The Woman wasn't pleased with the situation. Several weeks ago she'd taken what The Husk called a final test. A brutal battle that left her with doubts as to why she'd received a passing mark.

The Husk had taken her to a forest she didn't recognize, placed hundred of varying weapons in the trees and underbrush, and told her to fight as if her life depended on it. Before vanishing into the shadows. The battle started like any other day of training, The Husk assaulting her from any and all angles it could, taking chunks of flesh and breaking her bones with every blow it landed, but, after a short time, and several brutal injuries, things changed.

The Husk rasped out a series of words that made little sense to The Woman. "Ach dech hakhaar duun arach den tuuch ac a dech rhec dhegaan." "All will gather to assault this soul in a trial by fire." The Woman felt the words more than heard them. The feeling bouncing about inside her resonating with something and echoing in the shadows far more than anything The Husk had ever said before.

Before The Woman could ponder on the feeling or the meaning of the words, hundreds of beasts and monsters began flooding into the area. Each one completely disregarding the rest, seemingly drawn to the Woman. Each one an assailant, The Woman, would need to confront.

Every second felt like hours, and hours felt like days. During the fight, The Woman was forced to drain every ounce of her spirit to survive. She used her version of Rending Slash and Crushing Blow the most often, both easy to replicate without acces to the actual skill. She often relied on Battlefield Perception to keep track of her opponents and Weapon Awareness to track down a way to defend herself after the weapon in her hand broke. While these were the ones she had used the most, by the end of the battle she had to use every skill at her disposal in order to not be overrun by the creatures around her.

When she could no longer find a weapon to wield, she used the environment. Throwing creatures into tree branches, or smashing them into the few exposed stones. And when that environment was rendered worthless by piles of corpses, she used her body. Clawing out eyes or breaking bones with her fists. Unfortunately, no matter how strong she was, even she would fall to the endless swarm of assailants. After what felts like days of fighting, with no end to the sea of monsters in sight, The Woman's body finale failed her.

Her feet slipped, so she failed to evade an attack that she'd seen coming, and a blow from a goliath took her in the back, sending her flying across the ruined forest. Before she could recover, a creature she didn't know, something seemingly assembled from a sharpened carapace, used its bladed limbs to cut deep into her shoulder, nearly severing her arm. The bladed creature was unable to launch another attack before a spirit infused fist slammed into its body, shattering its exoskeleton, killing the thing inside.

Through the blood loss induced haze, she did her best to use her spirit to nit the wound closed, evading attackers the best she could. With her focus split, she failed to notice The Husk appear from the shadow of an approaching ent and subsequently was unable to dodge the palm strike aimed at her stomach.

Once again, The Woman sailed through the air. This time, when she struck the ground, it did little to stop her flight, only causing her to spin and bounce along like a stone on a pond. Ultimately, she was halted when she slammed into a cliff face, coming to rest in a heap at the bottom.

Broken, and unable to move, The Woman's vision began to fade. As the blood loss and trauma finale robbed her of her consciousness, she saw the hoard of monsters closing in on her, like a wolves pack.

Before The darkness took her, believing that the endless hoard would rip her body to shreds, she heard The Husk speak again in that same bizarre tongue with that same resonance in her chest.

"Dhuugaal duuc shuulkar, rhuulaac rhec alkuurekaan ol, den tuuch man haraal ar dech. DrERAaGAan." "Forged through combat, broken by impossible odds, this soul has passed its trial. DISPERSE."

The Woman attributed what she saw next to a hallucination induced by being so close to death. All the creatures in the area, beast, and monster alike bowed their heads before slowly fading into the air without a trace, corpses, or otherwise.

When she awoke, she was once again in that cave she'd trained in for the past ten years, utterly unharmed with a feeling of defeat in her chest. Despite The Husk's words that she had passed, that feeling never really faded—only seeding itself deep in her mind, whispering that she had not been strong enough, that she should have been able to do more.

After she'd had time to rest, The Husk gave her a choice she hadn't expected. She could choose to follow it to wherever it was going, something it refused to tell her or stay behind.

She'd chosen to follow her teacher, as she'd once said she would.

Now, weeks later, deep in the mountains of a foreign nation, cold and short on patience, The Woman voiced the question she'd been denied the answer of before. "Where exactly are we going?" The Woman asked the bandage wrapped figure ahead of her.

"To meet someone and reveal the truth of my intentions." The Husk rasped out an answer that revealed nothing to The Woman and left her with more questions than before.

Taking a moment to swallow her irritation at The Husk's answer, The Woman opened her mouth to ask another question only to be interrupted when The Husk vocalized something infuriating.

"We are almost there, just past the next bend is our destination. I will go ahead to prepare for your arrival." With that rasping comment, The Husk vanished from sight, leaving The Woman to march forward on her own.

This wasn't the first time she'd been left alone on this trip. The Husk would leave her whenever they approached a town or when they got close to a group of travelers, but this time was far more irritating than any other. She did not doubt that it was telling the truth about the distance to the final destination. But the next bend was still a ways away in the deep snow, leaving her with quite a bit of time to tend to her irritation, growing it into anger.

By the time she was rounding the bend to whatever The Husk was leading her to, she was fully prepared to lash out at The Husk in a fury. Ignoring that such a thing would do little more than graze the creature, she merely wanted to let out some frustration against her teacher.

All that anger vanished in an instant when she rounded the bend to a sight she didn't understand.

The Husk stood facing a large black tower, the architecture far more sinister than anything she'd ever seen before. The mountain's snow seemed to avoid landing around the tower, leaving a clear ring of grass and stone.

However, the sight that caused the anger to vanish was not in front of The Husk, but behind it.

A man around thirty years of age stood with a complicated magical staff leveled at the back of The Husk's head. A massive magical formation spread out from the tip of the instrument. The Man's face twisted in anger, his knuckles white from how hard he clinched the staff in his hands. "How many?" The Man said, fury in his voice. "HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE YOU BROUGHT HERE TO DIE YOU BASTARD?!" He bellowed, the formation glowing brighter with his words.