The Dusk Spider didn't roar. It didn't need to. It simply vanished into a blur of speed.

  Julian threw himself to the left. A glob of green venom sizzled on the rock where his head had been a microsecond ago.

  "Reaction time: 0.4 seconds," Julian gritted out, rolling to his feet. "Too slow."

  The spider turned, its eight legs tapping the ground rhythmically. *Tap. Tap. Tap.*

  Julian analyzed the movement. It wasn't taunting him. It was echolocating. It was reading the vibrations of his heartbeat through the soil to pinpoint his location.

  "It can 'see' my pulse," Julian realized. "So I just need to give it something louder to look at."

  He grabbed his modified Iron Sword with his left hand and the Sonic Lancet with his right. He slammed the tuning fork against the flat of the blade. *CLANG.*

  But he didn't stop there. He drove the vibrating sword into the soft earth beneath him.

  [Skill: Internal Oscillation]

  [Target: Soil Medium]

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  [Output: Chaotic Waveform]

  The ground didn't shake like an earthquake. It *buzzed*.

  To a human observer, it was just an annoying hum.

  To the Dusk Spider, it was a flashbang grenade going off inside its brain.

  The beast shrieked—a high, piercing sound of pain. It thrashed wildly, its sensory hairs overwhelmed by the sudden flood of seismic noise. It couldn't tell where Julian was. It couldn't tell where the ground was. The white noise blinded it completely.

  "Sensory overload achieved," Julian said coldly.

  He stepped forward. The spider lashed out blindly, a razor-sharp leg slicing the air inches from his nose. Julian didn't flinch. He knew exactly where the spider was striking because the spider *didn't*.

  He aimed for the joint of the cephalothorax—the structural weak point where the legs connected to the body.

  He pressed the Sonic Lancet against the chitin armor.

  [Resonance Frequency: Matched]

  *CRACK.*

  The spider's armor didn't just break; it popped like a pressurized canister. Green ichor sprayed out. The leg detached with a sickening wet sound.

  The beast collapsed, twitching, unable to process the attack through the wall of noise. Julian finished it with a precise thrust to the nerve cluster.

  [Target Neutralized.]

  [Loot: Dusk Spider Core (Level 8)]

  [Quest Item: Spirit Token (+10 Points)]

  Julian exhaled, wiping sweat (and a bit of spider goo) from his forehead. He picked up the Spirit Token. It was a heavy, golden coin.

  "Ten points," he muttered. "Let's see where that puts me."

  He tapped his wristband to bring up the holographic leaderboard that hovered over the forest.

  [Freshman Trial Rankings]

  1. Kaelen (Fire Mage) - 450 Points

  2. Lyra (Wind Blade) - 380 Points

  ...

  298. Julian (F-Grade) - 10 Points

  Julian stared at the number. Kaelen, the arrogant fire mage, had already killed forty-five beasts in the time it took Julian to kill one.

  "Linear progression won't work," Julian calculated, frowning at the data. "I can't hunt them one by one. I don't have the mana or the stamina to catch up."

  He looked deeper into the dark forest.

  "I need to farm," he whispered. "I need to find a way to kill them in batches. Industrial scale."

  He turned off the map and started walking towards the area marked with a red skull: **The Hive**.

  Author's Note: