It went almost exactly like the first test.
Except worse.
Much worse.
The moment Emma's song rose and the three blades lit in sequence, Alex changed from terrifying to absurd.
Do.
Re.
Mi.
With Emma's buffs layered on top of her own class, plus the edible boosts from Phong's garden, Alex stopped looking like a diver and started looking exactly like how Emma described her earlier: "raid boss at home".
She moved too fast.
And worse, her judgment got sharper with the speed. Her psychic constructs accelerated alongside their creator, and they hit harder with the added strength. Her stamina held together through the pressure with that boosted constitution. Spear, rapier, vajra, bows. shields, all of them moved around her like a private army, or more precisely, like funnels from Vanessa gunpla kits.
For exactly one minute, nobody could really touch her.
Dominic crashed in first and got blasted back by a shield slam that sent him skidding.
Jake and Vanessa tried to split her attention from opposite angles and found out that her attention did not, in fact, split. It multiplied. One bow pinned Jake's path, the rapier drove Vanessa off line, and the spear nearly tagged Janet when she came in to support.
Jack raised terrain to break her movement.
Alex used it as a firing perch.
Joanne swore with feeling as a psychic arrow forced her to abandon the spell angle she wanted.
Séline and Camille almost reached Emma once. Almost. Then Alex intercepted with the kind of clean brutality that made both women peel off before losing the trade outright.
Alexei, in the middle of all this, discovered that trying to tank an Emma-buffed Alex was a deeply educational mistake.
Outside the ring, Phong watched with his arms crossed and the expression of a man seeing a future logistics nightmare in motion.
Then Emma used a Weeping Onion.
A quick recovery, just enough mana back to stretch the impossible a little longer.
And so, with all the weeping onions down the hatch before reaching their daily limit, the one minute became one minute and twenty seconds.
That extra twenty seconds was awful for everyone else.
Dominic's team got battered across the ring by a woman who looked almost serene while doing it.
Jake got clipped by the spear and pin to the ring post.
Jack lost his footing once and paid for it with a vajra to the dome.
Janet had to burn movement to keep from getting poke from a blind spot by the rapier.
Joanne abandoned two cast lines she had clearly wanted because Alex's constructs were dangerously closed to forming a pincer attack around her.
For one minute and twenty seconds, Alex was everything Emma had promised and more. A wall, a spear, a storm. A one-woman army with song behind her and Phong's buffs in her blood.
Then Emma's voice stopped.
Team Nemean only needed that one small opening to regroup and crack back.
The Greencap bunny captain's training showed this time in ways that even Phong, who lacked all real combat experience, could appreciate.
Jack went from pure defense to zoning. Stone rose in ugly lines that narrowed space and cut clean lanes, herding Alex where they wanted her instead of merely trying to block her constructs.
Alexei planted himself in the choke point like a stubborn oak. Alex couldn't get pass the paladin, not with the window she was afforded. Too short to do major damage, too risky to push less she wanted to be on the receiving end of 5 people strongest attacks.
Dominic, freed from being the main tank, started going ham with all the damage he had soaked up from Alex's constructs. He leaned into rage, every blows, every punches hit with the force of a pile bunker.
Janet forced Alex into a zugzwang with her airborne mobility. Alex must either endure the morale and attack buffs the War Valkyrie gave to everyone else, or chase after Janet and took the bait that the Valkyrie had clearly set up for her.
Joanne found a way to make it worse.
Using Jack stone pillars as platform, she started looking for angle to snipe Emma with her magi-bullet. The constant threat of Joanne forced Alex to pay close attention to the Spell Sniper position or risked losing Emma.
Jake, Séline, and Camille formed the trident, and took the responsibility of being the main DPSs.
Jake feinted low, then used his back as a launch pad.
Séline stepped on Jake and launched herself toward Alex, both fists glowed bright with mana.
Camille slipped in from behind and found the an opening. She punished it before Alex could fully recover from the earlier two.
Then Jake swapped in to attack Alex precisely from an angle where Camille would force the Arbiter Mindblade into.
Emma, already winded from the buff window, tried to reset support with what she had left, but now Dominic's team had seen enough to understand the rhythm.
Dominic put both hands together and toss Joanne up high, opening up a whole bunch of new angles for the sniper to get to Emma. Alexei rammed into Alex, hard enough to send her reeling and force her to reposition.
A spell fired by Joanne hit Emma square in the forehead.
On a real battlefield, this would have been fatal.
Jack lifted a stone pillar and sent it toward Alex.
Alex dodged to the side, only to realize that Séline had use the pillar as cover to approach her. The French girl showed the slightest of a smirk, then both of her fists connected with Alex's guts, bringing the Arbiter Mindblade to her knees.
And just like that, Alex and Emma lost.
The ring fell quiet after the call.
Everyone stood there breathing hard, sweaty, bruised, and more than a little shocked by what they had just managed.
Dominic bent over with his hands on his knees and laughed first.
It was not graceful laughter.
It was the kind a man made when he had just survived something ridiculous and wanted the world to know he counted that as victory anyway.
"We did it," he wheezed.
Janet wiped sweat from her temple. "Barely."
"That still counts," Jake said at once.
Emma straightened slowly, still recovering, and looked around at the team with a new sort of respect.
Alex rolled one shoulder and let her constructs dissolve. She was annoyed, obviously. But not in a bad way. More like a predator realizing the hunt was finally starting to become interesting again.
Phong, meanwhile, had opinions.
That was clear from the way he stood there frowning at Alex.
Alex caught it and narrowed her eyes. "What."
Phong looked at her for a moment, then said, "You need a heavy hitter."
That got everyone's attention.
Alex folded her arms. "Go on."
Phong did, because once the idea settled, it came easily to him.
Part of it was just how his mind worked. He was resourceful, practical, always looking for what the current setup lacked. Another part came from a childhood most of the people around him did not share. He had grown up in Vietnam until he was ten. Different stories. Different heroes. Different kinds of cool.
So while most of them would have framed it through games or raids or whatever the current surface culture liked, Phong's brain reached somewhere else.
"You already have range," he said. "And flexibility. No one here has to explain that. What you did against Samir, then against Dominic, proved it." He nodded toward the ring. "But when someone can survive the pressure and stay in your face, you don't have one decisive heavy strike. Not really."
Alex listened.
That alone told everyone he was onto something.
Phong went on. "There's a swordsman in Jin Yong's works. Dugu Qiubai. His whole thing is that mastery keeps stripping away layers until flashy technique matters less than overwhelming force and simplicity."
Jake blinked. "What."
Phong ignored him completely.
He looked only at Alex now.
"Yang Guo too. After he lost his right arm, he stopped relying on all the flashy moves he used before. He trained with the Heavy Dark Iron Sword instead. Big. Crude. Heavy. No finesse compared to what he had before. But it forced him down a different path."
Alex tilted her head.
Phong pointed toward where her constructs had been.
"You already do finesse better than almost anyone. Maybe that's exactly why you need to learn the opposite too."
There was a small silence after that.
Then Alex said, very slowly, "You want me to hit people with a giant sword."
Phong shrugged. "I want you to have an answer when finesse isn't enough."
Emma, still catching her breath, looked between them. "I hate that he might be right."
Dominic laughed. "That's becoming a pattern."
Alex stared at the simulation field for a second longer.
Then psychic light gathered in her palm.
At first, Phong thought she was making one of her usual weapons.
He was wrong.
The shape came out massive.
Broad. Brutal. Ridiculous.
A slab of psychic steel longer than her arm span and thick enough that it looked more like a heap of iron than a sword.
Phong blinked.
Then blinked again.
That was not just a heavy sword.
That was Dragon Slayer.
Alex rested the gigantic psychic blade against her shoulder like it belonged there.
Phong stared at her. "You read manga."
Alex glanced back at him, faintly amused. "There are things about me you don't know."
Then she looked pointedly at him.
"Same way I never knew you read wuxia novels."
That was fair.
Phong huffed a laugh.
Around them, the others reacted in their own ways. Jake looked delighted. Jack looked alarmed on behalf of future targets. Dominic grinned like he had just been handed a better problem to fight later. Emma watched Alex with narrowed eyes, already recalculating what this meant if Alex really added a true heavy hitter option to everything else she could do.
Alex gave the massive psychic sword an experimental swing.
The air groaned.
Everyone in the room took one unconscious step back.
Except Phong.
He just looked at her, at the absurd slab of force in her hand, and felt that strange mix of satisfaction and concern that came from realizing a terrible idea had worked immediately.
Alex smiled.
Then she started training with it.