Without knowing when I’d fallen asleep, I found myself awakening in an unfamiliar place.

A pure white room without exits or doors.

Completely identical to the room before the tutorial where I'd chosen my difficulty setting.

Impossible…

Looking over my clothes and through my bag, I was quickly relieved. My clothing hadn’t changed. I was still wearing the black villainous clothing that I’d fallen asleep in and my items were still here, although Rin seems to have helped herself to my cloak.

That means, at the very least, time hasn’t reverted back to when I initially came here. In a world filled with various supernatural and magical means, that’s annoyingly possible.

No system messages have popped up, so I can only assume my personal system has stayed disconnected from the mainframe.

The battery life on the system decreased to around 17 remaining hours… So, I’ve slept for about 3 hours?

Poking my head around the room for anything interesting, I quickly found myself disappointed. As I stated before, it was a completely white room with no doors or windows.

Walking up to the white walls. An echo resounded throughout the room as my palm slammed against the wall. Both the wall and my hand remained completely unharmed from the interaction.

“No escape?” I muttered to myself, before frowning…

Did Rin somehow teleport me here after I passed out? That doesn’t seem like something she would do, though.

“That’s fragile, you know? Don’t damage the walls.” A female voice called out from behind me, startling me. However, her tone portrayed that she was actually completely uninterested in the content of her words.

Summon a spear from my wristband for protection, I immediately turned around and pointed the spear toward the woman who’d suddenly appeared behind me.

The girl’s voice had come from was either a teenage or young adult. Brown hair, fair skin… Black t-shirt and red mini-skirt, she looks around 16-17… however, even now, I had trouble sensing her existence.

A stealth type ability?

The teenage girl had an extremely bored expression on her face and projected an ‘I don’t want to be doing this’ attitude with every fiber of her being.

“Who are you?” I asked keeping my spear in a ready position.

“The test will begin-” the girl yawned mid-sentence, “-momentarily.”

I narrowed my eyes at her and examined her.

She wasn’t at all concerned about my spear or the possibility of me attacking her? Is she extremely dangerous or ignorant?

Either way, turning aggressive wasn’t the best course of action. One option would end in my death, the other in being trapped here until I discovered another way out.

Lowering my spear, I gently inquired for more information. “What test?”

The teenage girl ignored me. She lazily waved her hands causing a spear, sword, shield, and bow to appear midair. Before they immediately fell to the floor with a clang.

“Pick up a weapon to begin the test, or don’t…” The girl lazily explained with another yawn whilst readjusting to be sitting on the floor, “I don’t particularly care.”

That casual movement hand movement… Did she teleport the weapons here or somehow create them with mana? Exactly how powerful do you need to be to waste mana like that?

My alertness was raised significantly with her casual action. Early assessments are indicating extremely dangerous is far more probable than ignorant.

I carefully thought about which weapon to take on the test… I'm not exactly in a position to take any sort of test at the moment. Honestly, I need to be resting and recovering for a period of time.

However, seeing how powerful this girl is... along with how young she is. The reward from this test could potentially allow me to defeat Rin in a duel. Even in a weaken state, I'm probably far more powerful than the average participant.

“Can yo-” I began to ask her to explain the test, but was interrupted midsentence by her.

“Right, and you’ve only got a minute to choose.” She suddenly said seemed to remember something important. “You’ll be sent out, if you don’t choose in a minute.”

Sent out? So, this test isn’t mandatory. Additionally, she seems to be implying that she has no control over whether I’m sent out or not.

Both of those things are good news.

I thought back to my promise with Rin and frowned. If I can choose to back out, would this be considered taking an unnecessary risk?

“Thirty seconds left.” The girl lazily tapped out the seconds on the ground beside her.

I froze. It’d barely a few seconds since she’d told me about the time limit. In other words… the countdown began when the weapons were summoned.

Damn unreliable girl.

Glancing toward the various weapons on the floor, my eyes locked onto the black metal spear on the ground. I temporarily desummoned the spear in my hands.

Do I want to take whatever this test is? Whoever that girl is, she’s obviously powerful. Implying that the reward for passing this test should be worth it.

That doesn’t necessarily indicate anything, though. Hard work is only a perquisite for rewards. Nothing requires that hard work must give rewards. The test could also be extremely dangerous and difficult whilst giving nothing.

“Ten seconds.” The girl lazily called out, “I’d choose the shield if you’re hesitating, it might surprise you~”

Running out of time, my eyes latched onto the shield at the girl’s recommendation.

Should I take this test? Should I take take the shield?

Suddenly, Rin’s advice from my future self flashed through my mind, ‘Choose the spear.’

Compared to the Dream Realm that I can barely remember, this seems to be a more likely situation to give advice on. Latching onto that thought, I reached down and picked up the black spear.

The dizziness of teleportation immediately ran through my body. When I felt the sensation stop, I immediately jumped forward before examining my surroundings.

Never trust teleports. At this point, that advice has been ingrained into my mind. Regardless as to whether there’s any danger, you don’t stay still immediately after teleporting. It’s too easy to create a trap at the teleport’s exit.

The surroundings seemed to be in some type of forest. Without any immediate traps.

Soon, I discovered the teenage girl still in the seated position in front of me.

The girl began speaking, but her overall voice and tone still displayed the bothersome nature of this task to her, “This test is in an illusionary realm, think of it as virtual reality. Kill 10,000 animals, monsters, or people with your designated weapon to move onto the next portion. As this is partially an illusionary realm time is sped up dramatically inside…”

What?! It would still take months or years to find and kill 10,000 monsters!

“Blah, blah, blah… Anyway, who cares about boring rules?” The girl’s personality drastically changed from moments before, as though whatever was forcing her to explain the situation had just disappeared. She leaned forward in her seated position with a grin, “So, did you choose the shield or not?”

My brows furrowed at her question.

Obviously, not. The spear is literally in my hand.

Wait…

I reached forward and attempted to touch the girl’s arm… but my hand directly passed through the girl’s body.

This girl is merely a projection in front of me?

No… When I thought back to my various questions and her responses. Besides when I hit the wall, she’d never directly responded to anything I’d done or said.

A prerecorded message or automated message?

The girl smirked before collapsing into a giggling fit, “The thought of someone having to use a shield as a weapon to bash people over the head makes me laugh. Every. Single. Time!”

My mind thought back to what she’d said a few moments ago and a cold sweat ran down my back.

Kill ten thousand animals, monsters, or people with your designated weapon.

In other words, if you’d chosen the shield, it would be considered the weapon you had to kill 10,000 things with? You couldn't even use another weapon you were carrying?

If I hadn’t trained with the spear after the advice from my future self, I almost certainly would’ve concentrated on the shield and sword. I might’ve actually chosen to take the shield after hearing her recommendation.

What’s a pit? This… this is a pit! A massive evil pit! How is that even remotely fair? Who would possibly choose the shield if they knew the goal in advance?

No wonder the advice from my future self was to choose the spear. I can only imagine the mental scar that would be left after picking the shield.

My future self probably couldn’t care less about what I choose, as long as it wasn’t the bloody shield. Who knows how long it would take to kill 10,000 monsters with a dull metal shield?

On that note, could the bow also be a trap? Would you have to use the bow itself to kill monsters? I certainly didn’t see any arrows provided. I’d assumed there would be arrows after choosing it, but with the knowledge that the shield was basically a trap weapon…

If that’s true, the only valid choices were the sword and the spear. Meaning from the very start, there was a fifty percentage chance of having a massive disadvantage (and that’s ignoring personal preference for weapons which swaps around the probability dramatically).

As I watched the teenage girl in her giggling fit. I felt speechless at the unfairness of this entire situation. Even if I’d managed to barely avoid jumping into the pit dug before me, the situation made me extremely uncomfortable.

The girl sat upright after her laughing fit had died down and confidently stated. “As this is an illusionary realm, any abilities or magic prowess are directly gone. Poof! Don’t worry about dying. It’s just an illusion, you’ll resurrect back here without a scratch…”

Just when I thought the situation couldn’t get any worse, the immature girl chuckled away once again. “But~ When you die the kill counter will reset!”

I felt my eyelids twitch. This girl made that statement as though the previous statement was good news and this was the drawback. To me, both statements sound like bad news. Dying here should’ve just caused direct elimination from the test.

Despite knowing this was entirely a recorded message, I voiced my complains, “This is insane. Find and kill ten thousand monsters without magic or abilities? Can I leave? Quit? Control-f4? Alt-Tab.”

The teenage girl didn’t even slightly react to my words and I directly sighed in defeat.

Basically, if I’m understanding this correctly, they want me to kill 10,000 monsters (an absurdly high number, as even finding that many monsters might take months or years)… yet if I die, the kill counter directly returns to zero.

At this point, I felt like strangling my future self who said ‘choose the spear’ instead of ‘Stay the fuck away from this place’.

Why didn’t you just tell me to avoid this bloody pitfall? Did you want me to suffer through it just because you had?! Could anything good possibly come out of this waste of time?!

The girl’s voice turned lazy again, “As for the reward for you hard work…”

I hadn’t expected her to talk about the reward in advance. Thus, I refocused on her.

“I’m sure boys will be satisfied.” She hastily said, giving a seductive wink whilst pushing down on her skirt from her seated position.

My hopes were completely shattered. There's no such thing as a reward for this venture.

Future me, I hate you.

The girl suddenly yelled in pain and her hands shot to her forehead, “Ouch! Don’t flick me. I was just teasing them.”

My eyes flashed at her movement. As I watched her in pain, my mouth curled into a smile.

She didn’t seem to be acting. Meaning someone else had actually flicked her.

There was someone else involved in this place’s creation? Maybe... they designed the actual reward?