Experimenting a few times by releasing her intent, Shiro exchanged several attacks with the monster.

  Naturally, she lost each time but in doing so she managed to gain some more information about this boundary.

  Comparing it to the information she knew about the one who had passed, Shiro understood that the key was grasping her surroundings without the use of energy or intent. It had to be a passive sense of sorts.

  For example, it would be akin to having a third eye that allows you to see the world without the use of energy or intent.

  ’Perhaps I need to use something more familiar as a medium.’ Shiro thought to herself as she started to envision a grid like environment around her.

  Furrowing her brows, she had an idea but doing this would be very risky as she’d be fighting against the monster until it worked.

  Her idea was to constantly release her intent and fine tune it every second until the monster could no longer detect her.

  Cracking her neck, Shiro decided to go with this approach for now since it was better than just sitting around and theorising to herself.

  Summoning her sword and spear, Shiro released her intent and formed a grid around the room.

  Sensing a large object forcing its way through her grid and swinging his claws at her, Shiro dashed forward and ducked down so that the claw barely missed her.

  Slashing out with her sword, several sword slashes appeared in the space in front of the monster and crashed against their hard armour but no substantial injuries were left behind.

  Frowning slightly, Shiro quickly fine tuned her intent while jumping up on the monsters back.

  Kicking off his shoulders, she flipped through the air.

  Just as she did this, she sensed several long ranged attacks coming towards her.

  Using her power of flight, she managed to dodge but similar to what happened with her sword slashes, she felt danger around her and twirled her spear.

  *CLANG!!!

  Blocking a majority of them, Shiro frowned when she felt a few attacks cut across her thighs and forearm.

  Landing on the ground, Shiro slammed her hands down and rock spikes started to stab out of the ground.

  While this was happening, Shiro continued to fine tune her intent.

  After this short exchange, she finally had a semi decent understanding of the room that she was in.

  Within this giant room were tens of large pillars that stopped after a certain height and she still couldn’t sense the roof of this place.

  As for the monster, he was similar to a gorgon with his lower body being that of a snake but his upper body was definitely not a gorgon. He had two large mantis like claws and several mouths around his body. In the mouths were rows upon rows of teeth.

  His head was completely featureless like a mannequin. No hair, no ears, no eyes, no nose or mouth.

  In addition to this, there was a translucent armour of sorts covering his entire body making it hard for Shiro to damage him.

  Slithering around the pillars, the monster twisted his body and slashed towards her with his claw.

  Dashing back, Shiro wrapped her chain around one of the pillars and swung herself around to dodge the claw.

  Just as she did this, one of the mouths on his body twitched slightly and a new arm exploded out.

  Lashing towards her like a whip, the arm seemed like it had no limit to its reach.

  Raising her sword, Shiro parried it but the force sent her tumbling back a little.

  Clicking her tongue, Shiro activated her Restriction of Ranged Weapons.

  That way, even if he was to lash out again, his new grown hands wouldn’t be able to harm her.

  Since she had used one charge of her restrictions earlier, this meant that she now only had two more charges.

  Trying to lash out towards her once more, the hand was deflected by a barrier which caused the monster to tilt his head before the arm was sucked back into his mouth.

  Leaning back slightly, he slithered forwards at shocking speeds.

  Appearing in front of Shiro, he pulled his claws back and slashed towards her without hesitation.

  Releasing a blast of wind between them, Shiro forcefully made some distance while trying to fine tune her intent some more.

  She needed to dial it down so that she could barely sense the surroundings while the monster couldn’t sense her. It needed to be her second set of eyes.

  As she was exchanging moves with the monster, more and more injuries were appearing but her senses were being fine tuned with every passing second. At the start, the monster was able to pinpoint her exactly but now he was becoming a little slower. Naturally, it was the same for her but she just needed more time to fine tune her senses.

  If she had to describe it, it was like adjusting her signal to mask it while she’s hacking something so that she could bypass the security.

  Only this time the security was much harder and was a giant serpent boss that could cut her in half if he landed a good attack.

  However, her main goal wasn’t to fight head to head with the monster so she didn’t have to worry about that. All she needed to do was to delay it as much as she could so that she could finish fine tuning her intent.

  Buying time with tactics such as using rocks to block his path or using the pillars as a way to escape, Shiro did try to fly as high as she could but after a certain point past the top of the pillars, she realised that she couldn’t fly any higher.

  But even at this height, she was still within range of the monster so she had to descend back down and focus on using the monster’s body against him. With his large body, she can try to thread between the pillars in an attempt to slow him down which is much better than staying in the sky.

  Time passed as minutes turned to hours.

  Sweat constantly rolled down Shiro’s face as she was burning through the large pile of medicine that Beril had given her. If not for the medicine, she would have been done for long ago with the wounds that she had sustained.

  After several hours of fine tuning, Shiro hit a bottleneck as any further would render her senses useless as well.

  However, in her current state, she was able to keep the monster at bay while making it hard for him to sense her.

  Similar to the training with Caedus, she arrived at the boundary once more but was just short of breaking past this veil.

  She kept trying to budge past this veil but it refused to move, denying her from entry.

  Shiro did try to fine tune her senses further but every time it did it would essentially pause the combat as neither one could sense the other.

  Biting her lip, Shiro wondered what she could do.

  Furrowing her brows, she decided to experiment a little by spreading her energy out like a web before pushing past the bottleneck but this onlyserved to give the monster an idea of her location while she didn’t know where she was. Giving up on that idea, Shiro could only dodge his attacks in frustration.

  ’What am I missing?’ Shiro thought to herself as there was one thing that she needed to grasp.

  One key thing that will allow her to bypass this veil.

  As she was thinking of this point, the time slowly extended to a day as the people outside were curious about what was happening inside the tower since there were still signs of Shiro attempting the trial.

  As for Tenma, he was currently fighting against the monster that could make his attacks phase through his body.

  Unlike Shiro, he wasn’t able to finish all of the monsters quickly so he had spent quite a bit of time defeating each of them.

  However, his fighting style was strange. Neither Beril or Tricia knew what was going on but he was suspicious to both of the sisters.

  ###

  [When you see him raise his arm, counterattack. Even if you are harmed, you forget I can heal you.] The voice lectured as there was clear displeasure.

  ’If you heal me, they would know that you’re helping out.’


  [What of it? It’s not like they can do anything with you in this barrier.]

  ’Just be patient.’ Tenma said as the voice stayed silent and watched this clown act on his own.

  If not for the fact that he was so easily controlled, he wouldn’t have even bothered with this clown.