From a position firmly in the middle of the table, to one of the top Double Team fighters, the Ultimate Survivor champion, and ultimately the Grand Champion of Season XXXVI, Blade is one of the meteoric success stories of Ultimate Monster Battle Arena.
Dark Steel in particular was not the strongest monster, or at the very least had yet to unleash his potential. Rarely moved to violence in his first matches, it took long hours of dedicated training to turn him into the killing machine he became. This too is emblematic of Blade's style as a trainer - willing to dedicate himself not only to training monsters but also to developing his look and style, and playing up to the crowds. This proved particularly important in the hard-fought doubles matches, where style points were key to Heavy Metal's success.
Many trainers now look to Blade as inspiration for mid-tier trainers looking to make it big. Dedication and flair are both key, as well as bringing out the full potential of your monster. But few have managed to replicate his success, so it is also clear that talent is a large part of Blade's success. Clearly one of Bastion's most skilled trainers, he was able to teach monsters an array of impressive special moves as well as unlock their latent potential.
Naturally, where else to go once you've become Grand Champion? That's the question that all Grand Champions have faced. Some choose to keep slugging it out until they fall from grace or into obscurity. Others retire and live on a large pile of Riel for the rest of their lives. Blade? He was never satisfied while he was training in Bastion. He lived for the bigger challenges, so it was only natural he sought them out further afield.
–excerpt from Atop A Blackened Throne: A Biography of Blade, by Relic
“Hey Arc, come take a look at this. This has to be the work of Dark Steel, right?”
“Holy crap, Sand, yeah! Look, there's the D, and there's the S. Right across the rock face.”
“What do you think happened here?”
“Well, judging by the scrap scattered around and the giant laser burns across the floor, Dark Steel probably fought some kind of robotic monster.”
“Clearly won, as well, by the looks of it.”
“Well did you expect anything else? If the rumours are to be believed, Blade's been out touring the wastes for years now, trying to find a match for Dark Steel. He comes back to Bastion periodically and fights whoever's the current champion, to assert Dark Steel as the 'Greatest Champion Ever'.”
“Has he ever lost?”
“Don't think so. Not that I've ever heard of, anyway. I mean, look at this. This goes nearly a metre into the rock, and it's just a single GIGASLASH.”
“Maybe it's soft rock?”
“If it's so soft, smack your head against it.”
“Okay okay, yeah I heard stories about Dark Steel. He sounds like he was pretty powerful.”
“The most powerful monster ever, I'd reckon. That's probably why Blade's still out there somewhere, looking for anything to give him a good fight.”
“This thing didn't, by the looks of it. Whatever it was, though, it was huge. We should be able to sell all this for a small fortune.”
“We're just lucky he didn't need to OMNISLASH whatever he was fighting here, or there might not be anything for us to salvage.”
“Lucky us!”
“Lucky us.”
–A conversation between two wasteland scavengers picking over the titanic broken corpse of a mechanical monster
Monster researchers at UMBC's Science! divison report a breakthrough in classification, which should hopefully allow the official rankings to better reflect the realities of training.
Riddle, the trainer responsible, is quoted as saying, “We first ran into the problem with trying to classify monsters using the classic Five-S scale. As everyone knows, these are Size, Smarts, Speed, Stamina, and Strength. Unfortunately, when our previous rating of Strength - which went from Pathetic to Unstoppable - had to deal with a need breed of stronger, more powerful monsters using new advanced training techniques, we had to expand to include the new All-Powerful rating. This sufficed for a while, but unfortunately we've run into the Dark Steel problem.”
The so-called “Dark Steel problem” is a infamous one for monster classifiers. Dark Steel so transcends the normal boundaries of monster scale that the legendary monster is used as a litmus test for any newly-proposed classification system.
“Our breakthrough was simple: no other monster has achieved such a power level - at least that we are aware of - so we decided to simply invent a new, even higher category that sat above All-Powerful, and we named it 'Dark Steel'.”
Researchers are hoping that the new 'Dark Steel' rating will allow more sensible classification of monsters in the future. Whether this proves itself to be inadequate is difficult to judge, but certainly no evidence has yet come to light to suggest that it will be.
–excerpt from Monster Cataloguing Weekly, a zine purporting to rate every monster in existence