Mila
The knife continued toward her right eye, but then it stopped, a large see through barrier forming around her.
“Sorry, Kiloran.” One of the five remaining E ranks Mila had forced into a contract with a death punishment, a male mage with pale skin and blond hair, appeared on the roof of a building a couple floors lower than the tower she and her assailant were on. “While I would very much like to see her dead, I can’t let you kill her.”
At the same time, six other E ranks arrived as well, another of the E ranks Mila had forced into a death contract, one of the first E ranks she’d tricked into signing a standard contract, and all four of the dead Corith’s subordinates.
Corith’s four subordinates took one look at their dead boss, then looked at all the E ranks present. “Who killed him?” the one blacksmith in the group asked, a large hammer appearing from out of nowhere in his right hand.
“Kiloran.” The blond mage who’d originally saved her pointed at the man who’d tried to kill her, the only E rank in the area who wouldn’t be negatively effected by her being hurt. “The city lord and his wife did most of the damage, but he finished your boss off.”
“Alright then.” As the smith spoke, the three warriors all summoned armor onto their bodies and weapons into their hands as well. “You have to die now.”
They attacked and, without the barrier from the mage, Mila would have died just from the shockwaves, the tower she was standing on starting to crumble as the mage’s barrier broke.
Thankfully, her stats were near maximum for G rank and her training with Nana Xara made her good at using her qi to help with movement. She jumped down along with the falling stones and used her high grade Law Egg of Obfuscation to hide from all the E ranks’ senses during the chaos.
Then she ran. Both D ranks were dead, which was awesome, and the city lord’s E rank wife had died as well, which was great. More E ranks would also hopefully die in the fight which had just started. But Mila wanted to be nowhere near them as they fought.
She was G rank. Most F ranks would destroy her in a fair fight, let alone E ranks, so she had to hide and then wait to hear about the aftermath.
This didn’t mean she couldn’t take advantage of the chaos, however. Mila made her way to the city’s granary, snuck inside while the guards were distracted, and then dumped the rest of the alcohol from the rather large bag of holding she’d stolen the night before. She then placed a scented candle she lit with a magical lighter, both also from the bag, right near the alcohol, and quickly made her way out of there.
When she was a few blocks away, she heard a muffled boom, and then she hid and watched as the entire building lit up in flames and the guards panicked.
Magic being a thing, the fire was quickly put out, but most of the food had been burnt, so the city now had a food shortage crisis on top of its still unknown poisoned water, and more chaos was better.
Mila then made her way to one of the three main houses of healing in the city, the only one not affiliated with a church, and walked in as they were slowly starting to get overwhelmed with cases from her plague. A nurse met her and asked if she had any symptoms and Mila quickly said no, explaining she’d heard about how busy things were getting and was there to offer her help.
Through that lie, she then spent the entire night in the best possible training environment for her Law Egg of The Healer and also a hub of information. She helped treat several patients not suffering from the poisoned water, doing her actual best, and watched as more and more patients came in during the night.
Most of those with actual healing skills in the city were also sick and those that weren’t, and even some that were, were dragged off by the city officials to treat the E ranks still alive from the day’s battle.
Through overhearing conversations, Mila learned Kiloran Kiv had managed to kill all four of Corith’s underlings, but had been heavily hurt himself, along with several of the other E ranks who’d been around. During the night, the two E ranks she’d made standard contracts with while disguised as a representative of the Tower of Baharun were killed as well, along with quite a few of the city’s strongest F ranks, but no one knew why.
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Mila then deliberately tripped herself and fell into a table, hurting her arm rather badly, and she spent the rest of the night healing it with her mana—as she was an energy lifeform and healing worked differently, qi of no help.
About an hour later, she heard all the city’s remaining E ranks other than Kiloran Kiv had died under mysterious circumstances, along with their children or spouses.
Then, at about an hour to noon, Mila practiced using her Law Egg of The Reaper, which she’d gained quite quickly after obtaining the relevant legacy, and silently killed every healer still in the building with a knife she’d stolen from one of the patients. She moved quickly to avoid blood splatter on her clothes and used obfuscation and a hologram over her form to disguise her identity, making everyone in the building think the killer had been a male.
Then she made her way to Kiloran Kiv’s house, where he was convalescing, and used the identity she’d established over the night to help out the exhausted healers there, entering the room at noon to fulfill the contract the E rank had forced on her.
The man was not in a state to do what he’d been planning, however. He was unconscious, having been seriously hurt the day before and only barely saved by the intervention of the healers, but then they’d filled him up with fluids and, their healing mostly done through magic, the fluids they’d filled him with was just water with added sugar, the water very much contaminated by Mila’s new bacteria.
Now, it wasn’t like these healers were worse than those from Earth. In many ways, they were way better. She’d watched F rank healers use magic to completely cleanse the bacteria from patients’ systems multiple times. The problem was they were infected as well, along with over half the city’s population when the symptoms finally started after the first twelve hours, and most people’s symptoms started after sundown. The lack of sleep, combined with the best of the healers being pulled away to help the E ranks, just meant they were delayed in figuring out the water was poisoned.
Mila then practiced with her Law Egg of The Reaper again, killing all the exhausted healers still in Kiloran Kiv’s house, and then she stole Kiloran Kiv’s personal bag of holding, finding quite a few poisons, antidotes, and assassination weapons inside.
For the next few days, she then practiced with those weapons, killing every healer she was able to find on the first day, then all the alchemists by the second, and anyone she could find by the third.
By that time in Aalam’s instance, the only ones left alive were the two D ranks, but Aalam found where they were sleeping. Then he searched the city for explosives and, as the settlement had been built for a mining operation on a D rank planet, where all non-living materials had been infused with enough mana to make them very, very hard to break, there were quite a few, and most were almost as powerful as a nuke. He piled them up around the two D ranks and then blew their very weakened bodies into pieces.
Only his city lord actually died from the explosions, but his Corith then finally faded three days later.
On the thirteenth day of the challenge, Mila felt her contract with Kiloran Kiv disappear as he finally succumbed to the disease she’d made before he’d forced her into a contract. Then she planted half the explosives she’d found with Aalam’s help and set the entire city on fire, watching from Corith’s old mountain as twelve individuals escaped through the path she’d left for them, right into the invisible field of poison she’d made using a powerful E rank talisman she’d found in Kiloran Kiv’s bag of holding.
It had taken her five concentrated blocks of mana from the city lord’s mansion to power it, but it killed all of them, even the three powerful F ranks she would have had no chance to kill even with a sneak attack, in under an hour.
She then waited four days for all the fires to go out and made her way back into the city, finding the teleportation platform at its edge still up and running, its entirely stone surroundings having protected it from the flames.
Someone had fixed it after her sabotage and, on the last day of the challenge, it activated and allowed twenty-four individuals through. They all died immediately, however, as Mila had set up another invisible poison field, and, on Aalam’s end, no one came through, something they considered a good sign.
Mila’s instance of the trial, however, still had one more test.
One hour before the challenge was completed, 16 F ranks, 7 E ranks, and 1 D rank came through. Mila immediately activated all the explosives she’d placed around the platform and, when the dust cleared, the D rank was the only one alive, and thankfully slightly unsteady on his feet.
Mila then used the remainder of the city lord’s blocks of mana to activate a D rank talisman, the only one she’d found in Corith’s bag of holding after tracking it down, and she was so thankful Aalam had tried activating the one in his instance first so she knew how it worked, or she would have missed.
The talisman fired out a beam of light, but it would have been incorrect to fire it at your enemy. Instead, it needed to be fired quite a bit to your enemy’s right.
The light beam bounced around, almost instantly drawing out a pentagram in the air, and a second later everything inside the pentagram turned to dust, the D rank, the bodies, and the teleportation platform all destroyed like half the universe after Thanos’s snap.