The trial had different stages ment to probe at different areas of Bani. First it was his prowers.
Bani's eyes snapped open, a sharp, ragged gasp tearing down his raw throat as stale, metallic air flooded his lungs.
He was no longer falling in the dark chasm. The pit beneath him had vanished, replaced entirely by an endless, swirling ocean of violet-black liquid that drank the light rather than reflecting it. Above him, a fractured, bruised sky hung impossibly low, weeping slow, silent drops of a thick, silver fluid that hissed whenever it touched the dark water. The gravity here was a physical weight, pressing down on his shoulders like molten lead, yet his newly awakened Highmage vitality pumped wildly through his veins, keeping his senses painfully, lucidly sharp.
He could feel every micro-tear in his muscle fibers. Every pulse of his racing heart.
Before he could steady his footing on the shifting surface, the landscape warped. The oily sea beneath him boiled upward in a slow, suffocating geyser. From the depths rose a towering centipede, its segmented body forged not of shell, but of writhing, weeping human faces, their jaws unhinged as they screamed in a synchronized, deafening agony.
Bani's tactical mind—honed by endless shadows, silent steps, and the cold geometry of lethal engagement—instantly began to calculate. He did not charge. He did not panic. A master of the unseen does not fight a storm head-on; he slips between the raindrops.
He melted into a pool of ink, dropping low to the surface to bypass the beast's sweeping multi-jointed limbs. He reappeared soundlessly in its blind spot, his daggers flashing in the dim, violet gloom as he drove them upward with surgical precision into the weak joints of its carapace. He struck to sever, to disable, slipping through the gaps of its defenses like smoke through a keyhole.
Second his versatility
But the trial offered no respect for skill.
The air grew violently, searingly hot. The bruised sky tore open, raining jagged, black glass shards down upon him like an unyielding hailstorm. Bani twisted through the air, his movements fluid and economical, wasting not a single ounce of energy. Yet, the sheer volume of the assault was staggering. A shard of glass sheared clean through his left shoulder, spraying dark, void-touched blood across the violet water. Another grazed his ribs.
He didn't scream. He simply gritted his teeth, his expression hardening into a mask of cold, calculated fury. He adapted, sliding along the ground, using the centipede's own massive bulk as a shield against the falling hail, all while carving a deadly path toward its core.
With a final, silent lunge, he buried his blade into its central nerve cluster. The beast shattered into a billion swirling motes of ash.
Bani stood alone, chest heaving, blood dripping steadily from his shoulder. But the silence lasted only a heartbeat.
Third his battle understanding
The environment warped again. The sea dissolved into a vast, blinding expanse of mirror-glass corridors that stretched infinitely in every direction. In front of him stood a thousand reflections of himself—not as he was now, but as a hollowed, monstrous caricature of the Void King: towering, eyeless, and dripping with ancient decay.
A heavy, oppressive dread settled into the pit of Bani's stomach. Fear—cold and sharp—pricked at the edges of his mind, but he smothered it beneath layers of rigid discipline. If he was to die here, he would not die cowering.
The reflections moved in absolute unison, reaching out to tear him apart from a thousand directions at once.
Bani became a phantom. He darted between the mirrored images, avoiding direct contact, slipping through microscopic blind spots, striking from the shadows of his own reflections. When cornered, he summoned a tempest of dark, suffocating flames, burning through his remaining mana reserves to carve an escape route. He hacked, slashed, and pivoted with terrifying grace, treating the impossible odds not as a wall, but as a puzzle waiting to be systematically dismantled.
Yet, the trial was not merely testing his physical lethality; it was dismantling his mind.
Every strike the reflections landed didn't just break bone; it carved directly into his soul, echoing a deafening cacophony of whispers. They told him to surrender, to embrace the void, to accept the crushing reality that he was nothing more than a cheap, disposable copy—a meaningless gimmick of a true god.
Doubt crept in, heavy and paralyzing. His focus wavered. His movements grew sluggish as exhaustion finally began to pool in his limbs.
Forth his mental fortitude
In the final, grueling phase, the trial stripped away all physical form entirely, dragging him into a mental purgatory. Here, there were no enemies to outmaneuver, no shadows to hide within. He was forced to relive every failure, every lingering regret, and the suffocating terror of being forgotten by the empire he called home. The psychological weight was staggering, pressing against his consciousness with the force of an collapsing star. He was torn apart mentally, emotionally, and physically, stitched back together by cruel, automated magic, and thrown back into the meat grinder.
His daggers were long gone. His body was battered, mangled, and pushed far beyond the absolute breaking point of human endurance. He was a master of ending lives, but here, he was entirely powerless to stop his own slow, systematic unravelling.
There was no clever strategy left. There was no angle to exploit.
And then, just as his consciousness finally flickered out and the final, crushing weight of the trial prepared to obliterate his remaining core, an infinitesimal, bizarre anomaly occurred. The ancient, automated machinery of the trial—perhaps recognizing a fatal logic loop or a glitch within his hybrid, "gimmick" avatar code—suddenly stuttered. A microsecond of dead silence fractured the endless torment.
By sheer, unmitigated, astronomical chance, the trial's final execution stroke misfired, violently ejecting his broken husk out of the simulation just a fraction of a second before total annihilation claimed him.
As he lay broken, mangled on the dark shore of the void, reality around him crumbled. His trial had come to an end.