Ding!

[You have entered the perception trial. This is the last attribute challenge. Your overall individual performance will be judged against the rest of your party. The individual with the highest attribute increase will be granted a bonus.]

To be frank, Logan had no idea what to expect. Perception was the one attribute he’d never figured out. The last time he’d tried, he’d ended up with [Idiot’s Inspect] instead. That had been a frustrating attempt all around. Perception was such a boring attribute that he hadn’t considered it tactically important.

Logan was regretting that now.

It felt bizarre to walk into the room without protecting himself. Knowing that he could encounter anything and being restricted from deploying his best assets was beyond disconcerting. Logan was wearing his swim trunks and the narrow strip of armour around his neck, but that was it. Everything else was bare, including his feet and legs. It would be like speeding down a highway at 100 miles while on a motorcycle without a helmet or taking a hot pan out of the oven without oven mitts. You just didn’t do it.

And protection was one thought away. All he had to do was deploy [Mimicry Armour] and he’d have an advantage over Asthea.

But Logan couldn’t do it.

He’d been through many things in the last six days, killed himself with pain and heartache, even communed with mold and insects. He’d made compromises, adjustments that he never would have made in a normal world. But throughout it all, Logan had maintained his principles. Now, more than any other time, was the measure of a person.

The stakes were immense. Winning this trial would award him the final True Grit Ring. A chance to triple his physical attributes. But if he went back on his word, how could he look Lara in the eye? Look the kids in the eye? The decision would fester in his stomach, tainting everything he’d worked so hard for until it turned into dust.

It was also a slippery slope.

If he changed his moral compass for expediency’s sake, no one on Earth would know. But Logan would know. And if he adjusted what he was willing to tolerate here, why not do the same when the next difficult decision came around? Again and again, until Logan would no longer be Logan.

If he couldn’t keep his word, then he’d be lost.

Logan had promised that he wouldn’t use his armour, and he was keeping that promise.

As for the trial itself, the chamber had once again been transformed. The table and insects had disappeared, and in their place was a… forest clearing? But this one was unlike the endurance trial and unlike anything he’d seen on Earth.

There was damp, green grass underneath his bare feet. Scattered throughout the clearing were random, massive grey stones. They looked weathered and ancient, like a river had rushed over them for thousands of years, smoothing them and sculpting them.

Surrounding the clearing were trees, but these weren’t normal trees. They looked healthy, but they were white and covered in peeling, paper-like bark. They reminded him of Paper Birch Trees, only they trailed great guzzling globs of purple sap like maple syrup.

To the right of the clearing was a narrow stream that looped around the stones. It was ten feet across, and it looked deep. Strangest yet… the color. Logan was no stranger to odd-looking bodies of water. There was a sister-lake close to the Okanagan Lake that shimmered an array of blue, green, and turquoise colors due to underwater crystals that reflected the sunlight.

But this one was purple. As purple as a plum.

Amongst the trees, growing at random were giant, giant weeds. They might as well be Jack and the Beanstalk tall. Thirteen feet at least. He could only describe them as massive white dandelions, with tall, green stems that were as thick as his arm.

A breeze trickled over Logan’s chest, and he held back a shiver. There was a light up above shining down on them like a sun, but it generated no heat, and it had an artificialness to it that gave him the creeps.

With a small smile, Asthea led the way into the clearing, her white hair trailing behind her. Coming to an agreement with Logan had changed her mood, and there was a cheerfulness to her expression as she sat down in the middle of the clearing next to the stream and crossed her legs in a lotus position. “Are you going to just stare?”

Logan blinked. What the hell else was he going to do? Just what was this trial, communing with nature? Shit, it was back to the tree hugger situation all over again.

“What do we do?”

But Asthea had closed her eyes. She was ignoring him, a stillness to her face, a sereneness. Her armour shimmered in the light of the artificial sun, the high-quality material looking supple and strong, emphasizing her relaxed limbs, as if she didn’t have a care in the world. Shit, she’d already started.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

“System, how much time is left?”

[Trial Progress: 45 minutes remaining.]

Logan had no idea what to do and he was rapidly running out of time. As he began to understand the challenge in front of him, a pit of doubt the size of a chasm opened in his stomach. He’d been so convinced that he could come out on top of these trials through sheer grit and determination. After all, if there was one thing he had tons of, it was foolish optimism and a willingness to never give up when the going got tough. But there was optimism, and then there was reality.

Logan paced, his bare feet crinkling over the wet grass. This was a perception trial; the tactics he’d used in the other attribute challenges wouldn’t work. You couldn’t increase perception with a physical reaction. It had to be mental.

Slumping to the ground and mirroring Asthea’s lotus position, Logan straightened his posture and threw back his shoulders. Looking at an insect outside of Jack’s cabin hadn’t done anything to increase his perception, but he was convinced it had to do with his senses.

There was something he could do.

Logan had promised not to deploy [Life Cycle Master], but that didn’t mean he couldn’t open his mind to the world around him. That wasn’t cheating. He’d employed the same tactic when trying to figure out how to get [Liche Siphon] to work. As long as he didn’t commune with any critters, he’d be keeping his oath.

Logan shifted into a better position. Perhaps advancing perception had been so difficult because it didn’t come naturally to him. Figuring out how to open his Karma pool and deploy his original [Life Cycle] skill had been a challenge. It was only through repetition that he got the hang of it.

He’d focus on one of the massive rocks to start.

Logan stared at a boulder twenty feet away. It was the size of a rain barrel, smooth on the edges and covered in green moss.

And yet somehow, he knew that if he just stared at it, his vision would blur and he’d get nowhere. If looking at something was how you increased your perception, he would have done it back at Jack’s clearing. No, it had to be something else.

Instead of looking at it, he closed his eyes.

By now, he didn’t have to deploy [Life Cycle Master] to do this; it was automatic.

The problem was, unlike in the other trials, he wasn’t surrounded by dead, void space. This room was alive. Opening his senses meant that he was taking everything in, from the stream splashing and trickling behind him, to the strands of seaweed that swung back and forth in the current.

Underneath the grass was a layer of moist soil, and amongst the soil were ants, beetles, worms—you name it. The grass was multiplying, budding seeds curling through the dirt. Even the paper birch trees were a distraction as the bark peeled and fluttered in the breeze.

To focus on the rocks, he had to dampen everything else, like turning on noise cancelling earphones to remove distractions. He’d treat them like layers. Layers of distraction. Like peeling an onion, each ring represented noise—it was the core that was important.

Gradually, Asthea’s hair rustling in the breeze, the grass trickling underneath his feet, the stream cresting the bank—all of it faded away.

Scrunching his nose, Logan pretended the rock had a presence that dwarfed everything else, until he was no longer pretending. It was real.

It was ancient, timeliness.

It was colossal.

And yet, he could perceive all of that, but it wasn’t triggering a perception increase.

Puzzled at first, Logan decided to adjust his thinking, like taking a mental step back and looking at a riddle from a different perspective.

What if he increased his perception not just by being aware of the things around him, but by knowing the history of each living thing? And if he needed history, what better way to start with than with this ancient, timeless rock?

It had been alive for centuries.

Lying dormant, deep in the ground, deep in a world that wasn’t like his world.

This world was unnatural and formed by the System.

As the ground altered, as tectonic plates shifted, the rock began to move. Millimetre by millimetre, year after year, up and up, travelling from the deep to the surface until…

Water. Bright, purple water.

The water rushed like a flood, taking the rock with it, shaping the rock’s sides, molding it, rounding it. Over the years, the flood slowed from a deluge and formed a river, a river that gushed like a monster had spit it up.

More years passed.

Then more.

Millimetre by millimetre, the rock’s journey continued until it inched itself up the bank, pushed by the bursts of water that flowed and ebbed like the tide.

And just like that, Logan had done it.

Ding!

[You have earned one perception point!]

[Trial Update:

Asthea: 10 Perception

Logan: 1 Perception

Arsen: Disqualified

Errol: Disqualified

Thorin: Disqualified]

Logan’s eyes opened in shock. Asthea had already earned ten points!

Asthea opened one eye and looked at him. “Thank you for taking such a long time. The System doesn’t turn on the penalty until everyone advances their perception.”

A penalty? With a feeling of dread, the sound of his heartbeat thrashing in his ears, Logan glanced at the tall weeds with their bright bursts of flowers and pollen. The breeze had increased into a gust of wind, and something was happening to these monsters.

Holy shit, that wasn’t good.

The wind continued to pick up, rustling the mutant dandelion weeds and dislodging white fluff. It reminded him of springtime at the cabin when the willow trees around the lake exploded, wildflowers grew like vines up the hill, and pollen drifted through the air. Allergies had never been a problem for Logan, but Lara had needed to stay away when she was a teenager, deeming the spring season the ‘no go’ cabin season until the heat of the summer blasted the pollen away.

The white fluff travelled through the air like pollen, drifting and falling everywhere. It became so concentrated it was difficult to see anything but white, monstrous fluff. That wouldn’t have been a problem if it were just that—fluff and pollen.

It wasn’t.

Logan hissed in a breath as the pollen fell on top of his bare arms, bright, red blisters the size of quarters forming in patches everywhere they landed.

This wasn’t just pollen. It was acid pollen.

He suspected he was in for a world of pain.