Tater stared down into the gigantic crater in front of him. It roared back at the Saiyan, as if irritated by the annoyed look on the boy's own face.
Then, Tater looked back at the Namekian elder beside him.
"You're joking, right?" He asked the guy, "You want me to protect a rock that attracts monsters, inside a monster-filled den… without killing any of them?"
The Namekian nodded. "If a single one of these creatures die, you fail. If the rock cracks or is eaten, you fail. Good luck." And without hesitation, the old green man chucked the rock toward the center of the crater, without giving Tater even a moment of warning.
Eyes going wide, Tater rushed forward, horrified, as a gigantic dinosaur with wings flew out of the crater, perfectly on a line to eat the rock. As it snapped its mouth closed, however, it felt a rush of wind. The dinosaur looked around, irritated, before locking its eyes on the heavyset Saiyan crouched on the ground nearby, the pheromone-coated rock tucked under his arm like a football.
The flying dinosaur screeched, attempting to dive toward the Saiyan that had stolen right out from under it, but was forced to stop in midair with an irritated roar as two land-walking monsters that easily dwarfed the pterodactyl-like one converged on the boy's location ahead of it.
Tater hefted the stone under his arm like a football, sensing all the energies around him like Tarble had repeatedly beaten into his head, searching his mind for a handful of the best options and choosing one at random like he'd learned from the Namekians. Pausing only for a few seconds as he took in all of the information, Tater lowered his center of gravity and began sprinting in the only direction that wouldn't end up with him running headfirst into another swarm of angry monsters.
Toward the two gigantic monsters in front of him.
Tater's speed wasn't that impressive. The only one who was slower than him out of his entire team was Tommy, but that didn't mean that some random Namekian monsters could match him. The monsters managed to follow his movements with their eyes, but only barely, as the young Saiyan rushed toward them with all the speed he could muster. The one on the left seemed to begin to lower itself, trying to stop Tater from dashing under its four legs, but Tater barely managed to roll underneath the thing before jumping to his feet and continuing his rush until he hit a wall, where Tater took a breath.
"Damn… How am I supposed to…?" He muttered under his breath. Protection wasn't a Saiyan's specialty. If his mission had simply been to protect the rock, slaughtering all of these monsters wouldn't have been too difficult for the boy.
But he wasn't allowed to kill any of the monsters. He could harm them, to an extent, but he didn't dare go too far, out of fear of failing the trial. His Saiyan pride wouldn't allow him to fail.
This particular test honestly felt like it poked fun at every single one of Tater's weaknesses, and he hated it.
As Tater thought to himself, the time that he'd bought ran out, and he was forced to kick the face of a giant dinosaur, using the beast's snout as a springboard to flip through the air and race away along the uneven wall of the crater for a few dozen meters before landing back on solid, mostly-even ground, in the center of a gathering of five smaller monsters. Without a second to catch his breath or think, Tater leapt into the air, slamming his elbow down onto the head of one of the monsters as they all converged on his location.
As soon as the blow landed, Tater realized that staying on the ground was just going to be a dodging game, and lifted off into the sky, where he panted, shifting the stone under his arm as a dozen flying monsters of all shapes and sizes launched after him.
Still, it was more time to rest than the Saiyan would've gotten on the ground.
Tater found himself dodging swooping beaks and razor sharp claws continuously as he flew to the edge of the crater, cursing in his head the whole time, as he begun feeling his biggest problem in this test rearing its ugly head once again.
The Namekian hadn't given him a time limit.
Tater's stamina wasn't limitless, and these monsters weren't allowing him to conserve energy. Even as he landed at the edge of the crater, he still found himself beset on all sides by flying creatures, while the monsters in the crater began attempting to climb.
It was only a matter of time before they succeeded. Tater couldn't escape.
"DAMMIT! I NEED TO END THIS SOMEHOW!" In a moment of blind rage, Tater genuinely believed for a second that he'd been set up to lose. His energy raged as he raised his right hand above his head in seething anger, gathering an energy orb above his head "CATAPULT BOMBER-!"
At the last second, before releasing the energy bomb into the hole and murdering every single monster in there with one single, rage-fueled attack, Tater's arm paused, at a slight angle above his head.
With a deep breath, the Saiyan reluctantly found himself letting his Catapult Bomber disperse, his arm fall back to his side as he dodged a futile swoop from the same pterodactyl-like monster that'd been the first to go for the stone.
"Look for a different perspective. Know what you're doing, and who you are. That's how you grow." Tater repeated his memory of what Tarble had once told them, back when he'd first begun training them back on Celatus. "Grow… What am I doing, why am I doing it, and what are my weaknesses here?"
The answers to those questions came to Tater surprisingly easily.
He was proving himself.
Because he wanted to become better than those bastards who'd sent him and his team off to be killed. And because he wanted to live up to his friend, Tarble's expectations.
His weaknesses? Stamina. Speed… no… He was perfectly fast enough, and nobody had perfectly infinite stamina.
So what was Tater's weakness here? What would Tarble say?
'Tater. You may be smart, but you're also as stubborn as Pepper when you want to be. That's a double-edged sword. Be careful of it.' Right. Tarble had already given him an answer to this.
"Stubborn… THAT'S IT!" Thinking back to the last trial, everything suddenly clicked into place.
Tater smirked, as he realized the truth of the test. Namekian were all the same, huh?
"Sorry, but you lose, monsters." Tater dropped into a sturdier stance after he dodged one final flying monster, gathering his energy. "CATAPULT DRILL!"
Dropping the stone to the ground between his legs for a single moment in order to utilize his technique, Tater's hands glowed with ki energy for a moment, before it erupted into a large cylindrical, drill-like shape that would likely have ended in a point, if Tater's ki control had been up to the task of perfectly forming it. The drill-like construct exploded forward, creating a small, yet incredibly deep, angular hole in the ground in front of the heavyset Saiyan. "Find the damn rock now!" Tater shouted, kicking the rock into the hole, just as another monster dove for it. The monster slammed beak-first into the hole, before pulling away, irritated.
Then, with a simple ki blast, Tater collapsed the hole he'd made with his technique, permanently trapping the stone deep beneath the soil of Namek, where it would likely never be seen again.