By Sh33p, CultofSh33p@aol.com
The great sequal of New Age. It'll knock your socks off. Tim Seltzer, seltzer@seltzerbooks.com
Sh33p Disclaimer: I don`t own Zoids. Consider this disclaimer valid for the whole damn story :P
Foreword: Chapter soundtrack is as follows:
Zoids - Raven`s Theme
The Two Towers - Helm`s Deep
Metallica - One
Puddle of Mudd - She Hates Me/Blurry
Couldn`t really find a song to fit the last scene, but listen to each song for each of the first four scenes. Pick your own for the last.
Fifteen seconds ago, the Wild Eagle had thought that things couldn`t possibly get any worse than they already had been. Leyla had effectively been kidnapped, Jamie was unconscious, a berserk Blue Geno Breaker was going nuts and an entire, heavily armed and armored paramilitary installation had been alerted to the severity of the situation that it was facing, meaning an armed, likely massive response wasn`t going to be long in coming.
Fifteen seconds ago, the Wild Eagle had thought things couldn`t get any worse.
Fourteen seconds ago, he had been proven wrong.
Dead. Wrong.
"Is this the only reception I get? I came all the way out here for the specific purpose of slaughtering someone and all I get is a lousy Scout Fox?" Echoed out from a newly formed black cloud at the center of the space between the two closest Whale Kings, the explosion it had formed from having thrown the currently-Zoidless Wild Eagle through the air. He had only landed on his feet with no broken bones by the graces of whatever god was watching over him, skidding along and smacking facefirst right into a newly entering soldier.
Will got the good end of that deal, standing up and promptly pulling the triggers of his two guns, only to find out too late that he was now out of ammo. A split second`s compromise and he would`ve remedied that problem with ease, but he wouldn`t get the chance.
"Ah well, it`ll do."
Pulse cannon shots rang out, the Scout Fox lunged out of the way and barely avoided getting vaped into oblivion like the side of the Whale King it had come out of, the huge carrier`s guts now clearly exposed and ablaze. The group of soldiers accompanying the one that Will had crashed into promptly scattered in fear, leaving their comrade and their former prisoner behind in the process of trying to make a vain attempt at escaping.
"Jamie, get outta here!" Brad yelled out over his own loudspeaker, unknowing of the change that had occured. Despite the naming issue, Will followed orders without hesitation, running towards the nearest exit as quickly as his legs could carry him and ignoring the sounds of a very one-sided battle going on in the background.
"This isn`t the Geno Saurer," Brad thought in the meantime, nimbly guiding his newly acquired Zoid through a string of almost intentionally poorly aimed gunfire, exploding the normally smooth, metallic terrain all around it into a mutilated no-man`s land, quickly cutting down the options that the small Zoid had for places to run to.
All too late though, Brad realized he was being roped into a trap, and by the time he fully figured it out, the smoke had blown open to reveal a monstrous black demon from Hell, diving at him with jaws wide open, laser-sharp teeth ready to clamp shut on his stolen Zoid`s throat in a death grip.
*CLAMP*
"WHAT THE FUCK?!" The former mercenary finally let out, his Scout Fox being yanked from the ground by it`s neck, flailing all the while. The attacker was even faster than he`d expected, comparable to a Lightning Saix even without activating any visible thrusters, and it`s vicelike grip rivaled that of the Elephander with no trouble whatsoever. For the first time since the battle at the Blitz Team base, Brad was coming to the realization that the best thing he could hope for was either survival or a painless death.
"Still as predictable as you were the last time I trashed you," Kale mocked, the head of the Geno Maxis suddenly shaking around, and by default, flinging the Scout Fox around with it like some cloth-made rag doll, leaving Brad to yell out in desperation and curse himself for not having put his safety harness on. It was a terrifying ride, he was only able to prevent himself from being smashed into the ceiling of the cockpit by sheer force of will alone - that and his vice like clinging to the control console.
"What the hell do you want from me?!" Brad managed to half-yell out, promptly losing his grip on the controls and flinging up into the ceiling, headfirst. If it had been like his last confrontation with Kale Obscura, he would`ve been knocked out, but this time, even with a new concussion, adrenaline kept him going, blood now staining the cockpit`s monitor.
Finally, the shaking stopped. The former mercenary dropped like a stone back into the seat, biting back tears against what felt almost like a cracked skull while Kale, who had been so effortless thus far, merely chuckled.
"I just want you to die. Is it that hard to understand?"
"Why? Don`t you have issues with Vega or some shit?!" Brad growled out, louder than he`d wanted but not really able to do much else, instinctively using one hand to pat over his head and make sure his skull was still intact and the other to yank the safety harness down and strap it in so tightly that he could barely even lean forward enough to reach the controls.
"Vega? Hah. Fuck Vega. My issues`re with your team mate, and ya see, if you die, he ends up feeling emotional pain for it - cuz you are one of his pals, and any goody-fucking-two-shoes like that is gonna be in near-agony that anyone used his friends to nail him. Get it?" Kale asked, a bit cockier and a bit less articulate than usual. It was obvious that he was too busy enjoying himself to really put any major spin onto things.
"You`re... You`re nuts..."
"... Gee, it took you this long to figure that little detail out? Shit, you really are stupid."
Brad felt the cockpit start moving again, higher up than it had been before, and for a few seconds, he held his breath, putting both hands onto the harness and preparing for whatever Kale had in store for him.
It wasn`t pretty.
A split second passed by in an eternity before the Scout Fox was practically judo-mouth-tossed into the steel flooring of the hangar, it`s legs crumpling and shattering like nothing as stabilizers blew out, sending caps flying through the semi-smoky air like oversized bullets, leaving visible craters in the sides of the two Whale Kings to either side of the ruthless execution that Kale Obscura was carrying out on Brad Hunter.
Jarred half-senseless, Brad squeezed his eyes half-shut as the brutalized Scout Fox was dragged from the floor again, tearing several plates up before all of the legs outright snapped off beneath the knee and elbow joints, power quickly beginning to fade and static starting to cover the viewscreen. Sparks were flying out of numerous openings across the small Zoid`s stomach, and one of the shoulders had come loose enough that it was hanging on by only half of the motor unit it was moved with, cables having pinched and snapped all over it. Smoke was starting to pour out of the Zoid`s back, as well, leaving one to wonder just how much more abuse it could take before exploding.
"... Nnnngsh..." Brad groaned out, almost totally deprived of his senses at this point. Where Bit Cloud had been able to keep fighting - or at least try to while trying to escape - Brad Hunter could not. For one thing, Bit had a great deal more natural talent and luck, as well as an Organoid and a better Zoid to compliment them both, and for another, Kale Obscura wasn`t toying with him. He just wanted the ex-mercenary dead.
"Still alive? Wow, I guess you`re about as tough as you are stupid, huh?" Kale asked, taking an utterly perverse joy in smashing his defenseless prey in with absolute impunity. Brad groaned out again in response, trying to form a coherent sentence that would`ve been packed with every single forbidden word in the common language, only to find that he could barely sputter out a muted curse beneath his breath.
A curse that was the precursor to the Scout Fox being through through the air with so little effort that it was laughable, practically floating for a few seconds before smashing sideways into the already abused Whale King it had walked out of in the first place.
There was a crumpling of metal, the unhinged shoulder flew free and crashed somewhere else in the immense space of hangar that the slaughter was taking place in, and after that, the Scout Fox smacked down onto the floor, on it`s stomach, facing the very Zoid now poised to annihilate it.
There was a swish of air, the Maxis` crestblade flipped forward, shimmering murderously as the Geno took a step forward and crouched, taking a sadistic amount of time to line things up just right to plunge the blade straight through the very center of the cockpit.
Survival instincts kicked in, with the screen rapidly starting to black out across multiple grids, Brad pulled the harness open and ducked out of it, pushing it back down and then inching to the side as much as he possibly could, the last grad of the monitor blacking out with an image of the Geno Maxis charging forward.
"Work, damnit..."
*SHANK*
Glass slagged before it could finish shattering, the inches-thick, two foot tall blade of the Geno Maxis stabbed straight through and kept on going for what must`ve been ten, eleven, maybe even twelve feet, gutting straight through the material of the harness and the seat behind it, missing Brad by such a short distance that his trademark blue longvest was just about skinned at the chest, the very tip of the zipper flash-melting off in an instant. Any closer and it would`ve run him through, going in one side and ripping out of the other.
More than any time in his life, Brad Hunter felt he had just lucked out.
And then he realized that he wasn`t through yet. Kale had shown that he was destructive before, he had become even more so since then, which lead Brad to the conclusion that the base itself - and with it, his brutalized, stolen Scout Fox, would soon be going bye-bye.
The blade seemed to hang in place for precious seconds, as if Kale was taking his time, visualizing the life draining out of his apparent victim, and then it drew away, slipping back out so perfectly that the cut through the glass, and the seat and harness, was left unscathed, not widened or heightened in any way. Hunter let out a gasp of relief, only now noticing that he had been holding his breath over the course of the past thirty seconds, though his gasp was completely overshadowed by the murderous growl of the Zoid that had been trying to obliterate him.
Gunshots rang out, Brad couldn`t see a thing, and quite honestly - he didn`t want to. The sounds of metal crunching like tin foil, ripping apart as if it were paper caught in the malicious path of a broadsword and blowing apart like a cardboard box trying to withstand a firecracker weren`t long in coming, which meant that those on base must have started trying to mount some sort of counter-offensive, however hopeless it was.
Loud, unhidden steps echoed, moving slowly away from the downed Scout Fox, as if Kale was taking his time, enjoying the utter immunity he probably had to the firepower of the disoriented patchwork defense force, and after a few short moments, Brad made his move, roughly kicking at the thin gap in the glass and breaking it before jumping out into plain sight.
The black Geno evolution was standing not too far away, it`s back turned, arms literally stretched out across a distance they weren`t initially capable of. The claws of one had been sunken into the head of an Iron Kong, the other was extended straight through it`s chest and out the back like a hot knife through butter.
All Brad knew was that he wasn`t going to stay and watch - he had to leave. Now.
"Good luck Jamie, I don`t think I`m gonna be able to hunt your scrawny ass down again," he thought to himself, turning and promptly breaking into a sprint towards the same hole that had been punched into the side of the Whale King hangar by the escaping Fatalistic Renegade, all of five minutes earlier. Maybe it was the dizziness caused by a newly reformed concussion, maybe it was fear and maybe it was just a classic case of the rock and the hard place, but when he got to the very edge of that forced exit, nothing stopped him.
Not even a ninety foot drop into the rushing currents of the river that the base had been built to overlook.
Without so much as an ounce of hesitation or even a last word, Brad
jumped over an upturned piece of metal and went flying, curling his legs
up to his chest and holding his nose all the way down before making splashdown
on the water`s surface and vanishing beneath the waves.
A sharp right turn, guarded on all sides, alertness pre-empted an attack that wasn`t ever even going to come and a kick lashed out as a nimble, seemingly well-honed body went flying backwards through the air on it`s sideways, the soft point of the knee constricting around a man`s throat, the trap slipping shut like the crushing utensils used to open up a crab or lobster shell in a resturaunt. Instantly, reflexes that would`ve taken a martial arts master a lifetime to hone were put to use - along with a seemingly inhuman show of control and agility, with the attacker swinging, the muscle on his lower leg catching the victim`s chin and the other leg coming into play in a downward kick to the nearest shoulder.
*Cerck-POP!*
The first leg uncoiled, springing away from the newly deceased man as a young fellow all but hovered in the air for a tenth of a second, legs straightening up beneath him, knees bending with the touchdown and a hand anchoring to the floor supportively as the landing turned into a crouch.
His head hanging down lopsided, neck completely broken, the Rommel guard`s hands dropped to his side. His lips sagged open and let out a dying breath, and then his knees gave way. With a muffled thump onto the smoothly shined metal floor, he ceased to stand, lying on his side, completely dead.
And a few moments later, he was also looted of his sidearm and the two clips of ammunition he`d been keeping for it.
With no remorse whatsoever, Will stood up straight and shook out his right leg - the one he had used to break this nameless lackey`s neck like a twig - and leered over his shoulder to make sure that he hadn`t been seen by anyone else. To his own personal luck and relief, it appeared that he had been given the fortune of finding the only bastard stupid enough to hold his post, even as the base rattled, the tremor originating from the colossal hangar that the Wild Eagle had escaped from in the first place.
A pause, he stuffed the two clips into his jumpsuit`s front shirt pocket - a feature that had originally been Jamie`s idea. The other personality hadn`t ever really thought of a use for that pocket, or the ones in the pants, he`d always had his lightly armored vest after all. Right now, Will was thanking any local gods and goddesses that Jamie had useless ideas sometimes, if only because this one turned out to not be useless after all.
And speaking of Jamie...
"Feel free to fuckin` wake up anytime now," Will bit out in a hushed whisper through grit teeth. Another tremor hit - he could vaguely register the sound of an explosion, even through what was roughly more than a hundred feet of double - sometimes triple or quadruple reinforced steel, which was probably becoming increasingly mutilated and faulty as the brutality continued.
Almost as an afterthought, Will slapped the button on the corner that had a 'Blast Door' label stamped beneath it, watching the ceiling around the concealed door promptly slip open, with the three inch thick slab of ten-by-seven metal dropping into place under the force of gravity alone. After that, he turned around and promptly took off down the hallway, darting past numerous open-and-shut doorways and encountering no resistance along the way, until finally he came to a pair of elevator doors. The first was still shut, but the second was slipping open as he arrived.
For a split second, he hesitated to continue forward, fearing that he might have had to turn back.
Then the doors finished opening and roughly a half a dozen mechanics could be seen, each of them looking terrified beyond words. Instinct and reflexes guided his hand, before he even finished looking at them, the gun in his hand was thrown up and aim had been taken, but by the time he could start pulling the trigger, the elevator promptly dropped out of sight, leaving the men and women inside to go screaming to their deaths a few dozen feet below after crashing into a sub-level of some kind.
Another pause. He blinked.
"... Well, fuck ya`ll too," he complained annoyedly, then whipped around in time to hear the blast bay door he had left behind all of a minute and a half earlier creaking and groaning. It wouldn`t hold much longer, and with only one escape left open to him...
Normal people would`ve given up. Will just tucked the gun into his hip pocket and stepped cautiously onto the edge of the elevator, the doors having frozen in place as power started going out. With little fear but a good bit of hesitation remaining, he reached blindly into the darkness on the left side of the door way, fumbling into nothing before checking on the right.
Success came in the form of cold, iron bars.
"Maintenance ladder," he thought needlessly, getting a tight grip and then swinging around the edge of the door with one hand, the other shooting blindly onto one of the bars, his feet already landing in a climbing position as his shared-brain calculated the distance between each of them, already beginning to climb up as if on auto-pilot by the time a fiery metallic shriek echoed from the hallway, which was already beneath him.
Self-preservation urged him on, a feral orange glow briefly shimmering through the opened elevator door before crimson flames belched into sight beneath him, automatically raising the shaft`s temperature by at least twenty degrees. Still, he kept going, moving higher and higher, to where the flames couldn`t reach him, even though they had died down by now. The men and women he`d seen earlier had been mechanics, he had no doubt of that because they had all been wearing mechanic jumpsuits, it was like it was stamped on their freaking chests.
That meant that one of the floors had to lead to a secondary hangar, which was likely to be on the top floor, which in turn was probably located at the top of the shaft.
He didn`t know how far he was from the top, but time really does tend to fly when you`re on the run from a genocidal madman, and what was probably ten or twenty minutes of breakneck climbing felt like only two or three seconds to him by the time he finally came to a closed doorway at the top, finding his hopes for escape dashed instantly.
"Fuck."
"Try shooting some grip holes into the nearest door..."
"Good to see you`re finally awake, Brainiac," Will commented, holding on for dear life with one hand and grabbing his gun with the other. Seconds went by, filled with muted gunfire that couldn`t hope to overtake the sound of creaking, yielding building supports below, but after emptying his first clip, sending it falling out of his gun to the bottom sub-levels however many hundreds of feet below and then cramming a new one in with one hand, neither Jamie, or the currently dominant Wild Eagle could really focus on any sound right now.
It had taken two shots for each shallow grip, but without any power to keep the doors shut, those two shots for each were all it had taken, leaving Will to forcibly pull the first half of the door out of the way enough to squeeze through, automatically raising his gun again and finding himself in an empty hangar.
An empty, aerial Zoid hangar.
One cracked grin later, Will lowered his gun back into his pockets and cracked his knuckles with a Lupinesque snicker.
"Eeny, meeny, miny, mo..."
"Just pick one!"
"My annoyingotherhalftoldme to pick that one," he stated proudly, singling out an eerily familiar, grass-green Zoid that just happened to be situated in plain sight, the only Wild Eagle-worthy thing currently left in a hangar which had formerly been crammed with twenty Redler Interceptors, a two dozen Foxbats and twelve high agility Sinkers - the 'home guard' for the base, as far as the aerial front went. Not that he particularly cared either way, then again, neither of them did for that matter, but still.
"Talk about fuckin` convenient, eh?"
"Check for bombs. Don`t forget what happened to Brad`s first Scout Fox, or that the commander of that escaped Whale King had to know what was going on..."
"Could`ve been a coincidence," Will shrugged, jogging across the near-empty hangar and swiping a thick, weighty vest from the floor as he did so. Obviously, everyone who had escaped hadn`t been paying attention to small things while in their rush, someone must`ve taken it off and forgotten it...
"Will."
"What?"
"First a Geno Breaker busts loose. Then the pilot turns out to know Leyla. Leyla knows him. Then an Organoid busts into the party and kidnaps her. Then the pilot goes nuts and leaves, right after a Whale King breaks out through the hangar door. Then a murderous psycho just happens to plow through the roof as Brad comes out in a new Zoid. Then we find a convenient flak jacket and our Raynos waiting for us."
Dumbfounded silence.
"Don`t ya think that`s a liiiiiittle bit too coincidental?"
"... Good point, but I`m not paranoid enough to look a gift horse in the mouth," Will replied, checking around the Zoid briefly in order to make sure it didn`t have any freshly altered things, like new welding, improperly colored bolts, diggering starter caps, things of that nature, then climbing up into the cockpit after taking a look under the seat.
"You`re freaking nuts."
"... This coming from someone who holds conversations with his other personality," the Wild Eagle replied, strapping himself in as another tremor rattled the entire base, making it sound more and more like the upright-barbel structure`s thinner midsection would be giving way soon. Either way, they weren`t waiting to find out.
The primary thruster ignited, the Zoid squawked a bit annoyedly and promptly took off into an unsteady run towards the exit, jumping clumsily over the edge before bursting off from zero to mach three so quickly that it would`ve killed just about anyone else, blaring through the low skies before making a rapid ascent and heading off over the horizon at top speed, leaving the immense base in the distance to come crumbling down around itself without so much as a single spare survivor.
Kale Obscura was thorough alright, but this time, he wasn`t thorough
enough.
Sensation, the ability to detect things through the five conventional senses, was something that had always been taken for granted by most people. Sure, there were those who were disabled in some way, but even they could take it for granted sometimes.
He couldn`t. He had forgotten who he was by now, existing solely in the realm of the senses, all six of them. From the feel of the solid rock of the ground crumpling and buckling out of his way over the course of a little over three miles every few minutes to the way that the sound was analyzed by his newfound hearing so many times over that it would`ve driven him insane, were he any less than what he now was. It extended outward from there, too, from sight so powerful that he could see through the solid earth itself, visualizing his target over a hundred miles away, and to his sense of smell, where every single scent of dirt was imagined, taken in and scrutinized before he could even register it.
And there was the sixth sense, the ability to register movements in the planet`s own magnetic field, tracking virtually every surge of energy across the spectrum, even going so far as to feeling the shifts caused by solar winds and clashing particles high in the atmosphere, it was like he had a built-in, secondary road map, tuned specifically to his brain.
He had once lived in a pitch black haze, going from fix to fix, squandering wealth that he had never even bothered to work for and learning how to pilot with the best that he could afford, and then there`d been the day he had lost it all. From there, the haze had been painful, going from fix to fix as before, but with longer intervals, torturously existing in what could best be described as a pitch black hell of withdrawls, with just enough in-betweeners to fill the void and keep him from becoming clean from it all.
And now?
Now, every single slither of his massive body brought him into a paradigm of ecstasy, heightened infrequently by pulses of something in his smaller self`s bloodstream. If he had been able to see himself, he would`ve probably had nightmares for the rest of his life. Cables and wires had been jammed into his body at almost every point, he hardly even looked vaguely human anymore, from the nutrient tubes that pumped new life into him to the waste management system that kept him from soiling himself to the fact that his skull was missing from the forehead up, leaving in place a disturbing looking helmet to cover his brain, tubes that were inches thick extending out to other parts of his merry little chamber of Hell. He wore no clothing, it would`ve been a moot point anyway, and his eyes were covered by what looked like goggles of some sort, a permanently cracked smile hidden by the mask covering his mouth and nose, sending filtered air mixed with mood altering, performance enhancing chemicals engineered into sprays coming in at regular times.
Even his true flesh wasn`t the same, taking on patches of what looked like the covering of a Zoid Core, every beat of his heart making each patch shimmer dimly with life that wasn`t even his own now.
He wasn`t human anymore. He had become something else.
Gunther Prozen would`ve looked upon him with envy, Hiltz would`ve looked upon him with challenging respect, but his own brother looked upon him with nothing but ruthlessness and calculated thought, and the people he knew he would soon be set loose upon...
They would all look upon him in terror.
He wasn`t human anymore. He wasn`t even a true, pure Zoid either.
He was the Hellwalker, and soon, he would let the world know why he
had been given that name.
It had taken an hour and a half to get all of the refugees from Romeo City off of the Empress Heart, they were all a good deal quicker to leave and enjoy the free, protected, civilized space of Champton than they had been to get onto what had felt like hour after hour of riding around in a flying sardine can, leaving the Whale King`s volunteer crew as the last group of people to disembark.
Not counted among that core grouping was the extended family-like bunch of people that had been the top of the command structure on the ride to relative safety, namely the Tauros family, Naomi Fluegel, Sarah Obscura and Leyon Martin. Sarah hadn`t come since she had gone off to find Steve and Leyon, while the other three were left to make the exit without any major fanfare of any sort, which is exactly what they wanted.
Naomi had been the first to come into view, stepping almost dizzily down the jaw-ramp of the huge ship, and she was followed by a half-asleep looking Leon, who was stretching his arms out as if it were the first time in his life that he had been granted freedom from a packed cell, leaving Leena to bring up the rear, though she was also the only one who wasn`t visibly exhausted.
Ironic considering she had probably done more work than either of her cohorts put together.
Which was even more ironic because of a simple fact. It was Leena Tauros. Leena. Tauros. It was quite blatant that the world was coming to an end when Leena-freaking-Tauros outworked her older brother and Naomi Fluegel, combined. A sure sign of the apocalypse, no doubt.
But there was at least one fan there, though his attentions weren`t geared towards Leon and Naomi in the slightest.
All things considered, Harry Champ looked like he`d seen better days. Hands tucked sloppily into his jacket pockets, he wasn`t wearing the platform shoes that made him four or five inches taller and his hair was a mess, while Sebastian and Benjamin were both noticably absent, and quite frankly, he looked like the only sun he had seen in the past week and a half had been from a television. Even if his expression lightened dramatically upon sight of the girl at the back of the exiting line, he still looked as though the weight of every single problem on Zi had been dropped on his head and then smacked down with a sledge hammer.
In short, he looked almost as bad as he felt, managing to raise up an arm in a wave over at the departing trio, which in turn caught the eye of the first of the three.
"What the hell happened to him?" Naomi asked bluntly, somewhat taken aback by the young man`s appearance. She`d seen Harry before, two or three times in chance encounters or second hand viewings on a monitor, but now? Eesh...
"The reality that the world isn`t made of gold, I hope," Leon half-mumbled under his breath. He had never had much like for the rich kid, half of it was due to his own dislike of the fact that he`d probably never had to work for anything in his life, the other half was just the big brother part of him being needlessly protective of Leena.
And as for Leena`s thoughts on the visible changes to her not-so-secret-admirer/stalker/walking-0%-interest-loan-office were the least indifferent of the group, however restrained they might have been. For a fruitcake like Harry to look as bad as he did right now, something had to have happened. She was also the only one to even return the poor guy`s wave, breaking rank from the other two and plainly walking across the landing pad towards him, leaving Naomi to stifle a rude joke about lunatics of a feather and Leon to shift a sideways glare in Harry`s general direction.
"Hi," the heir to the Champ Corporation greeted a bit glumly, his voice sounding rubbery for some reason, though the fact that Leena was even present lifted his mood drastically. Now within an arms reach of him though, Leena quirked a brow at the deep bags currently sitting just below his eyes, and the fact that those eyes themselves were bloodshot. Majorly.
"What`s wrong?" She asked without even bothering to return his greeting, placing her hands on her hips and waiting for an answer. It seemed to be a comedic irony to Harry though, he just let out a cracked, overly aware grin and an uncharacteristic giggle, turning and starting to walk away as if he was on the verge of bursting into laughter.
Now, she knew something was wrong, reaching out a hand and vicing her fingers down onto his shoulders, tongue in cheek with an expression that probably would`ve slagged titanium like a heavy duty laser. Harry only paused in mid-step, briefly losing his balance - or thinking it - and straightening up, both hands now hanging limply at his sides in resignation.
"Guess I don`t have a choice, huh?"
"Nope," the girl retorted bluntly, still maintaining her grip so tightly that Harry`s shoulder had probably started bruising beneath his jacket. Either way, his expression remained neutral.
"Could we at least go somewhere private if you`re going to grill my brains out?" He asked only half-heartedly, for once not dumping energy into glorifying the girl who was now holding him in place like an annoyed anchor.
"Lead the way," she answered, releasing her grip for all of a tenth of a second before locking her fingers onto his ear, causing Harry`s face to contort into a mostly unreadable, otherwise annoyed looking expression. "But you`re not getting out of this," she added as an afterthought, a layer of concern underlining her voice. It was roughly equivelent to saying 'I`m going to get the truth out of you, even if means beating you over the head with a brick. Because I`m worried about your wellbeing,' and meaning every word of it.
Either way, Harry got the message, tilting back and to the side a bit while hobbling off, with Leena coming along an arms length behind, still holding his ear with one hand.
Naomi and Leon were both staring mutely at this for a few seconds before finally sharing a sideways glance at each other.
"Which bodypart goes first?" Naomi asked as idly as if speaking about the weather. Leon seemed to take the question into actual consideration, thoughtfully regarding the young man who was dragging his sister off somewhere. Sort of.
"Depends on the circumstance, I suppose."
"Such as?"
"If he does anything like you-know-what with her, Harry`s losing his Champs."
At that, Naomi gave a long, slow nod and Leon narrowed his eyes with
that big brother look practically oozing out of every pore on his face.
A long time ago, somewhere in the range of one to ten thousand years, an Ancient Zoidian task group had identified Nyx as a number of things. Chief among them was that it`s very name translated into a Zoidian death threat, something roughly along the lines of 'God will strike you down.' Other names fot his place though, were just as menacing, but also more mythical, names like Oloska, a fabled realm covered with more gem wealth than any other place in Zoidian mythology, but the more common secondary nametag for the Dark Continent, at least in Zoidian times, was Baria.
The Land of the Dead.
That name, at this moment at least, fit more than any other that Madison Rose could think of, not that she was even bothering with any of it. Raw indifference personified, she stood with an apathetic glint in her pinkish-red eyes, staring at the former trench of now hardened, brittle magma, still hot to the touch but rapidly beginning to vanish under a thin, all consuming layer of snow and ash. Roc possessed less of an indifference, but more an expectation, cautious and well-hindered, but still there. Neither spoke, neither moved, one of them only barely blinked from time to time and that was the way things went.
The Liger Zero, on the other hand, growled out annoyedly, lashing it`s tail about in the equivelent gesture of tapping one`s foot till it hurt, having somehow been repaired already - if only by the graces of the Organoid it stood next to, rather than the woman standing blithely in front of them both, her club slung up between both arms, braced against the back of her neck. Where most would`ve been hurting over doing such a thing, Madison looked as if it was just business as usual, nothing else.
For how long, none of them knew, but they waited. Indifferent, expecting or flat-out upset, they waited.
And then, after what must have been another hour or two, with little warning, a gloved hand burst out of the ground, balled into a fist so tight that blood could be seen trailing from the glove`s rim.
If Roc had a human face, the First Born would`ve been smiling like an
absolute idiot right about now.
Author`s Note: "He`s alive! ALIVE!!!" :P
Not that long a chap this time around, but cut me some slack since I was a bit half-asleep/out-of-it-due-to-being-semi-sick while writing it.
The Big Fisch: Second guess away! Half the fun is leading the readers around by the nose, then blindsiding them with a sledge hammer and pulling cheap pranks on them while they`re helplessly unconscious @_@ Err... Waitasec >_>; Oh, and thanks for leaving the review, much appreciated since my other two chief reviewers were M.I.A. O_o
Illidan/EndlessAdventure: Where`d ya go? Did the last chapter`s title mislead you into thinking I was going soft or something? o_O;
Welp, what`d everyone think? Good, bad? In-between?
That`s all for now folks, enjoy, leave a review, Sh33p out and see ya
next time!
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