Looking out across the land from his throne of skulls, Aaron mused that the gathering crowd of chain-bound slaves really did look angry. Hundreds of them were crowding up by the base of the hill, preparing to attack.

  It was quite impressive, actually. There appeared to be all kinds of enslaved on this world, including several races Aaron recognized, and many he didn’t.

  I guess this is some kind of prison world.

  He wondered what that meant long term, considering they all believed he was the reason for their misery. But it was a problem for another day. After all, his universe had a hundred full years before it was even fully integrated. It still kind of sucked that the trials were taking the liberty to create more enemies for him across the multiverse.

  Oh well. It should be a good bit of training, at least.

  He had eaten a serving of his new bison pie before entering, and couldn’t wait to see how it worked alongside all of his other gains. It had also tasted knee-shakingly good.

  He sat and watched as the first enslaved stepped forward and started climbing up toward him. These prisoners were some of the biggest amongst the crowd and looked quite confident in their martial prowess. They were a combination of huge men with knotted and scarred faces marching beside insectoids with hard carapaces, and a few minotaurs.

  “Well, at least there’s variety,” Aaron shrugged as he jumped to his feet and started his warm-up.

  His warm-up wasn’t all about stretching or showing off, though. The calm before the storm gave him a perfect moment to read fate and consider his plan of attack.

  It was a mighty good cheat, being able to see what your enemies were capable of before the fight actually started, even if it were only several seconds into the future.

  Scanning the crowd, he didn’t spot any asuras amongst them, but there were a decent number of impressively big guys that were comparable in size to Mo’han. However, none were above level 80, which led him to believe the worst was still to come. It was a ninth-stage trial, after all.

  Picking a thread of fate that suited him, Aaron finally shot forward and got to work.

  There were a few things he intended to practice against this first wave of attackers before things got too hectic. Reaching them, he picked out the weakest in the group and peppered them with [ Spectral Fist ]. The ranged attacks weren’t the strongest, but they were a nice means of gauging his enemies before he reached them for the real melee.

  However, to his surprise, the spectral attacks were doing real damage to the level 50s and level 60s members of the group.

  Aaron was actually rather surprised at how strong he had gotten. He was at level 38 now, though, and with almost a hundred and fifty additional strength provided through Titles and other bonuses, it wasn’t that surprising that he could now easily hurt enemies, not to mention his ludicrous amounts of energy he could stuff into his attacks. And so, now he was doing real damage even with his weaker attacks.

  Some of the lower-level enslaved were even dropping to zero and crashing to the ground after just a few precise hits of the spectral attack. He wasn’t even trying that hard.

  And so, by the time he actually reached the enemy, the true devastating power of his attacks was unleashed with extreme prejudice.

  Regular punches blasted through weak defenses and broke bones, sending enemies flying back. While stronger opponents were hit by haymakers, causing devastating damage that left wounds across their bodies.

  Then, he singled out one guy who looked like a small giant. Lining the giant up, he hit him with [ Soul Shattering Strike ], combo chaining the strike with [ Turbocharged Haymaker ], and the results were unreal.

  The first strike blasted away the giant’s defenses, and the second sailed straight through, landing with all of its power and literally blowing the giant’s jaw away.

  After that, dozens of the weaker ones fled, charging straight back through the portals they had come through.

  However, the job was far from done, and new, bigger, and meaner-looking warriors were streaming out of the portals all around him to take the places of those who had fled.

  He spotted a few level 90s throughout the surrounding horde, but he had fought stronger and was eager to test himself out against more powerful enemies.

  What followed was an absolutely chaotic battle that exploded across the cracked and dry landscape. Enslaved prisoners threw themselves at Aaron with a myriad of attacks. Powerful beams, wind blades, asteroids, and so much more cascaded across the landscape, exploding every which way, and causing mayhem in their path. But half of the attacks killed other enslaved as Aaron expertly evaded, always seeming to know exactly where he needed to be.

  Not only that, but with every evasion, he was countering with his own devastating attacks, and those who survived his [ Soul Shattering Strike ] more often than not, lost all will to fight, and immediately turned to flee.

  The gauntlets, too, showed their worth. Spikes stabbed straight through impossibly hard armor, carapaces, and hides, and when empowered by haymakers, the energy traveling down the tungsten spikes occasionally sent so much energy pouring into his enemy’s bodies that they literally exploded into ribbons of burnt flesh.

  But the raw power of his attacks was only the beginning. Several minutes had already passed, and corpses were lining up all across the landscape. And yet, Aaron had barely shrunk in size.

  The density of his energy absorption had increased radically thanks to the bison pie. But even though it had increased the density of his adipose storage, he had continued eating anyway, stuffing more and more food down his throat prior to the fight. Like the madman he was, he continued to enlarge himself beyond what was safe, pushing himself close to exploding, and when he had stepped into the trial, he was absolutely massive.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  It almost seemed unfair. He was pouring such stupid amounts of energy into his attacks. Because the truth was, he simply had so much of it on hand that he could continue with such magnificent output for quite some time.

  And he was going to need to, as more and more powerful warriors were pouring out of the portals with deranged expressions on their bent and scarred faces.

  They wanted revenge for their torture, but if anybody could handle torture, it was the mad human before them.

  Aaron wasn’t intimidated in the slightest. What more could he have asked for? The ninth stage was the perfect place to sharpen his blade before facing Yendal again, and the more warriors they sent at him, the better the opportunity was.

  His gains were quite incredible already, though. He was already amazing at dodging and evasion. Already supremely accurate, capable of leveling incredible combinations that pushed his enemies to their limits. But raw power had been his bottleneck.

  Sure, he had the means to do damage, but he had to plan everything out perfectly when up against much stronger opponents. This had been a prime reason he had struggled against stage eight of this same trial.

  But that had all changed now. The difference was night and day, and he no longer struggled to land real damage against level 90 foes.

  Even if the combination of his gauntlets and haymaker was not enough to cause serious damage alone, he could simply whack them with a [ Soul Shattering Strike], destroying energy reserves, defenses, and lowering morale, and thus, opening them up to further attacks. And as if this wasn’t already overpowered enough, the combo effect meant that hitting them with a haymaker immediately after empowered the attack to greater heights than it was already.

  It truly was a devastating combination, and large, robust enemies well into their 90s were beaten down after only a few strikes.

  But that was only the beginning of what made him powerful. When combined with his energy regeneration, food consumption, and quite frankly, absurd amounts of energy storage, he could continue this astronomical outpour of power for quite some time.

  In fact, the cheat had been pushed even further thanks to his new gauntlets, as he was now actually leeching a little energy every time he struck an enemy.

  He still wasn’t entirely sure whether or not all of this was enough to overcome the absolutely ridiculous amount of power that Mo’han possessed, but at least he knew that when pressed against superior numbers, he had the perfect build to outlast them.

  Still, despite the seemingly one-sided slaughter that was taking place across the battlefield, he was learning a lot. He was getting better at chaining his combinations and learned the sweet spots for throwing them for maximum damage output.

  And whilst Aaron was generally more concerned with his output, it was hardly the only aspect of his growth that had seen enormous amounts of improvement.

  With the absolutely titanic amount of attacks flying his way, even near-perfect evasion wasn’t enough to avoid every attack, and sometimes he needed to simply tank an attack to gain a good opportunity to return with his own.

  And this was how he realized just how far his defense had come. The combination of Fortitude and Vitality gains meant that not only was he taking significantly less damage when struck by an enemy, but he was able to both absorb and heal ridiculous amounts of damage mid-fight.

  This durability was further magnified by his energy storage and regeneration. He had so much energy that he could easily spare enough for healing, and wounds were repairing and closing up across his hardy body within seconds of being caused, barely slowing down his relentless assault.

  It was clear that he was now in a place where numbers simply weren’t enough to overcome his fighting style. His opponents were both less skilled than he was, and now no longer held an edge in power, and if trying to rely on endurance to win against Aaron, one might as well simply surrender.

  It was an incredible feeling. He no longer had to land a hundred strikes for everyone he took. Every strike he landed counted, blasting serious damage into his enemies, and if that failed, he could simply sap away their energy until it worked.

  “Is this all you got?” He taunted and jumped straight into a flurry of attacks that left several dead, including a level 90 and a couple of level 80s. “C’mon! Look at me? I’m weak! You can do better!”

  “Foul creature!” A minotaur roared, but its head was beaten in the moment it stepped into range, and it collapsed.

  “Seriously? I expected more!”

  As if responding to his taunts, a pack of peak E-grade ettins was next to step through the portals. The two-headed giants were incredibly strong, and every strike of their massive clubs sent shockwaves blasting through the land that upended rocks and created deadly fields of destructive shrapnel.

  But even they were a little against Aaron’s power and persistence. They did manage to kill him once, at least. A far cry better than their allies. But even that had been thanks to a dozen of them all attacking at once with a cascading series of massively powerful attacks that killed several hundred weaker enslaved prisoners in the process, and turned several acres of land into crumbled and jagged rock.

  The battlefield was utterly destroyed time and time again as they continued to fight, and to their absolute shock and horror, Aaron flew straight out of a crater they had blasted him down into. His head was still dangling to the side as it healed, but he paid it no attention, flying through the air with [ Gust Step ].

  He barely even needed the terror-inducing effects of [ Soul Shattering Strike ] when he reached the ettins, as they were already bent with fear at the sight of him somehow surviving their accumulated power.

  The ettin skin was impossibly powerful and would put leather to shame; it was so thick and durable. But against the empowered, and now spiky fists of Aaron, that meant little. His punches slammed into them and pierced holes, blowing flesh into ribbons and filling the air with sanguine mist.

  But more enemies were already pouring out to fill the ranks of the fallen. It was obvious that the trial was a supremely difficult challenge for any ordinary trial taker, and he doubted few could withstand such enormous numbers, even if they were considerably stronger than any individual enemy he faced.

  But this was Aaron Dober, and more numbers simply meant more training practice.

  Soon, rivers of blood flowed across the land as the slaughter continued. An hour later, a particularly strong series of attacks set up by several of the stronger opponents killed him again, but it wasn’t anything more than a delaying tactic, and he had already recovered the aether from his first death.

  However, as the land itself cracked and cried beneath the massacre that took place across its hellish landscape, a true horror stepped through the portal.

  As the monstrous creature stepped out, the remaining enslaved fighters looked back upon its fear-inducing gaze and fled back into the portals. None wanted to be near when these two monsters clashed; that much was obvious.

  The enemy that had sent all the others fleeing looked like a giant beetle, antenna and all. The black beetle stood about ten feet tall, with four serrated arms that glimmered with an onyx sheen beneath the red sun.

  Beaming red eyes glared out from its hardened carapace, and it floated in the air, wings buzzing at its back too fast for the eyes to capture.

  Orrigomo the Death Bringer [ Level 101 ]

  Titles: [ Enslaved ] [ Behemoth Slayer ]

  “Oh, so I guess you’re the bo—”

  It happened in a flash. A puff of black smoke, and Orrigomo was in front of Aaron, with two serrated arms stabbed straight through his chest. The insectoid’s face twitched, and it kicked him off of its arms, sending him pummeling down to the ground.

  A cloud of dust burst up into the air as Aaron landed hard.

  “Ah, shit. Not bad, mate,” Aaron rubbed his head as he climbed out of the crater he had just been kicked into. “You’re gonna be a tough bastard, aren’t ya?”

  The beetle’s antenna twitched angrily. It wasn’t impressed.

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