《A legacy of gods and swords.》 The beauties and the boy. He had been going too fast, and when he saw those weird cosplayers in the middle of the street, he couldn''t stop in time. So he decided to swerve around them, hence his current predicament. Were his treads failing him? The car couldn''t stop sliding, yet he could feel and hear the result of the rough road rubbing against his tires. The sirens were loud in the distance. He couldn''t but thank whatever watched over the earth that there were no other cars on the road this late in the night. He wrestled with his wheel, doing his best to stop the skidding. Why was the police guy still blaring his damn sirens, couldn''t he see Rafe was trying his best to stop the crush? He ignored the sirens for now, a vice grip on the wheel and all his considerable lower body strength focused on the brakes. He didn''t crush into the rails, and all that skidding was well worth it. ¡°...shiiiit¡­ did I just perform my first real life drift? Is that what a drift feels like?¡± His heart was pumping like crazy. The knocking on the passenger side window woke him from his revelry. He winced when he noticed the one and only officer of the law in little old Crosshill town. With an imperceptible sigh, he rolled down the window, trying to mimick that charming smile that little sophomore bastard had. He almost swore that little shit must have used that same smile to get to Sandra. And the whole team had known he wanted her back, he''d told them as much. ¡°Rafael Kingsley¡­¡± the man almost whispered the name, but Rafe heard him. ¡°What has gotten into you of late? I was just on the way to your home after receiving reports of some kind of party, and then I find you in the middle of a suicide attempt?¡± Suicide attempt? Rafe inwardly scoffed. It was those weirdos in the middle of the street, and they hadn''t even reacted when he hooted. And that damn party¡­ ¡°Come on, mister Anderson. It was those weirdos back there who¡­¡± He couldn''t believe his eyes. Sure, it was a little dark now, but he''d seen them clear as day. There had been two women dressed in some weird shit he couldn''t quite recall. Then what he could only hope was a man built like an oak and dressed in medieval knights armour. It had been so clear, even the greenish gems behind them that he suspected were part of some prop they were carrying around to liven up their nerdy pictures or whatever. Officer Anderson turned around to scan the street as well, and he turned back to Rafe with a skeptical look. ¡°Let me smell your breath kid.¡± And before Rafe could react the man had leaned forward and sniffed his open mouth, open in disbelief over what he couldn''t see. There was no way the weirdos had escaped. There was nothing but the road for as far as the eye could see. On the one side was an ascending cliff, and on the other a rail that protected cars and pedestrians from falling into a descending cliff. There was really nowhere to go on this stretch of hill, that Rafe knew of. ¡°Jesus Christ, kid! What the hell is going on with you? Why the hell did you kids even throw a party tonight? You lost, again! Your team has crashed out of the tournament, for all I''m aware.¡± Rafe still couldn''t get his mind off the life like hallucinations he''d just seen. He hadn''t cared about the women''s clothing, because they were beautiful, he could admit. That make up made them look otherworldly, maybe he could get some for Sandra. Their faces gleamed, their eyes shone, one the blue of the ocean, and their pupils were gigantic, the most elaborate contacts he''d ever seen. But now he could remember one wearing what looked like a sword. What was in those drinks, he couldn''t help but wonder. When had a little smoke ever flown him so high? ¡°I''m going to be telling your aunt about this, you hear me?¡± This finally got his attention. He frowned at the man, wondering why he was so obsessed with the damn woman. If he loved her so much, why hadn''t he asked her out when she was still here.Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit. He scoffed. ¡°Yeah, maybe you''ll get lucky and she won''t ignore your call this time. She probably knows it''s you too. She is just not interested.¡± ¡°What are you talking about?¡± ¡°She is not interested in you!¡± he screamed. The officer took a step back, looking at him with wide eyes. Yeah, Rafe thought smugly, I know. He didn''t know what he knew, but he knew it was important. He should be happy he knew what he knew, but¡­ ¡°She is not interested¡­¡± he said in a small voice. ¡°Not in you, in me, in this damn hill. She''s like them, they just left me here.¡± By the end, his sight had gone blurry, his head too heavy that his chin now rested on his chest. He heard the officer sigh, then head over and pat him on the head. ¡°She will come back champ. She stayed in this place twenty five years, it''s her home.¡± It was her home, Rafe thought, until he''d showed up and somehow drove her from it. It didn''t even surprise him she''d left. He only wished he''d known why. He''d tried so hard to be a good guest, because he wasn''t going to stay here forever. At least he wasn''t supposed to. ¡°I think I''ll be keeping your car for a while, until I can get in touch with any adults in charge of you¡­¡± Yeah, Rafe wasn''t holding his breath. He''d get his car back in a week or two, after the officer gave up on trying to contact his family. Now he had the problem of having to get back home on foot somehow. Only, did he want to go back home to that damn ghost house? It was isolated, even for a place as isolated as Crosshill town, and it was big and there was no one there but him. Well, no one most nights. Tonight, he''d left Charlie sucking Sandra''s face in his own bedroom. That little shit! He didn''t have the concept of team work in him. Sure he had more skill in basketball, and maybe he even had hopes of going pro one day, but he was the reason the team had lost the whole year. If Rafe had been on that court¡­ What would he have done? He sighed loudly. The guy is one year younger, and he stole my number. Because he is better. The only reason Rafe would ever play was because he was reliable, predictable. He knew the rules and all the basics, and almost nothing else. His play style was boring, even he would admit to himself. Now that same guy stole his girl even as he watched. He watched the officer chain his car. He couldn''t afford to witness anymore, he''d lost too much in one night. He heard the officer''s car start, but he didn''t turn. Unconsciously, his feet led him to that place he''d seen the hallucinations. He didn''t know how he knew they''d been here, he just knew. There was nothing there now. The rumbling of the engine receded. Rafe sighed, and turned around to start the trek home. No one was going to help him clean the stupid house, after all. A green light flashed in front of him. Tracing it''s path, he found that it was coming from behind him, from that same spot. He gulped, nervous for some unknown reason. He turned at once, searching each and every part of the street frantically. There was nothing. He sighed. Why the hell was he seeing things? He turned around, and walked straight into two otherworldly beautiful women and a giant in a suit of armour. He didn''t immediately walk into them. He walked into the bright green gem light. He would have stopped then but for his momentum. The next thing he knew he was stuck in what he could only describe as an invisible curtain. It was the same as bumbling in a bunch of cloth, although it seemed thicker and more viscous. And he couldn''t move backwards even if he tried. It was painless, at first. And then it felt like his whole body was on fire,and there were worms moving around and biting him with the tiniest mandibles , and his head was pounding, and his body was torn into a thousand pieces, and the smallest bit of an electric shock, only it was perennial, and¡­ He landed on rough ground on all fours. It was rough and hot, and even the palm of his hands was scratched and charred. His jeans were torn around the knees, and his knees smarted. He was breathing rough, and he could still feel echoes of that internal pain, like he''d been roasted from the inside. He heard a gasp and a shout that could only be a warning. He opened his eyes and stared into two shocked faces. They would have been three if the giant didn''t have a helmet covering his face, he was sure. They were really pretty, those women. One had flowing lilac hair and matching eyes and the other had the most beautiful blue hair. Something flashed red in the corner of his vision, and that was the only reason he took his eyes off the group. There was a blue screen in front of him, like a computer screen with an outdated user interface, although it was flashing red for some reason. ¡®Ding¡¯ You have entered the Sailam dungeon. ¡®Warning! Warning! Warning! User: Rafael Kingsley Race: Human Status: Marked for tutorial Warning: Your level is too low for this dungeon. You are advised to exit it at your earliest convenience.¡¯ There were more messages too, from what he could see, but something distracted him. He had only looked away from the triad in front of him for a fraction of a second, but one was already gone. And she was approaching him. The woman with the lilac hair and matching eyes, and he couldn''t follow her movements with his eyes. His heartbeat skyrocketed, and it wasn''t in anticipation. He didn''t even get to feel pain, but he was able to follow her last movement. She set her feet, then lifted one off the ground in an impossible show of flexibility. The leg kept climbing up and up, and then it descended. The first thing he noticed when he came to was that he couldn''t feel the pain, or much of anything really. Then the pain of being in that curtain, but this time it was magnified. His eyes, or at least one of them, were not working. His eye sight was red. It was all red. He turned his sight to his left somehow, to the blue screen that was still blaring out warnings. This time the warning seemed different though. ¡®Warning! Warning! Warning! Dying status effect applied.¡¯ He was dying. He''d suspected it, but it was much harder to come to grips with. It didn''t matter though. He was sure the pain of being stuck in that thick invisible curtain had lasted longer than it had before. He was sure. Dying wouldn''t be too bad, if it could save him from this and the pain he was sure to go through should the pain in his head start to be felt. ¡®Ding¡¯ You have entered the Sailam dung... ¡®Ding¡¯ conditions met: Low level user critically injured in a high level challenge. User has been invited to the skyholm legacy trial. Would you like to accept. Y/N. A legacy of gods (1) He didn''t think about it for long. Sure, he''d thought about dying to spare himself the pain, but really what was a little pain. Or a little more pain in any case. He didn''t have enough time to come up with expectations, but the fact that his pain seemed to vanish into thin air was a wonderful result. His vision was no longer blocked by blood, and the vision in front of him was surprising. There was a man, a boy really, a bit younger than him even. The boy was in a state, a state perhaps similar to what he himself was pretty sure he was in right now. The boy was covered in blood, his own and an enemy''s. An enemy whom he''d left behind him dead and cut to pieces. The boy was dying, after having fought what looked like a giant rat. Rafe watched something separate itself from the beast, something that seemed both spiritual and physical. How he knew it was spiritual, he couldn''t tell. All he knew was that it oozed out among the beast''s blood, but there was an ethereal quality to it that he would never have confused with blood. It oozed toward the crawling boy. All but one of the boy''s limbs were the wrong angle, but he still had the desire to survive, to live. When the ooze made contact with him, he screamed. Then the scene in front of him changed, and instead there were two boys. It took him a second to recognize the second figure, with it''s head caved in on one side, even a bit of brain matter licking out. Blood flowed over it, like he''d been wrung out like a rug, his poor body. Rafe Kingsley gulped. His clothes had been cut up by something, and¡­it was sickening. His poor ¡®beautiful¡¯ face, his painstakingly developed physique. He was almost dead. But then the ethereal ooze made contact with his body, and then they screamed in tandem. All his pains came back, but it almost seemed like he''d miraculously received an increased pain capacity. He could feel it all, and so much more. He could feel every little break in his smallest bones, every painful twitch of every muscle, the blood and sweat flowing on his skin. He could feel his cracked skull, he could feel his brain going into shock even though he knew he had somehow survived death. He knew his brain was shutting down, and maybe that was why he paid so much attention to the new visions playing out before him now. The first was of a very familiar young man, now a few years older. He held a sword in his hands, and he swung it with the most beautiful form, but it was the colour he shorn, the light he gave off that was his true power. It was magic, violent light. His brown hair shorn a vibrant stellar silver, and his eyes twinkled like a night sky. His skin seemed to have a sun under it, and when he ran towards his enemy the ground cracked. The first Skyholm, aspect of the transcendent light,the sword, the lost weapon, and four others. But his path had been mostly built on an innate ability he''d been born with. One that made him a genius. In the scene he saw, the boy fought a man who was definitely stronger than him. Still, he made the first move, a streak of light attacking a staff wielding juggernaut. The weapons clashed, and the boy was thrown back. The man also took a step back. The older man smirked in self confidence, then covered his body in a layer of electricity as he attempted to take the boy down. He might have been weaker, but Rafe couldn''t make sense of his battle instincts. They clashed for a few minutes, too fast for Rafe to follow, but then he could almost follow them for a few seconds. The staff wielder feinted right, making the boy dodge toward the left where his fist waited with a coating of electricity. It was a very good feint, but the boy, the first Skyholm, bent his body impossibly without even seeing what was coming, the fist only taking a piece of his robe. The staff made a comeback immediately on his right, but the boy was already jumping into close range with what looked like electricity on his own fist, albeit it was weaker than the man''s. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it. It connected, and didn''t do much, but it enraged the man. And the few seconds he was able to follow flowed like that. It almost seemed like the boy was trying to close his eyes even, like his eyes were getting in the way. And that electricity, Rafe thought, the weaker one the boy was wielding. It was from his aspect of the lost weapon, the ooze that had bound his soul. He did not know how he knew these things, or even what an aspect was. Seeing another scene begin before his eyes had him sighing in relief, although he didn''t know why. The second Skyholm. The best thief the universe ever saw. She was a lowly adventurer on her world early on, and only joined a few parties because she had a rare storage ability. Her affinity with shadows though, was so high. High enough that she was able to combine her soul with her shadow, and with her storage ability to build an inner world. According to the information he had, even after her death, her personal shadow verse should still exist. In the scene he saw, the woman tried to escape from a world sized city. The building she was in was apparently the central palace. She seemed to be trapped, surrounded in a building of violet sand crystals that must have absorbed light during the day so they could shine perpetually through the night. There were lots of shadows, but there was much more light. And it seemed she had been expected. She sighed and grabbed two tiny knives from sheathes hidden somewhere on her body. A golden armoured man stepped forward from among all the surrounding men. She smiled seductively, her black hair neatly knotted behind her head. The trash talk was blocked out, although Rafe wasn''t sure by whom. When the two combatants met, it was obvious the man was stronger. But the smile never left the woman''s face, even when a wickedly sharp gladius came for her neck after not even thirty seconds of battle. He cut her down. And as the blood flew into the air, it turned dark, and the falling corpse turned black too. They all turned into shadows. ¡°A shadow clone? But¡­ she wasn''t robbing the central palace then?¡± the leader asked no one in particular. ¡°But, the information said she was going to steal the most important thing in our possession. What could she¡­?¡± And Rafe watched the minute the man realized something. He had only turned to shout instructions when the alarms started to blare. And then a giant shadow appeared at the closest window. The window the shadow clone had been retreating to since she had been first sighted. The remnants of the shadow clone withdrew into the shadow cloud. Then a small window towards it''s top opened and out came what looked like the giant barrel of a gun. It shone with power, and all this had taken the fraction of a second in which the gold armoured man would have spoken. The beam of cosmic power struck behind the man, and men and pillars fell. A laugh sounded out from the shadows. ¡°Endrick you fool. What is more important to a kingdom than it''s king? I am the greatest thief, I always steal what I said I would. Destroying your ugly ass palace will just be a bonus. An impregnable fortress,¡± she scoffed. And then multiple windows opened, and the shadow cloud swelled. There were blusters, and there were oddly shaped tools and even simple clothes with odd symbols shining with power. And they fell upon the palace, and destroyed it and everyone and everything in it with not even a speck of dust left to see. ¡°Oops! Maybe I went a bit overboard. Destroying half the planet was not part of the contract¡­ Ah, well, at least I have learnt that mixing too many destructive magics like this is not advisable for small scale jobs, for wide spread destruction however¡­¡± and she laughed. And the scene shifted again. The third skyholm. He too was humanoid, but this time there were differences from the other two. Sure, the queen of shadows had a lot of her face hidden in her shadows, and her dark hair normally covered up what was left, but he was reasonably sure she was a human woman. This man was taller than normal. What''s more, he had wings. Wings not of anything physical like feathers, but of something ethereal. The people Rafe saw in the background seemed to have wings of fire, or lightning, or ice. In the time when the rest of the guardians became most active, the third Skyholm tried to unite the others in keeping peace in the multiverse. Too bad his own planet was in the middle of an interspecies war. One in which the other guardians seemed intent on meddling. And so at one meeting of the multiverse elite, Skyholm complained. ¡°This iteration of the war has taken much longer than it was supposed to. If it goes on too much, one of the races shall be extinct.¡± ¡°And what do you expect from us then, Skyholm?¡± ¡°Stop meddling. People of our power should not mess with the lives of mortals.¡± ¡°But yours is an interesting world. The people, of all races are born with innate affinities, and your species can even use elemental energy to fly. Maybe we might find someone with a rare affinity like yours to pass our mantles to as well.¡± ¡°Ah, so that is what this is about. The fact that the Skyholm mantle has already been passed down twice and none of you old bastards want yours to be handed down.¡± Skyholm surveyed the others arrayed before him. All Rafe could see though, when he surveyed the other six, were colours, just like he''d seen when he first stared at Skyholm¡¯s wings. Skyholm snorted. ¡°You selfish bastards. I always thought my rise to this mantle was easier than any of the others. Maybe putting you old coots in line was always meant to be my biggest contribution to the universe. Even gods need rules.¡± And in a burst of transcendent aura that hurt Rafe to look at, a battle broke out. Six against one, and with every fist thrown, every breath of fire, every clash of words of power, galaxies were razed. This then, was what was possible at the highest level. Rafe still didn''t get to find out what this magical being''s path was about. Apparently it was not suitable for him. There were more scenes to see though.