“Persistent! Fucking! Ants!”

Ants.

In Rai’s tired and exhausted eyes, ants were what all of those men and women who fiercely tried to defeat him had become.

Conscious, smart, and relentless ants.

A single bite might not be noticeable in the slightest. In fact, it would not, considering Rai’s overall strength. These are not venomous ants or anything similar, after all.

But it is not a matter of a single bite.

After several hours of relentless assault, Rai had fallen victim to thousands of those bites, meaning that slowly but surely things were bound to start hurting. Really badly.

Pertaining to this situation, mana would usually play the important role of both protecting and healing, but due to the restrictions that had been placed on top of him by his mentor he had no choice but to rely on his fleshed body and nothing more for protection and conservation, something that he had neither been trained nor habituated to.

Lee, on the other hand, was Rai’s polar opposite. With a body that had been strengthened to a degree that would make it difficult for even the best martial artists to go as far as scratching it, a test of this kind would be nothing more than usual and pendular practice.

To aggravate matters, these ants were what could only be described as unkillable. Even when knocked out, beat up, and even dismembered, they found a way to get back on their thin and frail legs and become a reliable foe once again. They might lose some of their rationality and ferocity in the process, but they come back either way, making the number of enemies Rai had to plow through seemingly infinite.

Rai being unable to kill them for obvious reasons was, therefore, backfiring on him, since he had never expected them to be so persistent and forceful.

-

In total, seven hours had already passed, and the new practitioners showed no signs of giving up. Unlike what even Ms. Wang had expected, they were growing smarter and smarter the longer time went by - with experience came knowledge, and with knowledge, wisdom. It would be wrong to say that they had reached the wisdom phase, but what little knowledge they had acquired throughout this entire adventure was enough to make Rai grow further frustrated the longer time passed.

Their organization had become way better, too.

After being told by Ms. Wang to attack Rai as a collective, the green pupils wasted no time in changing their tactics, but even that wasn’t proving to be enough. Charging towards the boy only resulted in more accrued damage, which was something they could not afford to deal with during such an already tough time. Because of that, a change of plans was made and a lousy but effective system educed.

When Rai still stood near the podium, moments before falling victim to his teacher’s sadistic evaluation methods, both he, Liena, and Ms. Wang took a brief moment to observe and inspect the new pupils, attempting to understand how good and just exactly how talented they were. And in front of them, talent lied.

In other words, not all individuals who were partaking in this evaluation were equally weak and inexperienced. Not all of them were beginners, novices who had no knowledge of mana, martial arts, or other subjects that would raise their odds of winning.

The system that the new students had created revolved around using those talented individuals as their winning cards. All of the talents were collocated in a single team that would simultaneously attempt to defeat Rai in between the many waves of barrages the other students executed, leaving Rai no time to rest and tougher opponents to deal with. As soon as a member of the talented team was defeated, an entire team that had been created for the pure sake of guaranteeing that each of their important members came back relatively safe intervened in the fight, dragging the now injured or knocked out card out of the fight and leaving Rai unable to do anything further to them, making the entire process repeatable time and time again, or at least as long as their body held on.

Among the talented students were some able to not only make use of martial arts, even if to a far lower degree than Rai, but also manipulate mana, which was, undoubtedly, the biggest obstacle that had presented itself to Rai during this evaluation.

All of these things put together made for a never-ending bombardment that left the boy in a state of pure agony, as he was mentally and physically tortured by the practitioners who, despite also being exhausted, showed no signs of balking, praying to the Heavens that Rai would be the first to budge and retire from the also never-ending battle.

“I think it is just about time for them to wrap things up,” Ms. Wang said as she jumped off the stage and headed towards the field where the elite team of the new students headed towards Rai, bearing a look that seemed final and, lastly, conclusive.