PoV Folarin
When Forren returned, he was holding a couple of fish, one in each hand. His body had undergone an extraordinary transformation as he had put up a lot of muscles. His skin looked a bit darker; he had put on a lot of weight, and he looked stronger than ever.
Diego had undergone a similar transformation; however, he was nowhere near the same level as Forren, as he had bulked up a bit. It was nothing too drastic; he had gained a bit of size, but it wasn't to the point of making him look like a complete monster. At best, he looked more fit.
He was currently only wearing his underwear, holding those special crustaceans by the long extendable antennas they also used as weapons. There were no injuries on his body, and all wounds had healed.
'Did he die? Do we have to worry about his gas now?' That was the first thought that entered my mind.
"I fucking hate these things." Diego shouted while throwing those creatures at my feet.
"Boss, you shouldn't force Folarin to do most of the cooking." While taking the crustacean away from me, Forren said this.
Okay, we didn't need this because we don't know if it's edible." He said this before picking up his weapons and getting to work on his swings.
I really didn't mind cooking that thing for Forren. After choosing this team to do the trial, I knew I was the weakest, so I tried not to burden them.
Among the two, Forren was the kindest; he was thoughtful and gentle with his words, whereas Diego oftentimes seemed to lack that sort of tact, but all that mattered was that he was still willing to protect us at the end of the day.
Forren picked up the weird-looking lobster from the ground and quickly grabbed a pan from one of our shared backpacks—a precious non-stick pan that only cost a fortune and a half. He then cracked open the shell with his bare hands, ripped away all the meat, and cooked it in the pan.
'Shouldn't you boil that? I guess this is also fine; you probably won't die anyway thanks to your superbody, so a pan should do just fine.' I wanted to say but decided to remain quiet.
I returned to pay attention to Valis to check how she was doing and noticed that she had lost her focus and was now making cloudy Paisons.
'I regret it; maybe I shouldn't have accepted that deal. Sure, she has a lot of mana, but with such poor control over it, she's bound to become more and more unstable as time passes.'
"Valis, once you're able to create ten decent paisons in a row, we'll be able to start working on the next step." I said this while dragging her away from the others in order for her not to get distracted.
While she was out training, I started measuring the amount of mana I needed to roughly use the elements.
I started trying to lift a handful of dirt with one paison, but that was impossible, so I used one more, and so on till I managed to barely lift it. It took me about seven paisons to lift a handful of dirt; to put more context on it, to create a small sphere and shoot it like a bullet, I roughly needed three.
'The cost of this is bound to rise if we keep using it. Unless I go out of my way to change my mana, the elements will probably remain off limits. The cost will probably rise over time as the mana level rises; at this point, unless I change the way my mana flows internally, it will probably be more cost-efficient to simply create and control elements rather than using the ones around me.'
Forcefully changing one's mana to match the characteristics of an element is something often used by criminals. It can also become illegal, depending on what you produce. I remember one famous terrorist who was able to produce gold. It was an extremely rare case, mainly caused by genetics and a huge amount of conditioning. The most common elements are fire or water, which are equally destructive.
Water is actually the most damaging of the two. I remember hearing a lot about people in the suburbs illegally creating water from mana, creating tons of water every day—so much water that it actually started to cause irreversible consequences as well as raising the mana levels and increasing the chance of beast mutations.
Most countries try to limit the number of elemental users due to the rise in environmental damage their elements cause. It's not something that affects us, but humans can't handle that power well, and neither can most other animals.
'Now that I think about it, how come none of the creatures I've seen so far had any trouble with this much mana? It's at least ten times the amount there was back home and over five thousand times the amount there was back in Diego's days.'
The rise of mana in the environment is inevitable whenever there's a magic race living in it; the problems come afterwards. Once the mana rises to a certain level, it'll start affecting all the creatures, slowly morphing them into magical ones and killing off the few that couldn't adapt. That cycle continues until the mana levels rise so rapidly that no creature can adapt in time, killing off the entire planet.
Valis interrupted my train of thought by showing me 15 paisons of medium- to low-quality. They weren't completely transparent, and some of them were mildly uneven.
"See? I told you I'm a quick learner; give me a couple more days and I'll be done with this." She happily announced it, proudly showing me the fruits of her labor.
"We've only just begun training; this is still something very basic; soon we'll have to deal with more complex crystallization and element conversion, and maybe, if you keep training with this amount of effort, I could even start teaching you some very basic healing magic." I said that while pretending to carefully check her paisons one by one.
I couldn't help but smile while looking at her deformed paisons, reminiscing about past times spent cursing my teachers for forcing me to keep doing this painful and boring exercise.
"Trust me, give me a couple more days, and I'll have this technique mastered already!"
"While it's beneficial to keep a positive mindset, I'm sorry to say that this is not the type of exercise you can get rid of. To keep your body and mind conditioned, you'll need to keep doing this until the day you finally retire. Precision and speed are the two most important things for a combat mage, after all." I explained while giving her back one of her paison.
"Now for your next exercise, you need to use the mana inside this paison to lift a cup's worth of water and use it to cut down a tree... No, no, no, that'll waste precious water... How about... pebbles? This amount is perfect to turn even pebbles into formidable weapons. Just make sure to not stop creating paisons, or else you'll regret it one day, trust me." As I kept talking, I noticed her face lost all hope; she quickly lost energy to sit straight and looked tired just at the mere thought of exercising like this every day.
"Are you serious?" she asked me with a dumbfounded look on her face.
"Absolutely, only once you're capable of producing perfect marbles even under pressure can you probably stop doing this exercise daily. By that point, you can try to experiment a bit, increasing the size, making the marble shine, and all kinds of weird stuff." I said this while creating a dozen more paisons.
She rolled her eyes and laid down on her back, complaining about the exercise and trying to negotiate for a better deal. After a certain point, I simply stopped listening to her and kept working on my training.
"Why are you so hellbent on using that?" Someone shouted behind us; the voice belonged to Tsuitame.
They returned from their hunt, with Satsui carrying most of the catch and his brother eating one raw.
"It's good to have an ace up your sleeve." Responded Satsui.
"There is no need."
"I can't, Tsui! I can't let their sacrifice go to waste!" Satsui shouted back, stopping his brother from uttering anymore words.
"I know you're worried about me, but I can't do this to them; our enemy is still alive. Who knows what will happen to us and the enemies we'll encounter? I still need them." He added.
Satsui waved his hand at me as soon as we made eye contact, smiling. Tsuitame simply nodded upward and kept following his brother.
Tsuitame then started walking towards us and was promptly stopped by his brother. He whispered something to Tsuitame and went towards the shelter. Instead, Tsuitame stood still, growling. His eyes had gone red, and he was trembling in rage.
"THOSE ARE FORBIDDEN ARTS FOR A REASON!" He shouted, grabbing both shoulders.
"I already told you why I couldn't afford to let go of them. Case closed." He responded, shrugging him off.
As I turned my eyes back to Valis, I noticed that she had stopped her training and was totally engrossed in the small quarrel between Satsui and Tsuitame.
"Keep training, Valis!" While pinching her cheeks, I said this.
"Aren't you curious about what they're talking about?" She replied.
"It's pretty obvious to guess that they're talking about the black thing that then got mixed in with his flames. Now get back to training." After admonishing her, she reluctantly went back to training, often glancing over at the two quarreling brothers.
Half an hour later, Forren messaged us, telling us that Diego went alone to face the second stage.
"He can probably handle the situation alone, so we shouldn't intervene." I replied.
"I think we should go and help him." In the group chat, Satsui said
"Diego's body releases a toxic gas whenever he is gravely injured. I wouldn't recommend going there." I quickly responded.
"Can I stop now? I feel like my head is about to explode." Valis showed me a couple of extremely dense paisons in her hand.
It looked better than the rest she presented me so far because it was the most see-through of them all, but it was mainly because it's easier to manipulate a more dense mana. Instead, the small marble's weight was off the charts; it was probably around two kilograms or a bit more, and the shape was still uneven.
'So six hours is probably the limit; this is how far her focus will allow her to go. I hope this is just because she isn't used to this kind of training; we still have too much to learn and not enough time to learn it.'
"Yes, of course you can rest." I responded.
'I wish we had a bit more time to prepare ourselves before being thrown out into a wild forest.'
"I'm sure this is a very fair position; your teammates are strong and fast enough to hunt whatever creature is living here; the number of venomous creatures is the lowest compared to the rest of the planet; plus, there are plenty of creatures to hunt or fish in close proximity to a large drinkable body of water." An unfamiliar voice spoke to me from behind.
It scared me, so I immediately jumped away, screaming. I then noticed that the world had stopped and turned gray.
"Hi! Do you remember me?" The voice belonged to a small kid with long white hair and red eyes.
He was mostly naked, floating on a small hoverboard with a lot of monsters drawn on it.
'The God of Combat...'
"Exactly!" He said it in a cheerful tone.
"I came here because of your planet. Apparently, they want to censor some things and want you to stop showing off your magic skills to the whole world." While hovering around me, he said this.
"Well, with that in mind, how do I deal with them? Then there's the problem of—"
"You can solve this problem in any way you see fit." I answered; after all, there was no reason for him to ask me about such trivial things.
"I knew you would say that." He said this, smiling ominously before disappearing.
The world started regaining its color, and slowly, time started to flow again.
"This is my last gift to you as thanks."
His voice echoed in my head as many images were shown.
A golden army, composed mostly of humans but also having many other human-like monsters, all wearing golden mechanical armor and equipped with a mechanical set of wings and a weird lance that could also shoot lasers.
Descending from the skies to every city, killing every country's leader, and taking control of each city Executing every leader's family and eradicating their bloodline entirely, destroying every ship that was currently traveling, all while chanting a strange hymn. Then, once the military was destabilized, many portals appeared, and their ships started coming down.
They bombarded the prisons, killing every prisoner that tried to escape and publicly executing the ones that didn't. They quickly got rid of every criminal organization by executing their members; it was a purge so large that it killed almost one fifth of the population. Forcing each citizen to stay isolated in their homes, making sure they were watching us while many statues of that God replaced every church.
"What the—who are those people?" I asked, but it was already too late, and God had left me.
"What are you talking about?" Asked Valis.
"Nothing; it was just... nothing."
'Argh! It's useless to get worried now.'
PoV Diego
As I entered the stage, I found myself in front of a castle on top of a huge hill.
In front of me, there was an army of extremely angry peasants holding whatever farming tool they could get a hold of, drenched in blood, carrying the heads of various knights.
The objective this time had a choice: to calm down the rebels or kill them.
The peasants that were charging were soon killed by the archers that were guarding the castle's wall.
'What an annoying task to have first, and how can I even possibly calm them down when they're already at the point of revolting? At the very least, it's not asking me to protect someone; this gives a lot of room to be spared when choosing how to specifically deal with this situation.'
"So annoying." I complained while analyzing the peasants.
'Could my powers scare them away? Would that fear them? I've met quite a share of enemies who, after figuring out how my abilities worked, instead of getting scared somehow got even more excited, doing their best to make me reset at least once.' I thought as I was scratching my head, deep in thought.
"Dubir, come out!" The sword materialized in front of me.
Its shape was similar to that of a katana; it had a dark blade with some red veins all over it.
"Prepare the dark water!" I heard someone shouting from the other side of the walls.
In the meantime, the peasants were charging, using the corpses of their dead allies as a shield to protect themselves from the rain of arrows.
I noticed some of them carrying ladders. ladders long enough to reach the top of the walls.
'How convenient.' I thought.
I then started looking around and saw the city from which they were coming. They had the support of the local army, and their chivalry was headed towards us.
"Death to the dogs of Judemberks!" That was what all those people were screaming as they were charging.
"Dubir, you have no problem with me killing all of those people, right?" I asked but got no answer.
'Well, at least I tried.'
One of them managed to get close to me, and I beheaded him before he could attack me.
As I charged them, I used the ability on most of my body, leaving only my skin vulnerable so that even if I got hit by an arrow, I wouldn't be forced to reset my body and I wouldn't need to fight naked.
The sword was incredible. As I swung my sword many times, it didn't get damaged, even when it clashed against other swords.
My first kill was a middle-aged man. He was at the forefront of the charge, encouraging the others to follow his lead and not falter now that their freedom was near. I didn't bother to see what he looked like; giving him a face was pointless after all. He tried to impale me with his spear but was too weak to do so.
When I grabbed it by the shaft, I noticed that he had no strength left in his body, so I pulled him in and kicked him down on the ground before stabbing him in the throat using the sword.
I used my left hand to grab and block an incoming spear aimed at my neck, then from the throat of the old geezer at my feet I swung the sword to the side, raising high and cutting off the arm of another rebel.
I then activated my ability and turned most of my top half of the body intangible as a wall of ratchets and wooden spears came my way. The warriors were so excited that they kept advancing, not noticing that they hadn't actually pierced my body, so as soon as they entered the range of my sword, I decapitated them all with a single swing of my sword.
Blood splattered all over the place, dirtying my clothes.
'How annoying.'
Shortly after, I was hit a couple of times by the arrows, on my back and on my left shoulder, just as I undid the intangibility and was starting to retreat closer to the wall now that the rebels were panicking.
After the first couple of casualties, the rebels began acting more wary of me. While most of them would simply ignore my attempts at slowing them down, there were always a dozen or so men who would try to stop me, whether by impaling me or using weird magic to turn the ground I was standing on into mud.
I managed to take out a couple of them before being blinded by a rebel throwing mud at me. They used that moment to tie me down using what felt like some sort of fabric.
'Annoying…'
"He is a devil; don't attack him!" Shouted the man tying me.
'Maybe I should let them fight each other a bit to save some energy.'
They threw me aside and kept charging the castle. It was at that point that a teenage kid tried to strangle me.
'Ok, maybe let's not do that.'
I applied my ability to my neck as well as my arms to free myself from the rope. I put both of my thumbs in the eyes of my enemy, and once he tried to stop my hands, I grabbed my sword and killed him.
Now I was not only covered in blood, but also in mud.
As I turned to watch what the rebels were doing, I saw them covered in the oil the guards threw at them. Then the guards quickly set all those people on fire.
Even on fire, those rebels were trying to get inside the castle.
The trained knights made quick work of them and kept pouring down the oil on them.
I was then once again stabbed from behind, this time by a sword. One of them even tried to set me on fire. I simply rushed at him and ripped his heart out of his body.
"HOW ANNOYING!" I shouted while taking that sword and mowing down whoever came within my range.
At first it was just a bunch of men, but armed with makeshift weapons carved out of wood; only a few were carrying weapons, so it was rather easy to kill them.
I took a step back, deflected one of those weapons, took another step back to avoid getting hit to my left side by a spear, grabbed it by the shaft, and raised the sword. One unlucky peasant tried to tackle me from the right side in order to stop me from breaking their precious weapon and ultimately ended up being split in half by the same sword.
After I grabbed the spear by the shaft, I pulled it closer and broke its shaft with a kick. I was then hit to the right side by a wooden club. It hurt a bit, but it wasn't a debilitating blow. However, as the injuries kept increasing, I started to feel weaker with each passing second.
I backed away by a couple steps and then dove to avoid a blow to the head coming from my left side. I quickly turned around, enduring the pain of the many wounds on my back, and stabbed my opponent under his jaw with the sword going through his head and coming out on the other side, piercing his brain.
I kicked him away as I swung down the sword, opening his chest in two. I quickly stepped to the side to get closer to the walls of the fortress as the enemies were about to overwhelm me with sheer numbers. I swung down the blade once more to kill someone who got too close to me.
Someone next to the victim quickly dived in to catch the sword and pulled me in with all of its strength.
'Fine, if you want it so badly, have it!' I thought as I let go of the sword and began turning my body intangible and advanced forward, all I needed was to keep my feet tangible so that I could walk on the ground and turn it on and off with my hands.
And so I did, punching, grabbing, and squeezing the brains of everyone I came across until no more rebels dared to advance towards me, then I walked back to take my sword back.
It was currently stuck in the abdomen of the guy that was pulling me; he must've stabbed himself when I let go of the sword; he was still alive, so as I extracted the sword, I made sure to cut open his abdomen and let his guts leak out of his body.
'With this, my job is halfway done; now that the rebels are taking longer to invade the walls because of me, I can finally—' In the meantime, one of the knights in charge of defending the wall jumped the over thirty-meter-tall wall and landed on his feet.
Along with him, an entire squad of knights jumped down the castle's walls. The knight in front quickly unsheathed his sword and firmly grasped it with both hands as he charged forward, his eyes staring directly at me.
I was confused at first; we were allies; why was he going against his ally? Was he a traitor? Was this supposed to happen from the start? Did I go past the wall in order to deal with the insubordinates so that the remaining warriors could better protect the walls?
As the knight advanced forward, he swung his sword, aiming at my neck. I avoided it by taking a quick step back, and then I raised my right hand, ready to strike him down.
From the sides, two spears attempted stabbing me at my right and left sides. The spearmen then spun their weapons as they advanced forward; they were trying to get to my sides.
'It doesn't matter if there's a hole in front of your formation!' I proudly shouted in my mind as I swung down the sword, aiming it at the head of the charging warrior leader. I didn't quite follow what happened afterwards, but I heard the sound of metal clashing, yet I was the one on the losing end as a small cut slowly opened itself after the clash; it went from the right side of my cheek to my forehead.
Immediately after another soldier armed with just a sword and shield rushed forward, the leader put his foot over my sword and kept it stuck on the ground as the other knight kicked me on my right bicep, pushing me away from my weapon.
I didn't notice that the gates of the castle were open and that the enemy troops inside had already surrounded me.
'This should be a favorable enough spot.'
I thought while turning off my intangibility and letting all my enemies pierce my body and cut off my head, starting the process of reset.
'I need to save the remaining two uses for the chivalry that's about to charge.'
Contrary to what I thought, chivalry came to help us kill the rebels.
In the gas, I heard many people crying, begging for help, only to be murdered by the knights who had already surrounded the hill.
Everything seemed to be going well; my presence was barely needed there, so I decided to lay down on the ground and enjoy a quick nap while the soldiers were flanking the poor rebels.
It took roughly 4 hours. At that time, I had to hear most of the dying rebels cursing me out and wishing me every terrible thing a farmer could imagine.
Once everything was over, I was transported back to our little base in the forest.
"I'm hungry." I blurted it out randomly.
"How was the second stage?" asked Folarin.
She was sitting in front of the campfire, cooking some of the food we brought back with us from the floating island.
"Easy as usual." I answered without looking at her.
"We were worried since you took so much time, next- "
"There's no need to worry about me; although, I must say, it feels very weird to fight someone with a sword. I wasn't really prepared for this kind of combat, but it has been a decent learning experience nonetheless." While lying down on the floor, I answered her.
"So, how was your EXPERIMENT?" Asked me, Satsui.
He was behind me, butchering the prey he and his brother had caught during the day.
"Failure," I answered while getting up.
"Forren! Give me something to eat! I'm starving here." I shouted.
"He's not here. He went fishing at the lake. The only ones here are Folarin and us." Responded Satsui's younger brother.
'You could've simply said that he's gone somewhere with Valis...'
"Ah! Satsui said that we should relocate as far away from that forest as possible." Folarin added, pointing at some extremely tall and large trees in the distance.
"Apparently it's an extremely dangerous zone with dangerous magical beasts that they've never seen before." She added.
"Just when I was finally getting used to this place..." I commented with a deep sigh.
I had some trouble getting up. I felt a lot of strain in my knees and at the back of my knees.
"Did something interesting happen while I was away?" I asked Folarin.
"Tsuitame bought a pot, so now we can use it to boil the clean water we can obtain with that." She said this while pointing at a water tank filled with what seemed to be dirt, pebbles, and moss at the bottom.
At that point, my stomach started to growl.
Folarin then took a can of tuna and threw it at me.
"That's your lunch. You'll have to wait till the others come back to get your dinner." She said.
"Are you serious? Just this much for my lunch? For fuck's sake, I completed the second stage alone."
"I'm sorry, Forren needed to eat a lot more than I anticipated, so this is the only thing left from today's lunch."
'Well, it makes sense; I can't do anything about that. I hope we can feed him well, so his body doesn't fail us when we need it most.'
'And to think that this morning I was thinking about buying some seed to start cultivating our food—thankfully I didn't. We still need to somehow secure a way to get water and food; we've already spent probably over half our total budget on tools, and we still haven't secured a safe place to stay. At this rate, we might end up kicking the bucket because of the survival part instead of the stages.'
I threw away the empty can and laid down to think.
'Couldn't we hunt those magical creatures? Maybe if we spend some more, we could find ways to repel magical creatures so we won't have to worry about them and stay here. Once that is done, I could go in and figure out how they work, and with that knowledge, we would have no trouble hunting them.'
"If I clear one stage every two days, we might—"
"You can't. There must be a reason why they gave us ten years to complete 150 stages." Folarin quickly interrupted my train of thought.
'How bothersome.' I thought.
'I know.' A voice in my head responded.