Randidly rather casually removed some smoked sausages from his interspatial ring and began to snack as the next wave of foes came. It might just be his imagination, but he really hadn’t felt full since returning from the shaft. Some fundamental change had occurred in his body and respectable amounts of food no longer cut it.

That didn’t stop Randidly from trying, however. And the sausages were his own make, and delicious.

Below, more and more recruits streamed into the canyon, gathering up in bunches and throwing themselves forward at the elite group. Learning from the prior losses, each assault team was about two thousand individuals in size, probably all taught by the same Drill Sergeant, and possessed one or two individuals with powerful enough images they could rival Randidly’s elites.

Still, the Nexus was a place where quality mattered most of all. Even in the face of these large groups, Randidly’s recruits kept up their pace. They lashed out, disabling and wounding their enemies with each strike. The Head Drill Sergeant manipulated Absolute Grasp of Yggdrasil and cleared out the wounded individuals.

Alas, poor me… Randidly thought while pushing the rest of a sausage into his mouth. He noticed the struggle not to comment on Superintendent Xeruth’s face not to comment. Randidly licked his fingers with relish. Even though I am Head Drill Sergeant, I am working so hard with this Challenge… truly a martyr, I am.

And he didn’t even get a break. After one large mass of bodies was annihilated, the next one rumbled forward. Each seemed more powerful than the last, and finally, in the chaos of battle, there was a casualty. One of the elite groups was struck with a glancing blow in the side and stumbled. With just that small mistake, she was swarmed and smashed into the ground.

Randidly pursed his lips. He obviously hated to see his people wounded, but knew it was inevitable. He carefully marshaled his emotions. It had to happen eventually. The question is… How will you deal with loss, trainees…?

But his worries that this was the beginning of the end proved groundless. There were no dangerous deviations in that Squad’s formation after losing a member; Helen had been adamant that they practice their teamwork with all numbers and member combinations for just this sort of scenario. Gradually, this most recent assault was defeated and smoothly another came forward. In the next scrum, two of the elites were defeated. In the following one, another individual fell.

Randidly’s heart throbbed for each of his recruits that fell. It never got any easier watching them being attacked.

Yet as the elite group had defeated about half of their fellow recruits while only losing four individuals, some of the other Drill Sergeants were looking at Randidly with a strangely heavy gaze. He could feel hesitation seeping into the surrounding space; it seemed they finally realized the price of forcing this issue against him.

Influence +6!

Through his connection with them, Randidly could also feel the recruits’ understanding and respect for him shooting upward. They had been forced into exhausted and hopeless situations constantly in his training. At the time, they had just assumed that their Head Drill Sergeant was a sadist. But now he could feel them realizing the importance of the resolve they had gained by scraping their bodies dry, again and again.

For the next three waves of assault, not a single recruit was wounded. Their movements grew more efficient as they bashed and cut down their foes. This crucible was strengthening them further.

Yet Randidly’s expression shifted toward a grimace, despite their improvements. First, his elites had needed to use their images more and more often to keep from being overwhelmed. It was fine for now, but outside of the small squads, even his elites' images weren’t very compatible. Soon they would be fighting each other for influence in the surrounding space.

But more importantly… within the most recent group was an individual who definitely did not belong within the recruits. To Randidly’s sensitive emotional perception, this man dragged around a heavy clump of bloodlust that set his skin tingling.

Randidly’s gaze turned flinty. So, you truly mean to beat my recruits at any cost, huh…?

Without revealing his capability, the man suppressed his image and marched forward as a part of the new attack. And although it made him extremely uncomfortable to do so, Randidly did nothing but watch. He couldn’t protect his recruits from surprise threats like this. It was a part of learning the art of war. They would be weakened by his favor now, down the line.

That didn’t make it any easier to handle his thrashing anxiety, however.

Of course, when that bloodthirsty individual had the chance, he erupted with a horrible fuschia jellyfish that struck back and forth with its long tentacles. An entire squad of Randidly’s elites was wiped out like it was nothing. Then the jellyfish ballooned in size, rapidly swelling to fill the sky above the Challenge.

“All of you are nothing, ulululululoooooo!” The fellow cackled strangely. The fuschia jellyfish pulsed and undulated in an almost obscene way. The battlefield around him partially stilled as Randidly’s recruits shifted their focus to this obvious threat. The man’s smile widened. “Cocky scum, let me remind you of true power! One Thousand Seizures!”

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The jellyfish bulged as protuberances wormed their way out of its slimy body. Then they accelerated outward, striking at ally and foe alike. The man continued to cackle as Randidly’s recruits retreated before the onslaught. His eyes glowed bright fuschia.

Randidly gritted his teeth, forced to watch the indiscriminate slaughter. Although his rational mind knew it was foolish to do so, he made a mental note of the features of this man. In the future, Randidly would pay him back for his wild violence.

Then a Vulpine stepped forward and casually grasped at the air. The tentacles were frozen. Then, just as casually, Raymund Ballast flicked his fingers forward. “You reap what you sow.”

There was only the faintest hint of it, but even Randidly raised his eyebrows as he felt a massive image moving beneath the surface of Raymund’s skin. Helen told me that he was extremely powerful… but this is even more impressive than I had imagined.

After being ‘stolen’ and ‘released’ by that image, those thousand tentacles struck downward at their original owner without the slightest hesitation. Just before the blows landed, the man seemed to realize what had happened, but by then it was too late. His body was paralyzed, poisoned, and pummelled by the touch of his own insidious image.

Raymund raised his hand as though to strike a blow, but paused as he saw the jellyfish man convulsing and foaming at the mouth in his small crater. So instead Raymund turned away and slashed with his hand, smashing away a dozen of the surrounding foes who had been moving forward under the cover of this assault.

Randidly seized the jellyfish man around the waist with a root and tossed him away as the fight continued. But instead of crashing to the ground, the jellyfish man spun mid-air and landed on his feet in a crouched position, like a ninja. Without hesitating at all, he launched himself back toward the challenge. Randidly’s lips twitched; it seemed like his chance for revenge had come more rapidly than he had expected.

Adding some backbone to the Skill with Yggdrasil, Absolute Grasp reared up out of the ground with thick and thorny vines. The jellyfish man skidded to a stop, but the Skill moved too quickly for him to react. He was smashed into the ground with enough force that his bones cracked and he bounced a meter into the air.

Beside Randidly, Banum frowned. “Mr. Ghosthound, I must object to your behavior. It seems you removed this man before he-”

Congratulations! Your Skill Absolute Grasp of Yggdrasil (T) has grown to Level 354!

Banum was cut off as he had to scramble to the side; Randidly’s root had tossed the dazed man with a jellyfish image over toward their viewing area, where he crashed precisely into the ground where Banum had been standing. This time, he had been too stunned by Randidly’s attack to make a flashy landing.

“You… you-!” The man with a jellyfish image wasn’t so injured he didn’t quickly recover, so he rounded on Randidly with a furious scowl. However, Randidly allowed the ethereal flames of Weight to seep out of his skin and the words refused to come out of the man’s throat. He exchanged a helpless glance with Banum.

Randidly smirked at that; it was clear they knew each other. Below, the challenge continued unabated. No image as powerful as the fuschia jellyfish came forward, but his elite group was being pressured. He could feel several powerful images from amongst his recruits taking turns flaring to life to push the enemies backward.

“You might have been fooled by his performance into thinking that Di’irt was incapacitated, but that was just a ruse,” Banum finally said, as he mobilized his own image to resist the pressure that radiated outward from Randidly. He spoke condescendingly, as though this were Randidly’s first brush with combat. “Such tactics-”

“Wouldn’t have fooled a Nether Gatekeeper,” Randidly responded with a sharp smile. He was happy to throw this argument iback n this arrogant fool’s face but starting to grow quite tired of this. “Such antics on a real battlefield would have meant that- wait a second, your name is dirt? Ha.”

Di’irt flushed visibly, his fleshy skin moving closer to the fuschia of his jellyfish. Banum scowled but seemed truly flummoxed by Randidly’s response. So Randidly turned back to the Challenge below and placated the flames of rage in his chest. Yet his emotional state had difficulty stabilizing when he had to watch his group struggle. Truly, these most recent assault groups were strong. The elite group was triumphing in the face of superior numbers, but they were taking losses to do it. More and more enemy soldiers surged forward.

Charlotte Wick occasionally released her Primal Force image infused with Yggdrasil. It was a elk-like monster with an absolutely massive pair of pale antlers. It released waves of rejuvenating energy, restoring the flagging Stamina of the elite group.

Jieu Ronault also stepped forward, mobilizing his field of starfire image with the added benefits of the Stillborn Phoenix. Of all three of the images that Randidly had shared, Jieu had acclimated the quickest to the improvements that he brought with him out of the shaft. The new field of azure and black starfire was a roiling avalanche of emotions. Whenever the opponents were gaining too much momentum, he pulsed with power and smashed their emotions into a brief period of stunned submission.

The formation of Randidly’s recruits shifted as Raymund Ballast’s squad fell to the core in order to deal with the most dangerous threats. In the meantime, Vizzeret Clamman moved to the vanguard, where his Obsidian Wolf image endured the frequent battering of the opponents. Still, the blood of the Grim Chimera now flowed in the Obsidian Wolf.

The image possessed a massive body of glossy black stone. Each of its limbs was powerful and bulky, yet for all that power, it moved awkwardly. Which, of course, was part of its transformation. As more and more images smashed against its surface, parts of the stone were cracked and broken, revealing stronger flesh underneath.

Very soon, a streamlined and dominant physique was revealed as the shape grew closer and closer to perfection. The shimmering Obsidian Wolf ran rampant, slaughtering their foes.

Influence +5!

Randidly grinned over at Banum. “There are only five thousand recruits remaining versus about a hundred and twenty of my elites. I must admit, you were right about this Challenge bringing me a surprise; I would have thought my group wouldn’t have lost a single individual.”

Banum’s frown steadily grew. He didn’t bother to respond to Randidly as the final group moved into the canyon.

However, these new arrivals made Randidly’s face fall into a similar expression. This… is going to be rough.