"Higher, higher," Lancelot chanted, his expression the embodiment of battle frenzy. "I soar through fire."

Qi blew from Lancelot’s back, igniting and transforming into fiery wings that flapped to send him into the air.

The crossbow-wielding automatons followed Lancelot’s rise, and two fired at him while the other three targeted Isabel and Robert. The latter dodged, while Lancelot stretched his arms, his wrists joined, his open palms pointed at the metal group below.

The two white arrows kept flying toward Lancelot, only to tilt forward, affected by an ethereal force. The temperature between his palms and the area they pointed at rose sharply, creating a conical heat zone that exploded into something hotter.

Calling it a heat wave wouldn’t do the spell justice. An all-scorching force blew from Lancelot’s palms, twisting the air and melting anything it touched.

The two tilted arrows just stopped as their solid whiteness turned into blinding, liquid redness, while a pile of grey smoke rose from the metal group below.

Nevertheless, something quickly blew away the smoke, revealing a concerning sight.

The four automatons left in the first line had lifted their shields, while the crossbow-wielding and sword-wielding living armors had huddled up behind them.

Moreover, five more automatons armed with spears and shields had left the doors’ darkness, joining that defensive formation.

The white metal had grown scorching everywhere inside the spell’s area of effect, even melting in some spots, but nothing had broken. Both the nine shields and the nineteen automatons under them had remained safe.

And, if that weren’t already enough, five arrows shot from the doors’ darkness while the last presences it hid finally showed their face.

Isabel nimbly dodged, her arm snapping at the living armors. A dense water bullet reached the automatons in no time and without making any sound, slipping under the shields, hitting one of the visible helmets of a crossbow-wielding puppet.

The bullet carved a hole in the helmet and snapped it off the rest of the full plate, but the puppet kept moving as if it had suffered no damage at all.

Flames escaped from Lancelot’s feet, propelling him to his right to dodge the incoming arrows. However, he kept falling through the evasive maneuver. He couldn’t actually fly, but his elevated position gave him a perfect view of the enemy’s battle formation and new pace.

Be it due to the single loss or other triggers, the automatons started moving quickly, not relying on sluggish, slow steps anymore.

The first line of shields jumped forward while the second line of crossbows spread out. The third line of broadswords instead charged through the gaps, becoming the new vanguard.

The fourth line of more shields and spears also advanced, joining the second, while the five crossbow-wielding automatons that had just left the darkness remained behind.

But that wasn’t all that moved. While the automatons nimbly arranged their formation, someone charged at them.

"Screw it!" Robert cried, having had enough of being on the defensive.

Robert’s charge looked reckless. He was fast, but his sprint hadn’t relied on any martial art, allowing the sword-wielding automaton he was about to crash into to react to it.

The automaton swung its broadsword down, the slash swift and precise, timed to hit Robert’s head as soon as it entered its range.

And the broadsword cut through Robert’s figure cleanly, except that no blood spilled. Actually, Robert himself also disappeared, revealing that the severed shape was nothing more than an afterimage.

The real Robert was already in front of the automaton, and his shoulder slamming on its torso, unleashing a booming noise and sending violent gales everywhere.

Metal shards also joined the gales. The entirety of the automaton’s back had blown apart, only leaving mangled chunks of its front, which soon crumbled to the floor.

’It’s not enough,’ Liam thought as the second automaton went down, his calculations stretching far beyond what his other teammates could consider.

Liam had gone through Isabel’s same reasoning, taking it several steps further. He knew exactly how prepared the team was. He had concocted those products after all.

Stamina and Qi reserves wouldn’t be an issue, but injuries might. Lancelot’s concoctions had focused on the former due to the inheritance’s righteous nature. The latter were also far more expensive.

Yet, each team member still had close to twenty products, which was undoubtedly a lot. Liam even had much more due to his accumulation in the Roaring Thunder Sect.

The issue was that something had clicked in Liam’s brain, and it didn’t bode well at all.

The "Greed" in the trial’s name could look random to others, especially on its own, but Liam believed he could see a pattern from that single instance already.

The Church seemed fixated on the ancestral bloodlines despite its contradictory name, and Greed was one of the Ancestral Qilin’s titles. The maze hadn’t featured anything similar, meaning there could still be six trials next.

Even if Liam excluded the Ancestral Dragon and the Ancestral Snake, as the Mutated Battlefield had done, that wouldn’t confirm that the inheritance only had four trials left. Actually, he was inclined to believe otherwise.

Centuries had passed since the inheritance’s creation. Liam’s team had the strength to overcome six more trials at that level, let alone four. Still, it was simply impossible that no other similarly capable groups had challenged them throughout such a long period.

Moreover, the Church was in on that contradictory fixation, meaning its teams should have been readier for trials stemming from it. It was unthinkable that such awareness had still led to failure to claim the inheritance for so long.

Much of that was built on half-knowledge, conjectures, and hunches, but Liam felt almost certain that the five or seven trials could be a prelude to the real inheritance and what it actually required to be cleared.

And the team’s preparations might last for seven challenges, but they would probably fail to keep up with what followed.

The battle raged on, but Liam diverted his gaze, glancing at Julian. The latter showed no sign of wanting to help. His firm stance actually featured nothing but calm interest.

Which left Liam in a pickle. He could just do his thing, getting the most out of the situation without exposing himself. His team was bound to do well anyway. He didn’t know about the others, but Lancelot was a genius with near-infinite stamina and Qi reserves due to his lineage and talent.

However, Liam was also close to a bottleneck resource-wise. His time in the Roaring Thunder Sect had proven as much. Grace had to accept a heavy loss to get him a rank 2 martial art, and that trend applied to all the most valuable rank 2 assets.

If rank 2 resources were already that hard to get, Liam couldn’t even fathom what he would have to do for their rank 3 counterparts, and he needed those, both to reach the branching stage and facilitate his path toward that goal.

Liam couldn’t loot branching experts without the means to kill them, meaning getting those stronger resources was impossible as things stood, but that inheritance might just have them.

And when it came between playing it safe or risking it to hope to obtain greater rewards, Liam knew where he stood. His very life had impossible odds of survival anyway.

Besides, Liam wanted it.

’I had almost forgotten how greedy I have become,’ Liam sighed internally, activating his space-ring.