"Trygve, can you see that light?" He asked and pointed into the forest, in the direction of the light.
"What light again?" Trygve said as he looked from Steve to the forest and back to Steve again, "Are you on drugs? You've been acting weird lately"
"Hmmm…why can't Trygve see it? Let me try something else" He thought as he enhanced his feet with mana and took off into the forest only for Trygve to see him come back few seconds later with a handful of white sand.
"What's this?" He asked and peered curiously at Steve's palm
"Do you feel anything from this sand?" Steve said as he put all of it into Trygve's open palm.
"Eh?!" Trygve interjected as he felt the tiny wisps of Mana from the sand seep into his palm. "This….this is the forgotten sands of the goddess Ajá….where did you find it?"
"Goddess Ajá?" Steve asked, "Who is she?"
"The first celestial and most powerful being to have ever existed, a symbol of evil… Legends have it that she was petrified by the divine beasts, long before they evolved into fiends. Her petrified form was taken and crushed into sand that most of the world's most powerful mages and swordsmen have used to cultivate their mana" Trygve explained, "So where did you find it?"
"In the forest" Steve was awed by the history of the sands that he had used to level up
"All this time, it has been in the Infernal realm….I would have loved to use it to level up but it's a pity I'm already at my body's Mana core limit" Trygve said with a rueful smile as he poured the sands back into Steve's palm.
"How do you know so much about this?" Steve asked curiously
"Well.... my family consists of the world's most prominent historians" Trygve said with a shy smile on his face
"Historians? Why did you then choose to become a swordsman?"
"Well…I figured that I'd be of more help to the world while making history rather than preserving it"
And for the first time since they met each other in the Infernal realm, Steve gave Trygve a genuine smile as they continued their journey while he absorbed the Mana from the sand he held in his palm.
They finally arrived at the test arena for the second test.
A fenced rectangular piece of land, around 30,000 acres in size filled with fiendish blue whales, each with a length of 98 feet and weighing 600,000 pounds, approximately the weight of 33 elephants.
Most of the contestants stood with mouths agape as the gigantic black iron gates were flung open to reveal the lazy fiends that lay slothfully as they turned and rolled around slowly while making loud groans.
'I wonder what they'll tell us to do this time. Slice them?' Steve thought as he saw the whale-like fiends.
"This is the second official test of the contest, you are to get to the other side of the test arena by evading these fiends in ten minutes…" Williams said as he touched down on the ground in front of the contestants for the first time. He was taller when he was closer to them since he stood at an impressive 6'3.
"Must there always be a time limit?" Trygve complained loudly
"Don't even try to slice the fiends because their bodies are so thick that even a weapon of the six weapons of sin cannot pierce their skin. And also…watch out for the blowholes too" Williams said and walked to the side to give the contestants free passage.
'What does he mean by 'watch out for the….' Steve's thoughts were interrupted as he saw the hot sizzling green goo that shot out from the blowhole of one of the fiends. 'Oh no….. that looks bad'
"Readyyy contestants" The umpire screamed from his unknown location
As they heard it, they all scrambled and pushed each other for the front position but that didn't last long as the black board timer instantly materialized in the air and started it's countdown and the umpire quickly shouted
"START!!!"
Lloyd was the first to break out from the crowd as he took a big leap over the first fiend, before Steve knew it, those that could scale the humongous fiend were jumping wildly while those that couldn't jump were weaving around them on foot.
'Some people have already dug their graves' Steve thought as he scaled the first fiend with his strong legs.
As he jumped, he noticed that some of that sizzling green goo was on the ground and it melted the soles of his footwear.
"Trygve, Susan! Be careful…. there's a dangerous substance on the ground…look before you land!" He shouted to Susan and Trygve who were behind him since he was faster than them.
As they advanced, Lloyd was leading with Anna coming shortly behind him and to the surprise of most people, the third person was Steve who was moving as fast as he could to prevent Billy who was on his tail from overtaking him.
"Isn't that the guy that was in the last position in the prelims?"
"How is he able to contend with a level four?"
"How is he so fast?"
Steve could hear the strained voices of the contestants behind him as they expressed their surprise about his sudden growth.
Billy was more dumbfounded because when he heard that a level three swordsman hit his team member, he insulted him for been weak but he didn't know that the same level three swordsman would give him a difficult time in the test. It was outrageous!
Steve smiled inwardly as he continued to press on faster as one of Grandpa Matt's parting words played out in his head
"…so go to that contest and show them who's boss"
'I'm doing that Grandpa… I'm doing just that'
Anna was moving pretty well too until one minor accident that gave Steve the chance to pass her.
She was too engrossed in selecting a good landing ground that wouldn't scorch her feet that she didn't see the one that erupted from one of the blowholes right in front of her in mid air.
She went wide eyed and panicked as she saw the hot goo, she reacted immediately by twisting her body in an abnormal manner making her to fall down in between three whale fiends that were pressed on each other to form a traingle space in the center.
She was lucky that there wasn't any goo on the ground where she landed, she dusted herself and stood up to jump again only for her to realize that the fall had twisted her ankle.
"Damn!.." She spat and winced in pain as the twisted ankle throbbed.
Suddenly she heard a gurgling sound and looked up to see that the part of one of the fiends that formed the triangle was it's blowhole and the swirling mass of green goo inside it only meant one thing…..eruption!
She turned and began to use her sword to hack vigorously on the bodies of the other fiends that formed the closed triangle in a bid to find a means of escape. But it was futile as her sword left no marks on the thick skin of the fiend.
The gurgling sound increased and the swirling of the goo intensified. She looked from the blowhole to her sword then she dropped it and fell on her knees with tears falling from her eyes.
"Will I die here?" She asked herself as her life flashed before her eyes.
Anna Templeton, twenty year old only child of Tristan Templeton, her father and late Anna Templeton, her mother. Her parents met and fell deeply in love with each other during their generation's council contest of which none of them were able to make it to the sixth stage. They got married shortly after they left the Infernal realm and gave birth to Anna.
Tristan was disappointed when he discovered that Anna gave birth to a girl because he wanted a boy child that he could train to surpass the Heracles and win the Fiend Slayer.
But shortly after little Anna was born, her mother died after naming her because when little Anna was in the womb, her body lacked even the rudiments of Mana such that her mother's body started to support her life in the womb with it's own mana.
Mother Anna noticed that the baby was draining her Mana but she ignored it because she wanted to see her baby live.
When she finally gave birth, it turned out that the baby had drained all the Mana in her body….with so little life left, mother Anna died shortly after bringing her baby into the world.