The two pigmen were not much harder than the first. I didn’t really want to have to deal with the smell, so I took these guys out with my sword. They were pretty smelly up close, so it didn’t help that much. The next group was four. I had a sinking feeling that this was going to continue to grow exponentially. Survive indeed.

A thought came to me, one that I probably would have never allowed myself to have before I had lost a piece of my soul. I killed three of the monsters, and while keeping the fourth back using various tricks, I dragged the remaining three to one side of the arena. Then, I finished him off. In the next round, eight appeared as expected. I burned several skills to kill several of the pigmen as quickly as possible. Then, with the remaining, I took my time picking them off until one remained. Then, I repeated what I did the previous time.

Sixteen pigmen were the first time I started to feel some genuine pressure. I was firing off skills, and I could feel my mana draining quickly. I even had to heal from a few painful blows. If the star potion hadn’t restored all of my abilities, I definitely might have fallen in this round. Like before, I killed all but one and then started dragging the bodies. At this point, it was rather obvious what I was doing. On the opposite side from where the pigmen spawned, I started stacking their bodies up like a wall. They were currently three pigmen high, which given their large bodies, rose to about my chest.

When thirty-two spawned, I fought from behind my impromptu shelter of bodies. They managed to eventually get through the wall of bodies, but they weren’t able to surround me, and I was able to kill enough that I managed to finish them off. With one remaining again, I began to rebuild my fort of bodies. If this was the same, the next round would be sixty-four. Although I had a five-foot wall and I even had a blessing cast on my fort of corpses, I worried the next round would be too much.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Thus, I took out a clip and blocked my nose, then using Fire Control, I killed the last pigmen and set the wall on fire. The pigmen were very afraid of fire, and it worked splendidly. Best of all, sixty-four pigmen were more than enough to fill all the ones I had burned in the previous round. After taking out sixty-three of them, an act that left me extremely exhausted, I thought about keeping this one trapped and resting. No… I had to be reaching the end. 128 would be the final round! I knew it!

Taking all of the energy I had, I reassembled my fort or corpses, killed the last pigmen, and then 128 spawned. 128 pigmen were a lot more than I realized. It wasn’t until I saw it up close I realized just how screwed I was. They began to descend on me with a frightful quickness. I cursed as I realized I forgot to set the wall on fire. Just as I started to set it, they had already burst through the wall. A hundred pigmen descended on me.

They all suddenly disappeared moments before reaching me, including the bodies on the floor. The door on the other side of the arena clicked.

“Huh? The time limit was reached?”

It was then that I realized that the challenge said to survive, not defeat, conquer, or win. I only had to survive for a certain length of time. That meant, had I just restrained the first pigmen and took a nap, I’d have won just as quickly. I collapsed to the ground and let out a groan. I wanted to punch this Greggar guy if I ever met him.