Too Stubborn to Die

As it turned out, he could indeed simply challenge the orc chieftain every time. Barging into the tribe and trying to find the chief didn’t work and only got him killed, but if he just stood outside and shouted a challenge, the leader would come out to meet his challenge after about ten minutes. The orcs couldn’t understand his words, and he couldn’t understand theirs, but apparently, the language of a challenge was universal enough that they understood him.

The first few tries, he died almost as quickly as the first. The chieftain was clearly a few levels higher than the laborers he was fighting before, and he also had significantly more combat experience. As Aaron adjusted, though, he managed to last longer and longer, and on the tenth attempt, he landed his first significant blow. It wasn’t actually that strong, but it was the first time he had drawn blood.

The orc chieftain found this significant, too, and as soon as he got hit, he leapt backward. And put a hand to his side where Aaron had hit him. When he lifted it, his fingers were red with blood. He raised his hand up to show off the blood, and the orcs around him started cheering. For a moment, Aaron found it strange that they were cheering for their leader getting bloodied, but a moment later, he found out why.

The orc smiled and then walked out of himself. Or at least, that’s how it looked. Aaron saw the orc chieftain standing still and smiling, but he also saw him stepping to the side, and a moment later, there were two orc chieftains. Then, it did it again, and again, and there were now four orc chieftains standing in front of Aaron. The other orcs were cheering louder than ever as all four chieftains raised their axes to the sky.

“Oh, you cheating cunt.”

All four orc chieftains charged at once, and a moment later, Aaron was dead. He did his best to dodge, but with four of them attacking all at once, there wasn’t really much he could do. He wasn’t sure which had killed him, since they all moved so fast, and he wasn’t ready, but he knew that this battle would be a bit more difficult than he had anticipated. It might even be impossible. He would have to die a few more times to know for certain.

On his next attempt, he didn’t even get the chieftain to use his clone skill. He failed to land the same solid blow as before, and instead was decapitated a few moves later. The round after that, he got the chieftain to create the clones again, but died almost instantly afterward again.

It took him another ten attempts to be able to consistently push the chieftain to that state, and only then was he able to take the time to properly observe. Before the clones even came at him, he jumped back to give himself more time. When they charged, he moved closer to one of the ones on the side so that it would strike him first before the others reached him. This tactic worked, and he managed to dodge one single axe strike before the others closed in.

He tried this same tactic a half dozen more times before he was able to dodge a second strike. Then, the third hit him. He stopped moving, expecting to wake up back in the hallway, but instead the blade passed through him without dealing any damage. He had about a quarter of a second to be dumbfounded before the next strike vertically bisected him.

“They’re not fucking real?!” he exclaimed as soon as he could.

That changed things. He had been debating giving up on the trial, since fighting four chieftain-level enemies at once would just take too long to be worthwhile at his level, but if the others weren’t real…

He immediately jumped back in and died twenty times, figuring out the basics. The extra chieftains were all 100% illusory and could not hurt him. The one on the far left, the last one created, was actually the real one. While the illusions couldn’t hurt him, they looked, sounded, and moved identically, so if he ever lost track of the real one, he was screwed. And most annoyingly, since the illusions looked identical, they were also identically broad, and with four of them, all around him, there were times that the real one simply wasn’t visible, and a surprise axe would come through the chest of one of the illusions and cleave Aaron in two.

He tried a dozen more times to get a feel for picking out the illusion, but it just wasn’t working. There were some fairly obvious tells, like the fact that the illusions didn’t leave footprints and that they didn’t create wind when they moved, but even so, relying on his standard five senses just wasn’t working. He simply couldn’t be watching their feet or waiting to see if their strikes made wind when they swung at him before making his moves, and he definitely couldn’t punch accurately through the illusions to hit the real one. He needed something more, and he had a good idea on how to get it.

He sat down with the Focus Stone again, this time focusing specifically on sensing the aether. Once again, the three derived types blended together to his senses, but that actually worked out just fine for him. He suspected that the orc’s clones were Mana, but he didn’t want to waste a full day if that assumption was wrong, and sensing the base energy worked just fine.

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Once he finished, he jumped straight back in and challenged the chieftain again. This time, he simply focused on sensing the energy within the orc and its clones. The first few times, it was subtle, but as the deaths piled up, he got more attuned to the difference in the energies of the clones and the real one. They all had energy in them, but the distribution of energy in the clones was uniform, no matter how they moved, while in the orc, it felt more like how it felt in himself: constantly moving.

It still took 50 deaths before he could reliably pick out the real one, and another 50 before he could successfully tune out his other senses so he didn’t get distracted by all the visual clutter. By this time, he was relying almost entirely on his new sense. Sometimes, he found himself closing his eyes as he moved. His senses weren’t precise enough that he could actually fight with his eyes closed, but he could close the distance that way to keep himself from flinching due to the illusions.

After a few dozen rounds of allowing the mirror images to strike him and only dodging when the real champion attacked, he had spotted something else. It was the shadow. It had joined the circle of orc warriors and was watching him, unmoving. The sight of the smug shadow brought back his earlier annoyance. The quest had mentioned that the shadows provided guidance, hadn’t it? This one wasn’t doing any of that. He had died well over a hundred times at this point, and it had only stepped in the once to nod at him. Seeing the shadow just watching him again filled him with motivation, even as he was cut in half again and returned to the hall.

Without wasting a second, he bounced up off the obsidian tiles after dying again and rushed back into the trial, an eager grin on his face.

However, there was still a long way to go before beating the monstrous orc champion, and no amount of showmanship was going to shortcut that. Not only could it shoot destructive streams of energy that split the earth and anything else that got in the way of it, but it could also unleash a third and final Skill that had proven difficult to deal with; the orc champion had a whirlwind attack that turned it into a swirling tornado of blades.

The shooting wind blades were the easier of the two attacks to dodge. After spending so much time fighting the mage, the wind blades were quite frankly amateurish. They were both slower and far more obviously signposted than the mage’s spells. However, the whirlwind attack, on the other hand, was quite the obstacle.

The champion was inherently faster than Aaron, but there was one avenue he could exploit. The champion was trained to use his weapons in a specific way, like any warrior who dedicated themselves to a specific path; it wasn’t so easy to just change on a whim. If the champion decided to just tank Aaron’s damage and tackle him to the ground, there wouldn’t be much he could do. But instead, it fought as it normally would, striking with its axes, and it was these moves he could read and dodge. However, the whirlwind followed none of these rules. It was an inevitable tornado of death, and if it reached him, the outcome would be no different than if a giant threw him into a blender.

His training had made Aaron extraordinarily light on his feet, and his energy control allowed him to move as if his Stats were at least ten percent higher than they actually were, but that wasn’t enough to consistently avoid the spinning blades of death.

He needed a means of making an explosive movement at a split second’s notice. Something that would allow him to shoot out of the way if unable to escape the whirlwind.

He briefly thought back to the Evasion Skill he could have bought. It would have been nice, but he didn’t regret his choice. He had an idea for a makeshift version anyway.

At the moment, all he could do with the aether was absorb it into his body where it would spread through its entirety. Based on the movements he had seen the orcs make, he knew there was a way to control Stamina more finely, and he planned on doing that in the future, but he was already pretty invested in controlling the aether instead. He was fairly certain it would be a dead end, at least in the near future, but he was nothing if not stubborn, and he felt he was touching on something important.

He used the Focus Stone again as soon as it was off-cooldown, this time thinking about controlling the energy, rather than just sensing it. He made very little progress in the one hour he had to use the stone, but once he was finished, he could move the energy just a little bit, and just a little bit was all he needed to know he could go all in.

Days went by as Aaron trained, sensing and controlling the energy flowing through him. Luckily, the dining hall was unlocked, so he could shove his mouth full of burgers and fries whenever he grew hungry. Unfortunately, there was nowhere decent to rest. However, sleep was a waste of time anyway, so Aaron just entered the trial and got himself killed whenever he got tired, refreshing himself.

After about five days, he had a minor breakthrough when he decided to experiment with his other skills to see how they worked. By observing how the energy moved within his body when using Relentless Scourge or Thick Skinned, he got a better feel for how he could use the aether. He knew that objectively, the results weren’t anything crazy, but to him, they felt incredible.

By focusing the energy in his legs, he drastically increased his speed and explosiveness. He could jump higher, run faster, and dodge further. It wasn’t something he could do constantly, though. The energy he had gathered dissipated rapidly when he did this, so he could only dodge once or twice before he no longer had enough energy and had to work on drawing in more. Still, it was enough for what he needed. He had put back on the Talmora Weighted Gi while he practiced, and when he took it off, the results were even more pronounced.

I’m ready, he thought as he managed to dash a full ten meters in a single stride.

He returned to the dial and, after a quick round of stretching and psyching himself up, selected the Trial of Domination.

“Yendal, you smug bastard, you’d better watch carefully this time.”