“Go all out?” Michael repeated, the blood draining from his cheeks and forehead. “On that thing? What if it wakes up? I’m an F-ranker! A B-rank monster could sneeze on me and I’d die!”

“It won’t wake up,” Atla stated confidently.

“How can you be sure?” the young healer exclaimed.

She pointed at the glowing shackles. “Those. They’ve been enchanted to keep the wearer in an indefinite state of stasis. You could damage it to the point of death and it would neither feel nor know that it was happening.”

“Oh…” Michael drawled. “What if the enchantment fails?”

“It was made by an S-ranked blacksmith.”

“Oh…”

“I’m going first!” Heath shouted and rushed the rest of the way down to the arena.

The ogre was taking no visible damage from the assault by the axe wielder, even as they got closer. “His attacks don’t seem to be doing anything,” Eik said, eliciting chuckles from a group of teens who might well have been the current test taker's friends.

They were a mixed group of races. Some were covered in fur while another had four eyes. One even had a second, longer and slimmer pair of arms extending from behind his shoulders. All of them were humanoid, however.

“It’s an F-ranker against a B-rank monster — and one with a very high natural defense and physical toughness at that,” she said, watching the boy’s frantic striking. “The monitoring of the ogre’s body will probably be the only thing we can really use to judge his accomplishment.”

Breath ragged, the boy stepped back when the judge called for him to stop. His score was slightly below average — a result which he crestfallenly delivered to his friends who jabbed at him goodnaturedly.

The next participant in the friend group stepped up, apparently carrying no weapons. She was covered in fur from top to toe. Even her face had no visible skin except for a bit of her nose. She had neither animal ears nor a tail.

“You get one minute to deliver as much damage as you possibly can. You can attack in any way you’d like, but the rule forbidding things such as enchanted equipment, potions, and external buffs is of course still valid,” Mikla explained.

The girl uncorked a small vial of water from her belt and poured it on the ground as the judge began a countdown. The moment her one minute began she flicked an arm toward the ogre and the spilled water sliced through the air like a polished blade, striking the ogre across the torso.

Although no blood was drawn, a red streak flushed across the skin. Within seconds it was gone again, however.

She used this water manipulation ability to whip and cut at rapid speeds until her time was up. She, too, was slightly below average albeit better than the axe wielder, who was ecstatic to be able to give her a taste of her own medicine.

Eik watched kids as well as a couple of adults try their luck against the ogre’s body to various degrees of success. A few even managed to draw blood, but it quickly healed over, leaving no injury.

Heath approached the ogre as the first and drew his sword, for once discarding the shield that was otherwise usually glued to his back. He took the sword in both hands and swung down and then across with all his might as soon as the signal was given.

On his third slash he activated Unerring Strike, blackish blood running viscously before the shallow wound closed back up once more.

For the next minute he stabbed and slashed like a maniac, drawing one superficial streak of blood after the other. Just before his time was up he managed to use another Unerring Strike, but none of the damage stuck around.

“Is it being healed?” Sonja asked.

“Yeah, by its own physique. It’s one of the things that make these ogres so dangerous to deal with,” Mikla said. “And ironically enough, what makes them the perfect subject for this,” he added.

“This is a little cruel,” she said.

“I agree,” Mikla said but didn’t comment further.

The judge announced a score of 6748 — a number that held no sensible meaning to any of them. It was certainly higher than what the F-rankers managed. To match discrepancy between their ranks and the rank of the test, the score would also have been artificially deflated.

Michael went next, his lack of enthusiasm all too obvious just by the way he shuffled up to the ogre. His general aversion to fighting was not exactly alleviated by the presence of the gigantic B-rank monster either.

But there had been a change in Michael recently. Although he was no born fighter, he had begun to realize the necessity of the capability to fight. Half-hearted smacks with his mace soon intensified until he was employing his entire body to put as much power into the attacks as he could.

In the end he scored pretty terribly, but the blush in his cheeks proved that he had given it his all. He was satisfied.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

He walked away with a score of 1727.

“There had better be a healing test as well,” he wheezed as he rejoined them.

“There is,” Atla laughed. “but we’re not going to do that one today. I’ll take you some other time if you’re interested.”

Drawing her bow, Sonja prepared for her turn. She stood at the very edge of the arena, as far from the stasis-bound monster as she could get. Nocking an arrow, she pulled the string back to its full length and waited for the judge to give her the go.

The first arrow struck the ogre squarely in the stomach but didn’t manage to penetrate deeply enough to even stick. Her second hit as the first clacked against the stone floor, the third following shortly after.

She fired thirteen arrows in eleven seconds and then used Disengage to hurl herself across the platform. She drew her blade as she sailed through the air and hammered it into the ogre’s neck with the additional weight of her fall. This too caused blood to flow, but like all others before, the shallow wound knit itself together instantly.

She kept up the barrage of attacks until the time ran out but bit her lip in frustration when she got her score. Heath’s 6748 had beaten out her score of 6309 despite his defensive focus. Her brother saw the look on her face and refrained from dispensing sassy remarks.

Already before she stepped back down, Eik’s heart was racing with anticipation for what was to come. Viscous, blue liquid seeped out of his skin and collected into gurgling beads that stretched toward the silent monster, the Profound Toxin beckoning for him to rush his prey like a blood hound guiding a hunter.

“Can I go now?” Eik asked, his vision tunneling to the point where he barely registered the affirmative.

Leaping to the stage, he broke into a sprint, drawing Viper Fang with the hiss of metal against leather. Only the shout of the judge ordering him to wait pulled him out of the reverie of blood. “You have to wait for my signal! I’ll ban you if you can’t behave!” the judge shouted angrily.

“Right, right! I’m sorry.”

Eik popped a couple of poison balls, leaving him with only a handful left and readied himself. When he got the go he triggered Movement Boost and whirred up onto the ogre’s shoulder. Focusing the effect of the boost into his arm and hand only, he plunged Viper Fang into its neck with all his might but the blade refused to go deeper than a few centimeter.

Immediately the Profound Toxin gushed out from the blade and flowed eagerly into the shallow neck wound kept open by the sharp tip. Just like when he had been stuck inside the lake serpent’s esophagus, the toxin seemed to cause some kind of localized muscle or tissue weakness that allowed the blade to sink deeper and deeper.

Within fifteen seconds Viper Fang was buried to the hilt in the side of the ogre’s neck and the Profound Toxin could freely invade the B-rank monster’s system. The now familiar, discolored veins of affliction slithered out from the injection site like deadly snakes.

With the strange, mental connection Eik felt to his toxin, he sensed as it spread and bled throughout the victim.

He glanced down at the judge whose eyes were wide at the gruesome sight of Profound Toxin in action. Even though the man must have seen his own share of battle and death, the frightening aftermath of the toxin on a body wasn’t pleasant to look at. The whole visage of it must have looked evil.

Five seconds later, twenty seconds into his one minute, Eik triggered Accelerant.

A dull, hollow boom resonated through the frozen ogre’s body and a second later an energetic blue glow erupted out through its skin, shaking the thing like a cold pudding. A disc-like shock wave surged out and dissipated into thin air.

The Profound Toxin that had been coursing through the ogre’s system had disappeared with the activation of Accelerant, but Viper Fang was steadily pumping more poison in.

“It’s a finisher!” Eik whooped gleefully. “Accelerant is a finisher, guys!” Heath pumped his fist in the air and tried to climb the arena to get a closer look, only for Atla to pull him back down by the collar of his shirt.

For the next five seconds Eik let the poison reenter before he drove Accelerant through once more, the shock wave almost shaking him from his perch on the giant’s broad shoulder. The judge, who was monitoring the ogre’s physical condition, looked unable to believe what he was sensing from the beast.

It would seem that each use of Accelerant expelled all Profound Toxin from the victim to devastating effect.

He still had almost thirty seconds left. Just how much damage could this Accelerant skill potentially do? He had to know.

Wiggling the blade around in the wound, he crammed a hand into the bubbling gash, pulled Viper Fang out again and stabbed it into the other side of the neck, balancing precariously on the ogre’s wide nape. It took a little twisting and more poison, but after another fifteen seconds, he had two inlets for his liquid death to flow through.

He pumped the output up beyond what the two wounds could take so the blue fluid poured over and down the body. The pale skin reddened slightly at the contact, but no angry welts sprung forth.

“Ten seconds left!” the judge called, the sick, dark veins reaching past the ogre’s massive chest.

Eik knew that the way he was loading poison into his victim was only possible because it was happening in a controlled environment.

Recklessly clinging to the target like some bizarre, reverse leech was not feasible in practice, with the exception of especially extraordinary situations such as getting accidentally stuck on the inside of an A-rank monster.

This was the time to prove, in particular to himself, that he was worth something. That he was capable of and had potential for more than just being a pawn in the back and forth between Earth and the Nidafjeld Alliance.

“Five seconds!”

Eik kept the toxin flowing, the lively substance ardently obeying his internal desire and streaming into the wounds.

“Four!” the judge shouted.

Eik tore Viper Fang out of the wound, blood following in a thick arch. Sheathing the stained weapon, he wrapped his legs tightly around the ogre’s chunky neck and his arms around its forehead.

“Accelerant!” he hissed under his breath, calling upon the newfound power.

The boom this time was incomparable to the last two. A rumbling echo from within the giant’s body shook it violently like an earthquake. The blue glow started as a dim, barely visible sparkle but rapidly evolved into a glare of light so bright that it was difficult to look at directly.

Like an undersea detonation, two ferocious pulses of energy that emerged from the ogre’s body seemed to warp its form like some kind of macabre transformation. They slammed into Eik from below with such overwhelming force that his arms and legs were ripped from the monster, sending him sailing up and through the air.

He landed hard on his side, the solid flagstones purging the air from his lungs. He gasped as he wiggled and squirmed on the ground in agony. “My ass! Mike, I think I just broke my ass!” he howled as he felt around for blood, relieved to find nothing.

When no answer came he glanced up and noticed the expressions on his friends’ faces. He rolled over and looked at the ogre.

It was smoking.

“What happened…?” he whispered, eyes flicking between the stasis-bound monster and the dumbstruck judge. The man watched him with disbelief.

“You… are supposed to be E-rank, right?” he asked.

“Right,” Eik confirmed.

The judge started doing some calculations and appeared to hesitate to announce his conclusion.

“Eik Magnasen’s score,” he called loudly. “72496!”