When Dante watches Sean’s tumbling for only a second, he forgets about the second James, and turns back to see him glide past him, the scythe’s blade slicing into his gut. Dante, cringing from the low blow, is keel-hauled by the white James’s momentum, the drag slowing them to a stop, and the blade rips from his body when James swings him around, revealing a bright yellow wound and flinging him a few feet away.
At the same time, Sean attempts to stand in a daze, his chest armor smudged with a green wound, when he looks up to see the black James before him, his scythe raised above them, the blade glowing with red energy. He watches in terror as the scythe falls like a hammer, and he’s crushed by the outburst of magic on impact. As the sparks and dust clear, Sean is visible in a small crater, with multiple gashes of yellowish energy across him and his face in a twisted grimace. The black James smirks, turns around, and leaves him, flying back towards Dante.
Dante aggressively slashes at the white James, hoping the relentless attacks would somehow connect with the Reaper hopping around and parrying him. However, he soon catches in the glint of his vision the blade of James’s sickle pulsing with electricity. Wondering what kind of spell he was about to use, he then gets a bad feeling and whirls around to find the black James, his scythe’s blade also imbued with electricity. Once again, Dante knows he has been outmaneuvered and curses before two bolts of lightning lash out upon him from the scythes, connecting like a chain of energy through him.
Dante is trapped and crippled by the chain of lightning going through him, the current shocking him and blurring him in darkening wound energy, before the black James lifts his blade to increase tension on the chain while the white James mimics his movement. Dante doesn’t know what they are doing until they both tug away from each other, and the chain breaks with a crash of thunder. Speared from both sides and pulled apart at the same time, bright red wounds, gleaming like streaks of blood across his armor, bloom all over him. Almost torn apart from the rupturing attack, his sword fades out and he slumps to the ground, his body trembling to move despite the numbing damage.
The James’ leer down at Dante’s broken form, proud of the success of their coordinated spell. However, they soon pay the price for double-teaming against Dante. Out of nowhere, the black James is slammed from behind by Sean’s high speed tackle, snapping one of his wings in a flash of splattered green-and-red energy, and is grappled by him to fly extra yards through the air at the white James. Before he could react, Sean hurls his counterpart at him, and the collision flattens the two Reapers and rolls them across the ground in sprays of wound energy.
While the James’ are sprawled out on the ground, Sean runs back over to Dante and helps him to his feet, asking, “Hey, you alright?”
“Not really,” he replies, indicating the red wounds upon him. “Even though the potential strength of James is cut in half when he’s divided into two, he can still deal a lot of damage, it seems.”
“Hmm, yeah. How did he know what I was up to, when I was leading his white self back at you and his black self?”
“It must be that the two can sense whatever the other is sensing. In other words, the black James saw you coming at him through the white James chasing you.”
“Ah. Well, that’s not fair!” Sean looks back to the twins, seeing green glows from them and the red aura of the black one’s broken wing. “But hey, at least we hurt him. Er, them!”
“No, you hurt them, while I was the dummy for them to be distracted by. My sword can’t reach them, and they’ve brought me down to the brink of demorphing. Therefore, I’ve got nothing to help us in this fight.”
“Pff, what are you talking about? You’ve still got me! If we use a little teamwork like they have, we’ll force those Reapers back together, I’m sure of it!”
Dante can’t help but chuckle at the paradox. If James fuses himself back together then, he’ll definitely defeat them in their condition, from what he knows about his whole morph. “Well, it was an honor to fight at your side, Sean.”
“Hey, you say that like it’s a bad thing!” Sean jokes while watching the James’ stand up.
***
Matt and Rose connect when their attacks catch the other with Matt’s vertical cut from his sword stopped by Rose’s leaf daggers grinding against his arm. They both struggle to follow through, the edge of Matt’s sword touching Rose’s shoulder while the leaf daggers dig green wounds into his arm. Rose guesses that Matt’s greater strength is about to win, so she slides past his right side, letting the sword chop into the ground, and turns to strike his back. Matt feels the pain as she stabs repeatedly into his lower spine, leaving shallow spots of green in his black armor, before she delivers a kick into the wounds, sending a splash of lost health out of them and him to the ground face-first.
He gets up quickly and turns around to see Rose increase the gap between them and throw small leaf shurikens at him. To evade them, he divides into dark clones, which are shattered when the shurikens hit them. One of the projectiles, though, finds the real Matt, forming a small, yellow-green wound just below his chest.
As Matt sees more leaves coming from Rose, he tries something else as his arms turn into guns, and with burst shots stops the leaves and fires at her, but she dodges and ducks the black bullets flying at her. As she side-steps the firing, she keeps throwing more shurikens, but Matt shoots them down before they reach him. When he realizes this was going nowhere, he prepares to charge at Rose, a black blade forming from his left hand.
Suddenly, Matt is hit from behind and at his right arm, and he blinks in shock. In the midst of throwing the small leaves, Rose had snuck in two large shurikens, which spun toward him out of peripheral vision and landed in his wounds. Dark yellow energy marks the wounds in his back, and Matt finds his right hand missing, meaning he couldn’t get a sword or gun out of it anymore.
Rose, seeing she had flinched Matt, decides to rush him. With her fists clenching leaf daggers she dashes toward him, but he sees her coming, and as she does one last leap to reach him, spiraling like a spear thrown at him, her daggers the spearhead, he releases built-up air balance to thrust away. Then, reversing his air balance, Matt thrusts back at her while preparing a magic spell.
Upon missing him, Rose rolls a few times to get back on her feet, and sees Matt coming at her. She changes her knives into small, green seeds, and before he is upon her she flings them all around her. The seeds scatter and, as soon as they touch the ground, germinate into tall grasses, hiding Rose from view.
Matt had anticipated her trying an evasive move, and casts his spell in response. He divides into magic clones again, but this time the clones are wielding a large broadsword each. They do sweeping strokes through the cluster of grass, mowing it down in the attempt of hitting Rose hiding within it. But upon clearing the grass, they stand there as a group, wondering what happened to their target when neither of them had found her.
Rose lunges upward, hidden from laying low to the ground, and starts attacking the clones, her blades slicing and stabbing them as she spins in and out of adjacency to them. However, in a quick glance while she deletes them, she gasps at the unexpected. The real Matt is outside the group of clones, his left arm a rifle, aiming at her. Her trap had become his trap.
Matt fires, and the sniping bullet smashes into her chest, wound energy bursting from its entry-and-exit holes, blowing her over and laying her out across the ground. Her wound color skips green and goes to yellow, and it gets darker from pulses of energy, like heart-beats, spitting up more lost health. Grimacing, Rose reflects on how her wound is vital, putting her in a bad situation.
***
Sean, Dante, and the twin James’ face-off from opposite sides of their battlefield. Sean and Dante glow yellow or red from their wounds respectively, while their opponents are only green with a dash of red on the black James’ wing. The Reapers, after glancing to each other and nodding, turn to have their backs against each other and raise their scythes above them, the blades aligned i
nto a crescent-moon shape. With their wings flexed and the poles held up, they look like mirror reflections of each other. Then, as they both hover into the air, they start spinning around the line of reflection rapidly, and strong winds rise and blow around them while the sickle blades glow with an ominous energy.
Dante looks on at the Reapers’ formation and says, “That’s not good.”
Sean asks, “What? What is he about to do?”
“He’s about to execute his Ultimate Attack, for when he’s two of himself. See how his forms are spinning like that? They’re going to charge at us, and those blades will shred through us.”
“Really?” Sean looks closely at them before shrugging. “I thought he was going to fire a laser at us, or something.”
The James’ tilt down the head of their combined sickles in mid-air, pointing it at Dante and Sean. The energy collecting in the blades radiates outward, and the swirling winds bring the energy to flow with the vortex. Thanks to the energy, the wind becomes sharp enough to tear through the ground it blows across, tossing out dirt as it raked it up. Dante then says, “They’ve aligned themselves toward us. Now it would be a good time to run.” Without another word, he turns around and dashes away on air balance, and Sean, after brief hesitation, follows.
The James’ fly forward at tremendous speed, pursuing Dante and Sean. The wind shear from their movement becomes luminous with the radiating energy, and a trail of slashed ground marks their path. As Dante air balances like he’s on a board and Sean skates along with him, their two foes come after them as a massive arrow. Despite them being at high speeds, the Reapers are getting closer.
In the midst of the chase, Dante tries to think of how they are going to survive the Ultimate Attack. At these speeds, they’ll soon reach a campus border and be forced to turn around, right into the wind blades. As he’s thinking, it takes him a moment to realize Sean, once beside him, is slowing down. He whips his head back and yells at him, “What are you doing!?” He sees Sean merely smile a toothy grin, give a salute, and fall back further, allowing the wind to visibly flow into him and decrease his speed even more. The James’ deadly turbine is only a few yards behind him, coming closer.
Then, in a fluid motion, Sean spins around and floats in the air, becoming level with the center of the energized vortex. After yelling, “NOW IT’S REAPER-KILLING TIME!!” he shoots forward at neck-cracking speed into the vortex. The following happens in about five seconds, the chain reactions brought about at hyper speed:
First, Sean hammers the top of the scythe union with his fist, sending sparks flying into the wind shear. He flips forward off the smashed blades and gets caught in the spinning of the poles, but he kicks at them in a flurry, and the force from the high-speed collisions break the poles in half. Despite the fresh wounds to his limbs, Sean keeps going in his thrashing, being carried to the James’ and crashing into them, dark colors of wound energy flashing like firecrackers. After the furious slams, one more hit from him separates the two, letting them be blown into the energized wind with him. The monstrous blades shred all three, and as Sean demorphs after producing red energy, the James’ are covered with huge wounds of dark orange.
Watching the three tumble across the ground in different directions, and the vicious winds fading out, Dante can’t believe what Sean had done. But he is very glad he did, and he drifts a turn-around and accelerates back toward James’ morphs, his sword reforming between his hands.
The Reapers slowly get up, feeling the deep wounds on their wings and torsos, absent their broken scythes. However, they don’t panic or get upset, and by focusing some energy between their hands they form fresh sickles for themselves. The two are distanced apart by about twenty yards, and are about to move towards the other when Dante slices through them.
Without any sign of slowing down, he rips through the black James with one slash, then dashes to the white James and makes another slash into him. Once he passes the white Reaper, he brakes on his air balance and grinds to a stop. He doesn’t have to look back, knowing what would happen. The single cuts, delivered at such high speed and into the gaping wounds, splash scarlet health energy out of the James’ as their bodies are split in half.
***
Rose forces herself to stand up, the glowing wound thumping from her chest as she moves, and she glares at Matt several yards away. Feeling the darkening light pumping out of her, she knows that all he has to do now is deliver another direct attack and place it in her wound, likely turning her health red and assuring her defeat.
Matt figures this out as well. But hitting Rose with one shot was hard enough, and she had already done enough damage to him to cause worry, especially by chopping off his right hand. So instead of attempting a final attack against her, he thinks of another way to get her off-guard.
While her foe is occupied with tactics, Rose collects energy in front of her, and a bright green sphere forms between her hands. She then converts the energy into leaves, and they fly out from the sphere like a swarm emerging from its hive. They blow all about her, and when the energy sphere fades, she is immersed in the blizzard of leaves.
Matt watches as the leaves formed around Rose, wondering what she could be doing. While he’s looking at her, he suddenly loses sight of her. He blinks a few times, looks deep into the swirling leaves, but he still can’t find Rose. The blizzard blows toward him, and then Matt understands. It was an illusion technique, making her completely undetected to his vision.
The leaves engulf Matt’s position, and he soon stands in the middle of the vortex. Searching with his eyes, he catches not one speck of Rose. The leaves perfectly hide her, looking exactly the same and flying fast enough to make a cloud of green. Suddenly, Matt flinches from a slash made across his face, the scratch flashing with damage, followed by a rapid barrage of stabs and slices, fresh scars and holes forming all over him, turning to orange in color. The wounds appear so quickly he could have guessed more than one person was attacking him.
Hidden among the blowing leaves, Rose makes the quick and accurate strikes upon Matt, but she has to stop after a few seconds into the barrage as the chest wound spits more health energy out. She did open enough wounds, however, to perform her finishing link of the combination offensive. Harnessing control over the automatically moving leaves, she sends them into a raging cyclone, and the leaves converge upon Matt. Like a swarm of bees the leaves sting and slice through Matt’s wounds, stitching and stretching them bigger and darker. Once the leaves disintegrate after serving their purpose, Matt is left in open view, his armor painted red-orange instead of black.
Wracked from so much numbing pain caused without break, Matt can barely stay upright, but he forces himself to endure. He looks about and finds Rose several feet away from him, her orange wound resembling a shining breastplate to him. That glowing spot may have just saved his life, for the moment.
***
Two big flashes of red signal James demorphing, and he appears as only one human, clasping to his side where Dante’s sword had gone through him. As Dante demorphs in response, he hears Sean skipping over to them, cheering “Oh yeah! Who’s bad, who’s bad, I am! Who’s not, who’s not, James is! Yahooo!!”
James ignores Sean’s whooping and dancing, forcing a smile as he dusts his suit off. “Well,” he calmly says to Dante, “I guess I underestimated you both. I could never have foreseen not only my Ultimate Attack being trumped, but also having it turned against me. Theory states that’s usually impossible.”
Dante returns a half-smile, saying, “Yeah, I’m beginning to see that you never know what will happen with Sean fighting. His crazy tricks might just be his advantage.”
“You bet they are!” Sean agrees. He then leers toward James and says, “All right, you high-classed, care-free punk. Unless you want to become the newest senior reject, you better tell us what you did with Matt and Rose!”
James glances between the two, and says with a sigh, “Very well, I’ll give you what you want. I was doing
an espionage assignment for Cain. All I had to do was tell Matt about ninjas, and Rose about the S.C. I figure they walked away with a little more understanding of the topics.”
“…That’s it?” Dante is skeptical of how little conversations like those were meant to harm Matt or Rose. “What, and how, did you exactly tell them? And how does this benefit Cain?”
“Oh, we might find out, sooner or later. I merely informed Matt of Rose’s martial arts style and gave Rose a history lesson, that’s all. I myself don’t know for sure why Cain suggested I tell them those facts. After all, he has been unwilling to disclose all the details of his plots.” James yawns, peering across the horizon. “In fact, I was also instructed to keep you guys busy, in case you two noticed something was up, but I had not intended on getting into a fight. The only thing that’s certain here is Cain owes me for this favor, big time.” He then walks off, leaving Dante and Sean alone in the field.
Once the senior gets out of ear-shot, Sean asks Dante, “Was this a big waste of time?”
“Cain must have thought so.” He pulls out a cigarette with a small rock, lights it up with a flame from the rock’s rune, and smokes a deep breath. “But at least we know a little of his plans, and we’ve got dirt against James, so he won’t be involved anymore.” He turns to Sean. “Let’s go look for Matt and Rose. They can tell us what James said to them.”
“Good idea,” Sean says as they head off toward the student cabins. “Besides, what could have possibly gone wrong? It’s not like whatever James told them made them get into a fight!”
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