Erland was conflicted. He had grown to enjoy the trials presented to him in the Wild Hunt. But still, and always, his first love was combat.

His score in the competition had suffered for it.

Leonel had been particularly displeased, but he knew better than to threaten someone like Erland. Instead, he had dangled the proverbial carrot on a stick. He told Erland about the battles in the higher Tiers.

Now, a desire to fight those people burned through him.

When Baldr had tried the same tactic, it had been transparently manipulative. Leonel’s had as well, but there was a… hunger that underlaid his words. An unspoken desire for Erland to climb to Top Tier himself, so that Leonel could do battle with him.

Still, Erland was struggling internally.

He had finally caught up.

Halina had been dominating the E-Tier since the third trial. She had stretched her lead to nearly twice as many points as second place.

They hadn’t realized it until the end of the third trial, but the Great Tree was giving bonus experience to those who placed highest in the trials. Additionally, that amount of experience was compounded by how many Tiers you had climbed since the beginning of the Wild Hunt.

Erland’s rampant Player hunting was the only thing that had kept him in the running. He was currently fifth. He needed to be first in just three trials.

He couldn’t afford to hunt down Halina in these trials.

With a heavy sigh, he turned off his passive for the first time. [Hunter’s Scent] was his hidden passive, the one he shared with Leonel. It had been revealed when Erland had risen to D-Tier, and his control over it had increased.

Now that he was C-Tier, he could disable it entirely.

It was… disorienting. Erland didn’t realize just how much he had relied on his nose until now. He used it for basic navigation and sensing when people were around him. With the skill turned off, it was almost like he had gone blind in one eye.

Erland tried shaking off the discomfort and wariness that were rising inside of him. Unfortunately, the trial at hand was leaning on those feelings as well.

In front of him lay a large pile of building materials, neatly organized. Behind that was a marked plot of land with a golden flag in the center. His instructions were to build a defensible fortification in fifteen minutes. After the building period, they would defend against waves of monsters, culminating in a final wave against one of their rivals.

Erland wasn’t exactly sure how the last wave was supposed to work, but he put that concern aside for the moment. With an expression as grim as his name, he began building a rudimentary wall.

This work reminded him painfully of home.

His parents had forced him to help rebuild the barn in the aftermath of a particularly violent blizzard. Despite the two of them being strong enough to lift the walls of the building one-handed, they’d insisted he learn how. Their intentions had been to make him ready to run a farm of his own.

Erland had decided he wouldn’t be a farmer so long ago that the memory of the decision was lost to his infancy.

Still, despite having no skills or professional abilities, he was capable of building a steady foundation and solid walls. He even managed to dig a rudimentary trench and sparsely line it with stakes before the end of the build phase.

His approach to defending the building was more active.

Rather than sit safely behind the walls he had built, Erland waded straight into the monsters when they arrived. He was reminded of an old fairy tale as he did. All of the monsters were dire wolves.

he thought with a small smile.

The first few waves the dire wolves were mere pups, only coming up to Erland’s shoulder. They got increasingly larger with each wave, until they towered over him near the end.

Problems didn’t arise until about halfway through the monster waves. A vague sense of danger alerted him, but without his nose mapping out the locations of his foes, Erland failed to react in time.

Teeth sank deep into his abdomen, and he was shaken so fiercely he was nearly torn from his feet. Just one or two trials ago, this might have been the end of him. But he hadn’t spent his down time merely training his stats.

With a shout, he activated [Faultless Defense] and a dome of transparent white light pushed out of him, taking the wolf who had ambushed him with it. Whirling, he activated [Cleave] and all that was left of the wolves around him was a spray of blood.

It would be a distraction, but not being able to smell his enemies was too detrimental. [Hunter’s Scent] was reactivated. Immediately, he felt a ravenous desire to seek out and battle Halina, as well as quite a few others. With an effort of will that, while easier than it had once been, still cost him a moment’s concentration, he forced the feeling down.

That moment nearly resulted in another debilitating wound. With his nose active, responding to it was now child’s play. Another would be ambusher fell before him.

The waves ended soon after, as the corpses of the wolves dusted around him. Erland planted his feet and turned his back to the wall of his makeshift fortress.

He tried to contain himself, but a grin stole its way onto his face anyways. He found himself torn between hoping that Halina was his first opponent and wanting to savor the anticipation. Despite the odd spatial properties of this particular trial he could point straight to her.

Those feelings rose up again, still at war with each other. Before Erland could cave in to his yearnings the final wave began, and confusion overwhelmed him instead.

His vision blurred for a moment before abruptly doubling. In one view, he saw a man standing in front of his ‘fortress’. In the other, he saw a listing structure that looked to barely still be standing. Not because it had been damaged, simply because it was so poorly built.

Apparently, Erland was now controlling two versions of himself, one attacking and one defending.

“Oh?” boomed a voice from inside the shack. “I get lucky enough to fight the wee little D-Tier? Praise and exultation!”

When he hadn’t emerged after a few moments, suspicion bloomed in Erland’s mind.

“…Are you holding your building up so it doesn’t collapse?” he asked.

The silence he received in response told him everything he needed to know. He couldn’t resist a disbelieving giggle in response. That reaction did draw a response.

A bolt of fire shot from the entryway straight toward him. [Dodge] activated and Erland jerked uncontrollably away from the flaming projectile. He grimaced. While the skill was undoubtedly useful, he hated the lack of control he had over it.

Not to mention that he already had several ideas on how to exploit an opponent with such a skill.

Ranged combat was dicey for him, and mages even more so. He’d finally started to encounter them in the D-Tier trials, though most stuck at those levels were either talentless or so inexperienced as to be irrelevant. When a bolt of ice came screaming out of the doorway a moment later, Erland knew this fight would be different.

Developing skills came much more naturally to the classes that relied more heavily on mental skills. Leonel told him that all mage classes were granted a spell skill immediately on their ascension to Player status. Talented mages expanded their control over the element they were given insight into. This gave them skills that used their element in different ways, such as granting them immunity to cold or the ability to imbue their equipment with elemental effects.

Hard working mages expanded the scope of their elemental control. They moved on from firebolts to fireballs, then firestorms. Some of the fights Leonel described from his Top Tier battles sounded apocalyptic in their scope. Elemental storms of such scope that they could blanket the planet if not kept in check.

Genius mages expanded the scope of elements they could control. They peered past the surface level of one single element, gaining knowledge of the makeup of the Nine Realms themselves. With enough insight, they could nearly warp the very fabric of space with their control.

Leonel said that the real monsters of Top Tier were a combination of all three.

Still, Erland suspected that wasn’t the case here. His nose barely twitched at the man in the shack. His second attack had seemed more like a trump card played too early in surprise.

And the condition of the man’s shack gave a strong sense of laziness.

A wry grin appeared on his face. Likely blinded by the man’s insight, one of the Aesir had chosen poorly.

Before a third bolt could streak towards him, Erland activated three skills in quick succession. [Remorse] came down on one of the man’s supports like Thor’s hammer. The entire ramshackle building shuddered, and the man inside bellowed in anger.

“Fight me, you wretched coward!” he yelled. “Are you too scared to stand up to me on equal ground?”

Erland dodged another bolt and swept another thudding blow down onto the support. The thick lumber began to crack under the force.

“If you wanted even ground, you should have built your fortress better,” he said.

Muffled cursing and shifting answered him, but the only thing that continued to fly through the entryway were more bolts. Erland’s estimation of the man dropped again. He hadn’t even tried a larger scale attack yet. Whether that meant that he didn’t have one, it was on cooldown, or he simply didn’t think Erland was worth it, it didn’t matter.

Without something to force him away from the support, the fort would collapse.

The third blow crashed down and the crack this time was ominous. Splintering noises followed it, and a portion of the roof caved in.

“You filthy barbarian,” the man said, barreling through the doorway. “I will incinerate you until there is only a memory remaining.”

Erland got his first surprise of the fight here. The man was heavily armored and built like a brick house. His face, contorted in rage as it was, belied his insight. Heavy featured and broad of expression, this was the face of a conquering warlord.

Erland just grinned and pointed behind him.

“Maybe next round,” he said.

The man’s shack, now robbed of the support of its creator, virtually disintegrated.

As this part of the round ended, intense heat splashed over him briefly and he got a sense of a much larger attack.

“I will hunt you down for this,” the man said, uttering it like an oath rather than a threat.

Erland barely gave the words a thought.

His other consciousness had his real attention.

Halina was here.