Spatial Magic has reached level 21!

  For what felt like the thousandth time, I picked at the boundaries of our spatial enclosure, trying to glean even the smallest of insights into its innerworkings. Naturally, I would have far preferred to finish up my class trial instead, but with each failure kicking me out for half a day, I didn’t have much of a choice.

  If not quite as much as I wanted, I actually was making some slight progress, too. Sure, I couldn’t actually see the twists in space, but gradually, I was learning to decipher some of the feedback from casting Mold and Bend Space. Outside the spatial region, I would have never realized it, but there was a tiny bit of resistance whenever I cast my spells. Generally, it was so small I barely noticed it, but here, it was considerably more substantial.

  That was doubly true, in fact. For one, whatever forces had altered the space around us were clearly much stronger than me. Changing anything about the space around us was a challenge, and considering how recently I’d grabbed my 20th level of Spatial Magic, I wondered if the extra difficulty was helping my leveling speed along.

  Secondly, and more interestingly, though, it seemed that space liked being “normal.” If I was working on a stretch of space that was heavily curved to the left, bending it back to the right was far, far easier than trying to scrunch it together to an even greater degree. Similarly, contracting an already expanded space was much less burdensome than further expanding it.

  With this insight, I very slowly began to get a sense for the space around me just by gauging the resistance from my spells. I doubted it would be enough to free us, but what else was there to do?

  That particular question ran through all three of our minds over and over again as we tried -- to varying levels of success -- to keep ourselves busy.

  On the one hand, there was no sugarcoating it. It sucked.

  Each day, we’d allot a few hours to exploring, which basically just meant walking in random directions until we entered a new spatial pocket, blindly hoping that it was closer to the exit than we’d been before. Inevitably, though, there was only so much fruitless wandering we could endure each day, and most of our time was spent idly, trying to make the best of a miserable situation.

  It didn’t help that we were still all tied together. The cloth rope was decently long, giving us all a bit of space from one another if we wanted it, but it was still an imposition. Even so, no one suggested we untie our bindings, none of us wanting to even imagine what might happen if we got separated.

  By now, we’d all lived together for almost a year, often stuck with one another in close quarters while we ventured through inhospitable regions without any modern conveniences. We’d celebrated our victories together, commiserated over our losses. Multiple times, we’d saved one another’s lives during particularly high-stakes battles.

  Somehow, though, none of that made me feel even half as close to the others as this time together. Not necessarily good close -- gods only knew I could use some alone time, and the proximity had robbed us of even the illusion of any sort of privacy -- but close nonetheless.

  For all the bad, there were some upsides. Sure, there was almost nothing to do, but that had been true beforehand, too. It was sad to say, but the three of us had grown exceptionally good at dealing with downtime in the past year. On top of that, I still had a good deal of board games tucked away in my storage, alongside our stashes of moonshine. By now, I’d had to rebind Conjure Liquid to a thick soup broth to make sure we would never run out of food, but we had more than enough booze saved up to bust it out when needed.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, we needed to often. I’d updated the others on my plans to finish the Arcane Vision trial, and while I knew it gave them a very necessary shred of hope, it was also a double-edged sword. With every new failure, I could feel as their hopes slowly sank.

  And unfortunately, there were a lot of them. Even prior to getting trapped here, I’d started getting pretty good at the first few sectors of the trial. After two weeks stuck here, I could clear the first five regions over 90% of the time.

  The sixth, the forest, was more of a crapshoot. If I made it that far, I ended up killing the life elemental maybe 60% of the time.

  After that, things got a bit trickier.

  Shivering, I did my best not to think about just high up I was right now. Unfortunately, that was rather difficult when the trial forced me to stare directly downwards lest I fall to my death.

  There were some upsides about getting to the final four sectors. Chief amongst them, I didn’t have to worry about switching between different mana types. At this stage in the game, all four elementals stuck strictly to their own neck of the woods, which is part of the reason I’d done things in this order in the first place. Gods only knew that I’d have died twenty times over if I was forced to keep anything but Frost Vision up.

  Naturally, along with the upsides came the downsides. Firstly, with six elementals down, the remaining four had gotten much stronger. Rather than giving me any real downtime between attacks, they only waited a few seconds before reappearing for a follow-up strike. That, I could handle though. Considering the trial had taken my Dexterity all the way down to ten, it had to be fair, not making anything too fast for a standard person to react to.

  No, the real issue came with the remaining sectors themselves. The present one in particular was likely my least favorite.

  Even so, I could admit it was the most eye-catching of the ten. Rather than forcing me to search through the entire sector for the weapon, the trial had made its location glaringly obvious. Standing tall for all to see, a palatial castle loomed over the rest of the region. While likely entirely impractical outside of my trial, the structure was crafted almost entirely from ice, a venture that would have doubtless made even the most skilled sculptors on Earth balk in disbelief.

  If the rest of the regions could have their completion rates expressed as percentages, I’d finished the seventh so few times, it was better expressed in absolutes. Before getting trapped in our currently spatial dilemma, I’d finished the frost region only thrice, and the fire region after it only once. Those completions did allow me to know what I was after, though. Tucked away in the center of the palace was a frosty scepter, propped up against an icy throne.

  The only problem was that the palace was notably lacking in any ground-level doors. Instead, the second-story entrance could only be reached by climbing up a dizzying spiral staircase that wrapped around the entire building before reaching its destination. Each step sprouted directly from the castle, making me look like a mountain goat as I slowly scaled the building’s side.

  Even that would have been fine in isolation. Even though my other skills were sealed in here, enough time with Jet Step and Featherfoot had long ago cured me of any lingering fear of heights. The only issue was that said steps were made from perfectly, completely clear ice. To add insult to injury, once in a while, the staircase would be missing a step or would shift the distance between each one, not allowing me to ascend it from muscle memory. With how cold the region was, the ice blended in with the air in Frost Vision, forcing me to really focus to chart the path up.

  Stolen story; please report.

  All of that was hard in its own right before the assassin came into play.

  “Shit!” A claw of sub-zero air shot towards my face, forcing me to hastily crouch as it whistled above my head. As fast as I safely could, I bolted up the rest of the stairs in an effort to keep the number of attacks to a minimum. When at last I reached the castle proper, I wanted to collapse in relief.

  Unfortunately, I wasn’t done yet. If possible, the interior of the castle was even more grueling than the exterior. Stone stairs replaced the ones made from ice, and there was no longer any fear of plummeting to my death. On the flip side, half of the steps were coated in entirely invisible black ice. Paired with similarly clear icicles that often fell from the ceiling, the rest of the journey was even more perilous than its start.

  To my credit, I was doing pretty well today! I only slipped twice on the slick stone surfaces, and I even managed to catch myself before the frost elemental could capitalize on my tumbles. When the seemingly endless ascent did, in fact, end, bringing me into a throne room even more ornate than the King of Ftheran’s, I let out a cheer.

  As if its impending doom granted it one last burst of power, the frost elemental attacked me relentlessly as I dashed over to the throne and the scepter lying there. Had it been able to move in more than just simple straight lines and with telegraphed attacks, I likely wouldn’t have made it.

  Its own aggressiveness proved to be its undoing once I wrapped my hands around the scepter, as it practically impaled itself upon the weapon only a second later. A thick layer of frost began to coat the weapon as it absorbed the seventh assassin until it shattered, chips of ice falling onto my boots.

  With none of the other three allowed to come here, I finally gave myself a moment to relax, my heavy breaths fogging up in the cold. Moving glacially slowly on the way back down, I also took my time to appreciate just how stunning the architecture was. Assuming we ever escaped, I’d have to take some notes if I ever wanted to upgrade our humble cabin.

  Although, if things keep going this well, hopefully I’ll never be back here again. With only three sectors left, I had a real shot at clearing the trial today, didn’t I?

  Shortly after challenging the next sector, a gout of flame scorched that hope in its infancy, burning my body to ash.

  You have failed a class trial!

  Bend Space has reached level 6!

  Mold Space has reached level 16!

  Spatial Magic has reached level 23!

  Drinking has reached level 15!

  Gambling has reached level 7!

  At last, it had happened. We’d run out of food. Every last bit of meat and produce I’d had stored away was now gone, leaving us only with broth whipped up with Conjure Liquid. Good broth, admittedly, made to the very best of my Apprentice-ranked cooking abilities, but broth nonetheless.

  In a way, it was impressive, considering that only one of us actually needed to eat, but in fairness, I’d been eating here and there too. As much as Satiated Stomach could help me go without, unlike Cal, I wasn’t quite used to going weeks on end without eating. I’d also truly believed we’d be out by now.

  Of the three of us, Verin was hit the hardest. The dungeon had long ago stripped away her reliance on the finer creature comforts in life, but she was still a high noble. On top of everything else, being told she would only be drinking broth for the remainder of our stay here was a tough pill to swallow.

  Though it wasn’t enough to truly cheer her up, I was happy to say that she’d been using some of her time to get back into art. Gods knew there wasn’t much else to do. Much like our food, her art supplies were limited, mostly just a few leftover chunks of wood I’d cut into boards. Without a pen or a brush, half of her art was etchings. For the other half, I lent her needles and knives conjured with fire mana, courtesy of Arcane Armament. Quickly, we became used to the warm scent of burning wood as she drew with fire, blackened wood taking the place of ink or paint.

  Cal… surprised me. In the back of my mind, I knew that she was the most accustomed to this sort of thing. By her own admission, she’d spent months trapped within a monster-infested realm of darkness, running without sleep or food. Sure, any way you spun it, this was preferable, but I’d expected her to be bouncing off the proverbial walls with boredom.

  Instead, she mostly seemed to check out. Or, that wasn’t exactly right. It didn’t strike me like she’d given up or become depressed, although she might have been hiding it from us. Rather, it felt more like the time just didn’t mean as much to her.

  Presumably Sett had some sort of skill to help him, or else I couldn’t imagine how the grand magus was still sane after being bound for centuries without any human contact. Sometimes, I wondered if Cal had something similar to let everything just wash over her, but I never worked up the courage to ask.

  It was nice, though. No matter how many days passed, I never saw any judgment in her eyes. That was more than I could say for Verin. Oh, she’d never admit it, and she hid it well, but after over a full month trapped together, I could pick up on it now and then.

  I could almost hear her thoughts: You truly can’t finish one class trial by now? After all this time, when we’re stuck like this?

  Or maybe I was just being paranoid. Who knew? All I could say for certain was that I needed to try harder.

  I ran forward with four carefully placed steps before I abruptly came to a stop. It was good that I did, too, as a great pillar of flame erupted from the earth before me. From experience, I knew that it would have reduced me to soot and cinders in a heartbeat.

  The fire region, in many ways, was the exact inverse of its frosty counterpart. Rather than spiraling up through the icy air, I was forced to wind my way down into the earth. The entire surface of the sector was blackened and broken apart, with gentle flames spilling out of the cracks and licking at my feet. Still, these fires weren’t truly dangerous unless I went out of my way to stick my hand into them.

  Towards the center of the sector, an infernal obsidian archway stood inviting me in. The true gauntlet only began once I entered, the interior the same cracked black and red as before.

  Heat Sight, as was to be expected, was a necessity here. At any given point, the ground, walls, or ceiling could erupt, with great geysers of fire gushing out from the cracks. The only warning I got was a split second where the earth would heat up, brightening in my vision.

  In a weird way, I actually enjoyed this sector. It was the same all the way down, and I almost always managed to spot the impending flame traps before I could get caught in them.

  The real issue was the elemental. With seven of its siblings out of the picture, it was out for blood, and in the narrow confines, it was often hard to dodge.

  Even so, I rarely died directly from its attacks, generally able to move out of the way in time. The real issue was where I moved to. In the heat of the moment -- no pun intended -- it was difficult to pick a safe spot to run to, especially when I had to be watching the floor, ceiling, and two walls before I moved. Countless times, I just barely avoided having the elemental boiling my blood, only to end up stepping directly underneath an eruption site.

  Today, though, I was feeling in the zone. Running out of food had hit me hard, and I was really hoping to have some good news for Verin. Carried on through sheer willpower, I danced down the tunnel, flames kissing my back as I escaped my death by the slimmest of margins time after time. In time, I grew so consumed in my singular task that I almost didn’t process it when the tunnel ended, revealing a patch of earth surrounded by a tiny moat of lava.

  There, smack dab in the middle of the room and nestled into one of the flaming cracks in the ground, was a rod of obsidian. Styled in the same fashion as the rest of the region, jagged red lines ran over it.

  A hop, a skip, and a jump later, I was past the moat with the eighth weapon in my hand. A quick jab, and it was over, the red cracks glowing brighter and brighter until the entire rod burnt up in my hands.

  Today’s the day. Filled with a rare sense of confidence and surety, I rushed back up the tunnel and launched myself directly into the final regions.

  That can-do-it attitude, unfortunately, was not quite enough to stop the light elemental from grabbing a hold of me, searing out my eyes from my skull. Not technically fatal, but it might as well have been. There would be no finishing a vision trial while blind. Today, sadly, was not the day.

  With more than my fair share of cursing, I ended the run.

  You have failed a class trial!

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