>>Challenge and Transit Rift: Greenhouse Crossroads

  >>Update: Kobold defeated, round three completed. Thirty minutes until round four begins. Leave the arena to finish the trial at completion 3/5, stay to initiate the next round.

  Axl braced himself against the ongoing Mana assault, but after the notification, it rapidly drained away. His many wounds were largely superficial, already closing from just his passive use of Vitality. However, they certainly would've mounted if that explosion of aggressive Mana was allowed to rampage within the arena's barriers, like holding tight onto a shrapnel grenade while it was set off. Luckily, dealing with the self-destruction fallout wasn't considered part of the battle itself.

  Even if he was in a pretty decent state, Axl quickly removed his armor and lay down, letting Moxlin apply the salve to him as he rose only three fingers to her. Examining his body closely, he focused his Vitality and Bilesong on fully clearing out the damage from the poison, letting the salve work on its own. He briefly considered taking only a quarter or half of a potion, but decided against it, wanting to refrain from building up any more potion resistance.

  "Finally!" Moxlin yelled from across the arena. "Something worth getting! All his gear is solid F-Grade, and not even early tier, too. No dimensional storage, which is nonsense, since he was clearly using that in battle. At least this is finally starting to add up, no way having to fight an Attributes-match opponent with at least two battle-focused Skills wouldn't give you some extra loot."

  Axl shrugged, honestly not thinking this battle was that difficult, except for maybe having to handle that self-destruction at the end. "Collect it all, and we can figure out at the end what to use it for. I might want to use the crossbow and maybe the spear, but I have no use for the rest."

  In his training at the longhouse, Axl learned that he was comically bad with a bow and arrow, widely considered to be one of the most effective weapons for long-range attacks, with even his proficiency with the crossbow being dubious, despite it being the dummy's version of a bow and arrow. Other less common options like slings or a spear-throwing atlatl were equally awkward in his hands. He was somewhat better at just throwing stuff, so they settled on throwing daggers, but Suliana made it clear that wasn't a particularly strong option either. An assessment that was only reinforced by the embarrassing fight with the flying snake.

  That was a problem for another time, since his next opponent was a tree, and the mosaic made it look as if it was unlikely to be a flying one. Still, Axl focused on preparing as best he could, not forgetting that the kobold's Attributes had in fact exceeded his, and that the next battle would probably be even further scaled in that direction.

  He quickly refilled all his daggers, half with centipede poison, half with calcium-depleting poison, and replaced his sheersilk armor with his backup set. The boots had already taken a lot of damage in the previous trial, and the numerous cuts by the kobold had ripped it in many places, the, explosion at the end exacerbating the damage. Any more heavy damage, and it would stress the suit's ability to self-repair. So Moxlin took it into her shallowest storage, where she could keep feeding it Mana to accelerate the self-repair array.

  Axl's backup armor wasn't so bad, a matching set of dark brown leather armor that was early in the F-Grade, made by one of the artisans at the orc longhouse. It wasn't anything special, but being in the F-Grade made it largely match the defensive abilities of the sheersilk set, which mostly showed how good the G-Grade silk armor was.

  Soon, the dual Mana from the arena started to dissolve, and was replaced by a very odd mixture that Axl had a hard time identifying, something shifting and uncertain, as if his mind slipped out of being able to sense it at all, even with [Mana Shroud]. He rechecked the twelve-sided shape around his soul, slightly focusing his will on reinforcing the construct, which he knew should help, but ultimately, he couldn't sense if it did anything.

  

  >>Challenge and Transit Rift: Greenhouse Crossroads

  >>Update: A tree of spiritual obsidian enters, round four begins.

  A dense mist rose from the ground, entirely blocking Axl's sight. It even glowed brightly in [Mana Shroud]'s sight, making it look like he was in a shapeless white void, clearly an attempt to obfuscate Mana-sensing techniques.

  His sword in hand and dagger in another, Axl braced himself and focused on [Mana Shroud] while trying to strain his Perception as far as it could. He waited a second, then a few more, slowly switching to experimenting with getting [Mana Shroud] to somewhat be able to see through the obscuring feature of the mist, the bright white tamping down as he noticed it was only a small component of the Mana, a hyperactive light-attunement, having the effect.

  Nearly a full thirty seconds passed as Axl figured out how to filter out the saturating whiteness, slowly resolving the tree against a far corner of the arena, which was actively secreting the mist. It was somewhat small compared to the other trees in the vale or even outside the trial building, barely twice Axl’s height and with a trunk a meter and a half in diameter, its branches above not particularly long and filled with small, yellow leaves that looked stark against its jet-black bark.

  As Axl saw his target, he was additionally confused about the lack of any attacks, and he looked into his body fully, trying to scan for some subtle poison in the mist, but there was nothing like that, then into his soul. There it was.

  The 12-sided mind protection against his soul was flaring slightly, its yellowish brightness dimming on occasion, then recovering. The attack was so weak that Axl didn't even notice it, since he'd only gotten the orc shaman's attack or the far more substantial attack from the lunar slate's lightning before. Maybe the body tempering trial also counted? Regardless, it seemed like his standards for what was a "soul attack" were grossly out of whack, since this tree's best efforts felt like barely a tickle in comparison.

  Axl considered just walking up to the tree and killing it, taking the freebee win, but then he realized this was a rather unique opportunity to try out some soul-related stuff.

  He sheathed his sword and put the dagger away, then slowly approached the tree, focusing deeply on [Mana Shroud] to look at its response. It’s black trunk felt unusual, especially compared to the yellow leaves on its branches. Other than its mist production and apparent ability to cause soul-damage, however, it was utterly mundane-looking, even to [Mana Shroud].

  As Axl stepped closer, the tree clearly noticed that its camouflage failed, and it started to produce more mist, taking a deeper hue, shifting from white to yellow-green. But Axl could see it simply joined the hyperactive light-attuned Mana with a verdant bioluminescence attunement of Mana, making the camouflage somewhat more sophisticated, but ultimately not a huge deal for Axl to filter out with [Mana Shroud]. He'd have to think about this use of Mana later, however, since he never considered using [Mana Shroud] to hide in this way, and it looked far easier than subtly matching the Mana of the environment, which is what he'd been trying to practice so far.

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  The tree also slowly shifted from its edge as it changed its camouflage, roots quietly drifting over the ground to another corner of the arena. Axl let it think that its change went unnoticed until he was fully able to cancel out the effect with [Mana Shroud], and he then went to where the tree now stood. This time, it simply tried to increase the mist density, apparently unable to switch up its camouflage anymore.

  Axl slowed down as he approached the tree, trying to see what else it could do. Its attacks on his soul had at first redoubled, but now were spacing more out, each attack slightly more powerful, yet still not even close to enough to start destabilizing his protection.

  As he reached the tree proper, a handful of the yellow leaves fell, then were propelled at him with a burst from the mist. Wanting to be careful, Axl easily sidestepped the leaves, but let a single one land on his right arm. Another attack hit his soul, one more powerful than any before, that entire facet of his 12-face defensive construct dimming substantially.

  The damage was alarming, but Axl stepped back and waited a few seconds. The mental defense regained its luster, and he was glad he didn't tank all the falling leaves at once.

  Curious, Axl picked up the leaf that hit him from the ground and held it up, the tiny yellow leaf barely big enough not to be enveloped by his forefinger and thumb. It emitted a faint Mana with what he could now faintly recognize as attuned to souls, somehow, and figured they could be some useful, even if not quite at the level of an F-Grade natural treasure.

  He picked up the other leaves that fell to the ground without touching him, glad they all had the same Mana as the first, then he stepped forward, now fully under the tree's leaf-filled branches. He braced himself for a more powerful attack, and indeed more of the leaves fell, each one an attack on the dodecagon protecting his soul, their frequency easily adding up to some real damage.

  However, Axl just had to step away from the tree and let his mental defense recover, then go back to standing under it. He practiced trying to reinforce his mental defense, finding that if he could see the moment a leaf touched his body, he was even able to use Endurance to reinforce his mental construct, in addition to focusing his will on the defense. This was also training his Limerence, the Attribute not quite helping defend him against the soul strikes, but letting him deflect some of the damage back to the tree.

  Axl tried to activate [Filial Deathshroud], not really expecting it to work, and indeed it didn't. Trees didn’t have eyes, after all. Or at least this one clearly didn't have what the system meant by targeting something "that gazes upon the cloth". Disappointing, but the item would be far too powerful if it could just use those overwhelming soul attacks at whatever, especially at his Grade. Already, it was quite powerful against enemies that it was effective against, making him question if he really did that well in the poison hyacinth trial. After all, even the elf ghost guarding it was surprised at his getting the item. Still, if the system's juice and not Terrania's that got used up by getting him good stuff, so who cares?

  After a while of stepping in and out of the tree, he'd collected several hundred of the little leaves, and what each one lacked in potential for being a natural treasure, they more than made up for it in aggregate, the box he put them in in his dimensional storage positively brimming with soul-attuned Mana.

  But just as the tree started to look quite sparse, with barely a tenth of its leaves remaining on its now very bare-looking branches, it stopped dropping any more. Axl even reached up to touch one of the remaining leaves and plucked it out, but it had decidedly less of the soul-attuned Mana, and even that quickly faded away.

  He then reached out to the jet-black trunk of the tree, the creature actively leaning away from Axl, even trying to scoot off with its roots, but too slowly to really escape. As his hand touched the trunk, it felt less like bark and more like stone, hard and unyielding, but brittle. Even the Mana making it up felt like a seamless union of stone and bark, the first time Axl saw a form of Mana so strange and foreign, so untethered to something concrete that he could envision existing in the world. Except in the form of this tree's bark itself, because it was also like the very manifestation of that strange form of Mana itself.

  But that was just a distraction, Axl was more interested in attacking the creature's soul himself, without the help of [Filial Deathshroud]. It was something that was clearly possible, since Ramsen clearly didn't have that kind of item, and while it could be due to a Skill, it was unlikely that an Attribute required a skill to be used, much like his Bilesong was greatly helped with his poison-absorbing organ, but certainly could work without it.

  So Axl tried to focus on his [Mind-Soul Bulwark], and while this let him detect the tree's increasingly frantic attacks on his mental defense, it really wasn't helping him do anything offensive. Not a surprise, since the Skill description called it an "Active defense", but he still wanted to check.

  Next, Axl focused on the tree, but kept being distracted by its Mana. He even eventually actively disabled [Mana Shroud], since he was instinctively just looking deeper into its Mana. For a while, he hoped that would help, but it really wasn’t, just distracting him with more details on the tree's weird stone-wood Mana.

  Instead, Axl tried to focus on his Perception, Limerence, and Charisma, getting the three laser-focused on the creature. at first, the three Attributes clashed, Axl's attention positively broken as each of these started to work against each other, but soon, they started to behave, their attention more firm as he willed them to work, but nothing happened. It was just dense bark.

  He tried again, then again, and after a while even took a break to walk around the arena to clear his head, the dense mist mildly annoying to breath in, but nothing that some filtering with his Bilesong organ couldn't easily take care of, much less [Mana Shroud].

  The idle break also let him focus on healing his body fully, letting a full few hours stretch by, since this would also be useful for the final fight, to be able to get to it fully rested up. He even considered sleeping, but felt he shouldn't push his luck.

  Finally, after trying several other things unsuccessfully, Axl managed to sense the tree's soul, a walnut-sized branching plexus of an off-white color at the base of its roots. The solution was somewhat counterintuitive—the reason his Perception wasn't working well with Limerence and Charisma was that he also had to focus on Intelligence and Wisdom, the Attributes listed between Perception and Charisma. Ironically, focusing on five Attributes rather than three, while much harder, actually made it all come together and work, and Axl could feel the creature's soul within grasp, and even touching it or not didn't actually make a difference, even if the distance between them did.

  From then, launching a soul-attack was relatively straightforward, he simply pictured his soul emanating an attack at the enemy's, his Limerence in full bloom as a yellow bruise spread over the main bulk of the tree's off-white soul. The tree shuddered at the attack, most of its remaining leaves withering and falling, turning to dust before they even touched the ground.

  Axl experimented slightly with weaker, controlled attacks, glad his [Mind-Soul Bulwark] was entirely unaffected by his attacks. In fact, his actively using the soul-related Attributes seemed to make the mental polygon protecting his soul slightly stronger than if he were just not paying attention to it.

  This felt like a substantial revelation, since he could attack a creature's soul basically for free, without adding additional risk to his own soul. Not that he'd be able to do this anytime soon in battle, since it took him a good minute, fully focused on the tree to even see its soul, much less attack. But he felt its effectiveness would get much better with practice, not to mention help him use multiple Attributes at once, the obvious way to make his Class work to its full potential.

  Axl wondered if he should experiment some more, but he hesitated. He strongly suspected these creatures were just projections or simulations of some sort, since they didn't give out Karmic Energy when killed, but the tree was visibly in a great deal of pain, and he wasn't eager to torture anything so thoroughly, especially not for marginal gain.

  So with one final strike as powerful as he could make it, Axl crushed the bulk of the tree's soul.

  

  >>Challenge and Transit Rift: Greenhouse Crossroads

  >>Update: tree of spiritual obsidian defeated, round four completed. One hour until round five begins. Leave the arena to finish the trial at completion 4/5, stay to initiate the next round.