After his spell selections were finalized, in his mind at least, it was time for gear. Once again he didn’t get any protective stuff, so that part was easy. As for weapons, he had a glut of choices, but very few would actually be useful due to his spell choices. With the randomizer options for his attack spells, he really only needed utility style weapons. This severely limited his weapons options. In the end he went with a staff, a rod, and two wands. The staff, which he carried in one hand, covered everything on the attacking spell list to one degree or another, leaning more towards the area of effect spells. The wands, strapped for quick draw on each hip, covered every common rune in all of the bolt formations. The rod was a rarity in that it was designed for healing spells, instead of attacking. It only covered two spells, Rejuvenation and Summon Healer. There was actually a whole section of rods dedicated to two spell options for healing, this one just matched what he was taking, and easily fit strapped to his back.

With his choices made, and gear gathered, he wandered off to find Chance. When he explained his choices for the spell sections she took it well enough, although she was a little bummed out that he didn’t take the randomizer for all of the spells sections. The fact that he took it for literally half of the spells, even if it was only one section, still made her happier than she’d been in a long time. Apparently, the random option wasn’t popular amongst transfers.

With a wave of her arm they were off. Dix was hoping, he would have called it praying but there were too many gods around he didn’t want to talk to, this would be his second to last random teleport. Although if he did his math right, there may be one more after this test was done before the final teleport to Mantra. Provided the gods teleported him to Mantra, instead of throwing him off whatever this place was like a pirate making him walk the plank.

The third test looked, from the outside, shockingly like the first test. Another big, misty cave. Considering the lack of landmarks at both locations, it could very well be the cave from the first test, just with new monsters. He almost headed straight on in, but Chance’s voice stopped him.

“Before you head in, you should probably listen to the differences.” Dix looked back sheepishly. Chance chuckled at the look on his face, then started explaining. “The main differences with this test from the first are that it’s magic based instead of melee, and the monsters represent that fact. Most of the monsters in this test are either completely immune to physical damage, or at least highly resistant. So use magic, a lot of it. Additionally, while you still can’t die, this time around you can get damaged. By that I mean that you will suffer not just pain, but injuries. This was done so that people can get a better feeling for the healing spells, and how they work." Dix wanted to cheer at his forward thinking on healing spells, but Chance was still speaking. "Admittedly, that might be a little pointless for you, Mr. I’m going to blast myself with spells for an hour to get my resistance skills.” By the end of her opening statements she was giving him the death glare. The one every woman alive knows how to do that told any man he obviously did the worst thing possible, even though she was completely aware he had no idea what she was upset about.

Dix was starting to think that she was the Goddess of Chance because that was how her attitude worked. At any given time there was a chance that her attitude would be completely different than it was two seconds ago. Sadly, in his experience, that meant she would have a lot of company with that title. Every woman he had ever met was the same way, not that he would tell any of them that. He might be crazy, but he wasn’t stupid. Instead he just smiled faintly, and waited for the chance that her attitude would turn around. In the end it only took four seconds.

“Enemy distribution will still be random, but scaling upwards. You can expect the test to stop when you stop showing an increase in your mental stats, no longer progress against the monsters, or stop moving forward. Good luck.” Goddesses must have more emotional issues than even other women, because when she finished she looked to be pouting, crying, and reveling in the upcoming sadism of watching him fight through some sort of magical gladiatorial debut. And he was the scum of the Earth for letting those looks make him horny. Which she seemed to also be enjoying, and hating. To escape the confusing emotional roller coaster, Dix ran towards the cave full of hungry monsters. It seemed safer.

He stopped as the mists started thinning. The spells in his head had changed. He had somehow forgotten most of the attack spells. Looking closely, he realized this must be the randomizer working. He thought he would have six spells, but for the moment he only had five, meaning one had duplicated. Going into his first fight he would have Discharge, Water Blast and Slicer, Force Bolt, and Wind Blade. Thinking about it, he decided to make sure that casting spells from other sections wouldn’t have an effect on his current attack spells.

Quickly casting all three summoning spells, as well as Shield onto his left arm, and activating his Empowerment skill, he found that his attack spells remained unchanged throughout. Looking around at his summons, he realized that this test was likely to be completely different from the first one. People could skip the summoning spells completely, but they were a smart decision. If nothing else, they could tie down one opponent a piece for a brief period of time. So with the inclusion of supporting summons, area of effect spells, and healing, it was likely that there would be more than one attacker from the beginning.

Laughing at his own audacity, he looked back at Chance, still displaying a cheerleading squad's worth of emotions. “Nice work. Taking the random option sounded like fun, but it may completely screw me here. Enjoy the show!” Ignoring the confused look she suddenly sprouted, he charged into the mists, staff in his left hand and a copy of his trusty glaive conjured into his right. Even ghosts are susceptible to weapons made entirely of mana, he suspected. If not, he could always drop it.

As it turns out, the first enemy wasn’t ghosts. It wasn’t even something new, although there were a lot of them. Eleven slimes greeted him inside the first cave. He was careful to count twice, and check the walls and ceiling. Once again, the ‘cave’ was obviously fake, being almost perfectly circular and having a floor of hard packed, completely flat dirt. Getting a second chance to study the place convinced him that his original impression of the caves being barely disguised arenas was correct.

Fake cave or not, the slimes were real. And luckily eight of them were very close to each other, right in the middle of the room. The other three were scattered to the side behind the pack, so they weren’t important for the moment. Turning slightly sideways, left side leading, he planted the staff against his foot and pointed the focusing gem in towards the slimes. The spell was already charging through the staff, even as he slammed it down, Overpower jumping up the power to unnecessary levels. For an introduction to the third test Dix decided to go big or go home.

Discharge blasted outward from the gem, arcs of lightning tearing grooves through the ground, not stopping for quite some distance, whether a slime got in the way or not. Thos arcs that did connect to a slime, immediately blasted it to chunks, not even slowing down as they tore towards the far wall. Even Dix was surprised at the devastation. The three slimes behind the others, that Dix thought he would miss, were instead treated exactly the same as the others, leaving Dix the only living being within the cave.

Once he got over the shock, Dix just laughed, dismissing his suddenly useless glaive. Twirling his staff and whistling a tune, he sauntered off towards the next cave. There was a very good chance he was a little over powered for this test, even without using his skill of the same name. A quick thought confirmed that the spells in his head had changed again. This time he had even fewer, four, but he wasn’t worried. Both fire spells, and both lightning spells. He really hoped he would get a chance to use something other than just Discharge, but he couldn’t really think of anything that would be quite as effective.

The second cave opened up before him, and his whistling stopped abruptly. It wasn’t the numbers that stopped his cheerful whistling, it was the enemies. Wraiths, ten of them. Or at least he figured they were wraiths. Really no way to tell for sure with no one around to ask. But they were translucent, skeletal, floating, and surrounded by ethereal flames. That seemed to rule out Flamethrower, and he wasn’t about to start with single shot spells with ten enemies to face. Discharge flowed through the staff again, without Overpower this time.

This time it was significantly less messy. The powerful arcs still tore through the ghostlike creatures, but unlike the slimes they didn’t explode. Instead they cut the wraiths into pieces, as though they were paper torn apart by a wrathful toddler. Most were dead, but four were still coming his way, only two of whom were still whole. The other two were both missing legs, which seemed to slow them down even though they were floating. With a thought his two elemental summons charged forward.

He had been rather lackluster during his summoning of them, but apparently much better than people normally were if they considered the spells useless. There had been nothing in the information on summoning the elementals that said they had to be imagined as normal animals or monsters, just a size constraint of small, and of limited intelligence. To combat both of these problems, he simply summoned them into the forms of tiny dragons whose breath weapons matched the area of effect spells of their particular element. It took a little bit of thought to get the breath weapons to match, but the elementals seemed to know how to use them just fine from the start. Or at least he assumed as much since they had both let loose with their attacks the second he was out of their field of fire. Perhaps even more alarming, they actually combined their breath attacks. On second thought that was probably just because they had been floating next to each other the entire time, and released their attacks too close together.

Whatever the reason, it blasted chunks out of three of the wraiths. While they were working on those three, Dix looked to the last. At the moment, his only bolt spells were Fire Bolt, and Wind Bullet. Neither was optimal, but he only had a single crippled wraith to take care of. Leaning his staff against his shoulder and drawing his wands, he followed the example of his summons and fired off both bolts at once. He hadn't been sure it would work, but either alone would have been good enough to spin the spell wheel again. Merging together just before making contact with the wraith, they formed a mini-fireball. Cute as the little bugger was, it was equally destructive. The last of the wraiths rained down as chunky ash. Dix just shook his head and moved on.

Cave number three was a huge surprise. Chance had said that most of the monsters in the test would be either immune to physical attacks or at least very resistant, but this wasn’t at all what he had expected. Sleeping in the middle of the cave was what looked like a goblin fed HGH and steroids from birth. Along with maybe that ooze that made the Turtles bigger, minus the parts that made them at least somewhat intelligent. It was huge, green, ugly, and stank worse than a landfill of vomit. Dix’s best guess was that it was a troll. And if common literary tropes from Earth were to be believed, they were famous for three things. Stench, stupidity, and regeneration. He really hoped the stories that people on Earth told about trolls were based on trolls from Mantra, or this could hurt. A lot.

Checking his spells again, he started cussing to himself. No fire. Hell, almost nothing useful against a damn troll. Both Lightning spells, and wind blade were the only useful ones that he had at the moment. He couldn’t decide if he was pissed at his cocky decision to take the randomized spells or not. The spells he would have taken of his own volition certainly weren’t optimized for killing trolls, but who would have guessed that’s what he would be fighting. At least it was sleeping, that gave him a chance.

As much as he would love to Overpower a Wind Blade, and chop the ugly thing in half, he knew it wouldn’t work. Lightning Bolt wouldn’t be enough, so Discharge would carry the weight again. He was hoping it would be close enough to fire to stop the regeneration, or at least that it could be followed up with Flamethrower. He didn’t even have to pray to Chance to know the odds of that happening, fifty percent (odds aren’t probability). Shrugging at his terrible plan of depending on luck, he tried to pick where to attack from. Discharge, even Overpowered, didn’t have a huge range, but it did have a fair bit of spread. To do the most damage he needed to make sure as many arcs as possible hit the troll, and that meant getting closer.

At least when everything went to shit, his summon had Flamethrower.

The best bet he had for getting closer was either sneaking or running. Either one could result in him waking the troll while he was still too far away. He didn’t think it would be very fast, but he wasn’t willing to risk that chance, so a distraction was needed. He was regretting not having tested out Overpower while running. He was sure he could do it, but he needed a better idea of how much longer it would take, or if it even took longer. Holding an Overpowered spell in a weapon was terrible for the mana chamber. If he held something in there too long the whole thing could blow, but if he didn’t have it finished by the time he got to the troll it could rip him apart.

Grumbling to himself in his head about a combination of shitty planning and shittier gods who made tests with fucking trolls in them, he sent his air summon around the far side of the cave to the opposite side of the troll. Crouching into a runner’s start, with a giant stick in his hand didn’t make him feel any less ludicrous, or any more assured of the brilliance of this plan. Sending a thought to the summon saw it slicing a windblade into the troll's leg. He couldn’t get it to focus on the achilles, or the knee, so the leg was the best it could do. Through the sudden roaring, flying spittle, and flailing troll limbs, Dix saw the gash on the troll’s leg closing. It wasn’t nearly as fast as he had thought it would be, but the attack hadn’t inflicted nearly as much damage as he had hoped it would. When the next wind blade hit the troll in the face he started running and charging.

When you use an active skill, things happen no matter what else you may be doing. In the case of Overpower, that meant that the spell charged at exactly the same rate it would have if he was standing still. Had he managed to actively accept sudden other increases in his abilities, he could have kept to the original plan of stopping a little ways behind the troll and unleashing Discharge into its torso. Instead, it wasn’t Overpower that threw off his calculations, it was his movement skill. Dix moved far faster than he had thought he would. Empower, his buff to his strength, speed, and toughness, added even more to his traveling speed. Consequently, he was far too close to the troll and Overpower wasn’t quite ready.

Thinking fast, thanks to Empower, and aware of the trolls every move, care of his movement skill which had, unbeknownst to Dix, absorbed his Battle Sense, he dropped to his leg and ass, sliding between the trolls legs. Just before Discharge finished powering up, he planted the end of the staff and his foot into the ground. His momentum driving against the pivots of his foot and the staff threw both him and the staff upwards directly under the troll. As Discharge fired off straight up through the troll’s groin, hips, and torso, Dix twisted around the staff and lept backwards right as the spell finished.

While he was still far too close to the troll, and his luck didn’t come through for him on Flamethrower, he did have a couple of options and contingencies. One of which started as soon as he cleared the troll. His fire summon had followed behind him, but it had actually stopped at the right spot, and immediately turned its Flamethrower on the troll. Discharge had wreaked havoc on the troll. As the staff hadn’t been completely stable during the spell, the arcs had sliced jagged tears through its whole body, nearly severing both legs, one arm, and gouging out large chunks of the heart and one lung.

Seeing the flame coming entirely through the troll’s body at a number of points, Dix took a risk. Once more he charged forward, Overpower forcing mana into the staff. Luckily, between his two summons both attacking the troll, it was too distracted to notice him. Judging that extra force couldn’t hurt, Dix jumped into the air and slammed the staff into the ground right as it released an Overpowered Force Pulse, stripping the separated sections of flesh from the troll’s bones and sending it staggering backwards. While there wasn’t much flesh left on the patchwork troll, it was still alive. And now it was very, very angry.