The Beginning After The End novel Chapter 285

Chapter 285

Chapter 285: Ascension 101

As the three giant spiders, each one clad in rune-covered armor to protect their bulbous bodies and twitching legs, let out a series of chittering hisses, I couldn’t help but wonder how they had gotten these beasts out of the Relictombs.

‘Maybe they’re just normal mana beasts from the surface,’ Regis answered.

Ah. You’re probably right, but aren’t these supposed to test—

One hulking, armored form skittered toward me, cutting my conversation with Regis short. Despite the spider’s large frame, it moved incredibly fast.

The runes on my suit began glowing brighter as one of the spider’s clawed legs slashed past me.

‘Hey, do you think the runes on your gear react to the runes on the spider’s armor?’ Regis asked.

Artificing was not my field of expertise, but I thought Regis was probably onto something. Perhaps the shadowy judges above could track my performance with the runes, similar to how Emily had helped me train back in the castle. I could just imagine how fascinated Emily or Gideon would be if they saw something like this firsthand.

Actually, Gideon would probably feign disinterest while getting grumpy out of envy, I thought with a smile.

I dodged another barrage of strikes from the spider, glancing toward the other two, which were still waiting at the edge of the assessment hall.

The giant spider lunged at me and I grabbed its fangs, holding it at arm’s length. “Uh, excuse me?” I called out as I turned into the momentum of the spider’s attack, using its own weight to send it tumbling away. “What exactly am I supposed to do for this assessment?”

There was no response.

Frustrated, but hesitant to do anything that might give away my strength, I continued to defend against the relentless assault of the first spider, feeling like a mouse fleeing from a tarantula. As I threw myself back from a slash of the spider’s claws, a warning sounded in my mind and I was forced to spin and dive to the side to avoid the stabbing fangs of the second spider, which had suddenly burst into motion and joined the battle. Had the mana beasts’ armor been designed to be more silent, I might not have heard the creature’s hurried approach in time.

‘What do you suppose happens if those things bite you? Do people die in this test?’

Thanks for the concern, but I’m fine, I thought back, sliding under one spider’s thick legs just as the other leapt at me, causing them to collide with a crash.

‘I’m not concerned, I’m bored.’

My companion’s words got me thinking, and so I started to experiment, purposely allowing a few of the spider’s strikes to hit me.

Surprisingly, despite the speed at which the spider struck, most of the force was dampened upon contact, as if the foam suit I was wearing was several feet thick, rather than several millimeters.

‘You should find out what happens if you get hit in the face,’ Regis suggested, half out of curiosity, half for his own amusement.

Despite Regis’s obvious intentions, I was curious too. I waited until the third spider had sprung to life and joined its brethren, then, right after I had dodged one of the spider’s fangs, I let spider number three swing down at my cheek with its front limb.

The runes around the collar of my suit lit up, encasing my entire head in a silvery dome. The runes surrounding the limb that was about to strike my cheek also flared to life, and, just as it made contact with the protective barrier around my head, both of us were blown back by a concussive force.

I spun in the air, landing on my feet, but the three spiders’ bodies slumped. They scuttled slowly toward the tiles that they had come out from as if they’d been scolded, then the tiles closed behind them.

“The next assessment will now begin,” the examiner watching behind the glass window declared, his voice echoing through the chamber.

Before the last echo had faded, the entire testing chamber began trembling, and the tiles on the ground and walls began sliding outward, forming square pillars. The tile on which I’d been standing lifted me upwards a few feet, then water began flooding the room below me.

“Seize the gem located at the top of the assessment hall before the water touches you,” the voice commanded. “Begin.”

I rolled my eyes. At least this time I had some clear instructions.

Wasting no time, I channeled aether into my legs and leapt from platform to platform. The entire chamber had been transformed into a sort of vertical maze, with rectangular platforms criss-crossing each other to block my view of the top.

Additionally, the platforms moved at random intervals, keeping me on my toes more so than the oversized spiders.

Regardless, with my draconic physique and aetheric enhancements, the assessment was little more than a casual climb up a children’s play structure. High above the floor where I fought the spiders, I found a fist-sized crystal hanging from the center of the ceiling. Below me, the water had filled less than a quarter of the space.

As soon as I grabbed the crystal, the platforms slowly receded, and the water drained through a series of empty tiles in the floor. The pillar I stood atop lowered until I was again standing in an empty square room.

After the water had completely drained and the chamber was back to its original empty form, the central squares of the room began to glow with a dull blue light. A single square at one corner glowed white.

“Please step onto the white square,” the judge announced in his eerie, echoing voice. I did as I was asked, though a part of my mind told me it was stupid. What did I really know about this whole place? They could have detected my lack of mana, or Alaric could have turned me in, and stepping on that white square might disintegrate me, or teleport me into a prison cell, or—

I caught myself before I dug myself into a hole and steeled my nerves. There was no reason for them to be suspicious, and I had already decided to trust the old drunk. I was in the heart of the enemy’s empire, but here I was Grey, not Arthur Leywin.

Once I was standing with both feet firmly placed on the white square, further instructions echoed down from the shadows above.

“Step only on the white tiles. Your goal is to reach the black tile”—one blue tile turned black in the opposite corner from where I stood—“without leaving the platform or touching the blue tiles. You must do so before you pass out from mana loss.”

‘Wait, what did he just—’

Regis was cut off as a sucking pressure began pulling at every inch of me, and I felt the aether in my body being drawn out through my aether channels. How the hell?

‘It’s like that platform in the Relictombs!’ Regis shouted in my mind. ‘They must have modeled this place after those crazy djinn’s tests.”

He was right, of course. I immediately pulled all of my aether back into my core, similar to what I had done with my hand back in the Relictombs, and it seemed to work. My physical body was weakened due to the lack of augmentation, but it drastically slowed the rate at which aether was being sucked out of my body.

I bet they don’t even realize what they’ve created here. There is no way they know that this place can manipulate aether as well as mana.

‘Probably a good thing, though. The sweaty, pained expression on your face doesn’t give anything away.’

I suddenly realized that, while I had been speaking to Regis, the tile in front of me had turned white, and the tile below my feet was slowly turning blue. I stepped forward quickly, and the title behind me instantly changed to the same glowing blue hue as the rest of the tiles. Besides the square I was standing on, one tile to my right, and one tile in front of me were also white.

This, too, was familiar. It wasn’t exactly the same as the revolving platform puzzle I had navigated in the Relictombs, but it was similar in premise: a maze that I couldn’t see until I was standing in it.

I chose the right hand path, and two more tiles turned white, one in front of me, one to my left. I stepped forward again, and the tiles forward and to my left and right all turned white. When I stepped forward once more, however, I found myself at a dead end as no new squares changed color, and was forced to return to the previous tile.

The path changed before me with each step, sometimes leading me backwards, other times stopping suddenly, forcing me to dart back to a safe square before the title under my feet turned blue. And all the while, the aether continued to leak out of me. After nearly two full minutes, I had progressed approximately halfway across the board when the voice from above spoke again.

“Your ability to manipulate and contain your mana is impressive. We will now increase the level of difficulty, but not to worry—you will be scored at a handicap.”

Behind me, the corner square where I had started turned gray, then fell out of sight, leaving a shadowed pit beneath it.

‘Oh, great.’

I waited, counting until the next square descended.

Twenty seconds between squares, unless they speed up as they go. That gives us...a few minutes at most.

‘Step on it, chief,’ Regis urged.

As I progressed across the platform, I twice found myself turned around and cut off by the collapsing tiles. Still, this maze was a much simpler version of the one I experienced in the Relictombs, and even that hadn’t been able to stump me.

It took only two more minutes before I was standing on the black square. Behind me, more than half of the tiles were missing. Internally, I could feel that I’d lost perhaps a third of my aether.

The missing squares reappeared, the lit tiles all faded back to their default dull gray, and the sucking pressure vanished.

A panel in the far wall slid open, revealing a second entrance to the assessment hall. A man and woman, each garbed in white mage robes with a distinct red band on the right arms, walked out, my “uncle” tottering behind them.

“Striker candidate Grey,” a thin bespectacled man said, reading off his clipboard. “Flexibility of offensive magic, below average. Manipulation of mana, above average. Athleticism, above average. Mental acuity, above average. Survivability rate, high.”

I cocked a brow, amused by the man’s reading that my mana manipulation was above average even though I didn’t have a shred of mana in me.

The bespectacled man finally looked up and gave me a smile. “Congratulations, Grey. You have passed the assessment.”

“Of course my nephew passed!” Alaric huffed before walking over to me and patting me on my shoulder.

“I have to say, your ability to obscure your use of mana is impressive,” the blonde woman said, echoing the examiner’s praise. “Even our suit wasn’t able to pick up on the minute traces of leakage while you augmented your limbs.”

“It is impressive indeed,” the bespectacled tester agreed. “And it’ll serve you well in the Relictombs since many of the beasts within are attracted to mana.”

I simply nodded at this new information, but quickly added a smile and said, “Thank you,” when I noticed Alaric staring at me intently.

“I highly recommend that you party with a caster, as you specialize heavily in close combat. Even better if that party has a shield as well,” the woman added before offering her hand. “We hope to see great results on your initiation ascent.”

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“Well, if you saw one in the wild, the sensible thing to do would be to burn them down, but the arachnoids that they use for testing are protected heavily by runes,” Alaric explained. “You weren’t able to do any damage to them, which is why they marked you low for that, but you still lasted longer than a lot of the formally trained candidates from academies.” _{freeweɓnovel.cøm}