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As the Ghoul’s maw got closer to biting my head, I took advantage of my smaller size, brought both my legs under its belly, and kicked off, flipping the Ghoul above me and onto its back.

I took this opportunity to draw my dagger and swing it above my head, plunging the blade into the Ghoul’s head. Once I felt the hilt of my dagger hit the skull, I yanked out my dagger and leaped to my feet to turn to the last Ghoul.

After I laid eyes on it, I relaxed my guard. The last Ghoul that I left my sword in was clawing its way away from me, toward a Verminar carcass. But all it was crawling on was its left hand and the stump of its right hand, all while being impeded by the hilt of my sword still stuck halfway in its body, digging a furrow in the sand.

When I caught up to the crawling Ghoul to see why it was not using its legs, I immediately found out why. As I looked along it's protruding spine, I saw that the blade of my sword was firmly lodged in its vertebrae, most likely paralyzing it from its upper chest down.

It seems that physical anatomy still counts for something regardless of whether it is a magical undead.

Sensing me standing over it, the crippled ghoul turned as much as my sword allowed and took ineffective swipes at me with its remaining arm.

Seeing no need to prolong this, I cast a spell to manipulate the earth under the ghoul, and earth spikes rose out of the ground to crisscross over the ghoul's arms, restraining it.

After that, it was just a simple matter of stabbing it in the brain, retrieving my sword from its body, and decapitating it and the other two ghouls, just to be safe.

After all the ghouls were beheaded, I looked up to the royal’s balcony again to see the “Round 3” wheel being spun. This time, the monster that I will be facing is one that needs two to five average, non-aura-capable soldiers to safely take down.

When the wheel stopped, it landed on something called a Lesser Chimera.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, our contestant has shown us his skill in combat in these two rounds, but for a winner of three tournament events, was there any doubt to begin with?” the announcer asked, and the crowd cheered in response. “But now, he will be putting his skill to the test facing a true monster. A Lesser Chimera!”

As the portcullis opened and a cage was wheeled in, I saw it. As big as a draft horse, it had the head of a ram with a fanged maw, the body of some kind of canid, giant wolf most likely, and a very long tail that was some kind of bladed bone whip that it was running along the bars of the cage while growling at everything around.

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If I remember correctly from what I read, a Lesser Chimera is the spawn of an adult Chimera, which is a stable artificial monster that some group of mages created as weapons for a long-extinct kingdom more than two thousand years ago, and as most cliché stories go, the kingdom came under a sudden attack and the first chimeras used the opportunity to break their bonds, kill the mages and escape into the wilds to mate and multiply.

Now, the less initiated might ask, ‘What's the difference between a chimera and a lesser chimera? A chimera is a chimera, they all have different beast/monster parts, so why put them in different categories?’, to that, I would say size for one, the adults start at the size of a small log cabin and go up from there, the other reason is the number of different parts the chimera manages to integrate into their body.

When a lesser chimera is born, it inherits a random beast/monster part from each of their parents, so it starts off in life with two different parts, and through some unknown process, over time it manifests parts of what it ate, and when it reaches the point that it shows five different parts from different beasts/monsters, it seems that they are considered adults and start looking for a mate.

So, this lesser chimera in the cage before me does not seem to be a newborn and has killed enough to manifest its third part, not to mention that that tail looks mighty deadly.

As the announcer finishes waxing poetics about the lesser chimera, the tournament staff does the same thing as the last round and closes the portcullis behind themselves before pulling a chain to open the lesser chimera’s cage.

Unlike the previous two rounds, the lesser chimera stalks out of the cage with the grace of a true predator, confident and concentrated on me.

As it stalks over to me, it stops to give the carcasses from the first two rounds a sniff and averts its nose in disgust, apparently, it has refined enough palate to not go for undead or sewer meat, which left me as the only option, and as tasty as I surely am, I am not going to easily give it a taste, not that the mana shield would let it if I get hit too hard.

Seeing that this monster is not mindlessly charging me, tells me that it is experienced and recognizes me and my pointy stick as a danger.

It then starts circling me, and not wanting to get flanked, I circle it too, but as I do so, I am mentally weaving and caching spells, and after I weaved as many spells as I could maintain, I struck first.

I reached out my hand and shot out three third-circle lightning spells, but it was already on the move the moment I raised my arm and managed to dodge two of the spells, but one was all it took for it to be shocked and stunned in place.

As it was spazzing out from getting shocked, I charged in for the kill, but despite lacking control of its muscles, it still managed to whip its long bone blade tail in front of itself and thrash it around, and as I was in the way of this tail thrashing, I almost got hit twice and had to back away.

It seems that being shocked has its perks, despite the ongoing electric shock making the tail attacks erratic and inaccurate, it also made the trajectory of the attacks unpredictable.

Soon, the shock wore off and all that was left was a snarling and slightly singed lesser chimera that seemed very pissed at me.