He glanced around, wondering what was going to happen. Then his Danger Sense flared up, and the leaves of the trees that had been gently swaying seemed to almost freeze. They were still moving, but far slower than they had been. Tom instantly understood that this was his new trait at work. His perception had been sped up, even if his body gained no improvements. With wide eyes, he searched for the monster that Danger Sense had tagged as threatening him, and then spotted it flying at him from directly in front.

The monster was tiny and looked weird. It was a chaotic mess of energy rather than anything defined. Much of it resembled an air elemental, but not the normal type. It was more compact than usual, and it was heading straight at him and moving at a speed that, even with his boost, it was hard to follow.

There was no time to do anything but react on instinct. As he would have done if a bird was menacing him like this, he sent his orders to his muscles to move his spear tip into position to push it away. Instantly, he realised that the reflex was wrong. His muscles complained immediately, and he thought it was possible that he had torn something. His weapon and muscles also failed to respond even close to the rate he needed. The trait boosted his perception, but did nothing for his body, and he was just incapable of moving fast enough to compete with the monster’s speed.

It flashed past him at the level of his head. A slither of its compact, swirling mass extended out from the main body like a spinning saw blade to reach for him. Despite the risk, Tom was fascinated. At close range, its nature was as indecipherable as it had been at a distance. His original guess about a concentrated air elemental remained, but it could have also been an exotic monster that used biological processes completely different from anything that had developed on Earth.

His cheeks stung as its slicing appendage cut into him. Luckily, it was only slightly larger than a mouse, so it was limited in the amount of burst damage it could inflict.

Nevertheless, the single encounter gave him more than sufficient information to assess what he was facing. There was no way he could beat this thing physically. Even if each cut was insignificant, given enough time, it would wear him down with a thousand of them. Briefly, Tom wondered whether he could out-heal the monster. If he recovered fast enough, it would be as though he were like one of the giant monsters that Tom couldn’t currently damage despite their low ranking.

He tested the idea by exploring the cost for him to close the cut. A full mana was all that was required, but that was still way too much. There was no feasible path for him to keep up with its damage output, if its first blow was consistent with what it would continue to deliver.

Prolonging the battle was not a possibility. Instead, he needed to kill it quickly. Intelligence was always critical in these kinds of contests, so he hacked a sensing spell together. To save on energy, he only placed three layers in it. That compromise would lower its effectiveness, but, combined with Danger Sense, which was already warning him of an attack from behind, and the fact that it was a curated battle with one opponent, he didn’t actually need that much accuracy.

The outer layer of his sensing construction was broken behind him.

It was coming again. Then, in a blink of real time, the second one failed. It was too quick for him to turn and face it, but his magic didn’t have the same level of restrictions. Electricity, fuelled partially by precognition affinity mana, crackled into existence. He aimed it for a metre in front of the monster in order to hit it, because it was going so fast that’s what he had to do, even with a spell which was almost instantaneous, like Spark.

The current of electricity, concentrated enough to disable a human, struck true. It should have been overkill against a monster as small as the one he faced, but the magic had no noticeable effect. It didn’t even slow it down.

The creature flashed past him, and he touched his waist. It came away dripping with blood and in the time it took him to do that, he suffered two more scratches. Both wounds were on his lower back, and the clothes that had been tough enough to deny the bat’s claws did nothing to stop the concentrated attack of this creature.

Spark had failed, but there was no time to consider the mechanics of why, because the creature was coming against him again.

He watched it, unsure of what to do.

It was still moving too fast for him to physically react, but, because it was fully in his eyeline, he could follow its progress.

Crack.

Another lightning spell arced out and struck it head-on. This crackling bolt of energy would have taken down an adult human.

The monster, whatever it was, briefly had its internals lit up by the strike, but then it was past him, leaving an additional cut on his upper arm.

Tom had struck twice with the best Spark had to offer, and had failed to damage it. He needed to change strategies. Despite the sideways evolution which was supposed to have greatly increased the chance of his magic stunning the monster, this creature had remained unaffected. To continue using a strategy that didn’t work was a guaranteed death, but he was stumped by the question of how to proceed.

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It flew around him, darting in regularly to slice him up, as he conserved his magic. Each pass left another scratch on his body and in a war of attrition he had minutes of dilated time at most, and well less than a minute of real time. Tom realised that this was becoming a slaughter. He wasn’t even getting close to defeating it.

His mind cycled through options. Spark wasn’t working. His physical body was too slow to land a blow.

What then?

While he could imagine April throwing him into an unwinnable battle to prove her point, it was not her standard m.o. Whenever he died, she would critique the fight and explain how he could have succeeded, how he could have won even with his current body and talent limitations - if not immediately, then shortly after.

There had to be a path to win here. Power Strike would not be useful even if he had of already gained it. Spear Mastery was no better, as it did not give him speed. Living Wood was not a real time option. Precognition would just tell him that he was about to die, and healing was only a stopgap measure. None of them had a depth that could save him. That left Spark, the ability that many people rejected, but one he had proven thousands of times before to have incredible depths and flexibility. The question was, how to shape it to let him survive?

Direct attacks had failed completely. Was there a way to concentrate the power? No, that second hit had been intense for a creature that size, and it had been brushed off easily. More of the same was not the answer, which meant he had to find an indirect avenue to defeat it.

Its next sweeping attack sliced a cut into his forehead. He healed it immediately to avoid the blood leaking into his eyes.

It came back and struck the same spot.

Tom mentally cursed his instinctive reaction to heal the wound. The damn thing was learning where he was vulnerable, and the speed with which he had healed that specific injury while ignoring the others had obviously triggered something in its tiny brain. Now it identified his forehead as a vulnerability.

Worse, it was right. Too much bleeding there, and he wouldn’t be able to see. Even if every cut only leaked a single drop of blood, that would soon cause blood to drip into his eyes.

A third slice had opened up. The monster was obsessed with repeatedly hitting the recognised weakness.

But the threat was an opportunity. It was targeting the same spot. Which meant he could predict its flight patterns.

A high-risk strategy occurred to him, and he started to spin the spear to get it into position at the right time.

It was coming at him.

His outer sensing layer identified where the attack began, and from there, with a known target of his forehead, it was easy to plot the path it was going to take.

Throwing caution to the wind, he engaged Spark, forcing most of his available mana through it. A series of intense explosions erupted in the air, painting a line between him and the creature. As it flew, it was buffeted with the wave of pressure released by each of the pinprick detonations. There was a whole string of them, each of them placed immediately in front of the monster.

The unexpected wind worked, and, while a direct hit had failed to slow it even slightly the indirect, intense, repeated blasts were effective.

It slowed.

It slowed dramatically right within range of his weapon.

For the first time in the battle, his spear tip was moving faster than it was.

The monster was clever. It realised the problem. It tried to dive sideways, but Tom was able to compensate as it did so. His sped-up thoughts let him react when usually he would have been incapable. A series of explosions held it to its spot.

His muscles strained to keep the weapon on target. It was like trying to cut an erratically fluttering fly out of the air, but he was a spear master, and he demanded his body not to fail him.

The spear slashed through the creature, and it exploded as its inner core was pierced.

Danger Sense stopped its warning, and time flow crashed back to its normal pace. The leaves waved like usual, and he staggered and fell, unbalanced by the desperate slash. He felt woozy. He hadn’t realised how injured he was. Once more, he was bleeding profusely.

“April,” he yelled out weakly while he simultaneously used his advanced spells in tandem to restore his blood volume while healing the deepest cuts. There was only a little mana, but it was sufficient to patch the worst of them up.

“April, please. Help me, please.”

The world shifted, and he found himself back in the café with his wounds healed.

“You know I can’t bring you back straight away when you’re injured. You have to show that you’re going to survive first.” She told him before he could complain. “Once you had passed that threshold, I was able to spare you the ten minutes of you drifting in and out of consciousness as you fixed the final bits. Well done.” She finished, sounding surprisingly unenthusiastic for herself.

Tom patted down his fully restored body. That had been close, but he remembered how much time had slowed during the fighting. “It worked,” he declared in excitement. “And better than expected, too. The time dilation it gave was amazing. And I can’t believe you made it immune to Spark.”

April remained unimpressed. “Yes, it was a bad matchup for you, and I picked it deliberately.”

He grinned. “I noticed.”

“And I’m glad you won.”

“So am I. It’s a relief. I can handle Speedies, and, once I get Power Strike, I’ll be able to dispose of the larger enemies as well.”

“I hadn’t finished.” April continued frostily. “It was a worse matchup, but it was only rank-two. It was close to rank-three, but it wasn’t there yet.”

Tom stared at her blankly. He remembered how helpless he had been in his fight before he had worked out his Hail Mary strategy, and even with it he had only barely won. If it had twisted more to avoid his weapon, if he had slightly less mana in the end, if it had possessed one minor burst ability to avoid the spear, he knew he would have lost.

But she couldn’t be serious about its rank. He had only just won. “Sorry, I didn’t hear that. What did you say?”

She arched an eyebrow and said nothing.

“No, it couldn’t be. It was too fast for that. It wasn’t rank-two. There’s no way.”

But April was not lying, and if what she was saying was true, then maybe there was truly no way for him to get good enough to get into the divine champion’s trial.

“Don’t overreact. I have an idea to bridge the gap. But with the abilities you have at the moment.. Nope, they won’t get you there.”