The test from Heaven and Hell

A wide but shallow pit greeted Niklas. This was the end of the cave. This was where the legacy was found. Niklas jumped into the pit. The pit was not just a pit; it seemed like it used to be someone's dwelling place. The presence of a rotting wooden table, a rotting chest drawer made of bamboo, and a rotting bamboo bed stand, which were positioned at a corner of the pit adjacent to the entrance, indicated this. Niklas and his friends had no instruments to gauge the age of this furniture or know how recently the pit was last occupied.

The red-haired boy looked at the odd, dark wall behind the stand. The wall of the cave was earth brown, but a patch of the wall in the pit, which happened to be behind the bed stand, was coloured black. He and his friends had discovered that this was a route that led into the area of the cave where Phiona had marked its wall with a bold blue '3'.

The discovery was made after Emeka came back here, bleeding, crying, and screaming. He alerted the crew about the killers who were hot on his heels. It was unknown who exactly found out what the dark patch of the wall was, but all of them exited the pit before a small number of killers arrived in the pit.

The group walked through the dark patch of wall in the pit, into a dark tunnel, and to the exit point. They thought that they had evaded the killers, not knowing that they had walked into the hands of the rest of the killers who had waited at the exit point. To the eyes of the killers, Niklas' friends appeared from thin air. Niklas didn't follow his friends out. Diallo's intuition had felt the danger ahead, and he told Niklas not to leave the tunnel.

Emeka was the first to leave the tunnel, and he was the first to die. Niklas heard him scream as he was slain. The rest fought to their deaths.

Niklas had his eyes closed as he remembered what transpired in the pit. He remembered that Diallo was the last person to leave the dark tunnel. Diallo's last words to him were,

"You are a lucky lad. They don't have guns. If they overwhelm us, I will make sure that you are the only one that leaves this cave alive."

"Thank you, Diallo," Niklas whispered through tears.

He brought up his gaze from the floor and saw his friend standing before him through his memory. Diallo was as tall as him; he was dark-skinned, wore a full-stop earring on each of his ears, had a ripped muscular physique, and had a buzz cut. The image of Diallo dissipated like dust blown by the wind.

Niklas pulled up his system interface.

[NAME: Agu Niklas Vox.

AGE: 20 years old.

HEIGHT: 6'2 feet.

WEIGHT: 58 KG.

CLASS: Lightning-mancer.

RACE: Human/Demigod

PHYSICAL QUALITIES;

STRENGTH: 5+10

SPEED: 5+10

AGILITY: 5+10

STAMINA: 5+10

PERCEPTION: 1+10

****

MANA AFFINITY: 1+10

MANA VOLUME: 0+1000 MP

****

MISSION: Go to the secret cavern of Amadi and find the weapon—the lightning blade.

MISSION TYPE: timed quest. Timer: 12 hours. Time left: 05:12:05.

PUNISHMENT: You instantly lose the blessings from Amadi's legacy.

User activates the punishment when the user does not complete the quest within the stipulated time.]

Niklas fixed his gaze on the punishment for failing the mission.

"I won't lose this legacy," Niklas promised. "I got this blessing by the blood of my friends, and I will be a fool to lose it."

Niklas called off the interface and began searching the pit for the legacy. He first looked behind the chest drawer because the legacy was hidden in a pocket on the back of the chest. But the lightning blade was not there. He turned the bed stand on its head and proceeded to dismantle and destroy the bamboo bars, but he still couldn't find the weapon. He didn't give up and voraciously searched the pit. He went as far as digging into the walls and floor of the pit but found nothing.

'You have less than five hours to complete the mission!' Niklas' system reminded him.

Niklas tensed up, yelled in frustration, and kicked around the furniture and pieces of bamboo.

'Why is it hard to find this weapon? It is not like it's a legacy; it is just a damn weapon. What if someone had taken the weapon before I came here?'

Niklas pounded the earth in anger with his fist. He realised that his journey here would be for nothing if someone else had taken the weapon.

'What if the person with the weapon is still here?' Niklas calmed his nerves to think. 'I remember hearing that systems had an omnipresent and omniscient quality. That means the mission should change if the weapon isn't in here.'

Niklas became anxious. He wondered who the weapon was with—was it another legacy user, an awakened person, or an ordinary person? He worried that he might lose and die if it came down to a battle.

'But I have high perception. If there was another person in the cave, I would have known.' Niklas felt a bit relaxed, knowing this fact. 'Where in this cave could this weapon be? It doesn't help that I don't know what the weapon looks like.'

He pulled down his system interface, accessing only the mission bar.

[MISSION: Go to the secret cavern of Amadi and find the weapon—the lightning blade.

MISSION TYPE: timed quest. Timer: 12 hours. Time left: 04:58:02.

PUNISHMENT: You instantly lose the blessings from Amadi's legacy.

User activates the punishment when the user does not complete the quest within the stipulated time.]

'The lightning blade? It is surely a sword.'

He unhung the backpack and took out the bottle that contained the map. He decided to read the text on the lower third of the paper.

"Everything has an origin. For all, the origin was the concept of something. Something begot us all and put us in different tiers of life—the good side and the bad, ugly side. I was born ugly. But my heart wasn't ugly; I had a good heart. Now, all sides of life praise me. No one knows my birth origin or my struggles to reach this peak. Only I and my trustworthy blade will remember."

Niklas muttered, "A warrior's sword is always by his side."

He looked at where the bed stand used to be, but there was no sign that a sword was there.

'What if one of the killers had taken the sword?' It dawned on him that he never thought of how his friends managed to kill the enemies since only a few of them were armed after they abandoned their digging equipment at the pit.

'Could it be that my friends found the sword first? The sword must be there!' It made sense. One of his friends had found the lightning blade and kept it, but he didn't think it was worth anything. This friend was named Jadon. Jadon used the sword to fight the killers and managed to kill two of them before he was murdered.

Niklas rushed to the area of the cave where its wall was marked with '3'. The mess of bones and ash made it a difficult task to search for the sword. He used his hands to feel beyond the ash and bones. He wondered, 'How many of these bastards came after us?' 30 people were sent after him.

'Damn it! Using my feet will be faster.' Niklas walked across the area while stomping his feet. He soon had contact on four occasions with something metallic beneath the ash, but it was not the sword he was looking for because his system did not react to the discovery.

Cling! Niklas bent down and dug out a long sword with his fingers.

Ding! An automated bell rang in Niklas' mind.

[You have successfully completed a mission!

MISSION: Go to the secret cavern of Amadi and find the weapon—the lightning blade. Status: Completed.]

Niklas went on his knees, pumping his forearms, celebrating his success. Then the shocker came.

[Reward: Due to possessing Amadi's sword and Amadi's legacy—The Lightning Sheppard, you will undergo a test from heaven and hell to determine if you are worthy to keep the legacy.]

"Huh? A test from Heaven and Hell?"

Niklas tried to run away, but he bumped into an invisible barrier after taking a step. He discovered that he was trapped in a small, invisible sphere.

[Prepare yourself for the test. The test commences in 5,

4,]

Niklas desperately and repeatedly punched at the barrier, hoping to rupture a hole and escape. He feared heaven and hell because of the stories he heard about mortals visiting these planes and never returning just because they were mortals. What this entailed was that spirit bodies from astral projection or gods could exclusively visit this plane and return to whatever dimension they came from.

[3],

[2],

[1].

[You will be transferred to the limbo verse to undergo your test.]

Niklas yelled in fright as he felt every molecule of his existence gradually being transported away from Earth.

All around it was dark and silent; there were no sounds; not even the sound from his heartbeat could be heard. Suddenly, the light returned along with white noise. Niklas looked around. The place he was in currently was just land—red-colored land that had above it a red-coloured sky. He looked left, and he looked right; the scene seemed to continue to infinity.

Niklas began walking in a direction, aiming to find another existence. He looked at the sky, trying to locate the sun or the moon. Grrr! A growl made Niklas switch focus to forward. What he saw in front of him made his blood freeze and his heart race at an alarming pace.

A few metres before him was the most vile-looking creature he had ever seen. The creature had in its possession his mother and brother, who sobbed and desperately called out to him for him.

The vile creature was bipedal, black in colour with a silver lustre, and had two pairs of arms that tapered. The tapering edges were razor-sharp. Its backward elongated head featured no eye or eyes and had a wide mouth, which it gaped to a horrifying extent, revealing three rows of razor-sharp teeth on each jaw.

Nnedi and Zack lay on their beds before the creature that stared menacingly at them. When the bedridden called out to Niklas for help, the vile creature raised its head and bared its teeth at the demigod. Niklas had frozen in place. He gathered the guts to take a step, and the vile creature brought the knife edge of one of its arms onto Zack's neck.

"Please, don't kill them." Niklas shed streams of tears. "They are all I have left. My father and sister are gone. My mother and Zack are the only people that I share dreams with. Please don't kill them."

The creature closed its mouth and seemingly gave a mischievous smile. Before Niklas could react, the creature stabbed the bedridden mother and son, and they both died.

"No!" Niklas cried and angrily charged at the vile creature. The creature didn't act like a coward and charged towards the lanky, red-haired man.