Somehow, he wasn’t surprised.
This was the last attribute trial, a trial that not many prioritized. After all, if you were given limited time, would anyone sane choose to level up their perception first? Or like the Silverdagger Clan, would they choose to level up strength?
If you made it to the end like Logan, you had to be beaten down and exhausted. In a way, the System had made this trial the most difficult of the lot. According to Asthea, her people had been honing their perception since childhood. They would have taught each other the way forward. Unlike humanity, they’d been dealing with the System for a hundred years. That was a heck of a lot of time to figure out how to level up a tricky attribute.
The only reason Logan had a chance was pure luck. Without [Life Cycle Master], he never would have had the ability to sense the world around him. At this point, it came down to magic and wizard-shit. How else could he sense what mold or insects were thinking? Or hell, even the mutant dandelions. Without his experience with the skill and without lessons learned through trial and error, he would have bumbled his way through this trial and walked away with nothing but acid burns.
As it was, the System wasn’t just throwing a hurricane worth of acid pollen and sap at him, it had also tried to trick him, introducing a stream that should have been shelter but had turned into a weapon. It was a drugged stream! That syrupy purple water had lured him in and acted like warped cough syrup, making him forget that he was in a trial in the first place. An insidious stream that would have kept him occupied until the time expired. He’d only crawled his way out both mentally and physically by thinking of Lara and Ernie.
Logan couldn’t even trust the water! Everything was suspect.
And worse yet, Asthea had been clever. He’d incorrectly assumed she’d made a tactical error by jumping into the water and showing him an alternative way to get around the acid. Instead, she floated in the stream with a small smile while Logan wasted precious time clawing his way free of the mental enchantment.
Clever, clever alien.
“System, how much time is left?”
[Trial Progress: 14 minutes remaining.]
Shit! He’d lost way too much time in that cough syrup stream, floundering around in a drug-induced daze for over twenty minutes! That meant he’d need to earn ten perception points to beat Asthea in less than fifteen minutes, nine for a tie. To that end, what happened if there was a tie? Did that mean no one would win the True Grit Ring?
He’d tried so hard, pushed past what he’d thought himself capable of, even resorted to employing questionable tactics. At first, he’d wanted to advance for himself and then he’d wanted to advance to beat the taunting guards, but now, after receiving the Save Humanity Quest, he needed to win for more than personal satisfaction. This was bigger than himself.
Logan refused to believe it ended here. Once he left this trial and went back to the real world, to have any chance at the quest, he’d need a mountain’s worth of Karma. [Life Cycle Master] was the key to everything. He needed to jack up his physical attributes so he could dump everything into intelligence and wisdom.
Logan could make an argument that constitution was also important, but was it really? Through [Regenerate], he already had a huge advantage. The skill upgraded with his Grade, so all he needed to do was grind away, level up, and eventually he’d be able to chop off a finger and watch it grow just as fast. Logan had been skeptical when Asthea said his skill was like a fairytale, but if the others had struggled so much with simple cuts and injuries with a level that high, he was starting to come around to just how lucky he’d been to come across Ernie.
If he lost this trial, he wouldn’t receive the last ring, which meant he’d lose out on the tripling effect, not to mention that the rings wouldn’t sink into his body. If he managed that, he wouldn’t have to worry about anyone looking at his unnatural black metal rings and trying something. Logan liked safety. He could get behind rings that couldn’t be stolen.
But to get to that point, he needed to win. His heart was beating like crazy, his body twitching with adrenaline, his mind racing as the ticking clock echoed like a gong.
Although Asthea was high on purple cough syrup water, her face was still above the surface and although glazed, she was looking right at him. Just his luck that she’d have a way to combat the mental effect of the water and watch what he did with crystal clarity. To be safe, Logan couldn’t use his spatial storage. The risk was too high.
Shit shit shit. Logan hissed as another plop of acid sap landed on his chest and ate through his skin, the burning reek of flesh making his stomach lurch. If he couldn’t use his spatial storage, was there anything else he could use? The water was out, the grass would be laughable. He could use his strength to claw a hole in the dirt to create a massive trench, but although that would shield him from the flying sap projectiles, it wouldn’t solve the tornado that was flying and dropping the pollen everywhere. His nostrils and airway were beginning to feel like raw meat, his eyes stinging as if he were in a sandstorm.
Tick tick.
Tick.
Tock.
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Shit, there had to be something!
He was losing time.
There was nothing.
Mutant pollen, fluff and sap were going to eat Logan. And yet… it was just pain, pain that was dulled by [Idiot’s Paradox]. If his skin sloughed off, if welts the size of glass jars formed everywhere on his body, he had [Regenerate]. He’d suffered through a severed toe, a chopped off finger, and losing a whole hand. He’d been fried by the noxious mushrooms, burned by the can of flaming hairspray. Flying acid should be child’s play.
He would heal. He would come back from it.
Filled with new resolve, Logan stood tall and faced the coming onslaught. He had a way forward, and the only challenge was concentration. He needed to divorce his mind from what was happening to his body, tune out the agony, and open his senses to the world around him.
But how?
Although [Idiot’s Paradox] was paying dividends, he still experienced pain. He was being lashed by acid, his skin turning into a patchwork of blisters and welts. Each time a large glob of sap landed on his body it stung like nothing else. Hissing, Logan made sure to keep his mouth closed, continuing to take sips rather than gulps.
It came back to the same thing as everything else. Visualization. Visualization had always been his ace in the hole.
Logan closed his eyes. This would be the difference between winning and losing. Logan wanted to come out on top.
He pictured his mind as a building with multiple rooms. The acid and pain surrounded the building, trying to seep through. In his mind, he visualized shutting a door and sectioning off the pain, cordoning it inside. But just like [Idiot’s Paradox], it could only do so much. There were cracks in the door, both on the sides and at the bottom, allowing the acid to leech through.
Logan visualized himself taking a step back, entering another room, and shutting the door.
This one was solid, carved from the wood of an ancient tree, ten inches thick, weighing a ton. But still, it had cracks underneath the door and acid seeped through, spreading into the room, splashing and scalding his chest.
Logan retreated into another room further in the building and shut the door.
This door was made of the black metal, radiating an aura that was like a supernova. The bottom of the door stuck to the floor like a suction cup, creating an impenetrable barrier. Above the doorhandle, he pictured a lock that was a force all its own, unmovable, implacable.
Logan was at the heart of the building, cushioned by rooms, separated by ever-stronger doors. The acid couldn’t get to him. It would never get to him.
Logan opened his eyes.
Welts, raw flesh, blood—you name it. His body was a disaster. Blood trailed down his legs in red torrents like someone had used a scalpel to score lines through his skin. Acid was eating into his scalp, creating further bare patches of burned skin. His eyebrows were half blown away, and his face felt as if his five o’clock shadow had been shaved off by acid, his skin nothing but a tomato. Even his fingernails were bleeding from clawing his way out of the purple stream and grabbing clumps of acid fluff.
Logan didn’t care.
He couldn’t feel it through the walled-off rooms.
Rolling his neck back and forth, he calmed himself until his pulse was steady, his heartbeat slowing. Opening his senses while the acid pummeled him, he searched, but he did it in a languid, unhurried way, as if he had all the time in the world. It was the only way to maintain his calm and keep the doors shut and the pain out.
Focusing on the brightest spot of life in the clearing, one that dwarfed the others, Logan narrowed in on an immense paper birch tree. This one had to be the width of five men standing side-by-side, and so tall its canopy of leaves helped to filter the flying pollen.
To grow this thing with [Life Cycle Master] would have taken all his Karma. Even though Logan wasn’t deploying the skill, he instinctively knew how the tree had ended up the massive tower of life it was now. From a seed, launching its roots into the ground, burying deep, shoots breaching the dirt and looking for the artificial sun, Logan had the image in his mind like breathing. The tree grew, sprout traveling until it was five feet, then ten feet tall, branches bursting forth like a brain stem, limbs thickening, strengthening. Then the trunk thickened, a layer of bark fattening it, year after year, century after century.
This was an ancient tree.
And an ancient tree had secrets, secrets of the room.
Gasping, Logan stared at the tree, his eyes widening.
Just like that, he had it.
He knew how others had survived this room. The knowledge was etched into the rings of the tree. The bark. Trial after trial, users had torn the bark, using it to shelter themselves from the acid. Unlike Logan, they’d known about the bark before they’d entered the trial, the knowledge passed down from clan to clan, generation to generation.
It was a paper birch tree. Paper birch trees peeled. And the System had manufactured this one to neutralize the acid, giving anyone who covered themselves in it armour that was like living steel. All he’d have to do was peel the white bark into layers and wrap himself with it, making him look like a wrapped toilet paper mummy; ridiculous on the face of it, but effective.
Ding!
[You have earned one perception point!]
[…]
[You have earned one perception point!]
[Trial Update:
Asthea: 11 Perception
Logan: 6 Perception
Arsen: Disqualified
Errol: Disqualified
Thorin: Disqualified]
[Trial Progress: 4.53 minutes remaining.]
Logan blinked rapidly. He’d received four perception points from that one instance alone! That meant he only needed five more points for a tie with Asthea, and six more to beat her. But he had less than five minutes! Despite his best efforts to remain calm, Logan’s toes twitched with nerves as urgency surged.
The thing about it was, even though he’d discovered the secret to the room, he didn’t need it. It would take needless time to peel away the bark into useable wrappings, time he didn’t have. He’d managed to get by with his walled-off rooms, and what was another four minutes of pain?
Gnashing his teeth, he slammed shut every single door in his mind, shouting in exuberance as he strode over the acid-soaked wet grass, blood oozing underneath his feet.
There was one problem. He needed to earn six perception points, and he was rapidly running out of test subjects. The rocks, the grass, the trees. He could focus on the screaming mutant dandelion weeds, but somehow, he knew that would get him one attribute point at best.
He needed something massive.
Logan hesitated.
Well, never say never. If he needed to end this trial with a bang, why not choose the one thing that would be the most difficult, but also, the most valuable?
The artificial sun.