There are no fakes there. The comrades you fought with and the scars you carved on each other. An illusion that is all real.

Stella’s words meant that the damage Cadel inflicted on his subordinates would be reflected in their bodies. If he cut off an arm, his subordinate would suffer as much as the pain of a severed arm. If he broke a leg, his subordinate would suffer as much as the pain of a broken leg. It would become a bomb of damage that would fly back to the main body.

‘So if we thought our comrades were fakes and tried to kill them.....’

A chill ran down the back of his neck. If he had done enough damage to endanger Lumen and Lydon’s lives, now that they were getting it back, they would have died without so much as a protest.

The reverse was also true.

“What a crazy trial.....”

The pain he and Van were experiencing now was all a reflection of the battle Lumen and Lydon had fought to overpower them.

‘It looks like they crushed Van more violently than they did to me.’

His suffering was not insignificant, of course, but it was nothing compared to Van’s. How had they overpowered him? Blood continued to leak from Van’s gaping wound.

As Cadel watched pitifully, he suddenly remembered how he and Van had defeated Lumen and Lydon.

They were tricky opponents. One was fast enough to make you want to break his legs, and one was flying all over the place, casting AoE magic. They were impossible to subdue without a bit of earnestness.

‘If I had known this would happen, I would have adjusted the power.’

Cadel’s trembling gaze traveled beyond the chains. He fervently hoped they had fought more moderately than he remembered, but the sight of the two men in front of him was enough to shatter that hope. Both seemed to be in the same level of pain as Van.

Compared to them, Cadel was relatively unharmed, a result of Lumen and Lydon’s efforts to subdue him with minimal damage.

Cadel breathed slowly, feeling the fading pain and chill. He pawed at the ground, barely able to center himself, and pulled a potion from his bag. A potion to neutralize pain and aid in the healing of wounds.

‘I’ll need to heal myself with potions first, what the next trial will be is unknown, and I need to reduce my wounds as much as possible before the bigger fight begins. I need to get this to Lumen, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to throw the potion properly because of the chains.... but I have to try.’

Since his subordinates couldn’t come to their senses, he had to prepare himself. With that thought, Cadel uncapped the potion.

Crack. Crack.

The glass potion vial shattered with a loud crack with no time to stop it. Cadel stared at the potion soaking the ground in disbelief.

“Let the challenger face the trial honestly.”

His gaze reflexively snapped back to Hesonia, who was staring at Cadel. Somehow, Hesonia had shattered the glass.

Cadel tossed the remaining shards of glass in his hand roughly, then asked, his voice full of wariness.

“Do you want me to win the trial, or do you enjoy watching the challenger suffer? I’m not sure what you want me to do, since you don’t even tell me what the trial is about.”

Hesonia’s eyes narrowed. There was an undercurrent of probing between their gazes, and Stella’s expression was one of amusement, mingled with some concern, as she watched their battle of nerve.

Cadel realized that this attitude could lead to dangerous situations. But he hadn’t let that stop him.

‘I need to figure out what Hesonia and Stella want to see in the final trial. If I don’t know that, I will only end up fumbling recklessly like the first and second trials.’

He had to figure something out. The first was a trial of ‘cooperation’. The second was a trial of ‘trust’. Both trials were things he couldn’t do alone.

In other words, all trials presupposed that there was a ‘comrade’ next to the fairy whose abilities were sealed.

The problem was that the trial was the stagnation of the ultimate value that the fairy and his comrades wanted to prove.

‘The final trial won’t be solved by knowing the rules or just plain luck. We have to show them something they want.’

It would be nice if they could somehow complete it like the previous two trials, but he didn’t think it would end so easily.

And so Cadel taunted Hesonia, and Hesonia, slowly, shifted his gaze, and what he saw was Lydon. A fairy who was enduring the pain of death.

“I want a hero to rise above my failures. I want a bond that is unbreakable, that is perfect, that is true to my ideals. I want a beacon to light a new world.”

Hesonia raised his hand to the scabbard at his waist. With a hiss, the blade of the longsword slipped out and pointed to the center of the two pans, connected like scales.

“So challengers, collaborate, trust, and sacrifice.”

「The ‘Trial of Sacrifice’ begins.」

The pans beneath the mercenary corps began to vibrate. The pan, which rattled up and down as if weighed down, swayed unsteadily.

Cadel felt the pan rising and thought back to the theme of the last ordeal.

Sacrifice.

He didn’t know exactly what behavior Hesonia was hoping for, but the words didn’t sound hopeful at all. Cadel’s expression hardened with a surging sense of foreboding.

* * *

The scales were perfectly weighted to one side. The pan with Cadel and Van was raised close to the ceiling, and the pan with Lumen and Lydon was lowered close to the ground.

Cadel looked down, horrified at the height, three times higher than he’d been at first. The pan on Lumen and Lydon’s side was close enough to the ground that they could land safely with little effort.

‘I don’t think it’s just the weight that makes the difference.’

What the hell made the scale tilt like this? His question was answered by Stella, who ascended along the rising floor.

“This scale is weighing the pain you’re feeling. Would it make more sense to say it’s the sum total of the wounds you’ve sustained over the course of your trial?”

“Total of wounds....?”

“The goal is to balance the two pans so that they are perfectly level.”

Cadel’s face paled as he considered Stella’s words.

‘She said it was a scale to weigh pain, and right now the scale is so badly tilted. She’s telling me to level it out, that means.....’

The one on top should feel enough pain to make the scale level.

“That’s ridiculous.”

Cadel muttered under his breath, and then glanced back at Stella. Her eyes were still unfocused, but he could tell she was looking at him.

“Balancing the pain on a bare pan? Are you saying I should kill myself?”

“Wow, you’re making a scary face, Cadel. Stella is upset. There’s no way I’d do such a cruel thing!”

“Then what the hell.....”

“Don’t worry too much, Stella is here to help make the balance easier.”

A soft, intangible energy surged around Stella. Her long hair fluttered in the breeze, and a strange glow emanated from the slits in her white eyes.

‘What is she trying to do?’

Things were going in a much worse direction than Cadel had expected. If only he had realized the secret of the first trial sooner. If only he had seen clearly the essence of the second trial. If only he could have corrected this lopsided imbalance.

His mouth went dry at the belated regret and the identity of the terrible trial.

Van had stopped coughing up blood, but he couldn’t quite hold himself together, as if most of his energy was gone. No wonder. If Lumen and Lydon had taken Van by force, they would have pushed him to the point where he could barely stand upright. They had done it to themselves.

‘I don’t know if they’re both in the same condition, but I’m not. Lumen and Lydon subdued me relatively mildly. I suffered far less than the others.’

Cadel was grateful, but if he had known it would turn out like this, he would have begged to differ.

And so, while Cadel groped for the elusive breakthrough of the trial, the wind that enveloped Stella subsided. An intangible aura vanished in an instant.

In that place, monsters rained down like hail on Cadel and Van.

They were the Jelly Bombs.