The man with the pipe looked towards Nero once more. He was crawling on the ground, his ears and eyes bleeding, his body covered in his signature blue flames. This was the worst he'd been wounded since arriving in KMA, yet there was a mad grin on his face.
It was not because he was a masochist - no, Nero was indifferent to pain. He was grinning because this is what let him know the true level of KMA. Simple, hand-to-hand fights without innate abilities or cards was very deceptive about the true combat quality of the cadets. Only in a genuine fight, without anything held back, would he come to know just how much he could improve here, and how skilled the cadets were.
The fact that Nero had been nearly crippled in the very first encounter against that white-gowned girl revealed just how devastatingly lethal her strength was. That lethality reassured him that, indeed, he was in the right place.
