"That is why you should not use a rock dome, you will never see your attacker coming." Blake shook his head as he appeared beside Damon.
It turned out to be team 4 and they comprised of 2 commoners and 4 nobles.
When the noble team leader had been sent the map of the location, one of the commoners had protested against the idea, but he was quickly eliminated by the team leader.
Unluckily for them, the stupid action of the team leader made Blake's work easier as he eliminated all of them effortlessly.
Seeing the rock dome that was still intact but currently empty, Damon couldn't help but agree to Blake's words.
"Time to return to the shelter." Without diverting again, the duo went straight to the water barrier.
"We know you eliminated 2 other teams, so what took so long. Did you discover something interesting?" Beyoni asked.
"No, we went after the 3rd team, before returning." Damon answered as he took sat down.
"What?" Beyoni activated the holographic projection of the leaderboard and found out that another team had been eliminated.
'MONSTERS!!' That was the only word that could for in his mind.
Seeing Beyoni's shocked expression, Damon spoke as he pointed at Blake. "Don't look at me that way, I just cast night mist and he did the rest."
"I need to get some rest. Tomorrow we will talk about what went on tonight." Blake didn't say it just to avoid the conversation, because he was seriously tired.
Throughout the fight against both teams, Blake had been spamming void shift without using mental boost, and that had completely drained him of mana.
Unknown to Blake, almost all the teams still in the test had arrived at the ant hive, just some minutes after they had returned to the barrier.
…
Because of how much stress Blake had gone through during their scouting missions, Blake was given more time to rest.
When they were back, Damon had taken over the watch since he hadn't done much. He handed over to Sach who stayed till 3 hours before daybreak.
When Blake was woken up for his turn to watch over the barrier, Sach looked at his movements and noticed he was bubbling with energy.
'How did someone who fought against 2 teams and had less than 5 hours of sleep, be bubbling as he had slept for 2 days?' It was quite surprising, but he didn't think much about it and went back to sleep.
Once Blake made sure that everyone was back to sleep, he sat in a cross-legged position and began absorbing energy from a beast core, while the system stood watch.
2 hours later, Blake had finally filled the 28th star and the elite rank beast core in his hands had joined the pile of dust on the floor.
He was about to grab another elite rank beast core, but that was when the system reported the strange movements at the entrance of the ant hive.
"This needs to be checked out." Blake left the water barrier and moved to the hive entrance which was just a few seconds away.
"It's either they are going to battle a group of beasts or insects or they are attacking humans." Blake thought. "Let's check it out then."
Blake released the holographic projection of the leaderboard and noticed the points of team 10 increasing rapidly.
"Are they insane? The sun isn't even up, and they are already hunting." Blake couldn't imagine how stupid people could be. They had alerted the entire hive of their presence.
[Even after eliminating the 3 teams yesterday, their points are still below 2 of the 3. So, it is natural for them to be desperate.] The system explained.
"We have to deal with them before things get out of hand.' Blake said as he returned to the water barrier and informed the group.
"Why do I have a feeling that there are other teams in the area apart from team 10?" Sach said.
He was dumb and he knew the hirer wasn't either. He hadn't completed the mission or showed signs of completing it, so it was natural for him to have a backup plan.
Since basically, all the team leaders were nobles, Sach had already guessed that they were gathering them here to cause a ruckus. So that in the heat of the battle when Blake was facing multiple teams and ants and was about to be eliminated. He would tamper with the safety mechanism, ending up killing him by 'accident'.
"That is also my suspicion." Blake said in a pondering tone.
"So, should we continue with the plan of going free for all?" Beyoni asked.
"Of what use is it?" Blake said. "First of all, because of their idiotic actions it the difficulty of hunting ants would have doubled because it now looks like an all-out war against them and humans.
Second, although the exercise aim is to gather as many points as possible in 7 days. If the test was only left with one team wouldn't it be automatically over?"
"You are saying we should eliminate the other teams?" Kade asked.
"Since we are already leading with more than 5000 points I don't see why we shouldn't just end the test before time." Blake replied.
"So are we just to wait till night time before doing anything?" Damon asked because he saw it pointless to do nothing when others were farming points.
"Who said we had to wait till night? Funny enough it is way easier during the daytime." Blake spoke with an evil grin as he thought of plans in stock for the other teams.
"First let's deal with team 10." Blake said.
"Isn't team 10 your girlfriend's team?" Kade couldn't help but ask.
Ignoring the girlfriend part, Blake spoke without thinking. "This isn't a life or death situation, so it doesn't matter. Winning comes first."
Blake sounded like a villain ready to do anything to win, but Sach couldn't help but beg to differ the first part of the statement.
"Right now, at any moment it might actually be." Sach thought.