A little below the clouds, the overseer of the trial slowly floated as if invisible wings made him go forward in the air while subtly swinging up and down from time to time.

His eyes, looking to the horizon, now could see a river that cut the land from right to left and was surrounded by majestic purple trees with white flowers at the top, a few birds passed by him singing a beautiful melody while he descended to a small hill not far from the river.

While descending his gaze changed from the beautiful view in the horizon to what was below him, a mountain of corpses.

He wished that was a figurative description of what he saw, but unfortunately, it was literally a mountain of corpses, or in better words, a hill covered in corpses.

Hundreds of bodies charred, cut in half, decapitated or with a hole in the center of their chest, head, or with missing limps or even completely and utterly unrecognizable meat pastes, that once were human beings.

The scene didn’t made the overseer flinch, but only made him remember of his own past battles.

He gave a long sigh and descended at the top of the hill, where a single man stood alone laying his back against the base of an ash tree while slowly smoking a cigarette.

The man’s right hand was tinkering with an essence pistol as if he was already used to one, while his left hand moved to his mouth to take another drag at the cigarette.

The man raised his gaze and saw the overseer descending and as if it was something that was not of his concern, he moved his gaze to the side to enjoy the beautiful view that surrounded them.

The trees top and the river could be fully seen from the top of the hill where he stood.

“Beautiful isn’t?”

Said the man, still not moving his gaze, and puffing out the smoke from his lungs.

The overseer too didn’t move his gaze from the man as he already knew what he was talking about, and indeed in his opinion, was a beautiful view, but his focus was on other matters now, and not sparing the time to answer what was obvious to everyone who had eyes, he asked “You really had to kill them all?”

Hearing the question, Mack, put the pistol down, closed his eyes briefly as if remembering the events or if trying to figure a answer and said, “They had three opportunities to be alive now, and you know too…”

Mack opened his eyes, took a drag of the cigarette and continued, “The first time, I was trying to make all of them forfeit the trial by not entering, I tried to scare them at the beach, but they still went forward.”

Mack took a pause, and remembered the second time, everyone thought he was dead by the combined assault of a dozen of people, then when he came out of the smog they could have just turned their backs and entered the beach again and leave the trial.

“The second time, they could just have walked to the beach when they saw I was alive, but they still chose to attack me, together, almost a thousand against one. And the third time was here, the river was just a past this hill, they could have gone there, but they still chose to fight me together using the advantage of the the numbers again and again. Tell me, would you spare them?” Asked Mack back to the overseer, not actually caring for his answer, and changing his gaze back again to the tree tops to appreciate the view.

The overseer didn’t respond the question, the dead was dead, there is no ‘ifs’ when life ceased, there was no point in having a discussion about that, he was just curious about the way that Mack thought process worked, and seeing that Mack was in no mood to talk, he finished with a sentence “Congratulations on passing the trial, In half an hour a vehicle will come to take you and the other winner. The bodies will be collected later, and the ones who forfeit were already sent to another planet, so, if you want to collect the spoils of the battle, you better hurry up.” said him looking at the bodies everywhere.

Mack heard what the overseer said and his expression suddenly turned serious and he asked, “Winners? Who?” as he could not remember of leaving anyone alive.

“A mage, you cut her leg out, but she cauterized the wound and passed out. She is being treated by a healer right now as we speak”

“I see…” Said Mack, but his thoughts were unclear on the matter as the overseer could not read this man’s facial expressions.

Mack took a pause as if thinking and then changed the subject to the spoils as he said “I already collected what I think is worth.” and put his hand on the weird pistol by his side, the other two pistols were at his back already.

In Mack’s opinion the thing that he lacked most was having range attacks, specially when he used his middle finger runespell as he did today or the domain runespell, he could not keep throwing out his daggers and his swords all the time, someday he will not be able to get them back.

Mack had two ranged runespells for attack by now, the first one he developed that looked like a sniper shot, and the second one that looked like a fireball but with a fixed area as a target instead.

Both were great and could cause a lot of damage, but the problem was the activation, it took too much time during a battle, he could use them to initiate a battle when his hands were free or he still had time to activate them, but once he grabbed his swords and using his dual welding fighting style, he would have to drop the swords or put them back again and then wait for the activation of the runespells that could take time to activate.

The entire process was too cumbersome during an intense fight. But the guns he collected today could change that, they were mechanical guns just like the ones from Earth, the difference lay on the runes carved in the gun and bullets, and also, the bullets had essence crystals instead of gunpowder. The time to activate them would be the time to pull the trigger, much faster than his runespells, the problem, was the damage they caused, but Mack was sure he could at least try to optimize that, he had three guns, he was planning on doing research with one and then apply his final changes to the other two. In the worst case, he would at least learn a bit more about runes.

Just thinking about all this made his mood turn better as he fidgeted with the pistol full of runes.

The overseer spared a glance at the pistol but thought it was as worthless as any gun, limited, and said, “Don’t delay, and be at the beach in half an hour.”

With that said, the overseer took flight and disappeared on the sky, leaving behind only a gust of wind that blew at Mack’s nose, bringing with it the smell of rusted iron of blood once again.

“So there was a survivor….” Said Mack aloud as if thinking to himself, he could not come to a conclusion if it was a bad thing or a good thing.

“… I guess time will tell..” He said, already taking another drag at his cigarette and putting the matter at the back of his head.