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course
, he thought,
they aren't going to throw one test at me that is essentially like the last, even if I am battling for a mere Class IV
.
    The test masters were shrewd. What would come next would not be anything like what had gone before. The whistle would not work here. He drew his sonic knife, pointed it at the devils climbing down the dragon's skull, and made the motion of cutting. One of the devils screamed. The invisible keen edge of the sonic blade had caught him, sliced him. His stomach suddenly split wide, dumping entrails and blood over the dragon's chin. The devil twirled slightly as if unable to believe what was happening, as if wanting to turn away from the scene and collect its senses. Then it fell, twisting its neck on the floor.
    Guil was disgusted with the thousands in the tiers who wanted blood and who demanded it in the ceremonies, even if it was not real They cheered and gibbered and waved their arms. Vampires, they were, thirsting after the forbidden liquor.
    Another roar of approval. Louder. Deep. Guttural.
    He swung the tip of the blade toward another of the animals, sawed off its left hand. The member fell wetly to the floor, and the fingers convulsed wildly for a few seconds before admitting defeat. Then the hand disappeared. The engineers had no use for it, no reason to maintain its existence.
    He approached the other eight devils, swinging the blade menacingly. But, of course, he could not drive them away. They were not real with a fear of their own, could not experience pain, and had been especially constructed to kill him. Viciously, he swung the tip of the blade, not really touching them, but arcing it across two devils. One, cut nearly in half, wobbled a single step, jerked epileptically, and bounced to the floor in a shower of red that—despite its unreal source—spattered Guil's face. He wiped it off as best he could when he realized the engineers were going to keep it intact. A bubble of it caught in his nose, and he blew it free. The second devil, his head split, slid gently to the floor.
    Vomit tickled the back of Guil's throat with its acid fingers. The test masters were a little too careful with the detail, a little too generous with the sadism for the spectators. They splashed gore and pain around like children with water and sand. Guil wondered whether the real reason they did not want to see sound rifles used except as a last resort was because sound rifles were clean and left no blood or mangled remains when aimed correctly. Was the purpose to gain a station and prove manhood— or to thrill the Musicians and their Ladies with horror by the bucketful?
    The six remaining devils separated and gingerly tried to surround him. They closed in from three sides, teeth foam-flecked, eyes hideous and wild. But it would not be those teeth, no matter how horrid they looked, that would kill him. The devils would simply grasp him in a death embrace where their null waves would negate his positive waves and wipe him off the face of the earth. He arced the point of his knife and smoothly halved all of them in ten seconds. There was a tremendous amount of blood on the floor, leaking away in all directions like a thousand-fingered hand with an irregular palm.
    Guil searched the arena for signs of the next test. For a time, as the seconds ticked by, he thought that it might be over and that he might have won. But the silence of the crowd and the gaze of the judges told him this was not so. Then what? Was it now a war of nerves, stretching seconds into minutes, stretching minutes into scores of minutes until he was ready to crack from the stress-then throwing another horror at him? But he did not have time to follow that course of thought any further. The next test was upon him.
    Suddenly he saw that the gore from the past battles was shivering, not just as all sound configurations shimmered, but with a purpose. The blood from the ten devils began to draw together, defying gravitational laws, surging