They continued their clearing activities and had hit the milestone of fifty percent of monsters killed, but they had not explored anywhere near that amount of floor space.

  They were going through a tunnel towards the fourth room, when Danger Sense suddenly exploded. Six different gemstones fell from the ceiling and transformed into their monstrous statue forms.

  Kang immediately engaged the three on his side, which left the others for Tom to deal with.

  Time slowed down as they focused on him, and that gave him the space to think. Three were too many to do anything other than to take them seriously.

  Throughout most of the previous engagements, he had focused on training, at least partially so. Even if it meant accepting minor damage, he had been willing to suffer glancing blows to buy a window to progress Quick Step or simply be knocked off his feet. The tumble was hopefully going to move him closer to meeting the prerequisites for an earned skill. The more extreme the impact, the better, as far as Tom was concerned, and he often had to apply his healing after he had recovered from the blow. Basically, he had been taking regular calculated risks in the lesser fights in order to speed up later advancement. Practicing skills in true combat, after all, gave one extra dividends that sheer repetition couldn’t match, so here, in a trial where his life was at risk, it was a good time to do some gambling.

  Against the three statues, any thought of such frivolity vanished. He focused on Danger Sense and allowed it to guide him from spot to spot.

  The girls, as he was proud to observe, reacted to the sudden threats beautifully. They had sufficient experience now for their reactions to have demonstrated an instinctive understanding of the threat the statues represented. They moved, ducked, and weaved in the protected space in sync with Tom’s movements.

  Despite the significant danger that fighting six statues simultaneously represented, Tom wasn’t concerned. They knew what they were doing, and he was confident that their preparation was going to get them through unscathed, or, at least, without material injuries.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Eloise’s bracelet crumble as she threw herself flat upon the ground. A swishing limb from one of the statues Kang was battling went through the space she had previously occupied. It had been the girl’s own fault, as she hadn’t been paying attention and had gotten way too close to the statue.

  Thankfully, she didn’t panic. Straight away, she leapt back to her feet, an act that got her legs under her to position her better in order to dodge, if further evasion was necessary. It wasn’t, but, in the same movement, she impressed him by grabbing a spare bracelet to replace the one that had been turned to dust.

  Tom spun between his opponents and accepted a glancing blow that scraped the skin off his upper arm to allow himself to be spun around and knocked clear of a different strike. Then he almost stumbled as the pitch of Danger Sense changed. It was screaming about a threat to his team, but it was ambiguous, without hinting at an action he could take to mitigate it.

  Sweat beaded on his forehead.

  What was happening?

  There was no opportunity to investigate as the three statues kept pressing him and forced him to focus almost on them exclusively. There was no chance to ponder possible counters to the undefined directionless threat. However, that didn’t mean it wasn’t there; and it was real, loud, incessant, scary, and terrifying.

  He had gotten an advanced warning, but the moment the alarm was screaming about was approaching, and he was completely helpless to break out in order to face it. Tom felt like roaring in frustration.

  To know, but to be unable to act… it was not a nice feeling.

  The time dilation was not helping - it just made him more aware of the helplessness.

  Between dodging, he desperately searched for a sign of what was coming. He guessed it was going to be a ranged attack, but he didn’t know from what direction or angle it would originated from and had no way to locate the threat. Even if it was ranged, he didn’t have to pre-emptively kill it to be effective. He could protect his friends directly. There was nothing to stop Spark from being used on his allies to save them, but he had to recognise the threat before he could move to counter it.

  Where was it? There! His mind screamed as he saw Briana change the direction she was moving to slam into Kang’s back and knock him off his feet. She went spinning away, and he watched, horrified as Kang was almost pulverised by a fist; however, somehow, he activated Quick Step, or potentially a completely new ability, mid-stumble to save himself.

  Then there was no time to react further. Tom was ducking and weaving, and, out of the corner of his eye, he noted that that part of the wall had been struck with a ranged attack.

  One of the ranged stick monsters had joined the fight.

  Even here, in the slightly dimmer tunnels, his vision was too restricted to see for more than ten metres, and they shot from further out than that. There was no way to confirm it visually, but he had other options. As he swayed out of the way of another statue strike, he calculated the angles, including the assumption that Briana’s actions had been related to the ranged attack. Between that and the damage pattern on the wall, he was certain that the culprit was near the entrance of the tunnel. He unleashed all of his free-to-cast, lightning spells at the entrance.

  There was no time to watch as he was forced to spin under another attack and use his hands to spring back up from a sitting position. As he did so, so he felt the blast wave wash over them.

  Satisfaction radiated in his core. The sniper that had almost got them was dead. He couldn’t check, but his spells only exploded when they took one of the stick things out, so he was confident that he had got him.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Not that it helped.

  His Danger Sense alarms were still hollering at him, but, this time, there was a direction. He reversed his course and fell flat to the ground, instinctively spending a point of a fate when he did so. This one was directed at upgrading the trial reward.

  Trumpets and a ding went off in his head.

  However, there was no time to think about it. He was already leaping to his feet as two statues attacked the spot where he had been lying. For a fraction of a second, he had space, and it gave him a moment to assess the entire battlefield.

  His three light statues were still focused on him. Kang’s were now all dead…

  And then he saw Briana.

  Tom’s mouth went dry.

  She was crumpled and curled on the floor, clutching at her stomach. She was still, as though dead. Red spread out from her in a puddle whose size made him shiver.

  Horror filled him.

  Words couldn’t capture the level of fear that rose within him.

  He had come into the dark hole trial to save her, and now she was…

  Not dead, he told himself desperately, but he wasn’t sure he believed that assessment.

  His mind threw up a million thoughts at once as he tried to understand the situation. She must have been caught in the ranged attack. He was very aware of how powerful those strikes were. They had repeatedly penetrated inches into the kind of stone that his spear could barely mark, and there were hundreds in each attack. Any human exposed to the wide arc strike was doomed. They would be filled with so many holes that even his cheat-level healing skills wouldn’t matter. Maybe if he was an adult with a hundred levels and the high-tiered spells to go with them; maybe then that sort of damage wouldn’t be deadly. But he wasn’t that. He was six, and couldn’t bring someone back from the brink of death or resurrect them.

  And it was a large puddle.

  Please, he screamed in his head. Please, don’t be dead!

  All he could think about now was getting over there as soon as possible in order to heal her. Different options presented themselves to him, some of them more stupid than others. Running straight at her, as Danger Sense informed him, would be a mistake; common sense had already confirmed the same.

  What then?

  A crazy idea occurred to him.

  One of the statues was throwing a punch at him. It lined up with what he wanted, and he didn’t even think about dodging. Instead, he put his shield in the way, jumped slightly, and braced.

  The shield crumpled instantly upon impact, and the full force was transferred from it to him and launched him across the corridor. He crashed into the wall above Briana, all the air in his lungs being blown out. Cracked ribs? Probably not. It felt more like deep bruising, but he didn’t care if the damage was more than that. As he fell, his stretching fingers touched her overly pale forehead.

  It would only let him maintain contact for half a second, but with the massive time dilation that came with his ability, that time was more than enough for his purposes. Almost immediately, Touch Heal told him everything he needed to know.

  Fifteen of the metallic plastic spikes, each no thicker than a sewing needle, had gone through her stomach and leg. She had only been at the very edge of the projectile zone. That was where the good news stopped. They were not simple projectiles, they contained a form of petrification energy that he was going to need to take care of; however, that could wait.

  He had less mana than he would have liked to work with, but it was enough for his purposes, and his mind focused on triage.

  The first step was to address the critical problems, the ones that would kill her in the next ten seconds-types of issues. These were all the things related to blood loss and future blood loss. A road map presented itself, and, without hesitation, he used his advanced healing skills to deprive oxygen from the brain and knock her unconscious. He also tweaked the hypothalamus and set it into overdrive to ensure she remained knocked out. That would keep her still and prevent her from aggravating and tearing the quick patch job he was going to do to her insides. Then, disregarding the durability of the fixes, he fused the veins and the arteries to stop the bleeding. That alone was not enough. He had to firewall the entire area, which involved expanding a lesser vein well beyond its normal capability to allow blood flow to bypass the injured area. Then a free cast of the Blood Replenishment spell addressed the low blood-pressure caused by the large red pool she had created.

  And that was all the mana he had to throw at the problem.

  He crashed into the ground and leapt right back at the light statues.

  She was stable… hopefully.

  He just had to make sure that he won the fight and that the three statues he was entertaining didn’t switch from him and choose her as a softer target.

  He needed to draw them away from Briana to give her a chance, and then pray that what he had done had been good enough.

  Tom threw himself forward, rolling away from her and drawing the eyes of the enemies towards himself. They changed direction slightly to focus on him.

  He had no way to hurt the light statues, so he continued evading them, and absorbing the damage when that was impossible. It was a struggle. His left arm had been shattered when he had tanked a blow to reach Briana faster, which forced him to make compromises. He dropped his spear, and a new shield appeared in his hands.

  The only positive part of the entire experience was that Danger Sense hadn’t changed its pitch. The fight remained infinitely survivable, at least for him personally. It was just a bone jarring chore to get through. With the new shield, he shrugged off the blows and used the imparted momentum to stay ahead of the next lot of potentially deadly strikes.

  The shield he was using shattered, and he got a new one. He was conscious of his mana pool and the need to conserve it for Briana, so he delayed healing himself. With the time dilation in play, there was sufficient time to review the events that had led to Briana getting hurt.

  He had a suspicion about what had happened. She had saved Kang. That was clear enough. Her danger sense bracelet had clearly seen the issue, and she had acted to protect him.

  The question was, why had Kang even been at risk? Throughout all the previous fights, there had been little true danger, but Tom guessed that was the way of fighting monsters. For nine hundred and ninety-nine-days in a row, there was no risk, but then, on that thousandth day, you faced something that could kill you. It sounded like great odds, until you realised those numbers meant that every three earth years you confronted mortality. Multiply that for over fifty years, and there was a reason so many of the human adventurers had died.

  But right now, in the present, things weren’t adding up. Kang shouldn’t have been in danger, as he had his own bracelet to protect himself.

  Tom kept moving and took a blow to his thigh. It hurt, but not enough to cripple his movement.

  The fight was turning their way. All but the two statues he was fighting with were dead, as Kang had just killed the third and that pair focused exclusively on him, which was going to make them an easy prey for his companion.

  Kang swung his axe, and the second-last enemy died; a spray of crystal shard tinkled as they bounced on the floor. The final opponent did not even notice. It continued trying to destroy Tom, and died in a similar shower of glitter and crystal dust only a moment later.

  Time returned to normal. Tom took one look at Eloise and Kang, decided neither of them were about to die, and so continued to work on Briana. The petrification energy left in the wound was a problem. The Grow Skin Wall component of Touch Heal and the sideways evolution he had gotten helped, but it was not enough. With his current spells and skill level, all he could do was stabilise the injury. Yes, he had multiple sideways evolutions that supported fighting these types of lingering wounds, but the venom used here had to have a tier-three resilience, even if its infection ability was only tier-one. It was beyond his power to purge.

  Tom wanted to bury his face in his hands. He had no way to heal her completely. While they remained in the trial, she was going to suffer.