The fake night sky above them held two moons. Shabby wooden shacks and mud huts littered the stretch of hard-packed dirt; a village of some kind. There was debris lying all around: clumps of stone, twigs, heaps of sawdust, glass shards, dry leaves, and broken pieces of various objects. A great many of these were animated and loitering around.

  Sprites.

  Caen felt a surge of panic and anxiety. He needed to leave this place and run away right now! He couldn’t do this anymo—

  Caen cleared his mind with a spell, countering the spectral affliction. With some effort, he cast the same spell on Goat Mask and Jum, who had already begun shuffling backwards.

  “Spirit and Dream zone,” Caen said. “Let’s move.” There was much more slag in his spirit than there’d been an instant ago, and false feelings of fear and trepidation started to bubble up in him again.

  Up ahead, stone sprites began rolling towards them. Caen could dematerialize these using Spirit-healing spells, but that would out him as a spirit-healer to the people watching. Small spikes of pain lanced through his spirit and mind: the stone sprites were using spiritual and mental attacks on them. Their soul structures proved it.

  “We’ll have to destroy their physical forms,” Caen said as they ran.

  “That won’t kill them,” Jum protested.

  “None of us are Spirit-healers,” Caen replied. “It’s our only option.”

  While still Mimicking Stormsong’s Lightning, Caen flickered Soul-sense at the stone sprites with only enough force to disrupt their magical attacks. Stormsong split the congregated rocks into pieces, scattering them across the ground.

  Sprites could simply reconstitute themselves or reinhabit whatever portions of their physical forms were detached, or just take on other physical forms entirely. So, damaging their physical forms was a temporary solution, but it would slow the creatures down, and that was all they needed to do.

  They wove around the shacks and huts in the village, along with other participants. The wall of fog hung in the far distance.

  Waves of confusion and terror washed over Caen several times. Removing specters from the mind was a delicate process, and he couldn't spare the time for it right now. Still, he counteracted the effects on himself and his teammates. A typical mind shield couldn’t keep out committed specters, or do anything about the ones that were already in his mind.

  Slag built up in his spirit at an immense rate, hampering the efficiency of his spell casting and weighing his spirit down, but Caen was used to a hindered spirit. The slag was coming in from an external source, and the spirit shielding spells he knew helped prevent some of the intrusion. However, he couldn’t cast these on others, which was unfortunate for Goat Mask and Jum, who were already struggling, as the afflictions from the previous zone persisted.

  Caen felt a large presence moving overhead, and he looked up. A green whale with skin that glowed hurtled through the fake night sky. Its soul structure revealed it to be a summoned creature. The summoner was… inside the whale. Dust sprites swirled around the creature, attacking it.

  A great distance ahead, the whale vanished with a crisp and resounding pop. A trio of participants dropped to the ground and ran into the closest safe area.

  Caen's team made it into a separate safe area, which put an immediate pause on all their afflictions. There, they sat with their backs to each other as Caen cleansed all three of their spirits. The spirit particles from the creatures they’d slain in the first and second zones were currently being integrated into their spirits, which naturally resulted in a significant amount of slag buildup. He had no hope of ridding himself or his teammates of all that right now.

  They moved on to the fourth zone. It was a jungle with man-eating plants, pits in the ground, and stretches of quicksand. There were also clouds of spores, much smaller and far less irritating than the ones he had in his bag of holding. The plant matter, vines, and branches everywhere grabbed for them.

  Caen used Flora magic to keep all these at bay. Stormsong filled the air with the smell of bleeding sap and damaged plants. Jum pummeled woody graspers with his hammer, and Goat Mask used corrosive substances from the canister on his back. Jum hardened quicksand for them to walk over, and they avoided the pits easily enough. Caen retrieved heartstones, splitting them among the party.

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  As they were nearing the wall of fog, a large group of participants off to the side fought a huge plant monster together. As soon as they took down the creature, a tall, heavily muscled man with long black hair and a slender, gray sword appeared in their midst.

  Anomis. With his awakened weapon, he began attacking them with preternatural speed, blinking through space and avoiding attacks. Many in the group vanished in pillars of light before he even got to them. Others tried to run; he didn’t let them. A woman with a Parthran fragment overlaying her armor survived the longest. Those were known to resist the harmful effects of the man’s artifact better than most. In mere moments, he’d eliminated the entire group. He blinked towards the downed monster and began prying off its heartstone with his sword.

  “What a dick,” Jum muttered as they reached the wall of fog.

  The fifth zone was an extremely hot volcanic field. Rivers of lava and molten rock covered the terrain. Ash fell from the sky like light rain.

  They were attacked by huge, hulking golems of red-hot rock, which possessed no soul structures, marking them as automaton constructs of some kind. Fortunately, the golems—though strong and durable—were much slower than Caen.

  Stormsong insisted on it, so Caen sliced into the golems viciously. The sword could not easily cleave through the golems, but Caen managed to hack off limbs and immobilize them for long enough to tear out their heartstones, which immediately caused the automatons to vanish. He looked forward to inspecting them properly.

  The terrain was broken up by rivers of lava that bubbled and boiled, requiring participants to fly or leap over small patches of terribly hot land. Jum climbed onto Goat Mask’s flying shield, and together, they flew over the terrain. Caen followed behind them on Stormsong.

  A golem several times the size of the others lumbered towards them. It could shoot out a stream of lava from its hands, and Caen could feel the heat wafting off it from so far away. Smaller golems trailed the automaton.

  Caen itched to face it. What would be the effect of feeding such a thing to Chasma? But Goat Mask and Jum were not handling the heat well. And Caen owed it to Rithya to help them through the trial. They zipped away.

  “I'm out of mana,” Jum said, as they flew towards the wall of fog.

  Goat Mask touched his shoulder.

  “Thanks.”

  “Do you need mana as well?” Goat Mask asked, turning behind to Caen.

  Caen was intrigued, but he shook his head. He still had quite some mana left. “Is that a bloodline?”

  “Yes,” Goat Mask replied.

  Not all Ereshta’als had the Spirit-healing bloodline, but this was certainly handy. He held himself back from asking any questions.

  They moved into the sixth zone and immediately found themselves underwater. Caen was shocked by the jarring change in temperature. He immediately held his breath and Mimicked Stormsong’s wind affinity as water flooded his mask and armor. An expanse of slightly murky water stretched out all around them. The ground was far, far beneath, and in the distance, the wall of fog glowed softly.

  Goat Mask continued flying on his shield, Jum, holding on to it, and Caen on Stormsong. Their flying weapons propelled them through the water without having to flail their limbs and burn precious air.

  There were schools of palm-sized fish with evil–looking teeth swimming towards them. Caen unsheathed Stormsong and met them. Basic Kinesis spells here and there helped him with leverage, while Body-enhancement lent power and flexibility to his strikes. The passive augmentations from Stormsong’s Wind affinity allowed Caen to better manage his dwindling breath. His lungs had already started to burn as he dyed the world around him red with the blood of the creatures.

  Touching the red heartstones allowed them to move better underwater, which was functionally useless to Caen. The orange heartstones, however, caused air to enter their lungs, which meant that they could survive the swim for longer.

  They focused more on heading towards the wall of fog than fighting the monsters. Though they made an exception for the creatures with orange heartstones. Caen cast a spell to sharpen his mind and those of his teammates. The lack of air was making it harder to think. Participants vanished around them every few seconds.

  They burst out into the seventh zone in a splash of water. Caen pulled in air greedily. Jum stumbled to the sandy ground, coughing out water. Goat Mask seemed a bit better off as he hopped off his shield.

  This was the second-to-last zone in the trial. It was a desert terrain with dunes all around, and a single moon hung in the faux night sky. Strange and unsettling sounds filled the entire area. Caen’s ears were assaulted by a chorus of unsettling whispers. Translucent trees and bodies of water littered the zone, along with illusory copies of participants doing all sorts of things. A few yards away, an illusion of Goat Mask was attacking a different group of illusions with a sword.

  “Eerie,” Jum mumbled.

  There was constant movement in the periphery of Caen’s vision, though he could see an ephemerality to these movements, thanks to his speculon. In fact, many of the visual illusions were translucent and flimsy in appearance.

  He felt something crawl up his skin and heard his mother shouting his name, which startled him for an instant; more specters.

  Tall and thin anthropomorphic silhouettes stalked the zone, moaning in terror. Their long arms dragged behind them in the sand. They had sharp claws and gaunt faces with no eyes or other organs. Caen noted Gleam and Kinesis affinities active in their soul structures as half a dozen of the silhouette creatures turned towards him and attacked.