Suddenly there was a faint whistling that started growing in volume until it sounded like the screams of a thousand tortured souls. Many were even more suddenly cut off as they impacted the flying monsters, causing major casualties amongst the airborne monsters, as bone shattered into shrapnel and ripped through wings in all directions. Most of those affected by the shrapnel would end up falling to the ground and crushing yet more monsters to death. The rest of the Exploding Shots began raining down, bringing Hell to the monsters. Some of the shots flat out missed, and impacted in the lava, spikes, and other hazards separating some of the lines. The problem this caused for the monsters was that the arrows still exploded, causing lava and shrapnel to go flying in all directions.

Most of the shots, however, hit monsters. The largest monsters mostly ended up with large chunks blown off of them, leaving behind holes edged with burns, and even a couple of deaths from lucky shots. Large and mid sized monsters either died immediately, or very soon after from massive trauma and maiming. Small monsters just ceased to exist, usually large numbers of them, as they had been clumped together to make a solid line.

But the portion that made the largest impact during the initial salvo were the blue ogres. It turned out that what they were drinking from their barrels was not alcohol after all. It was either a mix of turpentine and nitroglycerin or just plain napalm. Whatever it was burned fiercely when exposed to fire if it was just a small puddle, but exploded like a house sized deep fryer had a thousand frozen turkeys dropped in it when it was contained in a barrel.

If that had been the end of the after effects, it would have been messy, but not insurmountable for that section of the shooting range. The few ogres that had fallen and spilled their sauce had spread it almost everywhere, so that when the first of the Exploding Arrows fell from the sky the whole section went up in flames immediately. The barrels the ogres carried their booze in were also highly flammable, but the instant the flames of the barrels touched the contents… BOOM!!!

The first explosion was bad, but the chain reaction it set off was much worse. The whole line of blue ogres went off like a series of nuclear dominoes. But, still, the worst damage was yet to come. The ogres had been walking in a tight circle made of two lines with about two feet of space between them going opposite directions. The circle that walked around that of the ogres was the goblin jugglers with the weird shaped metal balls. Except they weren’t jugglers, and those weren’t balls. The goblins were sappers, and the balls were alchemical grenades. And there were a lot more goblins than ogres. The chain of explosions didn’t immediately detonate the alchemical grenades. No, it did something far in excess of worse. It instead threw the sappers, doused in some flaming concoction, into the three or four nearest sections of monster targets. Then the grenades detonated.

Alchemical grenades aren’t the same thing as fragmentation grenades. Sure, the detonation of the grenade will throw broken pieces of the casing around, but not as well organized as would a frag. The ones that exploded would be more closely related to an incendiary grenade, or even the ogres’ burning booze, throwing out incredibly hot flames that stuck to everything they touched, leaving behind what appeared to be a sea of fire. But not all of them were fire or explosive based. There were large electrical blasts, pools of acid, blasts of cold that flash froze everything but the fire and caused massive concussive blasts when the two crossed paths, and a multitude of other effects. No matter where you looked in the area around where the ogres had been, all that could be seen was chaos and death.

The rest of the Exploding Arrow Hail was also still going off all over the gallery, knocking many of the monsters over, some dead, most injured. Of the injured, the majority had also lost their “carrots”, leaving them suddenly confused and in pain, but also starting to awaken their sleeping instincts. Eventually they would set about attacking anything not of the same race near them, either due to the assumption they were responsible for their pain, or just general aggression.

Dix hadn’t stopped while all of this was happening, but he had slung the bow over his shoulder again. Once more using Endless Quiver, he made copies of his chakrams and knives, and then threw a set of each in that order. The chakrams were aimed with decapitation in mind, and the knives were thrown to Bounce and strike the severed heads into an upwards direction. This was another of his gambles, but it had at least a chance of working, provided the legends of Earth were based on anything other than some old dead dude’s imagination, or booze-addled idiocy. After five sets he once more grabbed his bow, and shot the heads, pinning them to the dismembered human torsos hanging in front of some reptilian giants.

Without waiting to see if his gamble was even working, he slung the bow over his shoulder again, and started whipping knives in amongst the hordes of monsters as fast as he could. Multi Throw and Ricochet were the main skills he was using this time. After a good amount of ricocheting knives were saturating the nearby monsters he shot a glance at the reptilian giants.

They looked more like King Kong with scales that anything else, or at least they had. Now five of them were statues. Not knowing if that counted as a kill or not, he kicked the arbalest up into his arms and fired a bolt towards the neck of one. Quickly dropping the nose of the arbalest back down, he stepped into the ring on the front and yanked back on the string to lock it into place. While pulling it back up to fire again he dropped a bolt in without looking as his eyes sought out his previously fired bolt. It struck the giant’s neck, throwing off a brief flash as it sparked against the stone. For another moment nothing happened, and then a shockingly loud crack echoed across the shooting gallery. It was followed closely by several more before the giant shattered. Dix didn’t really see it though as he was already arming his third bolt, the second having been fired as soon as he heard the first crack.

Having seen certain monsters, and recalling their legend back on Earth, Dix decided to give it a shot. If nothing else he could confirm if there was any truth to it, in case he ever encountered them on Mantra. The monsters were called gorgons, better known by the most famous member of their race, Medusa. If Medusa’s severed head could still turn bunches of stuff to stone, then maybe a gorgon’s could do the same. So he looked for something that looked hard to kill that was behind the snake haired ladies, and enacted his plan.

When the fifth bolt heading for the last stone scaled kong, Dix once again began whipping throwing weapons of all kinds into the monsters in the gallery, Ricochet and Multi Throw in full effect. This kept him busy doing something while he thought over his next move. He didn’t believe killing more giants was worth the effort. In the time it took him to kill five he could have killed twenty to forty of the small fries. There was, perhaps, another option though. Freeing giants. If they reacted like most of the monsters that had lost their snack, the giants would start killing everything for him. Dix was unsure if those kills would count, but it was worth the blink of an eye it would take to send one of his projectiles to sever the line holding the dismembered meal dangling in front of them. If nothing else, the confusion would be entertaining.

Dix quickly enacted his newest plan. By the time he had completed freeing the remaining giants in his easy throwing range, the first was already stomping through the orderly lines of befuddled monsters. He had squished several with each step, and held one of the larger monsters in each hand headed for his mouth. Having decided that this was an excellent plan, definitely better than severed gorgon heads, Dix switched back to his bow one more time. Starting with the closest sets of the largest monsters, he worked his way farther and farther back through the ranks, and then started on the sky. Soon grocery store size spiders, land based krakens, and a herd of beasts that immediately joined together into three giant spiked balls of doom that rolled off looking for an escape, each killing almost as many as had died in the fiasco following the deaths of the goblin sappers.

As the largest monsters moved about the field they constantly affected the areas around them. Many were so large that they would knock nearby monsters over just from the vibrations of their feet hitting the ground, and some just swung around their limbs, scattering the masses. The flying monsters Dix had freed quickly discovered they couldn’t fly much higher than they already were, so they immediately turned back to assert their dominance over the local airspace. The number of corpses falling from the sky rapidly increased, raining yet another facet of chaos onto the overstressed hordes below. Territoriality quickly became the leading cause of death. Well, other than claws, teeth, and massive blunt damage. It seemed that only a minor nudge was needed to lose the monsters from the control of the dangling meat carrot in front of their eyes. The awakened monsters normally took about ten seconds to reestablish their instincts before they jumped into the fray swinging. There were virtually none that didn’t fight immediately upon waking.

At this point there were very few monster conga lines that were still working as originally intended, and they were all close to receiving a rude awakening. Dix’s eyes flicked over each of them, calculating and measuring different angles and variables. Different ideas flitted through his head, many rejected almost immediately, but some sticking to the side awaiting a second look. Retaining a hold on his bow, he whipped out a couple more Ricochet knives, and then shot them with arrows. Each knife was redirected onto a new heading, that generally ended with a number of dead monsters. His newest trick was to knock a knife into a line with the smallest monsters, so that it would blow through all of them. The fairies and pixies he had spotted earlier, were nearly extinct in moments. All that was left behind by these two races were a few lines of slowly falling wings. Dix had neither forgiven nor forgotten Tuti.

The faint sadistic smile gracing his face was something he usually kept from people, but he didn’t really care at this moment. Leaning on his bow for a bit, Dix surveyed the mess he’d made out of the gods’ carefully arranged carnival ride. Currently it looked more confused and chaotic than a war between a post apocalyptic army of acid tripping rodeo clowns led by a methed out stuttering autistic with multiple personality disorder, and the super hyped up cannibalistic versions of every homeless or transient person to have ever lived on Earth all riding some seriously fucked up mounts that they periodically took bites out of. At this point, there really wasn’t much difference he could make in this mess with the weapons he had. Sure, Dix could drop a few more monsters, but they were mostly going to die out anyways within the next few minutes, and there were still several minutes to go in the test. Sometimes it was best to just enjoy the aftermath of your work.

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Lust was amazed. It wasn’t how well Dix fought that was amazing to her, or even the skills that he used to do it. What amazed her about Dix was his mind. No one had ever tried to turn the monsters against each other before, yet Dix did it almost as an afterthought. Even the fact that his later plan was the one that caused the most overall damage didn’t detract from her incredulity. Dix had no idea that each death counted for him, so he went for what would get him the most kills first, followed closely by what could be extremely high value targets, then easiest to rack up quickly. Only after covering all his bases did he blow the whole thing apart. It was a clever series of deductions and creative thinking, the very thing she thought this second test was truly designed for.

This test had always been a little enigmatic in Lust’s opinion. The first test was easy to figure out, but this one just didn’t seem to have really deep reasoning behind it like the first one did. It’s main, easily visible testing focus was on ranged combat, aim, and eyesight. But it’s secondary purpose was much harder to understand. All Lust and her partners could figure out was that it tested a person’s decision making more than anything else. Specifically quick decision making and deductive reasoning.

After continuing to watch Dix’s score increase Lust decided that it may also test something else. Resolve. Can you figure out what you need to do in the test, decide how you want to follow through, and then stick to what you decided? All these things Dix had demonstrated he possessed to great extent.

Well, maybe resolve wasn’t one of the test requirements, but Dix still had a lot of it.

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Roanoak was aghast. Being a god of crafters he wasn’t really all that big on violence. That’s not to say that he hadn’t engaged in it himself, or was really all that bothered by doing so. He was also well aware of what the weapons he made were for. But this was different. This was the territorial wars of monsters the world over condensed into a few square miles. It wasn’t just the eruption of violence that had him so shocked though. It was the casual way in which Dix had set a construct that predated the gods into the path of self destruction. The man, although Roanoak was no longer completely sure “man” was the right word to describe Dix, only took three minutes to do it, and it appeared that he could have done it in one. The devastation he had enacted was beyond anything the god had seen before in such a short time frame. And the human that had done it seemed to be just leaning back laughing as it all went up in flames and blood.

The only part that was worse was the score Dix was headed for. While Dix thought that anything he didn’t kill personally wouldn’t count for his score, he couldn’t be more wrong. Every single monster that died while it was his turn at the gallery would give him points, no matter how it died. That meant that the large feathered bears that were eaten by some cyclops counted as points for Dix. The goblins that were crushed under the bodies of the flying whales when they fell from the sky, and the whales themselves when they suffocated without the blowing wind constantly bringing them more air counted as points. Even the flame feathered tyrannosaurus rex wanna be that choked to death on an orc thigh bone counted for points.

And so Roanoak watched as a man shaped monster that pushed himself to great extremes while training, appreciated great weapons, and made bad jokes took the highest score ever seen on the second test while doing nothing but laughing for the last three quarters of the test. Watched and worried over what this madman would do when he got to Mantra. Watched and worried over which god would win the bid, and how that would affect Dix. Watched and worried that someone who could do this would undo every plan set in motion, every scheme to get ahead, and care naught for the ruination of others that was left in his wake.