CLANG CLANG CLANG Finally, two artificial hands came out from behind me, one holding a saber and spear and helping me defend against the weapons coming toward me. I lasted longer than I had expected, nearly three hours which is more than I had expected myself to last. With the appearance of two extra hands, things relaxed immediately; with these three weapons, I could have better control over the directions and control more area. Still, I did not dare to get too relaxed, things seems easy now, but they will get harder with the passing of time. So, I need to be careful and look for a pattern among the weapons, which will make dealing with this challenge easier. The notes of minority powerhouses claimed that there is a pattern in such challenges; if one is able to find and exploit it, then the difficulty of the challenge reduces a lot. Many more have refuted the claims, saying there is no pattern and these weapons come off randomly, but I am going to differ from that. I have felt the pattern since the first hour of the challenge; it is complex and elusive, and getting hold of it is going to be difficult. Those who have sensed the pattern have said that it is easier to sense it than unravel it and then make use of it. Still, I am searching for it because I do not want to defend myself like dumb; there is a challenge in that, but an even bigger challenge would be finding the pattern, and I will do it without taking any help from my clone, which is busy doing some important things. Before I knew it, five hours had passed, and I still have not found the pattern, but I have made progress, and I feel like I will be able to find it; it just takes a little more time. I was right; it did take time, a lot more than I had thought it would be, so much that now the pressure of the challenge has increased immensely, and in a few minutes, even three weapons wouldn't be enough to defend against the attacks. Though now, I do not have to worry about it, the pattern has become visible in front of me. I could see the invisible threat connecting to all the weapons. With this invisible thread, everything became clear, and I moved my weapons according to the pattern I was seeing. CLANG CLANG CLANG Something magical started to happen as I began to move my weapons through the invisible line; I started to find things becoming easy that, in a few minutes, they had become nearly effortless; I just needed to move my weapons in the invisible line and my weapons would clash against the coming attacks on their owns. The attacks of weapons are fast and complex, but I have no problem defending against them; it is starkly different than what I was facing a few minutes ago. I remained focused on the pattern and increased the speed and the power of my attack accordingly, I defended against the attacks without any effort, and it couldn't help but amaze me and filled me with inspiration. If I could find a pattern in the enemies fighting as I have done against the weapons, it would be much easier to kill them. Though I understood the difficulty of that, what I am facing now is a complicated pattern of attacks, but it is a dead one without a soul, far easier to crack than the fighting style of any sentient being, which changes according to a condition far more flexibly that something created by the runic formation. It made cracking the fighting style of a sentient being such a difficult, near impossible task if I wanted to do it on the same level as I have done with this dead pattern. Time passed, and soon twenty hours passed, and I sat down while two more arms came out of behind me and began to deal with the weapons around me. The difficulty did not increase by much, but I am slowly getting tired, and I want to rest a little because this challenge will last whole twenty-four hours without giving me the slightest break before I get thrown into another challenge. Before that, I want to rest my body as much as possible, as who knows what kind of challenge I got thrown into, and for it, I want to be prepared as possible. With the four artificial arms, I did not need to move my body, and after an hour, I even laid down and let the four arms do all the work they were doing expertly. Following my intentions across the pattern without making the slightest mistake. CLANG! Time passed as I defended, and before I knew it, the butcher's saber on my left struck the sharp boomerang, destroying the last weapon to come at in the challenge, and the second later, the blue stone door appeared in front of me. Click! I got up and walked toward the door before stepping inside into familiar darkness, which gave me another star, the one with the highest score, before sending me to another challenge. Days passed by one after another, and before I knew it, it had been fifteen and a half days since I entered this place. In these fifteen days, I have completed nine challenges; the shortest one had a time limit of three hours, while the longest one had a week. I have completed each and every one of them and got the best score; aside from the first challenge, which gave me a subpar score, every other challenge came at me, and I excelled at it, including this one that has given me the highest score yet. Hun! A moment later, everything cleared, and I found myself in great shock; in many instant things, I did not even sense them; they just happened in an instant. First, I am naked; there is not a single piece of clothing on my body, not even my storage ring, which usually lies hidden in my skin, but that is not a shocking thing. The shocking thing is that I have turned into a completely normal person. My connection and my energy had disappeared, and I found myself at the weakest I have ever, even when I burned my blood and became so weak that I did not have the strength to twitch the finger; even at that time as I was not weak as I am right now. Before that time, even if a King wanted to hack me, he wouldn't have been able to do it with the strength my body had, but now, a simple Knight of the lowest level could massacre me; I lost my power and also my physical augmentation, even sensing my core has become quite difficult. Though, I have a perfect connection with the clone, which is not surprising considering we share the same soul. As I came out of my shock, I looked around and found myself in a desert at near dawn, with wooden tables spread in front of me, and on them were various things; not powerful, magical things, but common things which could be easily destroyed by even the weakest knight.