamer mind instantly cross-referenced Kallen's own conditions against the setup. According to Kallen's Rule 2, "Low-Tier" pieces like Pawns and Bishops cannot inflict lethal damage or capture "High-Tier" units (King, Queen, Rook, Knight).
Because Haruto had utilized the Dual-Core Component to merge roles, every single member of his 5-man party was technically classified as a High-Tier unit.
Out of his 16 pieces, 8 Pawns and 2 Bishops are instantly rendered useless, Haruto calculated, watching the numerical data adjust on his HUD. They literally don't have the system authority to delete a single one of us. Ten of his pieces are completely dead weight from turn one!
Kallen had completely failed to utilize the piece-mixing exploit. By keeping his units standard, Kallen was still a base-model King—meaning his movement profile was locked to a miserable 1-tile radius. When the endgame triggered, he would be a sitting duck against Haruto's high-mobility Queen-King build.
He thought bringing a full army would intimidate me, Haruto thought, his fingers tightening around his steel sword as the countdown timer hit its final seconds. But he didn't realize that in a game of logic, raw numbers don't mean a thing if your code is flawed. Still... with the damage-equalization rule active, this isn't just a test of physical stats or raw magic anymore. It's a synchronized test of physical endurance and mental sanity for the whole team.
Haruto clicked the glowing "READY" prompt on the holographic screen floating before him. Instantly, the system's mechanical voice echoed across the stadium, and a massive countdown clock materialized in the sky:
[ WIZARD QUEST: FINAL PROCESS FIGHT ]
3... 2... 1... START!
The moment the timer hit zero, Kallen's vanguard snarled and surged forward, weapons drawn, intending to blitz Haruto's party before they could even process the field layout.
THUD! A deafening acoustic boom rippled across the sand as Kallen's front row smashed face-first into an invisible, vertical firewall. They staggered back, rubbing their heads in confusion. The translucent grid lines separating the alternating black-and-white marble tiles pulsed with an unyielding neon light.
Everyone instantly realized the absolute truth of the domain: they were completely bound by the system rules. Physical free-roaming was disabled.
"Looks like we're locked into our turns," Haruto muttered, his voice carrying effortlessly across the party link. He glanced at Toya and the girls.
"I'll see you guys on the other side of the board once we win this game."
Before Kallen could even shout an order, the entire amphitheater erupted into a deafening, chaotic roar. The sky above them fractured with golden light as two gargantuan, glowing digital health bars materialized directly above the factions, calculating the collective pools created by Haruto's Equalized Data Distribution rule.
The crowd stared up, completely stunned into silence as the numerical values rendered:
[TEAM KALLEN HP POOL]: 10,000 / 10,000
[TEAM HARUTO HP POOL]: 1,000,000,000 / 1,000,000,000
Kallen's jaw dropped. The jaw of every single noble, student, and royal guard in the VIP pavilion dropped. One billion hit points. It was an astronomical, completely broken anomaly.
Kallen's eyes bulged as he stared at the glowing numbers in the sky. The manic grin he had been wearing completely vanished, replaced by a look of sheer, unadulterated terror. He looked back and forth between his pathetic 10,000 HP bar and the monolithic 1000,000,000 HP bar floating over Haruto's head. The number was an absolute mountain.
"W-What the hell is this?!" Kallen stammered, his voice cracking through the stadium audio link.
"a billion?! Are you kidding me?! Even if my team stands here and beats on you all day long... even if we attack you until the sun goes down, we won't even scratch the surface of that pool!"
Behind Kallen, his vanguard team members were trembling, their weapons shaking in their grips. They looked at Kallen with pale faces, completely losing their battle morale before the first turn could even resolve. "Boss... what do we do?" one of them whispered, his eyes wide with panic.
"That's not a student party. That's a HP pool of layer 50 boss or even higher!"
Kallen's mind raced as he stared at Haruto, his teeth grinding in frustration. How did a worthless glitch accumulate this much baseline data?! he thought frantically. Even with a pooled team stat, human students shouldn't have variables this high. Where is this massive energy signature coming from?!
Haruto stared at his own team's HP, his gamer brain processing the numbers instantly. Holy crap... I knew they were high-tier, but this is insane, he thought, cutting a glance toward Ivory, Lustra, and Bellona. My counter-rule pooled our entire team's stats. This billion-point monstrosity is the collective HP of three Level 90 Goddesses and level 60 Toya. Kallen's team is looking at a literal ant to them.
But the celebration didn't last a single frame.
BZZZZZZZZT!
A harsh, blood-red flash violently detonated across Haruto's side of the board, blinding the stadium. A massive, glitching system error box slammed onto the holographic display, the word [VIOLATION] pulsing in angry crimson text.
CRITICAL SYSTEM ALERT: PENALTY ENFORCED
RULE BREAK DETECTED IN: [THE DUAL-CORE COMPONENT]
"A true game requires a full set. Each team must consist of 16 'Pieces.' To fill the gap, any player may occupy up to two 'Piece Slots' simultaneously, merging their movement sets and properties into a single entity."
SYSTEM LOG: Party Haruto contains 5 Active Players. Max allowed slots per player = 2.
TOTAL CONSTRUCTED PIECES: 5 Players × 2 Slots = 10 Pieces.
ERROR: Faction has failed to meet the mandatory 16-Piece minimum Requirement stipulated by the core code of the rule.
INSUFFICIENT DATA SET: 6 slots remain empty. The board logic is broken.
Haruto's eyes went wide as a sharp, agonizing phantom shockwave rippled through his chest, hitting Toya and the goddesses simultaneously via their shared link.
He looked up at the sky in horror. The massive, golden one-billion HP bar violently cracked down the center. The numbers began to roll backward at terrifying, light-speed velocity.
[TEAM HARUTO HP POOL]: 1,000,000,000 ➡️ 500,000,000
A severe, non-negotiable 50% Illegal Configuration Penalty had just been executed by the server, cutting their massive health pool clean in half before Turn 1 could even commence.
Across the grid, Kallen's stunned look twisted into a manic, hysterical laugh.
"Haha! Look at that! You tried to cheat, you pathetic glitch, and the Quest just auto-balanced your cheating ass!"
Haruto gripped his enchanted steel sword, sweat dripping down his temple as his mind raced to patch the exploit flaw. Damn it! I accounted for the mixing, but the system's hard-coding demands a full 16-piece set to initialize the game loop without a penalty buffer! We are down six pieces, and our health is bleeding out!