The Scenario space was much smaller than Fen expected. He opened his eyes surrounded by brownish-red rocks, with a clear path marked out in front of him. The area around him was flattened into smooth stone, while an evening sky lit up the world around him. Fen couldn't see any sun of any kind, but something was making enough light for him to see.
Following the path led to a massive clearing surrounded by even bigger stones that looked like claws reaching up to the sky. And in the center of this clearing was a silver hill... Wait a minute, that hill has scales!
"Holy shit! Look at the size of that thing!" Fen whistled appreciating the Lesser Dragon's size. The Scenario description was spot on, the monster was indeed much larger and scarier than the one he fought before. It's head was probably the size of two men laying side by side, while it's whole body was much bigger than a house, probably even around the same size as an apartment building.
With it's wings outstretched however... It might be much bigger than right now when it was all curled up like that.
It seemed the massive monster heard his whistle as it's eyes snapped open, revealing golden pupils surrounded by pure silver. The entire thing was covered in silver scales, with groups of golden scales on his stomach and wings, along with a crest of gold detailing it's head.
Fen could hear the wind created by it's movement whirl past him as the monster raised it's head to look at him, stretching it's massive neck up into the sky to get a better view of him. There was no sun in the sky to cast a shadow, but even someone possessed by greed like him was intimidated by the size it showed simply by moving.
He flinched from it's sudden movements before tensing his muscles as he waited for the mutated Lesser Dragon to attack, but such an attack never came. The monster only stared at his body with it's golden eyes before raising it's heavy scaled body off the ground and shifting it's sleeping position. The ground trembled slightly as it set it's heavy head back down to rest.
"Fuu..." Fen sighed with relief.
To be honest, he didn't really believe the Points Table's words when it stated that the Duel's monster wouldn't attack until he showed the intent to attack first. Earlier when he had calmed Dey's worries by saying he could leave before getting in a fight, he'd been lying out of his ass. Thankfully, everything worked out fine.
It was just common sense to not put any faith towards an organization that lacked in a certain mental area- Cough cough, sanity, cough.
Anyways, Fen took his sweet time observing the massive beast. While he knew that it was more efficient to spend his time fighting rather than fighting, the massive reward had to be proportional to the challenge of the Scenario at the very least.
In the Erudite-ranked Scenario, he fought and killed a regular Lesser Dragon. And while part of that encounter should be attributed to his terrible luck, that monster's existence should still be accounted for in the reward of the Scenario. In that case, if that only gave him 100 points and this Scenario gave him a total of 550 points if he killed it within five minutes, then the challenge had to be at least five times harder.
But what the hell did that mean in regards to individual strength? The two Scenarios were entirely different types in the first place; there might even be a larger difference than what he estimated.
Fen hesitated in his observation after thinking about the actual strength this mutated Lesser Dragon could have. He had been extremely confident earlier, but now he was starting to doubt his own strength.
Slap!
His mind cleared after he slapped both his cheeks with his hands. The Lesser Dragon noticed the sound and hurriedly turned over on it's body to look at him again before returning back to it's slumber when it saw that there was no sign of combat.
"I can't hesitate. If I kill this thing, I get stronger. If I don't, well... then I guess I won't have to worry about getting stronger anymore." A bitter laugh escaped from his lips as the edges of his mouth turned downwards. His words did contain a point however. Fen couldn't just expect to be able to survive through all eleven of the other Tasks if he didn't take any risks to fully take advantage of his abilities and the racial talents he had. Why not just take the risk?
If he didn't, then what the point of his struggle? Did he work so hard during his time in the Program just to give up when he reached an opponent who was too scary for him to handle? Of course not.
Even after gritting his teeth and pulling his hand back, Fen still struggled to keep his body from shaking while he started to put together a Flaming Spear spellwork in between his raised hand's fingers. His heart started to pound inside his chest, and his breathing grew more shallow.
He closed and focused on his memories while his brain rapidly fired messages throughout his nervous system.
Miko's face floated inside his head, all the times she made him laugh when he had a bad day. The way she helped him study whenever he didn't understand something even when she just as clueless as him. Just how comfortable he felt with her... No matter how many times he saw her, his heart always raced like the first time he told her about how he felt.
Slowly, a glowing line manifested within the air just above his hand. The line grew in size until it started to radiate with heat.
His Mom and Dad, how happy they were to see him after he spent the day at school. When he received a bad grade, they never got upset. They stopped doing whatever they were doing and brought out the old study material hiding inside the house, reviewing it all so they could help him understand the class. They hardly ever yelled at him with anger, and only did so when they were joking around.
The Flaming Spear finally finished constructing itself, and after Fen severed his tie with the spellwork created by his Mana, it fell heavily on his hand and instantly started to burn his skin. The pain made his hand grip the familiar tool in reflex; his body was already used to the action after repeating it over and over again while training and battling his way through Scenarios.
His little sister, Alex. The moment she was born, Fen knew that she was going to be better than him. Better at socializing, better in school, better in sports, being a better person. Just thinking about her made his chest warm with pride. He always teased her for being such a great person outside the house but turning into a little devil when she was with their family, but he hoped that she understood just how much he was proud of her.
Slowly, the muscles in Fen's arm tightened and stretched in a perfect use of technique, honed throughout his training and combat experience. While his grip remained tight, his arm contracted and threw the Flaming Spear forward towards the sleeping Lesser Dragon.
Suddenly, the happy memories inside Fen's mind were polluted by terrible sights. Teens chasing him when he was alone, coming home dripping with blood and bruises covering his body. The police ignoring his explanations and pinning the blame on him, saying that he was somehow the one at fault despite the severity of his wounds.
He wasn't always big enough to dissuade people from messing with him, but he never forgot the faces of those who made him bleed.
Fen's eyes snapped open as a surge of Vital energy cascaded through his body, releasing his body's potential which had been restricted by his limiting muscles. His eyes burned with rage as energy crackled in the air around him. His arm finished it's movement and a shockwave exploded just in front of him as his Flaming Spear pierced the air and rocketed towards the mutated Lesser Dragon.
He hadn't shored up his foundations for nothing in the past two weeks; just by increasing his understanding of Mana and its applications within different spellworks Fen discovered how to make his spells faster, stronger, and overall more powerful.
Instead of letting his Mana passively follow the spellwork's path and create the Flaming Spear, Fen took full control of the magical energy and spread it how he wanted, constructing the the line of fire and condensing it until it almost resembled an entirely different magic spellwork.
It was the same type of magic, but by consuming more Mana he was able to significantly increase the weapon's piercing power. Not only would it penetrate deeper into his targets, but the further condensed flames would burn even hotter inside the body of whatever creature was unlucky enough to be his opponent.
His Flaming Spear looked like a needle compared to the massive size of the mutated Lesser Dragon, but it slid through it's hard white scales like a hot knife through butter. The monster started moving the instant it felt him attack, getting on it's feet and snapping it's head towards his direction.
But his attack hadn't even started yet.
Two dozen more improved Flaming Spears were floating in the air around him, and when Fen could clearly see the monster's eyes, he snapped his fingers and severed the connection between his Mana and the Spears. His action sent most of the magically made weapons piercing through the air towards the Lesser Dragon's head.
Four Flaming Spear remained by his side. While he didn't have to throw them and could simply use his Mana to direct the spellworks, Fen found that by throwing the Flaming Spears he could save some magical energy and increase the power behind his attacks with his physical strength.
Because they weren't supported by his strong arm strength, the Flaming Spears he sent towards the monster's head weren't nearly as powerful as his first strike. Some of them bounced off the monster's hard scales, while others barely managed to find weaker spots and make small burning cuts on the Lesser Dragon's head. None of them managed to hit it's eyes however.
The monster seemed to sense his intent as his covered it's eyes with hard ice, preventing any of the more accurate Flaming Spears from managing to injure it's essential visual organs. But, it's usage of ice magic was more than enough to make the expenditure of magical energy worth the cost because it revealed that Fen's opponent was in fact a magically enabled mutant Lesser Dragon.
'Heavens, that's a mouthful...' Fen absently thought while he threw two more Flaming Spears towards his target. His greed however was starting to get him excited. He didn't actually know to create ice yet, none of the monsters he killed were able to use that particular path of the Magical Arts and he hadn't yet found any books on how to reproduce it, so an ice-enabled Lesser Dragon was a great find.
Subconsciously, Fen had already stopped thinking of it as an opponent. In his eyes, if you rearranged the body parts and changed the colors... Yes, it looked exactly like a big chest full of treasure, waiting for him to open it.
Smack!
'Shit.'
His arrogance prevented him from noticing the snow golems that formed behind him, so when one of the ice dragon sculptures slapped him with one of its claws Fen was too focused on throwing more Flaming Spears to notice.
He went flying and crashed against one of the rocks in the arena-like field, stunned and pissed off after realizing that unlike his prior monster opponents, this Lesser Dragon apparently knew multiple different spellworks.
Just by looking up, he could see multiple ice dragons, snow golems, magically alive blizzards, and other such mob monsters that could force him to his limit if he fought against them by themselves, but the existence of the giant Lesser Dragon posed another massive threat too.
"Dey's gonna lecture the shit out of me..." Fen snarled and pulled himself out of the rocks as his wounds knit over themselves and healed.
Just as he started to prepare his magical energy for another barrage of Flaming Spears, his magical sense started blaring. Fen didn't even waste any time by looking at the cause and instantly threw up a wall of flame in front of him by using the magical energy he was originally intending to create more Flaming Spears with.
While he didn't actually know any Flaming Wall spellwork, it wasn't too difficult to manipulate the structure of his Flaming Spears to just create magically-enhanced fire and then use his magical energy to control the flames his construct produced to make a sturdy looking wall of fire.
It would be much more effective to use a Flaming Wall spellwork, but Fen always made do with what he had.
His wall came up at the perfect time. It turned out that while he was distracted with the mobs, the big boss the Lesser Dragon used it's massive reserves of Mana to send a ray of freezing energy straight towards him.
"Dragon's breath. Is that an actual thing, or is it just making it come from the mouth to look cool?" Fen didn't think that a monster would care about things such as looking cool, but he hadn't read about any thing like Dragon's Breath anywhere. The closest thing he could remember would be the first monster he encountered in the Scenario's; the big lizard that breathed fire at him. But that was much weaker than this attack. Was it because this was a mutant?
His questions went unanswered as his wall of fire absorbed the cold energy emitted by the Lesser Dragon's breath attack, while it's sculpture subordinates went around the sides of his created defense to attack him. Fen took advantage of the lack of support the Lesser Dragon could give because of his fire wall and quickly attacked the ice constructs.
He conjured two weapons using his Vital blade technique, a sword and an axe. The sword was for his right hand while the axe was for his left; while he still wasn't ambidextrous yet despite training with his left hand in those two weeks of practice, his dexterity was more than good enough to wield a blunt force tool like an axe.
While a shield might've been a smarter decision, Fen's natural ability to regenerate was strong enough to remove the need for one. Plus, a large shield would block part of his vision and so prevent him from being as free as he wanted during combat.
Against his swordsmanship skills and regeneration ability, none of the ice constructs lasted longer than a few seconds as Fen flawlessly pierced their cores again and again. Their core was the only real weakness that the golems had- the Lesser Dragon couldn't control them using Mana directly and so expended a little of it's reserves to create the core, which acted kinda like what an artificial intelligence would for a machine.
By destroying the core, the golem would quickly disintegrate back into stray magical energy that was quickly absorbed by the Marks on Fen's body. By destroying the golems not only would he reduce the number of combatants he'd have to face, but he'd also recover his expended Mana reserves at a much higher rate than his natural rate of recovery.