Chapter 267

Trials of Champions (IV)

Senna had an odd look on her face, her eyes darting back and forth between the two stretched ends of her vision-- on one, scorched landscape extended into the dissipating horizon, while on the other an equally wide and spread-out landmass of frosted ice bellowed out into the infinity. Dead-smack in the center, ripping between the two, was a lush jungle of strange trees and flowers and fruits and grass.

She herself was standing on top of a twisted obelisk, a cylinder-like structure with widened and twisted foundation, cradling around itself was it heaved up some thousand feet into the air. Nothing blocked her sight and she was clear to witness the whole biome of the strange world that she landed as soon as she walked through the gates of the trial.

It was like someone took Earth and compacted it into two extremes, narrowing the whole of the habitable area within the ring-like center. Though she didn’t see any signs of life, she doubted there wasn’t any buried deep within the green. What she didn’t know, however, was what to do-- so, she stood still, yanking her neck and taking out a bottle of water, drinking some.

She had no clue what this world was but was certain it was yet another Mana-infused fantasy-- after all, how could there be a planet that is both as hot as hell and as cold as star-deprived corners of the universe?

Bereft of things to do, she sat down on the ledge, flinging her feet over and letting them dangle as she took in the sight. In the distance, the sun seemed to be in the permanent state of either sunrise or sundown, appearing unmoving, causing Senna to frown. However, attributing it once again to some wild Mana phenomenon, she ignored the physics behind it and continued to stare.

Her rest was ended by the abrupt appearance of the window in front of her, a fairly large one, causing her to sigh and grumble “Finally”, clearly annoyed that it took so long.

[Trial of Life -- Iris of Abiogenesis]

Difficulty: Archmaster

Attempts: 1

Participants: 1

Requirements to Clear: keep the planetary object in a continued orbit, maintain its tidal lock, and protect it from extraterrestrial threats until the appearance of the first lifeform (hint: you can aid the circumstances to speed it along)

Content: within the perfect orbit around its star, Kylar stands to become a hotbed for life. For that, however, it requires divine intervention and that intervention comes in the form of you. Maintain the equilibrium between the two sides of the world and the ringed epicenter of life; do this by maintaining the current tilt and the tidal lock and preventing the infernal and glacial storms from reaching the center. Furthermore, be on the watch-out for the sky that shall rain fire.

Note: due to the nature of the trial, the participant shall be afforded infinite Mana and a continued perfect state of body and mind for the duration of the trial. Adjustment period is recommended afterwards.

Say ‘Start’ when you wish to begin.

Senna stared emptily and hollowly at the window, even cartoonishly rubbing her eyes as though she couldn’t possibly fathom what she had read to be the truth. Yet, it remained there, beholden to her gaze. She looked up and down, read it over and over again, and with each consecutive read, she lost just a wee bit more of her ever-dwindling sanity.

Even if she entirely disregarded the contextual mess of her trial, what about the trial itself? Rudimentary speaking, her trial was to... keep an entire planet in place. It wasn’t to protect it or to destroy it or anything she could fathom-- it was to take the entire planet, mass beyond her comprehension and all, and then... keep it place for the indeterminate amount of time.

Tears all but swelled in her eyes as she collapsed back down. She quickly swallowed the gut’s response, however-- there had to be a trick. She was 100% certain that even Cain couldn’t do half of what the trial required, and he was someone who could do practically everything. After all, there was a huge rift between destroying a planet, defending it, and then ensuring it stayed in place. She could fathom the former two, but not the latter.

Though her education was fairly limited, Cain did force her to at least graduate from high school during their stay out, and she had learned some basics of what forces kept the planets orbiting a star, and even if she was a thousand times stronger, she wouldn’t be able to match them.

“No, wait,” she mumbled suddenly, frowning, and re-reading the last note of the description, realizing that was the key. “Infinite Mana...” that was the variable that tossed the entire principle of physics into the grinder and destroyed it beyond recognition.

Mana defied all reason and logic and what should even be possible. Cain often said that he was entirely limited by the amount of Mana and that if he had infinite access to it... he could essentially create life. Now, of course, he also mentioned that the number necessary would be in trillions, but theoretically... it was possible. That was likely what the description meant when ti mentioned that she could aid the fostering of the life.

The problem was that Senna was entirely in the dark when it came to raw manipulation of Mana. When Cain said he could ‘create life’, he was halfway joking since it was like saying ‘if we had access to infinite fuel we could map out the entire universe in great detail’. Possibility was certainly there, but the framework for it would still need to be figured out.

And like is the case with most things, Mana manipulation is heavily specialized. She’d discussed it often with others, including Emma, Kramer, Daniel, and Jamal, and the way they utilized Mana was definitively different than hers. In fact, differences were far more numerous than similarities. Fundamentally, she used Mana as a thin wrap around physically-existing objects, and almost in a string-like fashion used Mana to manipulate the objects themselves. Daniel, on the other hand, used Mana to affect other matter-- bend the light particles to hide himself, and even manipulate gravity to suddenly explode in speed.

Everyone had their own tiny ways and means of achieving what their classes were designed to and, most of the time, they did so intuitively. It wasn’t really until Cain specifically told them to realize how they’re using Mana that they began thinking about it. As such, becoming aware of it, only made them even more specialized to the point that excess Mana meant almost nothing to Senna.

Fundamentally, she couldn’t really run out of Mana; she’d much faster run out of weapons and objects to manipulate rather than Mana itself. As such, she’d have to use Mana to re-build them, whereupon it becomes somewhat of a reverse ‘chicken or egg’ situation.

Her frown deepened as she entered a deep thought. Cain spoke very little of the Tower, and even less of the Ninth Floor. All he said that most trials were deceptively easy and insanely hard at the same time. According to him, there was a ‘critical mass’ -- a point in which the trial goes from ‘oh, yeah, I broke a sweat’ to ‘everything is falling apart and all I want to do is lie down and cry’. This meant that there was always a ‘trick’ to the trial, means of completing its minimum requirements with fair ease.

But she knew that just completing the minimum requirements didn’t even constitute as ‘passing the trial’, just... surviving it. The difficulty of the current trial, ‘Archmaster’, was peak mid-stage -- effectively fourth highest possible difficulty that Cain was aware of. However, the trial’s difficulty was reflected in its peak state-- not by the minimum requirements for passing it. As such, she suspected that completing the trial itself-- keeping the planet steady and safe until the formation of life wouldn’t even be that supremely difficult as long as she figured out the ‘trick’.

Her issue was... what after? What was the actual trial? In truth, there was no way of knowing. Even Cain mentioned that he could, at best, just... guess and extrapolate from the few bits of information they were given.

Knowing that, she realized it was pointless to ponder; at the very least, she had to survive and that meant figuring out the ‘trick’ behind the trial. Looking at it again, the only thing that stuck out was ‘infinite Mana’... and that’s also when she finally realized the ‘trick’. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know how to precisely manipulate Mana-- she wasn’t limited, at all, in her access to it. She could just toss however much was necessary with her ever-sloppy ways of handling it.

It was also there that she frowned and realized the where the likely, true difficulty of the trial lay-- the end-amount of the Mana consumed. That is to say, the less Mana one consumed... the higher the ‘passing grade’. The minimum requirement was simply to ensure that the planet stayed steady, while the difficulty was doing so with as minimum of a waste as possible.

“Oh, fuckin’ hell,” she mumbled bitterly, realizing she was unlucky. She could, at best, just pass the trial. It wasn’t really due to her talent or anything but that the trial simply wasn’t suited for her-- Cain mentioned that this happened, too. In fact, the only trial he ever retold to Emma and her was specifically the one that he was so ill-suited for that he barely got out of it alive. “Whatever,” she shrugged. “Let’s just clear it as quickly as possible and move on... shit, some of his crap-luck musta rubbed off on me...”