Once Thorin agreed to start the trial, that same door materialized in the wall. Rolling his shoulders, his massive sword in one hand, Thorin threw a grin at the others, followed by a dark glare at Logan before rushing through the doorway.

As soon as he did, a sound like a power surge echoed around the room, and everything… transformed. This wasn’t normal virtual reality. Hell no.

The room had disappeared, and instead, everywhere he looked….

Holy shit. It was as if he were back in the battlefield prepping arena! The same blue sky, the same steep, sheer wall. Looking down, he could see the ground—the dirt, the gravel—as if he were walking on it. This was so far from virtual reality it wasn’t in the same stratosphere.

The others were looking around in curiosity.

“That’s one high cliff,” said Errol.

Logan swallowed and gradually, trepidation started to trickle through him. “Will the System show what we did to prepare for the battle?”

In the battlefield tutorial, Logan had made the calculated decision that the benefits of using his spatial collar outweighed the risks of discovery. In the back of his mind, he knew there was a possibility that the System might show the others a preview of everyone prepping for their trial—like a warped recap episode—but the System hadn’t mentioned anything of the kind. If he were wrong, he’d be up shit creek without a paddle.

He owed Asthea a lot—from his Save Humanity Quest to her help in easing tensions with her guards. As far as he was concerned, she’d be a great leader.

But leaders had to consider things beyond being a good person.

They had to think about their people.

Something told Logan that in this, he needed to be cautious. That meant that once the trial started, he could no longer use tactics that involved throwing boulders from his spatial storage or drilling tunnels. Whatever he’d completed in the tutorial—that was it.

Logan soon had his answer.

The viewpoint changed as if they were walking down the gorge, but everyone was standing in place. The System moved the virtual room until they were looking over Thorin’s shoulder. Slightly to his back, giving them a full view of the man, but also a view of the army around him. It was as if they were invisible spectators. Logan felt a breeze on his face and the scent of dust and earth. He felt the heat of the sun and the faint sound of birds off in the distance.

This was happening. Happening in real time.

“Well, my brothers,” said Thorin with a shout, waving his sword in the air. Ten inches in width and glinting with a razor-sharp edge, the thing had to weigh more than Logan. “We’re going to war!”

Around them, hundreds of soldiers shouted in exultation. But these were no normal soldiers. Not blobs, and not people with knives for arms.

They were rock people.

Standing eight feet tall at least, their bodies constructed of large, smooth boulders stacked on top of each other. They had a huge, round rock head, with two divots for eyes. Some had two limbs, others had three or four. It was as if someone had typed the name ‘rock people’ in a System generation tool and it spat out a mishmash of random rock soldiers. Half the soldiers were skinny and round, their edges smoothed as if by water, while the other half were rocky and sharp.

“Our purpose is blessed, commander!” said a rock at the top of the army, his boulders glinting with gold and diamond sparkles, as if he’d been carved out of a precious metal deposit. “Bring the sinners to paradise!”

“Paradise! Paradise!” shouted the rock people, the ground shaking like an earthquake.

Logan looked down in disbelief. Underneath his feet, his Logan exoskeleton boots were vibrating. He could no longer tell what was real and what was the simulation.

“Ah,” said Asthea. “Thorin chose the Monolith option. A good choice.”

And based on their propaganda, he must have sacrificed his friends and family and saved the world for the System to have given him a ‘good’ army.

“To war, my brothers! To war!”

“To war! To war!” shouted a hundred voices. The rock people stamped their feet and turned to face the opposite side of the gorge. Surging forward, a thousand-ton army streamed down the path between the cliffs like a stampede. Their rock-limbs pounded the ground and made the cliffs vibrate, sand falling, pebbles skipping.

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Thorin laughed and darted through his army, running at full speed, his silver hair flying behind him. Breaking out of the group, he rushed into open ground and then came to a stop in front of his army.

Facing him were the same rock people. This time, a shadow covered them, a shadow from Logan’s darkest nightmare. They clapped their rocky fists with a boom, stone on stone. Lightening crackled between their limbs, sending a shockwave through the narrow gorge.

“Oh the clan,” Asthea murmured in awe.

Logan felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up as static built in the air. The faint smell of burning wafted past his nose, his feet tingling as if he were standing on an electric plate.

Thorin laughed an unhinged laugh. “You’ve met your maker, evilness! I’ll crush you underneath my feet!” Planting his sword into the earth with a massive swing, burrowing five feet into the ground, he let it sway back and forth before opening his palm.

Logan was so close—this time as if he were Thorin himself—that he could see Thorin’s hand with crystal clarity, from the fine white hairs on the back of his skin, to the calluses on his fingers. Inside his palm was a ring. With a laugh, Thorin put it on his index finger and then with his biceps bulging, blue veins on his neck standing out from his skin, he wrenched his sword from the ground and raised it above his head.

And then something happened that Logan wasn’t expecting.

In front of him, five other Thorins materialized.

What in the world?

Exact replicas, down to the swords and unhinged grins. As the original Thorin swung his sword, the others mirrored him.

It had to be a skill.

“What skill is that?” Logan asked.

Asthea gave him a proud smile. “Doppelganger. From the nonalson animals from our world.”

“Thorin has a bonded companion?”

Errol snorted. “Idiot.”

Asthea laughed. “No, we don’t bond with them. Imagine Thorin bonding with a lizard! We harvest them.”

Wait. What?

“…You harvest them.”

Asthea nodded.

Logan felt a pit opening inside his stomach. His eyes widened as he started to connect the dots. Ernie’s Sky People! Were these fuckers harvesting octopuses for their skills?

“To confirm, how do you harvest an animal for a skill?”

Asthea winced. “That’s the part of the process I don’t like, but they don’t feel pain after the water temperature goes up enough—the boiling acts as a numbing effect. We boil them for a full day straight, then take the excess liquid to our smithies. Don’t ask me how, but somehow the nonalson’s skill turns into malleable material that our smiths can make into rings.” She nudged him with her elbow. “You should feel privileged. That knowledge was hard earned.”

What. The. F’ing. Shit.

They were killing them! Killing Ernie’s brethren! Instead of obtaining skills by bonding with animals, they were stealing them and manufacturing them! Assholes!

Logan’s rage burned white hot, everything he’d thought he’d known about Asthea’s character taking a one-eighty. How could someone like her tolerate this shit? His muscles and veins standing out on his skin, his nostrils flaring, it took everything he had not to reach over and strangle her.

Ernie!

They’d kill Ernie if they could!

Okay okay okay. Logan had to talk himself down from a mental cliff. Asthea’s people weren’t the Sky People or else they wouldn’t have been surprised to see Logan. They would have known about the Integration. No, it was some other asshole people from a world in the Collective.

Logan now had a fuller picture of what was going on, and he didn’t like it. The System had chosen Earth because of the potential animal skill values. Ernie was one of them, but there could be others.

As far as he was concerned, the whole spiel about carbon was just an excuse. The System had used that ploy to kill as many people as possible. Weed out the population, make Earth easy pickings. After all, if Logan failed his Save Humanity Quest, in less than a year, the population would drop to less than 60 million. Until then, the System kept them scrambling around to survive like a chicken with its head cut off while aliens from other worlds harvested animals and converted them into skill rings.

Those fuckers were going to pay.

If it was up to Logan, they had a hell storm of pain coming to them.

Grinding his teeth, Logan watched the six Thorins rush towards the incoming army. Grudgingly, Logan had to admit that for all the repulsiveness of the skill, it was impressive. He ran into the ‘evil’ rock army like a bulldozer, all five Thorins shaving off chunks of rock like he was slicing cheese. He was such a powerhouse that his army behind him wasn’t even needed. That wouldn’t serve him well in a tactician trial where the purpose was to lead your army to victory, but he must be gaining a hell of a lot of XP.

And yet, why hadn’t Thorin deployed that skill in the agility trial? Five different Thorins would have confused the hell out of the cannon balls.

Logan looked at the group. “Why didn’t he use that in the agility trial?”

There was a pause before all three of them gazed at him in disbelief.

A vein on Errol’s forehead throbbed. “Because it’s understood that you don’t use skills inside the attribute trial. Cheater, trickster.” Then with a faint mutter, “Plus, it’s been tried before. The cannon balls fly right past the clones. It only enrages them. Each person who’s tried deploying that skill ends up regretting it.”

Arsen gave him a less harsh but no less accusing stare.

They could stare all they wanted. After what he’d just learned, Logan wasn’t going to be lectured on fair play. Why don’t they try being boiled alive and see how they liked it!

And give him a break. How was Logan supposed to know they’d had an unwritten rule? No one had told him! And… if he were honest with himself, he might not have stayed within the rules even if he’d known.

Logan had always followed the rules—filed his taxes on time, followed the traffic laws—but that was before the apocalypse. Why should he follow a rule that seemed self imposed by another species? As far as he was concerned, if the rule didn’t come from the System, then it didn’t exist. If they called him a cheater, then so be it. They didn’t have friends and family relying on them, to them, it was a challenge and a way for Asthea to impress her mother. Logan was dealing with something greater, something life threatening… something world ending.

And someone who boiled sentient animals alive for skills didn’t have a leg to stand on.

“I’ll take that into consideration for next time.”

There would be no next time.