The silhouette creatures moved fast and could vanish out of sight. They left illusory copies to distract, while their real, invisible forms flanked Caen and his team. It was seamless. Masterful even.

  Caen, of course, could see faint traces of them through his speculon. And whichever one of them was outside his field of view, he could sense the weight of their soul.

  Nevertheless, he extended several of the vines wrapped around his torso, feigning to use them as a detection system of some kind to track the silhouettes. Caen needed to pretend to be fooled by the illusions, lest he reveal the fact that he could sense them clearly.

  He blocked swipes from the monsters’ sharp claws with Chasma or just dodged out of the way. Stormsong cut through their sinewy physique with ease. They bled… bright yellow sand that glimmered.

  The real work was in trying to keep his teammates from being gutted. Goat Mask dyed the surrounding sand with a blue liquid that turned white whenever pressure was applied to it, thus allowing him and Jum to determine which of the silhouettes were illusions. Jum pulled sand from the enchanted basket on his back and used that and his hammer to lay into them.

  The few immunity heartstones they recovered from the corpses halted the illusions for less than a minute.

  How, by the ancestors, is anyone without advantages supposed to pass this trial? Caen wondered.

  All around them, participants vanished in pillars of light. Some were illusions.

  He and his group occasionally left behind illusory copies of themselves that looked terribly convincing, to Caen’s physical eyes at least.

  Caen cast spells on himself and his teammates to keep their minds sharp and help counteract the spectral afflictions in the zone. It wasn’t enough, of course, but it gave them a leg up. Illusory copies of participants charged at them a few times, though Goat Mask's blue solution revealed their nature quickly.

  The large, green whale from earlier swam past them through the dark sky. This time, it didn’t disperse. Instead, it hurtled right through the wall of fog up ahead. Caen was impressed and envious at the same time.

  As they made their way to the exit point, he felt an approaching presence slightly to his left. A large silhouette, much larger and sprier than the others, clambered over a sand dune and turned invisible, leaving behind five menacing illusory copies.

  “Safe area, now,” Caen called.

  With the creature and its copies hard on their heels, they veered towards the nearest totem pole. Caen brutally cut down a pair of regular-sized silhouettes in their path. He was much faster than his teammates, and Goat Mask’s flying shield was slower when carrying both of them. At their current pace, they didn't have a chance of outrunning the huge creature, which was gaining on them.

  “Go on ahead,” he shouted as he turned to face the approaching monster.

  Six silhouettes, five of whom were illusions. The real monster, though invisible, charged in their midst.

  Stormsong rumbled.

  Caen let his vines dance around him; they grasped at the air in seemingly random patterns. The monsters pounced as one.

  He ducked, pivoted, slashed futilely through illusions, while keeping an eye on the real culprit. The instant the real silhouette was within range, all the vines on his armor darted for it. It swiped a clawed hand to tear them out of the air, but only managed to rend one. In the blink of an eye, the other vines latched onto its torso and limbs and began winding themselves around the creature.

  Caen ignored the illusions and charged the main silhouette with preternatural speed. It was still invisible, but with the vines around its form, he had a clear target. He took off its arm at the elbow, dodged a swipe from its other arm, cut off its leg at the knee, then decapitated it.

  Yellow sand fell all around him from the creature’s wounds. The greater part of its corpse dropped to the ground.

  Stormsong slid into its sheath as soon as he let go of it. Caen could see a few silhouettes in the distance.

  He placed a hand on the dead creature's chest and ripped out the blue heartstone there with a Kinesis spell. The creature vanished, and he retrieved his vines while inspecting the heartstone. It was the highest grade of heartstones in this trial, worth ten points.

  A tall, muscular man appeared a good distance away from Caen.

  Anomis. Currently in fourth place on the scoreboards. His soul structure revealed him to be peak Attuner.

  Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

  His free-flowing black hair cascaded down his shoulders, and his breastplate resembled a tightly packed ribcage, though a single bone-like plate at the center of his chest bore the emblem of the Zenith faction. Beyond that, he was unarmored and shirtless. Blight, the awakened weapon which he wielded, was a black hilt that terminated at a rounded guard. The blade was currently retracted, but the weapon's soul structure revealed a few active thread clusters, of which Venefic was the most prominent.

  From Caen's connection to the sword, he could feel a malicious desire to cause destruction. It was so eager and vehement that it gave him pause.

  Blight was one of the legendary weapons from the Hall of Choosing. In its intangible form, it caused material degradation when it came in contact with anything. Anomis combined this effectively with his bloodline, which let him teleport a step in any direction, even upwards. Many considered him the most dangerous participant this year. Wielders of Blight tended to be sadistic, and Anomis was infamous for his gratuitous violence in the trials so far.

  Caen had watched all of the man’s fights and wasn’t willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. He began pulling out spores from the spatial bag on his belt, letting them swell out behind him.

  “I was hunting down that monster,” Anomis said with a bored expression, as he eyed the heartstone in Caen’s hand.

  “Did you perhaps want this?” Caen asked.

  “You stole my kill,” Anomis said, his voice cold and detached. “Your entire bag of holding won’t be compensation enough.”

  “Then I wish you better luck on your next hunt,” Caen said dryly, while placing the heartstone in his bag. He turned to walk away, the still-growing, dense cloud of spores following him.

  “And where do you think you’re going?” Anomis asked quietly.

  Caen sighed. He sped up his mental processing, split his mind three ways, and turned to face the man as a very long, gray blade grew out of Anomis’s sword hilt. Blight. Before Caen’s eyes, the sword grew translucent, which meant it was now in its incorporeal form. That malevolent eagerness intensified.

  This artifact was going to be a problem. Caen hadn’t seen anyone in present or recent trials who had survived three strikes from it without bowing out or, in extremely rare cases, dying outright.

  “Stormsong, can you block a strike from Blight?”

  “You wanted a blade. I gave you one. Blades do not block. They strike.”

  Ironic, Caen thought grimly as he weighed his options. If he’d had no confidence in beating Fahptis, he had even less in beating this man.

  The moment a Space affinity cluster grew prominent in Anomis’s soul, Caen caused the cloud of spores to envelop a twenty-foot diameter around himself while reaching for Stormsong.

  Anomis blinked through space several times in an instant, coming to appear in front of Caen. He was already thrusting for Caen’s chest, which was covered with Chasma.

  Caen paired resilience with Body-enhancement, losing all his other spell constructs, as he lifted his Chasma-buckler to parry the thrust.

  Anomis blinked a few inches to the right, evading the parry, the momentum of his thrust uninterrupted.

  The sword, still intangible, stabbed through the Chasma covering, his breastplate underneath, and all the way through his chest. Caen felt nothing. At the same time, Caen’s counter-thrust reached Anomis, who blinked to the side and delivered another thrust to Caen’s head.

  He was much faster than Caen was. Caen couldn't raise his Chasma-buckler quickly enough to intercept. He didn’t even have the time to concentrate resilience before Blight, in its intangible form, stabbed through his cheekbone. Anomis blinked away.

  Muted pain spread through Caen’s face, his head, but it felt much less worse than he’d been expecting. Another attack from Anomis, through his neck, from behind. More muted pain.

  Caen swung his sword. Anomis had already blinked elsewhere, stabbing at Caen’s leg from another angle. This time, the sword was in its solid form. It punched through the armor and thick layer of protective clothing underneath, but only sank a couple of inches into Caen’s thigh. Resilience and his Body-enhancement spells weathered the strike.

  He was wasting his time trying to exchange attacks with this man. Caen held Stormsong off to the side and paired resilience with Dream-guarding instead. While Anomis was his better in physical speed, that did not apply to mental.

  A portion of Caen’s sped-up mind handled the task of concentrating resilience on whatever areas of his body Anomis attacked. Caen’s existence was spread three ways between Chasma, Stormsong, and Anomis. He disconnected from Anomis and connected to Blight, the awakened weapon, and could more accurately sense its trajectory in relation to himself.

  The next incorporeal attack on Caen’s head hardly hurt.

  “What are you doing? Don’t just stand there. Attack.”

  “My opponent has instantaneous teleportation,” Caen replied with a separate portion of his mind. “But don’t worry. I have a plan.”

  “Hmph. Ro-Hexur faced opponents of that caliber and still prevailed.”

  “While having access to your primary enchantments, I imagine.”

  Stormsong merely rumbled in irritation.

  At the same time, another portion of Caen’s mind was handling a separate and more important task. He couldn't flicker Soul-sense at Blight, as that would be very difficult to explain away. Using dampening magic on awakened weapons was possible, but rarely heard of. Which left him with one other option.

  Paying attention to the cord of connection between himself and Blight, he was immediately struck by the distinctness of its desires. He felt its urgent and desperate need to harm him.

  It yearned to cause immense pain and suffering. It wanted to overwhelm its wielder’s opponents with destructive intensity. It did so to every single person it attacked this season. It was… antsy… fervent, adamant on inflicting destruction on him. And quickly. It needed it to happen now.

  This. Caen could work with this.

  Read 30+ chapters ahead on Patreon.