Ultimate Dragon System: Grinding my way to the Top-Chapter 208: Olmo’s idea

Jelo stood there, arms folded, his expression tight with thought. He hadn’t expected things to unfold this way. The idea that a single teacher would choose a few of the strongest students to compete for representative spots... it had never even crossed his mind.

Jelo frowned slightly. To him, there was a better way.

Each group of students already had a master—someone who trained them closely, understood their strengths, their weaknesses, their growth. Wouldn’t it make more sense for each master to select the strongest from their own group? Then, from there, the chosen few could compete to decide who would represent the entire class.

It seemed simpler. Smarter. And frankly, more fair.

The logic was almost too obvious to argue with. A master spent hours with their students—drilling technique, exposing weakness, watching how they moved under pressure. Not from a platform or during a demonstration, but up close, in the kind of sessions where bad habits revealed themselves and good ones got built slowly through repetition. That kind of knowledge wasn’t something you could replicate from a distance. You couldn’t shortcut it or approximate it with a broader view. The depth of it came precisely from the proximity—from being present for the failures as much as the successes.

Olmo could observe the whole class, sure. But observing wasn’t the same as knowing.

There was a difference between watching someone fight and understanding why they fought the way they did. Between clocking a student’s results and understanding the process behind them. Between knowing what they looked like on a good day and knowing what they defaulted to when everything else stopped working. One of those things took time to see. The other only took time to pretend you had. And at this level, with this much on the line, pretending wasn’t going to cut it.

Jelo had experienced that difference himself. Tongen didn’t just watch his group perform drills—he interrupted them. Questioned them mid-sequence. Pushed them in directions they hadn’t anticipated to see what they did when their comfort was stripped away. That was a different kind of evaluation entirely. It produced a different kind of knowledge.

A master didn’t just see what a student could do. They saw what a student fell back on when everything else stopped working. That was the real measure—not the ceiling, but the floor. And no amount of observation from across a hall was going to show you that. The only way to know was to be there. Consistently. Up close. In the grind.

"Surely I’m not the only one thinking this," he muttered under his breath.

He let his gaze drift sideways without turning his head. A few students nearby were still watching the stage, expressions somewhere between focused and distracted. None of them looked like they were running the same calculation he was. Maybe they were—maybe they just hid it better. Or maybe they were simply waiting to be told what happened next, trusting the system to sort it out without questioning whether it was sorted right.

Jelo wasn’t built that way. Never had been.

He had always been more comfortable asking the question that made a room slightly uncomfortable than accepting an answer that didn’t quite fit. It wasn’t defiance—it was just how his mind worked. He needed things to make sense. And right now, the General’s approach didn’t quite clear that bar. It wasn’t wrong, exactly. It was just incomplete. And incomplete was its own kind of problem.

But unknown to him, Olmo had already arrived at the same conclusion.

Standing off to the side, Olmo watched the assembly with calm, calculating eyes. Unlike many of the others, he wasn’t surprised—just mildly dissatisfied. The current plan placed too much responsibility on the homeroom teacher, someone who hadn’t personally trained each student in depth.

Olmo, on the other hand, had trained them all—but only as a group. He knew their overall capabilities, yes, but not the finer details the individual masters would know.

And that was the problem.

The masters know their students best, he thought. They know who is strongest... and who only appears to be.

That distinction mattered more than most people gave it credit for. Appearances were easy to manufacture. A student with clean technique and confident footwork could look impressive in a group setting and still fall apart the moment they faced real resistance. The masters would know the difference. They had seen their students break and recover—or fail to recover. They had watched habits form under fatigue, under frustration, under the particular pressure of someone who actually understood what they were looking at.

Olmo had seen plenty of students who impressed from a distance. Far fewer impressed up close.

A faint sigh escaped him.

He had no interest in being dragged into endless debates—arguments over who deserved to be chosen, who was stronger, who was overlooked. That kind of chaos was inevitable with the General’s current approach. Put the decision in one person’s hands and you invited exactly that—grievances, second-guessing, the quiet resentment of students who believed they were passed over for the wrong reasons.

It wasn’t efficient. And it wasn’t accurate.

But if each group master selected their best...

It would be cleaner. Faster. More accurate.

Olmo’s gaze shifted toward the stage where the General still stood.

I’ll speak to him, he decided. After this is over.

He wasn’t the type to interrupt publicly. Timing mattered. There was no value in raising objections in front of the entire student body—that turned a structural concern into a spectacle, and spectacle had a way of getting in the way of actual solutions. Better to let the assembly conclude, let the room clear, and address it directly. Quietly. The way things actually got fixed.

As the assembly continued, his mind drifted briefly to the structure they had built within the academy. Dividing students into groups under masters had been one of their smartest decisions. It allowed for more focused training, faster growth, and a deeper understanding of each student’s potential.

And it had already shown results.

The students weren’t just stronger—they were sharper. More experienced. Many of them had already participated in small missions, gaining real exposure to the world beyond the academy. They had encountered other supers—those working quietly for the government and for the protection of ordinary people. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

They had seen enough to understand that strength wasn’t just about power.

It was about control. Judgment. Awareness.

Those things separated a student who could win a controlled match from one who could function when conditions stopped following rules. The tournament would test the former. But what the academy was ultimately building—what every mission, every drill, every grueling session under a master had been quietly pointing toward—was the latter. Olmo intended to make sure the right students stepped forward to represent that, and that meant the selection process couldn’t afford to be lazy.

Not the ones who looked strongest. The ones who were.

Olmo folded his arms, his decision firm.

Once the assembly ended, he would meet the General.

Because if this tournament was meant to showcase the very best...

Then the selection process had to be just as strong. He couldn’t just let his wonderful and less stressful idea go to waste.