The area-wide wind magic formed into a massive, concentrated sphere and shot straight toward the swarm of people. The sphere passed right through the crowd without harming them, traveling until it reached the absolute center of the battlefield. Then, it burst.

*BOOOOOOOOOM!*

The immense air pressure created by the blast caught everyone in its radius. Even the people standing far away were violently launched through the air and slammed into the cavern walls.

[Phantom Step!]

Alen, who was standing too close to the expanding sphere, instantly stepped away, his figure blurring as he reappeared at a safe distance.

The blast literally killed ten nearby people in a single shot. It wasn’t just an attack; it was an absolute massacre. The explosion instantly killed the men at the epicenter without even giving them time to scream. The people caught on the edges of the blast were heavily injured, their bodies covered in deep cuts from the razor-sharp wind slashes.

As the violent wind slowly subsided, the surviving people glared at Serene. They locked onto her with intense, bloodshot eyes, making her their primary target.

Zane immediately stepped in front of her, blocking the crowd’s view. His eyes were ice-cold.

He channeled a massive surge of dark mana into his sword and thrust the blade directly into the ground.

[Paradox Spiral Art: Willow of Darkness!]

Suddenly, pitch-black tendrils erupted from the ground, swallowing the entire battlefield. As a dark shadow fell over the panicked crowd, the tendrils shot forward like spears, violently thrusting into their bodies.

As their lives slipped away, they fell to the ground, lifeless.

[Ding!]

[You have successfully completed Wave 2 of the Trial...]

[Short break before the beginning of the Final Wave...]

As the dark tendrils started to disintegrate into mist, Zane fell to his knees, gasping for air. He had lost a massive amount of mana unleashing that final attack. Earlier, when he was injured protecting Serene, he had lost half of his mana reserves just letting her healing magic take effect on his body.

Healing magic did not actually heal the body directly; rather, it rapidly accelerated the body’s natural ability to do the task itself.

Because healing magic was an external factor, a foreign body generally showed resistance to it—similar to how a person couldn’t receive a blood transfusion without a proper match. To bypass this, healing magic temporarily forced the patient’s own ambient mana to actively respond to the wound. The patient’s internal mana would then hyper-focus on closing the injury, working at an incredibly accelerated speed to make the flesh as good as new.

This process required a massive amount of internal mana. If a person didn’t have enough mana in their body, the process remained slow, and it took significant time for them to heal. This was exactly why Non-Awakener citizens couldn’t simply go to healers to fix fatal wounds; lacking ambient mana, their healing process remained dangerously slow.

Serene quickly walked over to help Zane steady himself.

"Dummy... Why did you even need to use a massive area-of-effect attack? You could have killed them with your basic shadows without wasting so much mana..." Serene scolded him.

Zane steadied himself, leaning heavily on Serene’s shoulder for support. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

In reality, he knew he could have easily killed the remaining enemies without wasting so much energy. But after seeing Serene’s massive wind attack, his pride had flared up. He wanted to show her that he was just as strong. He just wanted to impress her; there was no other reason. Feeling embarrassed, Zane looked away, refusing to meet her eyes.

Serene looked out at the people lying dead on the cavern floor. A massive, suffocating burden of emotion settled heavily on her chest.

Even if she wanted to deny it and find excuses, she couldn’t help but blame herself for the massacre. She had just murdered these people. She didn’t know if the people lying there had a wife, a husband, a daughter, a son, or a family waiting for them back home.

She had just wiped out their families’ hopes that they would return home safe and sound.

Zane gently patted her head and let her rest her face against his shoulder.

’I can’t let her drown in a sea of depression, I have to comfort her...’

Alen, who had been standing a few meters away, calmly sheathed his sword and walked over to them. They were the only three people who had survived the ordeal.

Hearing his footsteps, both Serene and Zane looked up at him. Their worldview of him had shifted drastically. Before this, they thought he was just a soft, decent guy hiding behind a stoic, scumbag persona. Now, they knew better. They felt a strong resistance toward him, as if he were a monster who didn’t belong with them.

"Yo! Are you alright? Did you manage to hit the required kill count?" Alen asked casually.

They both glared at him, unsettled by his perfectly calm gaze. For the first time since she had met him, Serene looked at Alen with an expression of pure disgust.

"How can you say that so casually?" she demanded, her voice shaking.

"Don’t you feel any guilt for killing these people?"

Alen looked down at her, his calm gaze completely unwavering.

"Nope. Not in the slightest."

Both of them stared at him, absolutely speechless. This only further cemented their belief that the person standing in front of them couldn’t possibly be a normal human.

"Why would I feel guilty about killing people..." Alen continued, a faint smirk playing on his lips,

"...when I didn’t actually kill a single human here?"

Zane and Serene froze, entirely bewildered by his words.

"What do you mean you didn’t kill anyone? Are you blind? The people behind you are dead! Their dead bodies are still lying right there!"

Serene yelled, glaring at him with intense, teary eyes.

"Exactly..."

"If they were actual humans, their bodies would have vanished within a minute of dying in a dungeon instance. It’s the rule of the Ascension realm that the dead body of the participants vanished after they died. But look at this. The bodies are completely intact. It’s almost as if they are nothing but illusions."

"What?...I-Is that really true?!"

She looked back at the dead people lying on the ground. There was no visible hint of an illusion; the blood looked completely real. But she couldn’t deny the possibility. She had passed her first trial by suffering through a gauntlet of illusions, surviving heavy mental attacks that still made it difficult for her to differentiate between what was fake and what was real.

Even now, she honestly didn’t know how to tell the difference.

A slow smile tugged at Alen’s lips as he looked at both of them with an innocent expression.

"If you don’t trust me, should I give you proof?"

Serene and Zane looked at each other, then nodded hesitantly.

"Okay... But I might need Zane’s help with this, if you’ll agree to it..."

Serene nodded without hesitation. She slipped her shoulder away from Zane and stepped back. Left standing alone, Zane frowned, glaring at Alen with a highly suspicious look.

"What do you want me to do?"

"Nothing. Just stand there."

Alen instantly channeled a burst of dense mana into his right hand.

[Nexus Elemental Art: Sound Type - Waking-up Slap!]

Alen swung his arm and slapped Zane across the cheek with every ounce of physical power he had.

*SMACK!*

Zane, who had just been standing there waiting for instructions, took the devastating slap head-on. The sheer force launched him backward, sending him tumbling several meters across the stone floor. A deafening, high-frequency sound wave rang violently through his head.

"You f*cking bastard! Do you want to die?!"

He scrambled to his feet, absolutely furious and ready to launch a barrage of dark magic at the silver-haired boy. But as he looked up, he suddenly froze in his tracks.

He stared out at the battlefield.

Lying on the ground were not human corpses. There were absolutely no dead humans anywhere. The cavern was simply littered with the slaughtered bodies of the monsters from the first wave.

He finally realized that the "humans" he had killed had actually just been illusions. The system quest wasn’t to kill people; it was a test to see if they could kill the illusion without losing their minds. The Ascension Realm had simply played a sadistic trick on them by giving them such a bizarre, horrifying quest.

"Sigh..."

Zane let out a massive sigh of relief. The heavy guilt that had been buried in his chest instantly vanished. He looked over at Serene and nodded firmly.

Waiting anxiously for his answer, Serene finally collapsed to her knees, breathing a massive sigh of relief.

She was overjoyed that she hadn’t actually murdered any humans. The suffocating burden on her chest finally lifted. She looked up and stared at Alen with a deeply thankful expression.

Alen noticed her looking at him. His innocent smile returned, and he casually raised his right hand again.

"Do you want to get snapped out of the illusion too? Should I help you next?"