[First Advancement Trial] Stage 1 Complete
[Stage 2 Begins In 10 Seconds]
“Seriously?” Karl muttered as he saw the notification.
But the notification seemed to be serious, as the world around them was changing, morphing into a large cavern, similar to the one where the Dark Elven City had been located, except that it was filled with glowing green pools of what Karl could only assume was toxic goo.
[This place does not look fun. Not even being green makes it look better.] Thor noted.
At first, there didn’t seem to be any opponents here at all, they were just standing in a toxic field.
Then the monsters began to appear, walking up out of the glowing pools, a shambling wave of toxic sludge covered zombies.
Hawk immediately began pelting them with fireballs, while Remi brought up a [Blizzard] hoping to freeze them so they would stop advancing.
For a moment, it seemed like it was going to work, and the zombies ground to a halt before a new boss appeared in the centre of the largest puddle and began to cast spells, causing the downed zombies to regenerate while summoning more of them.
The boss didn’t look all that impressive, just a sludge covered zombie woman in a black dress, but the shining black eyes weren’t vacant, and everyone in the group could feel the power of its magic.
[Those pools will be an issue. Rae, can you send the Golems to deal with the boss? Either kill it or lure it out into the open where we can fight it properly.] Karl instructed.
Ice didn’t seem to kill the zombies, they just froze for a bit and then started moving again. Setting them on fire was much more effective, whether it was fire or lightning that burned them.
Once their head was destroyed, they would die, Karl noticed, right before Rae came up with a zombie hunting strategy.
Firing small stones, half the size of their heads, caused the skulls to burst like melons, and killed the zombies reliably in a single shot.
They were weak, but it was beginning to look like they were endless, and they just kept coming out of the pools as the old bodies vanished.
The Golems reached the boss, lunging forward with their forelimbs, but the creature simply dove into a pool, and appeared from another.
For a split second, the Golems were confused, then they began to chase the boss around, hunting it relentlessly as it continued to run away.
For a while the game of whack a zombie seemed pointless, then one of the golem’s limbs managed to catch on the zombie queen’s dress and throw her away from the pools.
The panic was immediate, as the zombie forces turned to rush at the Golems, and the zombie queen tried to make it to another pool.
Rae [Shadow Stepped] closer and surrounded the boss with a circular wall of stone, then repeatedly smashed the contents with a boulder from the top.
[Well, that’s a bit messy.] Remi noted when she realized that the Spider was essentially mashing the zombie queen.
[Hawk, go light the remains on fire, just to be sure.] Karl added.
The tube was engulfed in an inferno as Hawk burned the remains, and the zombies lost their guiding force, returning to a shambling horde that was more interested in the living things at Karl’s end of the instance than defending anything.
[First Advancement Trial] Stage 2 Complete
Karl sighed in relief as he realized that this instance had actually favoured his team.
If he was a warrior who had to chase the boss through the toxic sludge, or a mage who had to dodge the Zombies, it would have been a nightmare. But being able to control the zombies while the Golems hunted the boss made it a relatively painless experience.
For some time, the instance didn’t change, and Karl just waited. A bit of time to recover between fights seemed like the reasonable thing for a trial to provide, but it was unlikely to give him long.
Five minutes was what it granted this time, and then Karl found himself standing in a sand floor coliseum.
This time he was not alone, the rest of his team was standing with him, including the five Special Forces Knights.
Only, they were all transparent, as if they were the mannequins that he had seen at the start of the trial.
Two minutes later, Tessa’s placeholder turned solid, then became rather battered and covered in green blood before there was a flash of golden light, and it began to move.
“Dragons, what the hell are we going to have to do now?” She muttered.
“I’m not certain, but it’s good to see that you made it.” Karl replied.
“Oh, is that really you? Why are you here first?”
Karl shrugged. “I guess I finished the first two trials fastest. What did you get?”
“A massive black skeletal knight and a horde of Orcs. I picked one of the silver chests, what did you pick? Let me guess, you kept closing the Gold Chests until you got a set of skills you liked?” She replied.
“Closing them to get a new set of rewards was an option? I picked the purple one.”
Tessa rolled her eyes. “Do you not remember the last trials we were in? Picking the easiest option is the safest way forward. But how did it never occur to you that you could close the chests?”
“The first one I touched was the purple one, and it asked me if I wanted to start an Epic trial.”
Tessa nodded. “That must have been a Tier 3 Trial, with a random set of rewards. Of course you couldn’t resist the urge to touch the box that was clearly and obviously not meant to be safe to handle.”
One after another, the others arrived, none of them looking too badly injured, and in Dana’s case, she even had [Refreshing Lightning] still active.
The only one missing was Lotus, and Karl began to wonder if something had happened to the little Nature Priestess.
For half an hour, they waited, with no sign of her hologram changing.
Then, it suddenly shifted, and a startled Lotus was in front of them, sitting cross-legged on the ground.
“Oh, hey guys. What’s going on?” She asked.
“We’ve been waiting on you to finish your trials.” Karl reminded her.
“Trials? Oh, they’re starting already? I was playing with the box. Did you know that the contents change if you close the lid?”
Tessa stared at her for a few seconds before anyone spoke.
“Are you saying that you’ve been playing with the box for the last hour, and you never did the first trials?” The War Cleric asked her lifelong friend.
Lotus just shrugged.
“Well, that’s one way to do it. I guess there is a time limit. But the rest of us are on trial number three.” Tessa explained.
“Oh, sorry. I didn’t realize it was a group thingy. Alright, what are we doing? Is it a gladiator tournament?”
Karl shrugged. “It looks like it, but I don’t know yet. Nothing was happening while we waited for everyone to arrive. There were just those transparent mannequins holding our places until we all finished our trials.”
[Team Trial Three Begins In 10 seconds]
[Modified Difficulty Increased For Incomplete Trials]
[Epic Difficulty Chosen]
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