Nathan studied the hologram with an almost neutral expression.
He had expected something like this. Adam himself had said the cuffs contained their instructions, and it had been only a matter of time before they appeared.
[Instructions:
- You cannot die. A feature in the artifact will prevent death. However, once it is used, it is an automatic failure.
- Your objective is to kill the mutated beasts in the surrounding area. The higher the beast's grade, the more points you receive.
- There are five Fantasian prisoners in the area. Kill them. Killing one of them is an automatic pass for the exam.
- You are allowed to attack other examinees for their points. Defeating an examinee will give you all their accumulated points.
- You are allowed to use any method necessary to win.
- The exam lasts five hours. Gather as many points as you can to place in the top hundred.]
Simple and straightforward. It was the only way Nathan could describe it. The instructions didn't mince words.
His eyes dropped to the screen on the cuff, where a timer was already counting down.
[04:58:57]
So the exam started the moment we landed. That made sense. They had only been on the ground for about two minutes.
'Okay. How do I activate this again?'
His hand drifted up to the back of his neck, and his fingers found a small, button-like device nestled against his skin.
"Activate."
The implant answered with a faint click. A fine network of fibers burst out of it like a spider's web, spreading around his neck and shoulders and winding down across his torso.
They wove themselves into a seamless, skin-tight suit that ran from his throat to his wrists and ankles, black and thin as a second skin, settling and adapting to his every breath.
In seconds, Nathan was sheathed in a nano-tech fiber suit, thin lines of light pulsing faintly across its surface like veins.
"Cool," he muttered.
The nano-tech suit was a Terran invention, built to fight Fantasia's magic on equal terms.
Most Terran superpowers weren't physical upgrades, so the suits compensated.
Powered by the Etherium core in the wearer's chest, the fibers amplified the body's strength and speed, and how much they amplified depended on the wearer's synchronization rate.
The higher the rate, the stronger and faster the wearer became.
They also helped control abilities, since some powers were too strong for an ordinary human body to handle safely.
He looked down at his chest, where the suit's core glowed faintly through the fibers.
Etherium.
The main power source of this world, and also the main reason it was at war.
The unharvested Etherium in the northern regions had begun corrupting Fantasia's land once the worlds merged, and that corruption had made this entire war inevitable.
He looked around. The other students were suiting up too, and he could tell at a glance who had what.
Most wore the old models, plain and unremarkable.
His was one of the new ones, which came with built-in sensors the old models lacked, sensors that could track beasts and other examinees from a distance.
Without them, the regular students would be hunting half-blind.
That kinda made sense. The new models were outrageously expensive, enough to swallow the fortune of a middle-class family whole, and only the higher nobles could afford one like his.
'Would anyone team up?' He scanned the clearing, but the thought felt foolish the moment it formed.
The exam was designed to make cooperation pointless.
There was no fixed score to reach, only a ranking of the top one hundred, and even if you formed a team, what would stop them from betraying you when the cut-off came?
It's every man for himself.
Having decided that joining a team would only waste time, he dashed out.
He wasn't the only one with that idea. All around him, examinees bolted in different directions, vanishing into the trees.
'Whoa!' He exclaimed inwardly as he moved.
The world around him was smearing into streaks of green and brown.
He wasn't used to this kind of speed, as his body seemed to be moving faster than his mind could keep up.
But even at that, he had already settled on a plan. Anyone who killed a Fantasian prisoner was guaranteed entry.
So rather than comb the forest for beasts, he would aim for the prisoners instead. But first…
He skidded to a halt.
There were sounds up ahead. Crashing branches, a low, throaty growl.
He would need some practice before he took on anything that mattered, and he hoped, desperately, that this body still remembered how to fight.
Otherwise, well.... He'd be in real trouble.