Formless Ascension: My Affinity Is Limitless

Uhtred and Zara caught the look, and Zara’s expression turned cold as she squeezed Bradley’s neck more tightly and slammed a brutal kick at his knee, shifting his joint out of place.

The man squirmed in pain, and the sight sent a tremor of fear through Bianca again, reminding her of just how brutal the people they were dealing with were.

She faced forward and immediately revealed everything.

”Within the trial exchange, there is a section for putting up tasks,” she paused, and Uhtred searched for exactly what she was speaking about.

”Within that task section, there is a current task to kill a human ascender called ’Uhtred,’” she glanced up hesitantly at Uhtred, whose attention was split between her words and the panel he was rummaging through.

”Someone somewhere placed a bounty on your head worth 10,000 merit points... that’s enough to buy twenty general use essence cores...”

”Enough to last us days till we figure out how to stop our essence leak...”

The expression on Uhtred’s face became funny as Bianca spoke. He had only just arrived within the trial, yet there was a bounty on his head already?

Is it Krijn?

He thought of the Neanderthal general. It was only he who knew his name among the ancient variants to be able to put up such a bounty.

Heh! And so our war begins...

The message from the Neanderthal general was very clear: everything was game now, no more holding back.

Krijn recognized the threat Uhtred posed among the humans. While he hadn’t attacked Uhtred when the human penetrated their territory, the situation now was entirely different. He immediately placed a bounty on his head the moment Uhtred’s name appeared on the rankings.

Still, that doesn’t explain how these guys knew who exactly I was...

Uhtred’s eyes narrowed, and a sudden coldness bled into his expression, causing a horrified look to color Bianca’s face in an instant. She staggered back on the floor where she knelt, stuttering but failing to form coherent words.

”Oh? It seems you are very popular, Uhtred,” Zara suddenly said, drawing his attention. She stared at him with an unfocused gaze, as if using an inspect skill, though he felt none of the familiar tells of an active inspection.

”I accepted the bounty task just to see what it’s like,” Zara said. ”There is a marker above your head. It seems that once a bounty is placed on someone, even the System acknowledges it and assists with easy identification.”

”Are you serious?” Uhtred frowned. His gaze shifted away from Bianca, who looked mightily relieved to no longer have his cold eyes focused on her..

He strolled forward to Bradley, staring at the man’s red, teary eyes bulging against Zara’s locking grip on his neck.

”Ease up on his throat. I want to talk to him.”

The moment Zara relaxed her grip, Bradley sucked in desperate gulps of air. He had barely been able to breathe the entire time.

After his heavy breathing and wheezing, his immediate impulse was to curse viciously at Uhtred, and at Zara especially. However, he remained acutely aware that Zara’s grip, though slightly relaxed, was still around his neck.

Neither she nor Uhtred seemed like people who would take lightly to snarky remarks in a situation like this. So, he calmly swallowed his words and only gritted his teeth, staring back into Uhtred’s eyes with defiance.

Uhtred snorted at the look but didn’t bother to comment on it. Instead, he went directly to the point.

”So, let me get this straight. You arrived not long after we did. You saw us get attacked, and within that span of time, you went through the trial details and the new system panels. You saw a bounty available, you selected it, and I just happened to be the target... A guy among the very people you were already watching fight beasts, just some tens of meters away from you?”

”...that about sums it up,” Bradley choked out a response, adding a bit of sass despite his situation.

Uhtred searched the man’s eyes, looking for any sign of deceit. But it seemed he was actually telling the truth... at least to a large enough extent that Uhtred’s analysis was nearly spot on.

Uhtred moved to turn away, but before he could, Zara’s grip on Bradley’s neck tightened, and the man hurriedly tapped her arm with his good hand and sputtered:

”T—There’s also an information cache when the bounty is accepted!”

Uhtred paused and looked between his and Zara’s flat face before raising a brow.

Zara pushed Bradley away with an exasperated roll of her eyes, sending him tumbling across the hard, stony ground. A sharp hiss escaped his lips as his broken bones flared with intense pain.

”Apparently, the person who placed the bounty on your head also added an extra for everyone who accepted the bounty request. But this extra only appears after accepting the bounty itself.”

Zara pulled a simple hologram device from her spatial storage, projecting her system panel’s content into the air for Uhtred to see.

​A wealth of information floated between them. It detailed various tips and little tidbits about the trial grounds. How exactly the person who placed the bounty had figured all of this out just forty minutes into the trial remained a mystery, but the information was undeniably actually useful.

According to what was detailed, this dry desert region was only one of many terrains that encompassed the landmass of Australia. Diverse regions spread around the expanse of the continent in a wide circle.

Until the trial period of this ”Age of Hunger” trial was over, they would all remain within this circle at the edges of the continent. Trying to push further inward was futile.

Pending the time the Age of Hunger trial was active, several warnings were also added within the information cache about the various regions.

For the desert region specifically, which applied to Uhtred and his team, along with everyone else here, there was only one warning...

”Beware of the sand that remembers what walks above it, but waits for the heat to leave.”

Uhtred read the ominous words, and his gaze couldn’t help but shift over to the flat expanse of sand where the jackals stood silently, watching...