Beatitudes

Episode 78.

I stared at what popped up in my view with intrigue as I felt kind of familiar with such an occurrence, the downside was that I just couldn’t remember where or when exactly I had seen it before.

But as I continued to quickly read through what was written on the light screen, I couldn’t help but feel a little perplexed at what I was seeing. There were three things that got my attention,

The first being the number of beasts present in the mountain, since this was a trial of sorts and the lowest tier of the trials, I was surprised at the number present, I knew we would have to kill all the beasts but not this many beasts. But after realizing I wasn’t the only one around and doing a quick calculation keeping our improved battle speed in mind, I shrugged and accepted the number, it wasn’t like I could change it anyways.

I noticed it had an imperative tag attached to it, which meant that I probably had to make sure I did it along with the two other imperative objectives listed alongside it

The second thing that got my attention was the fourth objective I saw listed right under the trial objectives when I read through it,

‘Destroy the mountain, is the mountain actually personally asking us to destroy it…’, I couldn’t help but feel perplexed when I saw the objective. Unless there was someone else with us in the mountain who was secretly playing around and had the power to tweak these things to his liking, this was obviously the mountain’s objective… and since Adam had already said so previously, there was definitely no one else within this place. It was a bit confusing, and I couldn’t help but pause slightly as I considered it. In the end, since it was an optional thing and not something we could even do at this point, I decided to just forget it.

The third thing that I couldn’t help but notice was the most surprising one as I had not a single idea of it. There were punishments for failure! The trial would be deemed a failure if I failed to complete even just a single one of the imperative objectives listed.

‘Why the h*ck would there would be something like this, we get punished if we fail?!’

Even Astral  spoke up when he saw it,

Astral : The punishments are a little excessive…

And that was the most disheartening part about it, although it’s only been a while since I got my class and started getting stronger, I could clearly understand how important trial mountains and rank progression was based on the things that Adam said, the so called punishments if I failed to clear the mountain that I could see here was essentially either going to bar my entrance into any tainted mountain I come across, although I wasn’t sure how that was going to work, or would delay my rank progression which meant I wouldn’t be able to increase in tier or possibly even grow stronger… this was a whole three months and although it wasn’t going to be the two punishments at the same time and instead would be chosen randomly between the two, that still didn’t make it any more bearable as either of it would still be painful enough.

‘How is it even possible to do these things, it’s my body isn’t it….’

But despite my thoughts there wasn’t much I could do about it, and I had no time to think about it now either because although we were reading through the words on the screen at a quick pace, the snarling beasts charging at us weren’t going to slow down at any moment for us.

The screen disappeared from our sights as we stared ahead at the beasts charging at us.

Direflame wolves, the beasts charging at them were all of the same specie and origin. Their furs were bright orange as sparks were seemingly generated from them from time to time, the eyes locked on to the trio were also of a bright orange color, resembling burning hot flames as they held nothing but bloodlust and hunger for the intruders of their territory.

SHHIIING!!

The sharp piercing sound of a silver longsword resonated across the mountain cave, which was the first floor of the five floors present in the mountain that contained a separate space from the rest of the world.

Hiya held her sword in an elegant gripping style that showed no flaws or openings what so ever, her sword style to Isaac would always be a beautiful sight to watch yet unpredictable and dangerous, it wasn’t something to play around with.

The sword was directed at a group of charging beasts as it had usually been directed for the past few days now, and as it glimmered with a little bit of light, Isaac could somewhat feel that it wanted to spill more of these beasts’ blood. Isaac felt it was a good thing that there still seemed to be no shortage of supply of its favorite meal

Harry stared at the charging beasts as well with battle intent overflowing from his eyes, ever since he had gained his berserker class, he had always been eager for a battle whenever he saw one coming, even when it was proving to possibly be dangerous. It was possibly due to this reason that he grew so fast despite being the one lagging behind when they first stepped into the untainted zone. With every battle won, he felt a sense of fulfillment and pleasure when the curse energy poured into him, and although previously he was not able to make heads or tail on how to get stronger when they were in Sarang, it was like he transformed somewhat when he started tearing down the beasts in the tainted zone, like a warrior or a seasoned soldier was returning to the warfront and feeling right at home on the spot.