The spatial magic circle suspended above the grand courtyard of the Royal Academy expanded until its crimson light consumed the sky, swallowing the thousands of examinees in a single, silent wave of teleportation.
When the disorienting rush of compressed space subsided, Wralq’s boots sank into damp, dark soil.
The crisp morning air of the capital was gone, replaced by the suffocating humidity of an ancient, untamed wilderness.
Towering trees with iron-like, metallic bark stretched endlessly upward, their black foliage filtering the sunlight into a dim, violet twilight.
The Ironwood Trial Grounds felt less like a training arena and more like a sealed pocket dimension designed to strip civilized youths of their comfort and force them into raw survival.
Wralq did not move a muscle upon landing.
He immediately sank low into a dense thicket of fern-like vegetation, resting his back against the mossy root of a giant tree.
His dark violet eyes swept across his immediate surroundings, taking in the terrain, the wind direction, and the damp scent of ozone hanging in the air.
Around him, distant rustles and frantic shouts echoed through the fog.
The spatial matrix had scattered the candidates randomly across the vast sector.
Instead of seeking immediate shelter, many young nobles began calling out to their companions or recklessly casting light spells to illuminate their surroundings, instantly broadcasting their locations to whatever beasts inhabited the shadow.
A childish display, Mammon’s resonant voice echoed within Wralq’s mind, dripping with quiet disdain.
They treat a simulated war zone like an outdoor festival.
Let them draw the initial blood while we review the true parameters of this stage.
Wralq reached into his coat and retrieved his official brass examination token.
The metal surface was cool against his palm, its internal enchantment displaying a simple digital layout: a point score sitting at zero, a countdown timer set to three hours, and a localized ranking list.
According to the official decree delivered by the senior archmage before deployment, the pass condition required examinees to hold a score within the top twenty percent by the time the three-hour timer expired.
However, Mammon’s analytical mind saw the strategic flaw in blindly aiming for the absolute top of the leaderboard.
Aiming for the top five or ten percent is an amateur’s blunder, Wralq, Mammon advised coldly, his dark presence purring against Wralq’s mana core.
The high-ranking spots will be broadcasted across the domain in the final hour to force high-level confrontations.
Those at the very top will become exhaustion targets for every desperate candidate in the forest.
To maximize efficiency and keep your true power completely hidden, you only need to land comfortably within the top forty percent during the main waves, and gently push into the safe threshold near the very end.
The top forty percent allows you to observe every major player, collect vital intelligence, and let the domain’s natural attrition filter out the noisy fodder without raising a single red flag among the observing faculty.
Wralq offered a subtle, nonverbal gesture of agreement.
Remaining in the middle-upper bracket was mathematically optimal.
It minimized mana expenditure, avoided the scrying mirrors that focused primarily on the grand spectacles at the top of the leaderboard, and provided ample room to manipulate events from the shadows.
With the core strategy established, Wralq remained concealed in his thicket, turning his focus toward the surrounding candidates who were reacting to the rules.
A short distance away, a cluster of five examinees had gathered in a small clearing.
Among them were notable figures whose movements instantly caught Wralq’s attention.
Primary among them was a young woman whose presence commanded quiet authority despite her small frame.
Wralq recognized her immediately from Mammon’s prior intelligence notes: Princess Lehih of the neighboring Lopre Kingdom.
She had arrived at the Royal Academy as an elite exchange scholar from a foreign royal bloodline known for its brutal, highly disciplined martial doctrines.
Lehih stood with absolute, unyielding grace amidst the chaotic terrain.
Her long, dark blue hair fell like a sheet of silk over her royal silver armor, and her pale blue eyes moved with calculating precision.
While other water-element mages relied on wide, flowing waves or defensive ice barriers, Lehih’s mastery over water magic was terrifyingly refined.
Rather than generating large volumes of liquid, she compressed thin streams of water to impossible levels of atmospheric pressure.
Around her palm, a microscopic ring of water rotated at such extreme speed that the air around her hissed and cracked, creating a localized pressure field that violently warped the ambient temperature of the immediate area.
Frost coated the grass beneath her boots while the air three feet above her shimmered with intense, vaporizing heat.
When a stray iron-hide wolf construct leaped at her from the underbrush, Lehih did not even turn her head.
She merely flicked her middle finger.
A hairline needle of hyper-pressurized water shot from her ring, slicing through the beast’s metallic hide, its internal stone core, and three towering trees behind it in a fraction of a millisecond.
The cut was so clean and fast that the wolf construct remained frozen mid-air for two full seconds before sliding apart into two perfect halves, its core completely vaporized by the sheer hydrostatic pressure.
She controls water not as a flowing element, but as a hydraulic blade, Wralq observed silently, filing the data away into his memory.
And her ability to manipulate the surrounding thermal boundary means she can instantly freeze or boil any physical projectile that enters her personal space.
A formidable combatant.
Not far from Princess Lehih’s sector, two other examinees were tearing through the terrain at a speed that left the surrounding candidates utterly bewildered.
They were a pair of twin brothers from a martial lineage, operating in absolute, terrifying synergy.
Their scores were rising in rapid, synchronized leaps, steadily pushing them far ahead of the main body of examinees.
The younger twin possessed an innate mastery over elemental synthesis.
He did not cast traditional elemental spells; instead, he continuously fused raw earth and wind mana around his limbs, allowing him to glide across the forest floor at blinding speeds while launching compressed dense air-blades that could shatter granite.
However, it was the elder twin who presented a far more exotic and dangerous threat.
The elder brother possessed a high-tier spatial technique known as Multi-Body Spatial Relocation.
Rather than simple short-range teleportation, he could split his physical presence into multiple tangible spatial reflections simultaneously.
To the naked eye, it appeared as though four identical copies of him were fighting in four different spots at once, each capable of delivering physical strikes, exchanging places instantly, and collapsing back into a single body to dodge incoming attacks.
The spatial twin is using localized displacement nodes, Mammon analyzed softly.
He isn’t creating illusion clones; he is folding his single body across four distinct spatial coordinates within a twenty-meter radius.
To defeat him, one must destroy the spatial anchor at the center of his domain before he can swap places with his reflection.
Wralq watched the twin duo effortlessly dismantle a pack of incoming constructs.
The elder twin split into three reflections, instantly appearing behind three targets simultaneously and driving heavy daggers into their core joints before collapsing back into his original position alongside his brother.
The fluid combination of elemental speed and spatial displacement allowed them to rack up points with frightening efficiency.
Wralq absorbed every detail, mapping out the range, delay, and mana consumption of their techniques.
Understanding the mechanics of the academy’s top talents was far more valuable than rushing to score points early.
As the first thirty minutes passed, the domain matrix initiated the primary operational cycle of the trial.
The sky above darkened further, shifting from violet to a deep, ominous shade of crimson as the simulated ecosystem of monsters was fully unleashed.
The trial grounds were designed to simulate an escalating siege, where the difficulty, intelligence, and sheer physical horror of the beast waves scaled upward over time.
Wralq watched from his elevated vantage point as the first major wave materialized across the forest sectors.
The initial wave consisted of low-tier horde constructs, primarily Orcs and Goblins.
However, these were not ordinary fantasy creatures.
They were forged from dark enchanted clay and reinforced with ironwood sap, making their hides as dense as bronze.
The Goblins spawned in massive packs of fifty to a hundred, moving through the canopy and underbrush like a ravenous carpet of green flesh and jagged bone knives.
They possessed no individual bravery, but their strength lay in swarm tactics and overwhelming numbers.
They threw crude, poison-tipped bone darts at examinees from the high branches, aiming for eyes, throats, and exposed joints.
When a candidate was isolated, a dozen goblins would hurl themselves onto the victim simultaneously, using their weight to pin the examinee to the ground while gnawing through leather armor.
Behind the goblins marched the Orcs—brutish, seven-foot-tall constructs with thick, leathery hides and massive stone clubs.
Unlike the cowardly goblins, the Orcs possessed a rudimentary berserker aura.
When an Orc took physical damage, its eyes glowed a furious red, increasing its movement speed and physical strength by fifty percent.
They functioned as shock troops, charging through fireballs and ice lances to smash defensive formations and scatter candidate retinues.
Several groups of unprepared noble examinees were completely overwhelmed by this first wave.
The flashing fireballs cast by arrogant lords proved useless against the endless tide of goblins that swarmed beneath their defensive lines, forcing many candidates to frantically smash their emergency escape talismans within the first hour.
As the second hour approached, the trial grounds scaled the horror further, introducing mid-tier giant constructs: Trolls and Cyclopes.
The Trolls emerged from the damp swamp sectors of the forest.
Standing over twelve feet tall, their hunchbacked bodies were covered in thick, mossy hides that possessed hyper-regenerative properties.
A severed limb or a deep slash across a troll’s torso would knit back together in a matter of seconds, accompanied by a nauseating sound of squelching flesh and bone reformations.
The only way to permanently halt a troll construct was to incinerate its core node with sustained high-temperature fire or destroy its central nervous system before it could regenerate.
The Cyclopes were even more dangerous.
Standing nearly fifteen feet tall, these massive, single-eyed giants were built from solid granite slabs held together by thick veins of magical core energy.
They carried massive trunks of ironwood trees as improvised bludgeons, swinging them with enough force to generate localized shockwaves that shattered the ribs of any candidate caught within ten paces.
More terrifyingly, the single eye of a Cyclops was not a biological organ, but a concentrated mana lens.
Every sixty seconds, the Cyclops could charge its central lens, firing a thick beam of superheated kinetic energy that tore through stone formations and melted metal armor instantly.
Wralq observed a group of three noble mages attempting to fight a single Cyclops.
The mages cast multiple ice barriers to block the giant’s physical advance, but the Cyclops simply paused, its central eye glowing blindingly red before discharging its kinetic beam.
The beam vaporized the ice barriers instantly, blasting the three mages across the clearing and forcing their automated safety runes to trigger, eliminating them from the trial.
Following the giants came the most cruel and intelligent mid-tier wave: the Evil Elves.
Unlike the brutish Orcs or mindless Cyclopes, the Evil Elves were dark, slender constructs modeled after ancient, fallen wood-spirits.
They moved through the ironwood trees in absolute silence, their dark gray skin blending seamlessly into the metallic bark.
They were armed with long, recurve bows carved from dark bone and slender rapier-like blades infused with shadow mana.
The Evil Elves possessed high tactical intelligence.
They did not engage candidates in open combat.
Instead, they acted as snipers and assassins, tracking wounded or exhausted examinees who had just barely survived a fight against a Troll or Cyclops.
From three hundred paces away, nestled deep within the black canopy, an Evil Elf would draw its bone bow, coating the arrowhead in silent, sound-dampening shadow magic.
The arrows were designed to bypass kinetic magic barriers, piercing through shoulders, legs, and spell-casting hands before the victim even realized they were being targeted.
When an examinee was struck, the shadow mana on the arrow would temporarily paralyze the target’s mana channels, leaving them completely defenseless against the approaching horde.
This is a well-structured meat grinder, Mammon noted as he watched an Evil Elf silently pick off a noble candidate from a mile away.
The goblins drain their mana, the Orcs break their formations, the Trolls and Cyclopes destroy their heavy defenses, and the Evil Elves execute the survivors.
Only those with true situational awareness will endure this stage.
While the examinees fought desperately against these humanoid waves, the true terror of the Ironwood Trial Grounds lay in its specialized boss-tier constructs.
These were unique, towering entities that spawned at the center of each forest sector every forty-five minutes—monstrous biological constructs modeled entirely after predatory insectoid species found in the darkest corners of the natural world.
The first boss construct that manifested in Wralq’s sector was a nightmare known as the Sovereign Mantis.
Spawning from a massive chasm that split the forest floor, the Sovereign Mantis stood nearly twenty feet tall.
Its body was constructed from sleek, overlapping plates of obsidian-colored chitin that reflected no light, making it virtually invisible in the dim forest twilight.
Its two main forelimbs were giant, serrated scythe blades forged from compressed dark steel, vibrating at such high frequency that they produced a low, sickening hum that vibrated through the ground.
The Sovereign Mantis did not possess elemental magic, but its physical capabilities were terrifying.
It could compress its long, jointed hind legs and launch itself across five hundred paces in a fraction of a second, appearing above candidate groups like a falling shadow.
Wralq watched as the Sovereign Mantis descended upon a squad of seven examinees who had pooled their points together.
The squad’s lead warrior, clad in heavy plate armor, stepped forward and raised a massive tower shield infused with earth magic.
The Mantis swung its left scythe blade in a simple, downward arc.
CLANG!
The high-frequency vibration of the scythe blade bypassed the earth magic entirely, slicing cleanly through the heavy tower shield, the warrior’s steel armguards, and the stone ground beneath him.
The sheer force of the air pressure generated by the strike blew the remaining six candidates off their feet.
Before they could recover, the Mantis opened its translucent, glass-like back wings, fanning them violently to unleash a storm of microscopic, razor-sharp chitin scales that shredded the surrounding vegetation and forced four candidates to activate their escape talismans simultaneously.
The second insectoid boss construct that materialized in the northern sector was the Hive-Mother Arachnid.
This massive, eight-legged terror measured thirty feet across.
Its body was a swollen, bulbous mass of dark purple chitin covered in thousands of glowing, red optical clusters.
Unlike the agile Mantis, the Hive-Mother was a static area-denial boss.
The moment it spawned, it began spewing thick torrents of silk from its abdomen.
This silk was not ordinary spider web; it was infused with an acidic, mana-dampening liquid.
When the silk made contact with physical objects, it immediately began corroding stone and metal, while absorbing any elemental mana cast against it.
Fireballs thrown at the web were simply snuffed out as the acidic silk absorbed the heat energy to strengthen its own structural density.
Furthermore, the swollen abdomen of the Hive-Mother split open every two minutes, releasing hundreds of parasitic arachnid larvae.
These thumb-sized, hard-shelled insects swarmed over the terrain at terrifying speeds, seeking out living flesh.
Once a larva made contact with an examinee, it would burrow directly through clothing and skin, attaching itself to the candidate’s mana channels and rapidly draining their internal energy to feed the Hive-Mother, causing the victim to collapse from sudden mana exhaustion.
Wralq watched as Princess Lehih encountered a Hive-Mother in her sector.
Where other candidates fled in terror from the acidic webs, Lehih demonstrated why she was considered a royal prodigy.
She did not attempt to burn or freeze the webs.
Instead, she adjusted the pressure of her water rings to extreme, molecular frequencies, shooting thin, invisible jets of hyper-pressurized water that sliced cleanly through the Hive-Mother’s eight jointed legs before the beast could even launch its parasitic larvae.
The massive spider collapsed into the mud, its core destroyed by a single, precise liquid needle that pierced its central eye from two hundred paces away.
The third insectoid boss construct was perhaps the most psychologically terrifying: the Abyssal Centipede.
Rising from the deep mud of the swamp sector, this monstrous construct was over eighty feet long, composed of dozens of dark, segmented armor plates, each fitted with a pair of razor-sharp, sickle-like legs.
The Abyssal Centipede was a subterranean hunter.
It did not move on the surface; instead, it burrowed through solid granite and wet earth with terrifying speed, guided entirely by the vibrations of footsteps on the ground above.
Candidates standing on the surface would suddenly feel a deep, subterranean rumble beneath their feet.
Before they could react, the ground beneath them would cave in, and the massive, mandible-lined maw of the centipede would burst upward, swallowing entire groups whole into its churning, internal stone-grinder belly before diving back beneath the earth.
The centipede’s armor was practically immune to physical attacks, and its subterranean movement made it impossible to target with conventional elemental magic.
The only way examinees survived its appearance was by climbing into the high branches of the ironwood trees or using flight magic to stay off the ground entirely.
The fourth and final insectoid boss wave introduced the supreme terror of the skies: the Tempest Hornet Swarm led by the Queen Vanguard.
While the Centipede ruled the earth and the Mantis ruled the shadows, the Tempest Hornets dominated the upper canopy.
The Queen Vanguard was a ten-foot-tall wasp construct crafted from gleaming yellow brass and black obsidian.
Her wings beat at tens of thousands of rotations per second, generating localized, tearing whirlwinds that stripped the black leaves from the ironwood trees and created deafening sonic booms that disoriented examinees within a mile radius.
The Queen did not fight alone; she was accompanied by a swarm of fifty lesser hornet constructs, each the size of a hunting dog.
These hornets moved in tight, military flight formations, diving from the clouds at blinding speeds.
Their stingers were long, hollow needles of dark iron that could launch pressurized bolts of paralyzing lightning.
A group of examinees who had sought refuge atop a large stone hill were completely decimated by the Tempest Hornet Swarm.
The hornets dived from the sun’s glare, firing rhythmic volleys of lightning bolts that shattered the candidates’ spell barriers, before the Queen Vanguard herself swept down, her massive brass stinger impaling the hill’s central defensive barrier and detonating a massive wave of sonic mana that cleared the entire hill in seconds.
Wralq observed all four insectoid boss constructs with cold, analytical fascination.
He noted how each boss targeted a specific vulnerability in human combat formations: the Mantis destroyed heavy physical shields, the Hive-Mother neutralized elemental spellcasting, the Centipede punished grounded positioning, and the Hornet Queen shattered aerial and elevated defenses.
They are testing every dimension of combat, Wralq thought, his eyes tracking the flight path of a stray Tempest Hornet that was patrolling fifty paces above his thicket.
Physical strength, elemental adaptability, spatial awareness, and aerial defense.
And notice the scaling pattern, Wralq, Mammon pointed out softly, his presence guiding Wralq’s perception.
The constructs are not growing stronger merely in physical size.
With each passing wave, their internal mana cores are becoming more compressed, and their response times are decreasing by fifteen percent.
By the third hour, even the basic Orcs will possess movement speeds comparable to low-tier knights.
Wralq remained patient, executing Mammon’s precise strategy with cold efficiency.
Whenever a stray goblin, evil elf, or mid-tier construct strayed too close to his hiding spot, Wralq did not use grand, flashy spells that would draw the attention of the insectoid bosses or the scrying mirrors.
Instead, he utilized the dark iron dagger and Mammon’s low-cost Mana-Rupture techniques.
He would step out from the shadows for a fraction of a second, drive a razor-thin needle of dark mana into the construct’s internal core node, and melt back into the underbrush as the beast dissolved into ash.
He kept his score carefully regulated.
Whenever his point total threatened to climb too high into the top ten percent, he intentionally paused, letting other aggressive examinees like the twin brothers or Princess Lehih score ahead of him.
He maintained his position firmly within the upper thirty-five to thirty percent bracket—a completely safe zone that ensured passage to the next stage while keeping him entirely invisible to the rest of the domain.
By the time the trial entered its final forty-five minutes, the landscape of the Ironwood grounds was unrecognizable.
Over seventy percent of the original applicant pool had been eliminated.
The lush, damp forest was now a scorched, cratered wasteland littered with shattered stone, melted metal, and thousands of abandoned point tokens glowing in the mud.
The remaining examinees were exhausted, their clothes torn, their mana reserves running dangerously low, and their faces pale with fatigue.
The sky above turned a deep, blood-red, and the cold, mechanical voice of the archmage echoed once more from the domain’s central spire, signaling the arrival of the final phase.
Attention remaining examinees, the voice boomed, chilling the blood of every tired youth in the forest.
Two hours and fifteen minutes have elapsed.
The final trial phase is now active.
All safe zones are revoked.
The tracking beacons for the top candidates will now activate, and the domain core will spawn the final wave of Sovereign insectoid constructs.
Maintain your rank, or be consumed.
A loud, piercing chime echoed from Wralq’s pocket.
He drew out his brass examination token and watched as a faint, translucent pillar of pale blue light erupted from the metal, shooting twenty feet into the air above his head.
Looking across the vast, ruined forest, Wralq saw dozens of similar pillars of light erupting from various sectors.
To the far north, a towering, blinding beam of golden light marked the position of Princess Lehih, surrounded by the frozen remnants of three Hive-Mother spiders.
To the east, a double beam of flashing crimson and white light marked the location of the twin brothers, who were currently standing atop the shattered carcass of a Sovereign Mantis.
Because Wralq’s point score sat comfortably in the top thirty percent, his tracking beacon was visible to any nearby examinee within a one-mile radius.
Around his sector, the bushes rustled violently.
The surviving, desperate candidates who were sitting on the edge of the elimination threshold—those whose scores were too low to pass—turned their bloodshot eyes toward Wralq’s blue pillar of light.
To them, a solitary boy standing alone in the shadows with a high point score was the ultimate prize, a last-minute lifeline to secure their future at the Royal Academy.
At the same time, the deep, rhythmic thrumming of the forest floor announced the approach of the final wave.
From the dark chasms in the earth and the blood-red sky above, multiple insectoid boss constructs—Mantes, Centipedes, and Hornet Queens—began to converge on the active tracking beacons.
Wralq stood quietly beneath his pale blue beacon of light.
He did not run, nor did he draw his blade.
His expression remained completely devoid of fear, anxiety, or excitement.
The fodder is coming for your points, Wralq, Mammon purred in his mind, his ancient dark mana swirling pleasantly within Wralq’s core.
And the beasts are coming to clean up the rest.
How shall we conduct the final act?
Wralq adjusted the collar of his coat, his dark violet eyes reflecting the blood-red glow of the sky above.
“We don’t need to fight them all,” Wralq thought back, his tone icy and detached.
“We simply let the desperate fight the beasts, and collect whatever points fall into our lap during the chaos.” With thirty minutes remaining on the clock, Wralq stepped out from his thicket, stepping onto the open, blood-stained mud of the clearing as the first wave of desperate candidates and monstrous insectoids closed in from all sides.