"That’s me," Ethan said calmly as the chief proctor beckoned him forward.
His previous biodata evaluation had made this moment entirely inevitable. Every single pair of eyes on the mountain platform was locked onto him, desperate to see what kind of entity a quintuple S-Rank summoner would call forth from the void.
Ethan strode through the parting crowd, paying no mind to the countless gazes tracking his every footstep. Some eyes burned with bitter jealousy, others calculated how an anomaly like him would permanently alter the geopolitical balance of the four kingdoms, and a rare few simply watched with quiet, profound dread. The Bastion of Humanity had not witnessed an applicant of this caliber in decades.
As Ethan came to a halt before the spirit-iron gong designated for Tier 5 candidates, the morning sunlight above him was suddenly eclipsed by an immense shadow.
The sky above the mountain platform darkened in a heartbeat.
A colossal figure descended from the clouds, hitting the reinforced stone platform with a bone-jarring impact that sent visible shockwaves rippling across the bedrock. Heavy bronze and gold plate armor encased the titan’s colossal muscular frame, gleaming with an ancient, solemn luster beneath the pale daylight. Both of his massive, calloused hands gripped the thick haft of a colossal bronze warhammer: Gilgamesh.
The entire arena went dead silent.
The restless chatter died in the throats of thousands of spectators as surrounding candidates and elite guards instinctively took several steps backward. There was no theatrical release of oppressive mana, no deliberate bloodlust, and no overt roar of intimidation. Gilgamesh’s towering scale, ancient physique, and sovereign presence alone commanded the entire atmosphere of the mountain.
"What in the gods’ names is that?"
"Is that a humanoid variant? A giant bloodline?"
"That massive thing is a contracted summon?!"
Ethan ignored the rising flood of nervous murmurs, his dark eyes fixed entirely on the resonant spirit-iron gong suspended twenty meters ahead.
Gilgamesh required no verbal commands or mental nudges. He understood precisely what his master demanded.
Planting his massive armored boots into the stone, Gilgamesh lowered his center of gravity to lock himself into absolute immobility. The passive condition of *Super Human Strength* immediately took hold. His thick muscles swelled beneath the bronze plate, and as the colossal warhammer slowly rose toward the zenith, the ambient air warped violently under the extreme concentration of physical force. Ethan’s heavy traveling coat snapped violently in the localized gale, forcing him to take a half-step back to stabilize his balance against the vacuum created by the lift.
The bronze warhammer locked at its apex for a single, breathless fraction of a second.
Then—it dropped.
*GONGGGGGGGGG!*
A deafening shockwave detonated across the summit. The spirit-iron gong shivered violently as the internal acoustic chime began to roll through the metal core.
One resonance. Two. Three. Four.
The vibrations did not taper off—they accelerated with terrifying momentum.
Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve!
The entire testing platform groaned and trembled under the sustained sonic output. Spectators clamped their hands over their ears in agony as the chime rolled like continuous thunder through the valleys of Ascension City below.
Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen.
Only then did the ancient alloy finally fall still, its surface smoking from the sheer kinetic transfer.
An unnatural, suffocating silence swallowed the arena.
Ethan evaluated the result with a faint, measured smile. Fifteen resonances was an extraordinary score, but with *Super Human Strength* active while stationary, Gilgamesh had merely delivered a straightforward baseline swing without engaging a single destructive skill. There was still plenty of room to push the ceiling higher when real battle demanded it.
The rest of the arena, however, completely lost its collective mind.
"Fifteen resonances?!"
"He didn’t even use a spell or a martial art!"
"A Tier 5 summon just hit with more kinetic force than an authentic Demi-god!"
Up on the raised observation pavilion, Bartholomew stared down at the bronze titan for several long, unblinking seconds before letting out a slow, controlled breath. One resonance was the passing baseline for an ordinary Tier 5. Three was remarkable. Four was the historical threshold for individuals possessing genuine Demi-god potential. Fifteen shattered the operational limits the testing apparatus had originally been engineered to record.
"He’s going to be a massive problem," Bartholomew remarked coldly from the balcony, a faint, predatory glint surfacing in her silver eyes.
Beside her, Glacial jaw tightened into stone. "He’s going to be a foundational pillar of the human race."
Neither elder corrected the other. Ethan was no longer merely a promising applicant from bark; he was a supreme strategic asset the four factions would fiercely contest behind closed doors.
Ethan recalled Gilgamesh into his spiritual space and strolled calmly back to the ranks of qualified applicants, stopping beside Meng, who was standing frozen with his mouth agape.
"That was your summon?" Meng asked, blinking rapidly.
"Yeah," Ethan replied smoothly.
"You have four more like that?"
"Not quite."
Meng stared in disbelief. "You have four that are *stronger*?"
Ethan let out a quiet, dry chuckle. "I didn’t say that."
"That makes it ten times worse!" Meng groaned, running a hand through his messy hair.
Before Meng could interrogate him further, the chief proctor’s voice rang across the stage.
"Next candidate: Meng!"
The youth picked up his floating wooden trunk, his relaxed demeanor instantly vanishing into a sharp, hyper-focused posture as he stepped up to the testing line.
The crowd began murmuring once more.
"That’s Meng!"
"The other candidate who holds a direct Dawn Faction token!"
Meng took a slow, deep breath. Then another. And a third.
His chest expanded in a bizarre, rhythmic cadence that seemed to pull at the surroundings. At first, nothing visibly occurred, but then the ambient mountain breeze began to curl into tight spirals around his ankles.
Ancient pines along the cliffside bent violently as the atmospheric pressure plummeted. Meng continued drawing the air inward with every steady inhale, compressing the surrounding winds into a visible, howling vortex that darkened the sky directly above the platform.
Ethan watched with sharp analytical interest. Meng was not simply casting basic wind magic; his cyclical breathing technique was fundamentally seizing control of the local atmospheric domain, bending the very concept of air to his absolute will.
Meng’s eyes snapped open, his playful aura replaced by pure lethal precision. He drew back his right arm, compressing the howling gale into a dense, crackling sphere of atmospheric pressure around his knuckles.
*BOOM!*
The compressed air detonated forward like an invisible siege cannon, cracking the sound barrier with an ear-splitting pop.
*GONG!*
The spirit-iron shrieked beneath the localized typhoon.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.
The chime continued rolling across the stone until it finally settled firmly at twelve.
The arena erupted in awe once more. "Twelve resonances! Another absolute monster from the Dawn Faction!"
Meng let out a heavy exhale, wiping a thin bead of sweat from his brow before turning toward Ethan with a broad, competitive grin. "See that?!"
Ethan laughed softly. "You really are competitive, aren’t you?"
"Always," Meng grinned, jogging back to Ethan’s side with his hovering trunk trailing closely behind.
Ethan glanced back toward the high pavilion and met Glacial’s icy gaze. A faint, knowing smirk touched her lips—the expression of a faction leader who had just secured the two greatest mortal prospects of a generation right under the noses of her rivals.
The damage testing dragged on for several more hours as the remaining candidates stepped forward to strike the gongs. Several achieved respectable scores of three or four resonances, but after the displays put on by Gilgamesh and Meng, the crowd’s excitement had cooled significantly. The two Dawn candidates had permanently warped the baseline for what qualified as exceptional on the mountain.
Eventually, the head proctor barthalemew raised his hand to signal the end of the second phase.
"The evaluation for this round is concluded," his voice projected over the silent platform. "Those who generated six resonances or higher will proceed immediately to the third trial."
Behind the testing grounds, a colossal pair of obsidian gates slowly ground open, revealing a vast, dark arena carved directly into the mountain’s bedrock. The black stone was heavily etched with glowing, ancient suppression runes that leaked an ominous, suffocating chill.
Meng frowned, his lighthearted tone dropping as he stared into the dark opening. " under the mountain? "
Ethan looked ahead, his instincts sharpening. He has heard of this part too, it was by far the hardest of the three evaluations, in fact it was the only one where people could realistically die.
Bartholomew’s deep voice resounded from the high pavilion, booming across the clearing with solemn authority:
"The final evaluation is not about raw destructive power, nor does it care about your summon ranks or bloodline prestige."
The elder paused, his gaze sweeping over the surviving candidates with cold severity.
"The Bastion has no use for reckless combatants who perish in their very first mission. We need warriors who can endure absolute despair."
He gestured toward the dark abyss yawning beyond the obsidian gates.
"The third evaluation... is a pure survival trial."
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