Kralis pulled a single red star core out from the mouth of the dead ant. The ant came up to his waist, but it was still an ant, even if it was filled with stellar essence. It wasn’t even a fight. He appeared in front of the ant, summoned his staff and caved its head in. He scowled knowing that this wasn’t enough to ensure a passing grade.

  Only a few hours had passed since the field assessment began, and it was slow going. Everyone believed that the bug nest that Lodi hyped up would be swarming with Celestials of different kinds, but they were wrong. So far, only three Celestials had been found, and all three of them had been killed by one of the team leaders with ease. Volis killed the first, Vera killed the second, and Kralis just killed the third.

  Kralis crushed the core in his hand and immediately felt invigorated as the stellar essence rushed into his own stellar core, making him one step closer to being a main sequence. He turned back towards the rest of the group and started walking. The entire time, his eyes were on Arden.

  Arden paid little attention to the sulking man-child. He was thinking of the weakness and rarity of the Celestials they’d found so far. It was reminding him of the Mausoleum of the Maverick. Back then, boredom was the main killer. There were only two moments where that stargate became interesting, and it was the large room where Arden got his Bone Talons, and the Maverick itself. He hoped this one would be more enjoyable.

  “You’re thinking this is boring, aren’t you?” Vera asked, perfectly reading his mind.

  “It’s too soon to come to a conclusion," he said. “I’m just wondering if all Stargates are light on monsters in the beginning.”

  “For the most part,” Lodi said from in front of them. “I assure you all that tomorrow we’ll start to see a lot more, so be ready.”

  “Yes, Instructor," Arden said. “I forgot that you already have the info from the Association.”

  She shot him a glance, then looked away.

  Arden focused on the ant corpse. Its head was already smashed in, and the core was removed, but Arden believed it was a waste to let the rest of the body stay there. He wanted to take it and harvest it, but he couldn’t just do that. He wanted to keep the fact that he had a white-tier Satellite a secret, but there was a much more simple reason why he didn’t go and yoink the ant body. It belonged to Kralis. His kill, his loot.

  “U-um!” Kepler said loudly, raising a hand. Naturally, everyone, Kralis included, turned their attention to the meek girl hiding half behind Sya. “C-can I use that?”

  Kralis looked at the girl and who she was standing with. He wanted to tell her and her party to go dive under a live Celestial, but with the proctor watching for his reaction, he changed his tune. Of course, he still wasn’t pleased about it.

  “...Do what you want,” he said.

  Kepler’s face lit up and ran towards the body of the dead ant. She circled around it and dropped to her knees at its abdomen. Red sparks appeared in her hand as one of her tools from her trial appeared. It was a cartoonishly large syringe. She stabbed it into the ant’s abdomen and started pulling up on the plunger, filling it with a viscous black substance.

  After the syringe was filled completely, Kepler's eyes glowed briefly before she deposited the Satellite back into her soul cluster. She was mumbling to herself on her way back to the group.

  “Low-grade celestinoponeratoxin…It's like a stronger variant of the mundane poneratoxin used by bullet ants…Even a small injection of normal poneratoxin is recorded as causing as much pain as a gunshot…Mundane poneratoxin was also shown to be an insecticide because of its paralyzing qualities against other bugs…This hunt just got a lot more interesting…”

  When Kepler looked up she noticed that the majority of the participants were looking at her strangely, like she had just been caught doing something taboo. She immediately blushed bright red and looked down with anxious tears in her eyes. Her only comfort was that her current team didn't appear troubled at all.

  “Yeah, you'll fit right in,” Sya said.

  *****

  Another few hours passed, and though there was no sun underground in the bug nest, every Starborn still felt the pull of sleep start calling to them. Most of them had only been Starborn for a few weeks to a few months, so they had yet to leave behind their human habits.

  There were a few people who were doing fine. Volis’ team, Kralis and the edgy guy on his team, Vera, and Lodi were all doing just fine. The tenured and the trained.

  “We’re almost to the first checkpoint,” Lodi said. “We'll have a rest stop every night to rest and recharge before continuing.”

  “Instructor, what if we don't feel tired enough to rest?” Kralis asked. “Can we continue on?”

  Lodi shook her head.

  “No. In fact, anyone who leaves the resting area before we depart in the morning will automatically fail. Just because you and a few others are capable of continuing doesn't mean that you should. You guys are red-tier, so you're still mostly human. It'll take around a year for most Starborn to abandon their human impulses like sleeping and eating unless you've been trained.”

  Lodi looked ahead where a different type of Celestial was waiting. Everyone stared at it, revolted. Even a mundane version of the bug would have caused people to grimace, but this one was up their waists like the ant that came before it. This one was an affront to God.

  “Looks like a grand roach,” Lodi observed. “Any takers?”

  Arden stared at the huge cockroach as its antenna flicked in their direction. Unlike the ants that came before this one, Arden had no desire to harvest roach materials, even if it was just biomass.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  ‘Screw that. At least ant exo-skelotons look good. Nobody wants a piece of roach equipment.’

  “Can't you do it?” Someone asked.

  “I am only supposed to step in if you guys are in danger,” Lodi responded, not wanting to go out there either.

  “I feel like I'm being violated,” Arden said. “Does that count?”

  “Is your chastity at risk?”

  “No.”

  “Then no.”

  Lodi scanned the group of prospective Starborn warriors and was slightly surprised to see that no one was taking a step forward. Not even Kralis, ever desperate to prove himself.

  Her eyes eventually settled on someone who was looking at the grand roach like a test subject. There was a slight hint of disgust in her eyes, but there was more morbid fascination than anything. Lodi spoke to her.

  “Kepler, are you up for this?”

  With Lodi's words, Kepler realized that all eyes were on her again, and her detached clinical attitude slipped back into her normal anxiety.

  “U-um, I-I'm not s-sure. I've never f-fought a Celestial on my own before…”

  Sya’s eyes met Lodi's.

  “What if we went down with her?” Sya asked. “Moral support, you know?”

  Lodi gave it some thought, then she gave her blessing.

  “So long as you don't do any attacking of your own, I'll allow it.”

  Sya flashed the anxious girl and smile and patted her on the back.

  “Feel any less tense?” She asked.

  “Y-yes! Thank you.”

  “We'll be with you the entire time. Well, Arden will at least. He's our tank for now.”

  Arden looked at the grand roaches' grand antennae. They were already absurdly long on a normal mundane cockroach, but these ones were just ridiculous. They were like the antlers of the streamer stag, but had all of their sublime beauty replaced with horror.

  He suddenly wished that he had stepped up to kill the damn roach earlier. At least then it would be dead. Doing it this way, he would have to hold out against it while Kepler killed it. He shuddered at the thought of the roach wrapping its thin, long feelers around his arms. To call it a bad touch would be an understatement.

  “If we're gonna do this, we're gonna do this right,” he said to Kepler. “Do you have any weapons aside from your poison?”

  “No,” she said. “I couldn't afford one.”

  Arden nodded then pulled a rigid streamer stag antler out of his inventory. Despite it being several weeks since it was used, the tip was still stained red with the blood of its original host. He offered the makeshift spear to the aspiring alchemist.

  “You do now.”

  *****

  Arden stood a few meters in front of the grand roach. As before, he was clad in his Stoneflesh Shroud without his hands guarded in his Bone Talons. He suddenly regret agreeing to be the pacifist tank for Kepler. No attacking meant no weapons, which meant no Bone Talon, meaning no hand armor. He had yet to get rid of the unsettling image of being caressed by the giant evil roach.

  Vera, Sya, and Kepler stood a short distance behind Arden in a triangle formation with Kepler at the front. She eyed the bug having a staredown with Arden and tried not to freak out. Her fingers were already holding onto her weapon with such force that her knuckles were white.

  Sya gently nudged her, and Kepler felt more at ease. The presence of the other three helped her a lot as they provided calmness and stability. She took a breath, ready to step forward and do her job.

  At least until the roach made the first move.

  It reared its head into the air and gave a shrill, high-pitched shriek.

  “Since when can roaches hiss?” Arden wondered.

  The roach's feelers moved around at an impressive speed, rubbing against the ground to send up a cloud of fire and sand, obscuring it from sight.

  It was hidden but not invisible to Arden, and those proficient in aura control. He focused on the spot in the cloud of dust where he could feel the roach's aura being released. He could almost perceive its silhouette.

  ‘Okay, it's after me. I just need to distract it long enough for Kep-’

  His thoughts were interrupted when he felt the extraordinarily long and flexible feelers of the grand roach rub against his arms, like the nurturing, familial touch of a hellspawn. He was somehow able to feel it perfectly despite his armor, and worse, they weren't letting go.

  “Agh!” He yelled, giving a high-pitched shriek of his own and shook his arms with all of his might, hoping to be let go. “Bad touch, bad touch!”

  He felt his balance shifted as the roach attempted to pull him towards it. Refusing to come even a centimeter closer, Arden dug in his heels and shouted to Kepler.

  “Uh, Kepler!? A little help would be nice! Get it off me! Get it off me!”

  “R-right!”

  As Arden turned his head from the group of girls back to his newly realized greatest fear, he swore he saw pity on the faces of Vera and Sya. Their expressions weren't full of mockery after hearing the nose he made, they just felt bad. He wanted to tell them to piss off, but he held back.

  He also held back on straight up killing the roach. No matter how much he wanted to do it, or how much it made sense to do it, or how much the little voice in his head told him to do it, he resisted. This was Kepler’s trial, but he needed this test as well.

  He just hoped that this trial would end faster than his last one.

  A glass vial pierced the thin veil of cover that the roach erected, shattering against the chitinous armor of the roach. The black substance that Kepler extracted from the ant before splattered all over the roach and a little bit on Arden’s outstretched arms.

  Both Arden and the roach cried out in pain as the enhanced poneratoxin affected them. Unlike Arden however, the roach seized up, as if it was affected by rigor mortis.

  The cloud of dust settled as Kepler rushed in with her rigid bone club and smashed it against the paralyzed Celestial several times until its head resembled a particularly bad plate of spaghetti carbonara.

  You have slain red-tier protostar, grand hissing roach.

  “I did it!” Kepler cheered.

  She would have continued, but her celebration was cut short by Arden's pained wail.

  He was on his knees with his arms raised to the sky, clenching them as hard as he could to do anything to make the pain stop. Wave after wave of agony rushed up from his hands that had been splashed in Kepler's concoction.

  “A-ah!” Kepler shrieked, running towards him and bowing. “I’m sorry, I'm sorry!”

  Through gritted teeth, Arden forced out his next words.

  “Stop apologizing and do something about it!”