White flashed and was immediately replaced with overwhelming darkness. Kumo felt like she couldn’t breathe and started trying to move her arms around to no success. She clearly was confined in some sort of metal box and that made her blood boil.

  She focused on her Thunder Surge skill and condensed the mana as much as she could before unleashing the massive blast of wind in all directions. As she planned, the walls blasted apart and were sent flying through a moderately bigger cell.

  Her walls were made of metal bars and there were strange monsters patrolling around the cell. Immediately, she sent out cloud blades to try and cut through the bars which raised an alarm, and the monsters stood guard where she tried to escape. They were clearly the guards in this prison.

  Cloud blade after cloud blade hit the bars and had the monsters running around to try and stop her. She found it kind of fun, but it was time to get serious. Training with Shell on precision was about to pay off.

  These bars were too strong for a generic cloud blade to cut through. It would probably take twenty or so to get through, but if she condensed her mana into a smaller blade to maximize the power and sharpness then she could get out of the cell much quicker. Four guards were crowded around her last failed attempt, and she decided they were her targets. Several smaller cloud blades shot out rapidly and cut cleanly through the bars into the bodies of the guards. One died instantly, another lost an arm, the third had a massive gash in its side that was bleeding uncontrollably, and the last one was lucky to be missed completely. As for the bars, Kumo had aimed to cut out a square big enough for her to fit through.

  A few more cloud blades ended the remaining guards, and she stepped through her hole to escape the cell. Once she was out of the barred walls, she realized there was no exit in this bigger room either. It was yet another cell. She could tell this trial was going to take a while, but she wouldn’t quit until she saw the sky.

  Investigating the walls in her much bigger room, she found they were way thicker than the previous two. Without thinking about it too much, Kumo started to release condensed cloud blades to cut an “X” in the wall. She had to take a break around an hour in to recharge her mana before starting again.

  Another few hours passed before she determined the cuts were deep enough. It was time for her to deliver the final blow and escape this cell. She charged up a condensed thunder surge and released it right in the middle of the “X”. With a ridiculous amount of force against the wall, she was blown back, and the hole was blown open. A smile stretched across her face, and she squeezed through.

  Her previous metal box was in the middle of a much bigger space that had mirrored walls. To her surprise, it was also filled with hundreds of monsters. She jumped and used a breeze to lift push herself up onto the roof of her previous cell. Up here it would be much harder for the monsters to get to her, but it was a perfect position for her to start thinning them out.

  Activating her Stormcloud skill, a dark cloud appeared in the room overhead to start delivering lightning strikes on the crowd of monsters that had just noticed her and were charging. Heavy rain fell to slow down the mass improving her defensive position. While the monsters worked their way towards her and up the box, she cut them down with tempest powered cloud blades.

  To maximize efficiency with levelling her skills, she started to conjure a fog on one side of the room to confuse her enemies, deal passive ongoing damage to the mass, and allowed her to focus on the other sides. When the monsters finally got up on the roof she would wait for several to climb up before unleashing Thunder Surge to blast them off again and do damage. These beasts weren’t very coordinated, and she found that summoning a mildly strong breeze would cause them to tumble over. She was glad that her trial had some monster fighting in it. Hopefully, the enemies going forward will provide a better challenge.

  Forty minutes later her guards were all dead. The System started to wipe their bodies clean. Some had left remnant magical material, but nothing exciting. Kumo got to work on a new hole in the mirrored wall which she found frustrating because it kept repairing itself. She could do more damage than it could repair in the same time, however, that meant she had to work fast.

  Pouring all her mana into condensed cloud blades, and then one condensed thunder surge, she barely made a hole big to jump through. She fell to the floor in her new prison exhausted and the hole she made closed immediately.

  After catching her breath, Kumo stood and looked around. Her new cell was dark and much smaller than the last room. She could barely see, and it wasn’t clear where the small amount of light was actually coming from. Placing her hand against the wall, she determined it was some type of stone that would take a lot of effort to get through even with her enhanced attacks.

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  With her discovery in mind, the Cloud Tempest sat down to meditate and refill her mana. At this point in her class, she could top off her mana from empty to full in roughly an hour and a half. Due to her race, her skills were more mana efficient, so she got a lot of use out of a full mana pool. Sadly, the System clearly didn’t want her to get a full mana pool.

  Thirty minutes after sitting down, Kumo felt something wet coming from below her. When she looked down, it looked like dirty water was starting to fill the chamber through a drain in the floor. Now, she never had a fear of drowning when she was growing up, but after the blood mucus soup situation in the worm and being stranded in the ocean, this rising water had her panicking.

  Luckily, the water was filling slowly. Unluckily, as soon as she had that thought, the water started rising quicker. Her mind was on fire trying to figure out what to do. Images started to take over of the inside of that worm and her breathing became rapid. She realized that this panic would not help and did everything she could to get back to her meditative state. It wasn’t working and, in her panic, she started throwing all she could at the wall in front of her.

  Water was up to her knees and there was barely a scratch on the wall. She went to move and tried to calm down but slipped and crashed down into the water. It was freezing cold and Kumo immediately sat up and started taking deep breaths to gasp for air. Through this deep breathing, she found a little bit of calm to latch onto. Once her thoughts slowed, a plan formed.

  Quickly she tried something that hadn’t occurred to her before. She gathered mana for her breeze skill but tried to condense it. The skill had upgraded to allow her to make it stronger the more mana she pushed into it, and she had learned to condense her other skills for precision. She just hadn’t ever tried it with her breeze before. Minutes later the skill was ready, and she blasted the drain with a super condensed breeze. Air shot down the drain and pushed the water back to stop the rising water. This plan didn’t get her out of her predicament, but it gave her more time to think.

  Kumo quickly learned that she couldn’t keep this breeze up for long with her mana constantly ticking down. Without any other choice, she started to use cloud blades on the wall again while maintaining the breeze hoping the wall wasn’t as thick as she thought.

  Hope dwindled with her mana pool as she constantly struck at the wall slowly forming the “X” she needed. The stone was just so dense that even the sharpest cloud blade couldn’t do much damage. Every now and then she would try a thunder surge to see if a hole would open. Even a small hole she couldn’t fit through would help with the water. Instead, the stone held firm, and she had to keep cutting until her mana ran out.

  Water rose past her waist as her mana pool refilled during her break. Keeping herself calm was a battle, and the more exhausted she got, the harder it was. When the water was right below her chest, she reactivated her breeze which created a mini whirlpool in the water as the air went down into the drain. Unfortunately, the air acted like a pocket in the drain to keep the water from coming up, so it also prevented the water from draining.

  Her mana pool was about sixty percent full when she had to start again and it already was down to about thirty percent with all the condensed cloud blades, the constant breeze, and the occasional thunder surge. When she got to this point a thought occurred to her. Shell had trained her on how to condense the mana better to be more precise with her skills. One of the ways Kumo had learned to utilize this technique was to create a piercing cloud blade instead of a slashing one. When she tried this in the middle of her “X” it had made a noticeable dent, but didn’t push through, but what if she was able to twist the piercing cloud blade when it made contact to act like a drill of sorts to push through. This is how she spent the last twenty percent or so of her mana.

  On the last few cloud blades, she finally got the technique down. It had demanded much more concentration than the regular piercing cloud blades, but the impact was much more noticeable than just trying to poke a hole in the wall. Sadly, she would have to wait for her mana to recharge once again.

  Water was to her chin, and she was running out of room in the cell when she started again. Her mana was showing around forty-five percent full; however, she didn’t have a choice. The breeze seemed to cost even more mana now that it had to push through all the water and maintain a strong enough pressure to keep the water from rising. Underwater she could see her cloud blades form and adjust the drilling technique thanks to the visual. With this improved technique, Kumo finally pushed through to form a hole out of the cell.

  Water started to flow through the hole, but the drain wouldn’t be enough, so she started to drill more along her “X”. Her mana lasted for three more holes before it was empty. Water had been slowly lowering down to the level of the holes which was about her chest height. It would rise again now that she wasn’t clogging the pipe, but hopefully the holes would keep it at bay. With this reprieve, she started to work on a much bigger hole to finally get out of the cell.

  Two hours later, water came pouring through a big hole in a stone wall followed by a soaked Kumo. She fell in the waterfall for thirty seconds before realizing that she was falling to her death in a massive room. Her mana pool was tapped out, but it had refilled a tiny amount, and she used it to conjure a strong breeze up right before hitting the ground to keep herself from dying.

  As she lay there to refill her completely exhausted mana and stamina, she looked around to get her bearings. It was a massive cell that was designed to look like a mini forest next to a mountain range. The sky was stone, and the lights barely lit the room up. Before laying back her eyes caught something that filled her with annoyance. There was beast at the edge of the trees staring right at her exhausted form.