“Better. Much better,” Stormsong said as Caen laid waste to every hostile creature in their path.

  Caen could feel… something. But fully comprehending it was out of reach.

  “More speed. You should use more speed.”

  Caen layered modifiers to his Kinesis and Body-enhancements spells, allowing him to move even faster.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a hulking form in bulky ice armor charging towards him and covering the distance quickly.

  Fahptis.

  The man’s sword morphed into a slick whip and slapped aside a reptile in his path.

  Caen cast a spell to speed up his mental processing, already flickering Soul-sense. He was not entirely confident in defeating Fahptis as Herb Mask. The man had been trained here on the island all his life and was quite adept at using that weapon of his.

  “Decisiveness,” Stormsong said. “Don’t think. Attack.”

  Caen complied. With the last part of that, at least.

  Fahptis got within range, his weapon snaking out for Stormsong. Caen didn’t stop him—the whip wrapped around Stormsong’s blade. Making contact with the awakened weapon was always the same for everyone: painful jolts of electricity.

  Fahptis flinched backwards, letting go of his whip handle. Caen covered the distance. Fahptis recovered quickly, his weapon flying back into his hand and instantly morphing into a glistening sword that rivaled Stormsong in length. He blocked Caen’s empowered blow on his sword and slid several feet back on the slippery terrain without losing his footing: he had high Liquid magic passive augmentations.

  They clashed again. Caen avoided a thrust by inching his head sideways. At the same time, he scored a glancing blow on Fahptis’s side, only managing to chip the armor. In that brief moment of contact, Fahptis flinched slightly as Stormsong shocked him.

  They exchanged multiple blows. Caen was just a bit faster than Fahptis in body, but much faster in mind. He avoided most of the other man’s attacks by inches.

  Fahptis, though, was stronger and more skilled in swordsmanship. He landed a hit on Caen’s sword arm, piercing through his armor like wet paper, but Caen had already concentrated resilience on the point where the sword made contact with skin. The glistening blade skidded off, leaving Caen unharmed.

  Caen piled Kinesis spells and Body-enhancement spells just to maintain the pressure. And of course, he flickered Soul-sense. He disrupted the man’s spells, but not all of them.

  “More speed!” Stormsong said. “Strike with finality!”

  Caen was already moving as fast as he could and bringing more force to bear than he ever had in any fight. Fahptis’s ice armor was rather durable, and it smoothed out any gouges Caen made.

  The man’s sword snaked around Stormsong after each exchange, morphing into its whip form and sometimes smacking Caen’s unenchanted armor. Whenever it did this, portions of Caen’s armor that weren't covered by Chasma, his wet clothes, and his skin underneath were instantly frozen. Caen cast quick Fire spells to heat those areas lest he get bogged down.

  Hostile creatures attacked them mid-fight: eels, dog-sized reptiles, and even cloud sprites. A portion of Caen’s mind focused on manipulating the thorny vines around his torso and using them to keep the creatures away while he fought. Occasionally, he tore them in half or chopped off body parts, while blocking Fahptis’s assaults with Chasma or simply dodging. Fahptis weathered the creatures since most of them couldn’t breach his dense armor, though he had to shove them aside or slash at a few that clung to his helmet.

  A giant eel—several times as long as Caen was tall and thicker than his torso—joined the fray, swimming through the air. It reared up; a crackling bolt of painfully blue lightning shot out of its mouth towards them. Caen and Fahtpis darted in opposite directions, hoping to dodge the attack. The bolt split in two and followed them.

  Caen used resilience while holding up Chasma. A small portion of the lightning bolt was pulled into Stormsong, but the rest crashed into his buckler. Caen was only shoved a few steps back. Chasma absorbed the lightning attack faster than ever before, but lightning still crawled onto Caen’s arm and body. Resilience helped him endure it easily enough.

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  “You're fluctuating again,” Stormsong warned now that Caen was no longer Mimicking its Lightning affinity.

  “Working on it,” Caen said. He dropped resilience, Mimicked Stormsong's Lightning affinity, and rushed towards the giant eel. It was rearing up again to shoot another bolt.

  More creatures swarmed them. Red-eyed reptiles and smaller eels.

  Fahptis had been flung back a short distance away by the force of the bolt and had dropped to a knee, twitching from the attack. He staggered to his feet, slashed at a reptile, then took an empowered step towards the giant eel.

  Caen was certain that they could put down this creature together and then continue with their—

  Fahptis attacked him, glistening whip wrapping around Caen's sword arm, painfully. Still running, Caen ignored the attack, opting instead to hold up Chasma with his other hand and Mimic resilience just as two bolts of lightning shot out of the creature's mouth.

  Between resilience and Chasma, the bolt barely slowed Caen down, while Fahptis was hurled bodily onto his back, letting go of his whip, which still clung to Caen’s arm.

  Stormsong’s hum increased in intensity as Caen dropped resilience and darted for the creature with preternatural speed.

  Another giant eel arrived, prowling in the air towards Caen. Fahptis, still twitching, scrambled to his feet and began running away just as the whip around Caen's arm dissolved into liquid and flew towards its retreating owner.

  The first eel reared up for another shot as Caen reached it. An empowered swing chopped off its head, spraying dark blood in every direction.

  Caen spun in time to block a bolt from the second giant eel. Resilience had him barely budge from the attack. The eel swatted at Caen with its tail while rearing up for another shot.

  “Head-on,” Stormsong said.

  With a growl, Caen met the tail with Stormsong, lopping it off entirely. The creature screeched as yet another bolt of lightning slammed into Caen. Resilience and a raised Chasma-formed buckler bore the brunt of the attack as Caen covered the remaining distance with a Body-enhancement spell. He beheaded the eel, faster than he'd killed the first one.

  He dropped resilience as he dispatched the surrounding creatures that swarmed him with crisp and vicious strikes. In seconds, he was done. He panted heavily, as though he’d run a mile in his abjection.

  He hadn't flickered Soul-sense at the giant eels because that would be difficult to explain away. Affecting non-humans with Dampening magic was so much harder to do. And it would be all the more obvious with creatures who possessed flashy abilities.

  Caen let go of Stormsong’s hilt, and the sword slid into its scabbard by itself.

  “Was that decisive enough for you?” Caen asked Stormsong.

  The sword rumbled grudgingly, and Caen got the impression that it was stewing over something.

  He left it to it and crouched down to touch the red heartstone embedded in the abdomen of one of the reptilian corpses at his feet. A streak of gray light shot out of the gem and into him. In an instant, the sharp and charged air, which had been shocking his lungs all this while, became far more comfortable to breathe in.

  Red and orange heartstones granted varying degrees of temporary immunity; yellow, green, and blue granted points.

  He quickly moved around the corpses to pry out heartstones. He'd place his hand against a heartstone and, with a modified Kinesis spell, wrench it out of the creature's body. Whenever he did this to a corpse, it vanished. At the end of the trial, he'd be able to turn in the heartstones for the monster parts. More quality food for Chasma.

  “This is… a strange experience for me,” Stormsong finally said. “I feel a frequent waxing and waning in our compatibility. And still, you never quite lose that spark.”

  That likely had to do with the fact that Caen never disconnected from the sword’s soul structure, even when he wasn't Mimicking its affinities.

  “Hmph. Don't let any of this get to your head. I have not yet deemed you worthy. I will continue permitting you to draw me, but until you prove yourself worthy of my primary enchantments, you will have no access to them.”

  “Thank you, Stormsong. That is immensely helpful of you,” Caen said as he made his way to the wall of fog. He expressed feelings of gratitude through their connection.

  “Hmph.”

  As he butchered his way to the wall of fog, a small portion of his mind went over his fight with Fahptis. He hadn’t performed as well as he knew he could have, though Fahptis was certainly more skilled. Caen felt so frustratingly restricted in this competition with the limited skillset Herb Mask was supposed to have.

  He saw no way that he could have won that fight if those eels hadn’t chased Fahptis away. The man was simply a perfect counter to what Caen could bring to bear in combat, especially in this zone. There was also Yeishi and other high-performing participants to worry about, but Caen pushed these thoughts aside as he neared the flowing wall of fog.

  Off to the side, a wooden totem pole was erected in the ground. A safe area. Every zone possessed a few of these. The air in front of the pole shimmered, and Goat Mask stepped out of it, along with one other participant. He was another ‘associate’ of Rithya’s, a broad man named Jum.

  Goat Mask turned to Caen, already waving him over.