I was shocked, surprised, shaken. What the h.e.l.l was going on, I looked at the paladin in front of me and his cut off arm and had to ask him again just to be sure I heard him correctly."What did you say?"
"I said I forfeit."
"But we haven"t even started fighting yet!" I complained to him
"Does it matter?" He asked me with a slight smile on his face.
"Well no...but…"
"I forfeit. I believe that you deserve to win this, not after what you"ve been through to get your friend back. Let"s be real here, you"re a formidable fighter, skilled, deadly in all forms of combat as I"ve seen, though you"re a bit lacking when it comes to magic. But you"re not knowledgeable enough of your opponents and their builds to beat them. It"s obvious to more experienced players that you"re a noob, just an incredibly skilled one. And I didn"t really want to fight in this trial in the first place, I was forced to by my guild...…..oh! I guess that"s them sending me a message, and I"ve just been kicked out."
I was completely baffled by the current turn of events. The paladin in front of me seems to be some sort of dark elf, which is funny considering the paladin cla.s.s was aligned with the light and holy elements and dark elves like the dark. He was a player, his name being Conrad Silverbones.
From the beginning of the fight till now, he had; and in a very carefree manner, cut of his left arm and forfeited the match. It really surprised me, especially how cool he seems with being kicked out of his guild.
"So please win this s.h.i.+t for me and all that stuff. I"m much too lazy to care about it anyway. Well congratulations and all that stuff, see you around 7."
And then he turned around and walked off, leaving me still baffled and very much shocked. Though one thought was running through my mind, and that was the fact that his dude was so cool.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, he"s done it! Though it went down in the most unexpected way, but it has happened! Candidate Seven is the first to pa.s.s the knockout stage. And by rules of the trials, he is no longer a candidate, but a chosen! The first chosen of this year"s trial of Revelations! Marvelous, just Marvelous!........but what is this I"m hearing! It can"t be! Or the angels above!
Ladies and gentlemen it has just come to my attention, that one of the sponsors of Seven, the phenomenon that has captured our hearts in these two days with how hard he"s been fighting: to be reunited with his friend; that one of the powers responsible for his strength and even the magnificent armor he now has on, is actually the tree or revelations itself! Never has there been such a sight or scenario, not in the two thousand years this trial has been going on. I think I speak for everyone here, when I say well done and then ask.....Who In The World Are You Aaren Seven?"
This announcer rubbed me off the wrong way, like he was some sort of boss, sitting behind his desk and microphone plotting nefarious things against the people fighting, all to the benefit of his own amus.e.m.e.nt. Though that could just be my imagination getting carried away.
[You have received 2 skill points and 3 stat points for completing the knockout stage of the trial of Revelations. You can now proceed to the first ring of the trials.]
[All remaining battle points would be converted into monetary gain. You have received 500 thousand gold dollars, 500 thousand silver dollars, and 500 thousand bronze dollars.]
Suddenly a pillar of light splashed right down from the darkness. I looked up to see it stretching into nothingness, and as it touched the ground, there was a single golden ring being shown.
I guess I was supposed to walk into that ring. Which was exactly what I did. However the moment I did, the pillar of light rapidly shrunk, and I was dragged up by a force I couldn"t fight or resist.
But the feeling of being pulled in a certain direction only lasted for a moment before I found myself in another dark arena. I was standing on a walkway that led to a platform, and this platform was colored with seven different rings: that flowed inward, concentric to each other.
The outer most ring was actually black, and currently it was lit up and pulsing with a dim light. I was beginning to get really confused with no idea what to do until I heard a voice, a voice I actually recognized!
"Step into the first circle and receive your task!"
I couldn"t tell if the voice was male of female, but even in a game, I could feel such an aura of power from it. Something that was timeless and old, and somewhat wise. This was the voice that told me to run when I was being chased by Sortovat; that big a.s.s demonic snake.
I stepped forward and into the black ring. The arena on it"s own was freaking huge, almost at the size of an Olympic stadium if not a little bit larger. The circles shrunk as they went inwards, with the seventh being white and taking up the entire central area. But the rest of the circles were all dull and somewhat dim, with only the black having any sort of light.
The moment I stepped my foot into the black circle, I could feel an electric jolt go through me. Then just three feet away from me, a black stand/platform about one and a half meter tall, and about 25 inches long and wide rose up from the ground.
I walked up to it, and could see that words were written on it"s slick surface. At first it seems to be like another stat sheet of sorts. Though this one seemed to be entirely focused on aspects that dealt with the trial.
CHOSEN: AAREN SEVEN
RING: 1
TASK: ONGOING
SPONSORS: 4
PUBLIC APPROVAL: 3.8
[TASK: GO TO THE WORLD WHERE THE WAVE RIDERS LAY THEIR BONES, AND FIND THE VESSEL OF THE SEA THAT CALLS TO YOU. SAVE IT! AND STRENGTHEN IT, FOR IT"S POWER WOULD SAVE YOU IN THE TRIALS TO COME. SHOULD YOU FAIL, YOU WOULD BE FORGOTTEN, UNREMEMBERED, UNLOVED AND EXPIRED!/ DURATION: 5:11:58:20]
[YOUR SPONSOR THE TREE OF REVELATIONS HAS GIVEN YOU A MEMORY DISK]
A riddle, seriously! Why the heck was it so easy! I mean sure most of it was game/sci fi talk, but I knew with at least a 89% chance what it meant.
I"m supposed to go to a world that"s without a doubt a junkyard, and the wave riders have to be s.h.i.+ps of all kinds. I don"t know if s.p.a.ce s.h.i.+ps ride waves, but sea vessels do, and I have to find one and fix it in five days. Okay? that"s just...…..nice?
I looked up to see the so called memory disk floating above me, and it was a weird rainbow of sparkling silver, green, blue, gold, black, purple and red colors. This looked spooky no matter how you look at it.
I grabbed the memory disk and placed it on my forehead (since that"s the way they"re used.) Almost immediately there was a flash of light and I felt myself falling, however before I reached the ground, the light flashed again and this time I was falling downwards...…..from the sky.
I wanted to panic, I really did. But I remembered I had wings, so there was no need to go all crazy about my situation. However before I could implement their use, my body suddenly suspended in the air, and that"s when I saw them.
Huge, like freaking! colossal! They looked very real, and the fact that I was surrounded by them freaked me out! Leathery wings, feathery wings, elemental wings, and even bone wings. Glowing eyes that radiated magic and aura, coupled with a powerful body packed with muscle and scales of resplendent color, made me want to just bow down and say.
"Wow!"
"I guess that"s a better reaction than we were hoping for, wouldn"t you say Zephyr, the hatchling seems to be from your bloodline."
And they can talk too, so which means I wasn"t just experiencing a memory of some sort, I was really here! In front of dragons!
The dragon who spoke was a gold dragon, he had this amused look within his serpentine eyes that was somewhat infective and exuberant. The dragon he was talking to was a green dragon, who honestly looked like he was high on something and couldn"t be bothered by affairs of the world.
I"ve read and watched enough fiction to know the different color schemes represented the elemental affinity of the dragons. Green being wind and gold being light? Or earth? I"m not really sure.
"His blood is not as pure as I would like, but he"s a good seedling, and the fact that he"s here shows that he"s worthy. Let"s give the cla.s.s and see if he can find and set us free."
"Um okay, dragon guys, I"m right here. And forgive me for my rather brunt questions your highnesses, but where the f.u.c.k am I, what"s happening, and is this a part of the trials of revelations?" I asked as I looked at them.
"Ahhh, so you came here because you were sent by that tree. Very good, with you, that"s completes the seven required dragon kin that would be responsible for restoring the glory of the original dragon kings. You"re perfect hatchling." Zephyr the green wind dragon said.
His words were....wispy? Slurry? Untethered. There was just this feeling of freedom he evoked, but yet I could also feel a primal force clinging underneath his skin, roiling, boiling and most importantly blowing. I might be biased but; without a doubt, this was the most powerful dragon in the room or air seeing as we were all floating above the clouds.
"Thank you very much brothers and sisters, I"ll take if from here."
Zephyr said to the other dragons, and just as they appeared, they faded into the clouds. Then he turned to me and scrutinized me with eyes that literally had lightening running through them.
"Excuse me sir, um Mr. Zephyr, can you please tell me what"s going on?" I asked again, this time a little more politely.
"First of all hatchling, I"m female. And by dragon law, since you carry my bloodline regardless of how thin, you"re my son. You don"t have to be so stiff around me, especially when we have more interactions in the future."
"uhhhh sure?"
"Good, now let me explain why you"re here. In an era now lost to time, when a cataclysm of universal proportions scorched our dimension to ash and ruin, everything was destroyed.
However a planet called earth survived, and she grew to become New Gaia, home to it"s original race the humans, and it"s numerous new visitors from the stars, making it possible for elves, Patmosians, Orcs, and many other races to survive, to live.
But the power that destroyed the universe still existed, it was untamed, unruly and it had transformed the universe into a place where great power and skill could be had.
It was at that time the first G.o.ds were born, and magic and skills came to exist. But that power still hungered for destruction, so the G.o.ds sought to subdue it, to contain it"s destructive properties and put an end to the threat it posed.
And so they took fourteen young dragons, and separated them into two groups. One group was the elemental dragons, us, the other were the primal dragons, beings that embodied emotion and feelings rather than elements. I believe you know such emotions as the seven sins.
The power was split into two, like yin and yang, and good and bad. The bad was given to us, and the good to the sin dragons. And then on account of being given the bad part, we were watched, observed and followed like plagues. We couldn"t live or love in peace without everyone thinking we would go crazy and destroy the world.
To be honest we weren"t feeling any more or less murdery than normal, I mean come on! We"re dragons, we burn a few villages sometimes, topple kingdoms, and steal treasures, we like treasure!
When the sin dragons did it, it was seen as a normal act, just dragons being dragons. But when we did it, it was seen as evil, that we were being driven to murder and burn kingdoms because we were under the control of an evil that scrubed the universe clean, turning it into a blank slate.
So we withdrew, stayed in our lands and mastered our magic and our cla.s.ses, and we had love and hatchlings, sp.a.w.ning a race of dragons that were beautiful. We led advancements in magic and science and entertainment. But they gathered and they plotted and they said we had built an army, from our own children!
What kind of a parent would do that! But they didn"t care. There was a war: we were stronger, more powerful, and it wasn"t because of our individual powers. As far as that goes, the sin dragons has us beat in sheer explosiveness of power, but we"re better fighters, and we"re smarter, and we had family. And because of that we had too much to loose.
With our children dying, we had to surrender, we were left with no choice. Our once ill.u.s.trious civilization fell, our children killed to the point that only a few remember us, and we were trapped in a realm that only had darkness. (Sigh) the millennia of imprisonment drove us mad, but it also forced us to hone our skills, and learn to use the so called darkness inside of us.
About five hundred years ago, we manage to create memory messages that was scattered across the cosmos, given to primal and powerful forces of nature, forces who understood our plight. We placed strands of our soul energy into this messages, and once this forces find a suitable candidate of our bloodline, they would give them the disk, and the disk would bring them here, where they would be given an inheritance and tasked to finding not just the keys that would free us from our prison, but the prison itself, and building us an army for our revenge. So what do you think?"
What do I think, this s.h.i.+t"s some really dark world quest kind of stuff. And her story was quite touching? But I can"t let a sob story cloud my judgment, she had said things that rang warning bells in my mind.
"You want to start a war? Many innocent people will die!"
"My children were innocent, yet they were still slaughtered like animals. Do you think we can just let everything go, after all this years of imprisonment?" She said to me with her eyes narrowed in a glare.
"No I don"t, which is why I would like to suggest a better option than a war which would kill everything, since it was practically you seven against the world. No one would be innocent in your eyes: since their ancestors hated you for something beyond your control.
There"s another way, a better way and it would give you more satisfaction than burning everything."
I said to her as I scrambled to come up with a plan to dissuade a dragon from going on a war path. Saying that to myself made me realize how impossible it might seem.
"and what method is that?" she asked me with an amused look on her face.
"You take everything they"ve built, and make it your own. You want chaos, I"ll create that chaos for you, and I"ll do it in such a way that there would be less bloodshed, but blood will flow none the less.
Their children would wors.h.i.+p and believe in you like G.o.ds. They"ll love you, and offer all of their treasures at your feet. So you wouldn"t have to fight a war, because right under the nose of your enemies, especially the sin dragons, you"ll take what they love, and what they cherish. And when your enemies can"t take it anymore, and attack, then! And only then can you fight back. I believe no one is inherently good or bad, no! Doing evil is a choice, and having a negative source of energy does not make you evil, it"s your actions that does. Prove them wrong, whilst also simultaneously taking everything away from them.
"Most would call such methods evil, underhanded and unrighteous." Zephyr said to me.
"Well who would know, I"ll be their hero in s.h.i.+nning armor, and the villain in black that no one sees. Evil is relative, it"s subject to choice and actions and most importantly sight. No one would see me do anything evil, but it doesn"t mean I"m not doing it. So if I"m not seen being evil, how can I be unrighteous?"
"Hahahaha, I like you young hatchling, you really are the perfect embodiment of the element of wind. We don"t conform, we flow, we encapsulate and divert. And we can be cool and calm, but also raging and destructive. Very well, I"ll convince the others to follow your methods, they can"t say no to me anyway, not at the threat of a beat down session. Now come, let me give you your inheritance, my cla.s.s."