Collision by Alyx D. Vacca (e ink ebook reader TXT) 📖

it." I sighed, great this is just what I needed. As a guess people here do not like Earthlings and would rather I not be here.
The room that we walked into was like what I would describe as a mermaids cave. The walls had seashells pressed into them and the floor... Was non existent. All there was, was a deep pool that seemed to stretch down for forever. There was, how ever, a narrow walkway that went around the pool. "WELCOME!" What sounded like a giants voice boomed. "THIS IS THE FIRST CHALLENGE, YOU ARE TO SWIM TO THE BOTTOM OF THE POOL OF MER AND BRING BACK A KNIFE. BUT NOT JUST ANY OLD KNIFE! BUT ONE OF THE KNIVES OF THE MER! MAKE SURE TO GET IT, EVEN IF YOU COME IN LAST. FOR THAT KNIFE WILL BE ABLE TO HELP YOU IN THE FUTURE CHALLENGES. REMEMBER! ONLY ONE KNIFE PER TEAM, OTHERWISE YOU WILL BE DISQUALIFIED AND YOUR FAMILY SHAMED FOREVER!" "Why would I care if my family was shamed forever? If this works I wont ever see anyone from Treah again." I whispered to Tobi. He shrugged and said, "All the same, I hope you are a good swimmer." "THE TIME LIMIT IS FIVE HOURS. BEGAN!" Everyone dived into the pool. I was lucky. I used to be on the diving team in middle school and could dive pretty good. The only problem was that I was not the only one who could dive. As I kicked to the bottom of the pool I saw hundreds of knives. None of them looked the same and I had no idea which one of them was a Mer Knife. Some one touched my ankle I whipped around, trying to keep myself from gasping, I was running out of air, to see Tobi trying to tell me something. Something about the knives I think. Why did he not just get one? Instead he was trying to tell me which one to get. I pointed up and shot to the surface. I saw Tobi standing on the edge completely dry. What the hell! "Jayd!" He yelled across the water. "Get a dull one!" Get a dull one? But Tobi was more experienced in this kind of thing than I was. Tobi was the only one standing there, could he not swim? I dived down just as the first person shot to the surface clutching a knife. I dived down swimming for all I was worth. At the bottom I saw people trying to figure out just what kind of knife they were supposed to bring up. I saw a really boring knife and held it against me thumb to see if it was sharp. It was not! Since I had did not know what kind of dull Tobi was talking about I went for both kinds. I swam back to the surface. Once there I gulped down air filling my oppressed lungs. "DO YOU HAVE A KNIFE, CAW?" The voice boomed. I nodded and started swimming to the edge. As I hulled myself up to dry floor a short and squat man held out his hand. "LET ME SEE THE KNIFE." He asked. So this person is the one with the voice loud enough to wake the dead, he did not look it. I handed him the knife. He looked at the knife and then touched the edge and nodded. He brought out a cloth and started drying the blade. Once dry he handed it back to me and turned back to the pool. "DO YOU HAVE A KNIFE, CASNALIN?" I looked at the knife in my hand. It was completely different from the one I had brought from the water. It had a blade that looked as if it was made of Mother of Purl although it was much stronger. The hilt was made out of rock it seemed but it had pieces of bright coral embedded in to it. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Tobi came up behind me and looked over my shoulder. "Mer Knives are only pretty and useful when dry or being used by a Mer. When that man dried it he unlocked its powers." He looked like he had just seen something marvelous. "Do you want to see it?" I asked. "No!" He looked startled and somewhat fearful and pulled away. "Well there is no reason to make a scene. You could have just said 'no' and left it at that." A team near ours was standing with a knife and snickering at us. "Mer Knives are bound to whom ever pulls them out of the water. If I touched it, I would either burn or freeze, and neither one of those is good." I stared at the wonderful knife. Could it really do that? "TEAMS NUMBERS 1,2,3,6,9 AND10 ALL PASS. CONGRATULATIONS! PLEASE CONTINUE THROUGH THOSE DOORS." Two doors on the other side of the pool swung open.

Chapter Five
The Second Challenge

On the other side of the doors leading from the Mer room there was a giant sized room filled with well... giants. All of them had to be at least twenty feet tall and thirty feet from the ground was a spectators box in which sat a portly old woman with a mega phone. "Your job is to last three hours in this room while these giants try to eat or step on you. In short they are trying to kill you." Yeah, as if that was not clear enough. "Began! Giants! Eat your fill!" We all scattered. As me and Tobi ran from one of the giants, (He looked like a huge potato on legs with red curly hair, if you wanted a description) I asked him why the giants did not attack the old woman. "Because she is up higher than all of them. They are all stupid. They are not used to anything being taller than them that is edible. And giants do not usually grow to thirty feet." "So if we get up higher than them we win?" He nodded. "Let's do it!" We ran to the wall and started looking for a way up. We had but two advantages, but both could be rendered useless if a giant stepped on us by mistake. We were small which meant that we could run in between there legs and the giants took up most the space they had to push and shove to get to their prey. The other advantage was that we actually had brains that we used. Our giant was, at the moment, trying to untangle himself from his fellows. I looked up and said, "I wish we had that rubber chicken right now." Tobi grinned. "I do not think that would be necessary." He pointed to some normal sized stairs to our right. Some others were already running up them. We ran to the stairs and hurried up them as fast as we could. The problem was, was that the stairs only went up twenty feet. We would be level with the giants heads. When we got to the top platform the other team glared at us. "Go back down," one of them said. "We do not need a Earthling up here or even in the Tournament at all." "That is nice," I said absently, looking around for a way to get higher. "There!" I pointed to a platform ten feet above where we were now standing. "She is stupid, just what to expect from an Earthling," the boy who said that I was not needed sneered. "And just how did you expect to get there?" "Well," Tobi said, stepping forward. "I think she wants a rubber chicken." He turned to me. "Is that so?" I grinned and nodded. "A rubber chicken?" The boys partner asked. He looked to be a little young to be in this kind of competition. "Yep." Tobi closed his eyes and muttered the strange words again. There was a loud bang and then, there was rope. "So you now have rope, big deal. You can not do anything with it," the older and meaner boy said, slightly put off by the show of magic. Tobi muttered some more holding the rope out to me. I took it. He motioned for me to throw it. I did. The rope flew through the air just like the one that I shot over the gym. It flew up and over and on to the platform above us. Tobi came over and took the other end of it from me and gave it a hard yank. It held. He then pressed the end to the floor and stood up. The rope stretched taut between the two spaces. "You can come with us if you shut up," Tobi told them. He motioned for me to start climbing. I climbed trying not to think of what might happen if a giant spotted me hanging in the air. Helpless. Unable to move. I hurried up the rope. Once up I looked to see what had held the rope up here. I found the rope lying on the ground. Not very reassuring I tell you. I waved to the others to tell them that I was up and that they should start climbing. I stood as look out to warn them if a giant came this way. Now that I was up here I realized that there would be people that would not pass this part of the Tournament. People die in these Tournaments. That was another thing that Tobi and other Treahians had failed to mention when informing the public that this was going to take place and drafting all the teens. And I could very easily be one of the dead.
Now the insulting boy was up and his partner was on the rope. Tobi was nervous for some reason, he kept looking around. I know that he should be nervous, after all there are a lot of vicious man eating giants ten feet to his left. But he seems more nervous than that when I realized that I had forgotten that he was afraid of heights and now he had to climb a rope suspended twenty-five feet in the air. He must be looking around to disguise his fear. I wondered if he could do it. He had frozen on the rope at school, but maybe his fear of the giants would push the other one out of his head for a moment. Unfortunately we had no such luck. When the smaller boy got to the top (I learned their names later, the small one is Cole, and the bigger and meaner one is Henry. Seriously?) I looked down to see Tobi looking up with terror on his face he saw me and shook his head, he could not do it. Crap! "What is up with him?" Henry asked, coming up behind me. "He