***
Matt is still overcome with elation as he shoots down the fourth foe in a row within the pit arena, the knife-wielder dropping and demorphing from a black bullet going through his head. Anytime before earlier that day, either his lessons with Amelia or his bathing with Rose, was nothing compared to the ecstasy he felt from actual intercourse with Amelia. It was as if all those other times had been hints and peeks of the whole package, teasing him to wonder and want more. And when he finally got it, he was no longer in the dark, his eyes were fully opened to the beauty, the passion, the relief of sex. He had been so impressed by the ordeal, he was still reeling from it as the evening passed. He had not gone back to the cabins as he took a hot, steamy bath with Amelia in the fancy bathroom located next door to the study hall, and then went to the casino to cool off and clear his head, and body, of the past encounter.
As the spectators collect their reward money from betting for him, no more of them are willing to try his luck against Matt. They all can see that something is different about him this evening, the giddy look on his face and the sparkle in his eyes making him look like he was possessed. They can be sure, though, that he isn’t drunk as he has defeated four opponents in a row. If an Alkalian is under the influence of alcohol when in morph, his coordination and capabilities are severely flawed.
Some of the students are considering leaving to do other activities, believing nobody would be crazy enough to take on Matt in his state, when someone shouts out from among them, “Ah hah, I’ve finally found you! Matt Calamos, yes?”
Matt turns around to the source of the voice and sees Buster emerging from the crowd and strolling into the pit toward him. What four battles beforehand had failed to cause, it happens when he looks closely at him as Buster continues, “Every time I’m in the pit, you’re not around it, but when you are in the pit, I’m the one absent! Haha, it’s like fate was trying to keep us apart, or something! But now, we finally get to meet in the arena.”
Matt asks, “And who would you be, if you’re so excited to find me here?”
“Oh, yes, right. Introductions are needed before we get down to business. I am Buster Harmada! A pleasure to finally meet you, Matt.”
Memory from Sean’s forewarning of important people reminds Matt of who Buster is. “You mean you’re Buster, a boss student, the infamous King of the Pit?”
“That’s right,” he laughs, “and I’m pretty good at being it! In fact, that’s the reason why I’ve been searching for you around here. I have to protect my title!”
“Huh?”
“Oh, you know, I have to prove that I’m still king around here, and that means I must defeat all others who are doing exceedingly well in the pit battles. Right now, that just happens to be you and your little friends. Adding to that, I figure if I beat the one of you who the rest revolve around, I’ll be stopping all of you from taking my title. Of course, I would love the opportunity to fight the others, but I believe besting you will make the greatest impression around here!”
Matt isn’t sure if that is the true reason why Buster wants to fight him. He knows from Sean’s warnings that he is a boss student, which means he could be an ally of Cain’s. As he dreads the situation he is caught in, the crowd becomes thirsty for combat again, already making bets as their coins roll and flip noisily into the pit. They believe this is going to be the biggest pit battle ever since Matt had crushed Cain.
Buster takes notice of Matt’s troubled expression and the audience around them throwing money down into the pit. He says, “Hey, don’t take it personally, Matt, I’m just doing my job. Besides, if you lose, it wouldn’t be the end of the world!”
At the moment, Matt feels like it would be the end. The whole success of his conquest and efforts may now rest upon this fight. If he lost, all the hard work and support he had gained could be wasted. But instead of panicking at these thoughts, he faces them head on and steels himself before morphing. “I warn you, this isn’t going to be as easy as you might think,” he says in an effort to intimidate.
Buster laughs and replies, “Ah, now that’s the spirit! Let’s have ourselves a hell of a fight!” And with those final words, he morphs.
***
Matt’s hardened battle mentality softens at the sight of Buster’s MechWarrior morph, which he recognizes as a formidable foe from studies. When the siren goes off, the battle begins with Matt making the first move, turning his right arm into a rifle and firing burst shots at Buster. Before the bullets hit, he springs high into the air from a built-up air balance, surprising Matt down below. He and the crowd’s eyes follow Buster upward and see the large guns’ barrels change into the gatling design. The barrel circles spin at high speed, and as Buster drops back into the pit they point down at Matt and fire endless streams of bullets.
Matt dashes away from the raining fire on air balance, and then sharply turns to run back at Buster down the pit’s sloped wall. Buster lands near the center of the arena, sending a small quake through the floor, and aims his left gun mount at Matt to continue his bullet barrage. Matt accelerates forward without hesitation past and through the storm, moving with enough agility to let only a few bullets scrape him. As he nears Buster, he leaps up high and his left hand forms his large black blade, raised to split his foe’s steel skull.
Despite Matt having closed the distance with minimal damage, Buster has a confident look in his robotic eyes, and before Matt can bring the sword down on him he turns himself just enough to point his right arm up at him. Matt immediately hates what he sees. The right arm has become a shotgun, which shoots and hits him with enough force to stop his descent and throw him backwards onto the floor.
With wounds radiating green on him, he looks up to see Buster moving his right gun mount into position, the gatling design replaced by the gaping cavity of a cannon. Matt grimaces, his pupils dilating as the cannon stares him down, its core within the barrel flashing with loaded energy.
Buster fires his cannon mount at the same time Matt splits into magic clones. The mortar smashes the clones before they can scatter, and their disintegration goes along with the cannon’s boom. Matt is left standing close to where his shadows were, surprised and stunned by the shockwave. Buster lifts his left arm, now a grenade launcher, and throws out a sphere of energy. It smacks into Matt, and in the same instant explodes and sends him tumbling several feet away along the arena wall, leaving wide orange wounds across the front of his body.
The crowd cheers at something they have not seen before. For once, Matt is the one getting clobbered in battle. Buster reflects their enthusiasm with a hearty laugh before shouting, “Is that all you’ve got, Mr. Dark Warrior? Basic techniques won’t work against me!”
Matt understands this as he stands up. He feels stupid for starting out with a beginner’s tactics, especially since he’s had four battles for warm-up. He has to get his head in the game and pull off smarter combination attacks if he was going to defeat a foe like Buster.
Matt splits into his shadows, each armed with the large black sword. Buster’s eyes twinkle, already predicting the clones will rush him and take the gunfire while Matt moves into a position to nail him with a direct hit. His left gun mount changes the barrel into a missile-launching stump, and his targeting vision scans the clones and finds the real Matt. Buster locks-in on him, and the rockets of energy are fired, screaming into the air above the pit and then diving down, seeking out Matt.
In response, the clones leap up and together to become a shield against the missile barrage, which decimates them as soon as they unite. Buster ignores the mid-air clash, watching the real Matt zoom towards him with his massive blade aimed for a stab, and prepares to counter the attack by pointing the tank cannon at Matt. The cannon’s missile crushes the charging Matt before he can reach Buster, but, to his and the audience’s surprise, he only hit another clone, and the real Matt comes up to his side with a magic spell ready to cast.
He throws out his dark version of the Voltzon Fury spell
that zaps and shocks Buster, immobilizing him with the stunning electricity and lighting him up, as if his circuits are overloading and sparking out of him. Branching fractures of yellow wounds spread across him, scarring his limbs, chest, and head, before he looks down to see Matt pulsing with another spell to follow up the first spell at its end. Matt whips out his Blastion magic, and the explosion sears through Buster’s open wounds on his chest and blows him over backwards, leaving a cavity of dark orange energy in him.
The crowd is stupefied from Matt’s reversal evening the two opponents’ health energies. Buster himself, laying face-up on the floor, is impressed by Matt’s clever action of keeping a clone in his outline and using it as a buffer when he charged. He is also fascinated from what it feels like to experience a Dark Warrior’s special power, tearing through his heavy armor to deal immense damage and create a vital wound in his chest.
Matt, after a few panting breaths, forms his sword and leaps into the air, holding his sword’s point toward Buster below. Buster, seeing him coming, isn’t going to let himself become the sword’s plaque. With an air balance trick, he hovers while spinning his entire body, making his gun mounts into swinging battle arms. They deflect Matt’s sword plant and knock him away, and Matt rolls a few yards before standing upright. He looks back at Buster, who has four guns, two his mounted cannons and two his arms shaped into grenade launchers, aimed at him.
Buster releases all four guns simultaneously, and a huge explosion blooms where Matt was standing on the pit wall. The whole room shakes from the force of the blast, and the hungry crowd looks for the demorph flash, but are disappointed when they notice Matt had escaped the blasts by diving forward to the center of the pit, letting the projectiles land behind him. He is back up in an instant and racing off on air balance, gaining altitude and distance from Buster along the pit’s slopes.
Matt turns his left arm into a rifle and fires single shots at his enemy below, who hovers about on air balance to avoid the shots while his cannon mounts fire volleys at him. He speeds along away from the bombardment, the only damage he takes being the vital wounds of his torso bleeding darker, but he can’t fight back as he is being fired upon. So, instead of waiting to see if Buster’s cannon cores would overheat, he hurls himself high into open air off the edge of the pit, forcing Buster to stop firing or he would have hit the crowd beyond the pit.
Buster cusses, then chuckles, at Matt’s gamble, knowing he can’t hit his target when he is suspended in mid-air near the crowd, so he acts to resolve the problem. His right gun mount changes into the missile launcher, and he prepares to lock-in on Matt. However, once again, he underestimates the freshman Dark Warrior.
Instead of remaining in the air, Matt drops and sprints back down into the pit towards him at high speed. In the same moment he divides into black magic copies for the third time, but this time the clones are lined up in a straight line, perpendicular to Buster. The MechWarrior realizes he can’t stop this incoming assault with his arm weapons, so he does the next best thing, finding the real Matt anyway and firing two rockets into the air while crossing his arms to shield the vital wound on his chest glowing a dark orange.
The clones crash into him with sword stabs and slashes. His wounds shift into bright red and he is taken down, his legs chopped through by two clones, while the three others impaled his arms when they went for his chest. One of them, the real Matt, hops off and lands a few yards away, switching in his rifle for the sword to point at his butchered foe.
The audience has been muted, holding their breath as they see the battle is about to end. Matt coldly tells Buster, “Demorph, or I’ll have to do real harm to you.”
Buster tries to sit up, the red wounds all over him like magma vents and sheer astonishment in his mechanical eyes. He says, “That, wasn’t too bad…”
Matt hears a sharp whistle growing louder above him, and looking up he gasps. The duo of missiles hammer into him in colliding explosions before a demorph flash blinks out from between them. Matt as a human is left there, fallen to his knees and frozen in shock.
Buster’s eyes narrow with satisfaction. “But it wasn’t good enough.” He demorphs and the crowd goes wild with cheers.
***
Buster walks over to Matt as the crowd does their business of collecting the winnings up above. Matt is lost in his thoughts, a grim expression on him, before he lifts his gaze up to Buster in front of him.
Buster’s glee disappears when he notices the look on Matt’s face, and he asks, “How do you feel?”
Matt’s words are absent until he replies, “I’ve been beaten by a boss student, the one type of foe I couldn’t afford losing to. Now, all of my hard work in rallying people against this system of student leadership will be smudged by my failure. You turned out to be the force Cain needed to stop me.”
“…Have you talked to Rose yet this evening?”
“Huh? Uh, no, I haven’t met her back at our cabin yet. Why?”
Buster doesn’t reply for a moment before he booms out in laughter, making Matt jolt in surprise. “Man, no wonder you are so worried! You still think I’m on Cain’s side? Well, I’ve got breaking news for you. I’m a turncoat. I’m your ally now!”
“…Wait, what?”
“Simple, really. I don’t agree with, nor can afford risking my own neck, for Cain’s schemes anymore, and from what I’ve heard about ya, plus what I saw out of you tonight, it’s clear to me that you’re ten times the man Cain is. Sure enough, you turned out to be the dark horse of this contest, and now I’m gonna be putting my bids on you!”
“Ah, okay. So, you didn’t fight me because Cain wanted you to?”
“Right! Didn’t you hear me earlier? I’ve got a title to defend around here, so I had to put you back in your place. Nothing personal, of course, just civil sportsmanship. But hey, you did pretty well in that fight, made it nice and thrilling for everyone here, especially me! In fact, it was Cain who didn’t want me to fight you.” Extending an open hand to him, he implies, “Anyway, you may not be King of the Pit, but you could always be the Prince!”
Matt finally understands what Buster is saying, and can think of no way to thank him except by shaking his hand and saying, “I, I guess that would be fine.”
“Guess? Nah, you can be sure of it!” Buster pulls him onto his feet. “Now come on, let’s go have a drink or two, and chat about your plans to give Cain a taste of reality. Maybe I could help in some way!”
***
“And then he says to him, ‘Dammit, if you’re so hungry, I’ll feed ya my energy sword. You could swallow it whole!’” Buster and Matt both laugh as they stroll along the open fields in the night. The senior and freshman are both feeling buzzed from the drinks they had, and what was supposed to be planning out the next blow to Cain’s regime had given way to humorous conversation between them. Buster is probably more drunk than Matt as he had more to drink to fuel his silly stories from his life and training back home.
Feeling light on his own feet, as if the dark grass beneath him are the clouds in the night sky and he is walking across them, following the shimmer of silver from the moonlight, Matt says, “Hey, did I ever tell you about the time I was attacked by slag raptors?”
“Slag raptors? Those crazy lizards that leap around like frogs, scream like birds, and tear things apart like dogs? Why no, you haven’t! How did that go?”
“Oh, well, I was up near the mountains, above the tree line, and I got a little adventurous and ventured further between the crags. You know those rumors that there’s nothing beyond the mountains, that nobody can go beyond them? Well, I wanted to find out if they were true. Instead of the other side of the mountain range, however, I soon found the raptors. Or more correctly, they found me. This scary hiss was all the warning I got before they came out of nowhere, from above, around, and even below the cliff I was on. Fortunately, my dad had taught me to always morph at the first sign of trouble, so I was in morph when one of them pounced on me from behind and t
ried clawing and biting off my armor!”
“Hah, that must have been scary for ya! I’ve seen my share of the buggers, you know, but always from afar, off on the peaks far away. Er, sorry, what happened next? Did you beat the scales off them?”
“Oh yeah, I sure did! If I was scared of them, they were terrified of me by the time I fought off and wounded eight of them, the rest shrieking and whining as they ran away behind the rocks. It was funny, how I felt after that. I got out of there as fast as I could, afraid they might come back, but I also felt awesome, that I had scattered the stuff of nightmares, one of the most feared predators of Minari!”
“Well, but of course, you scared them out of their wits, man. The most of the things they try to eat don’t shoot guns or cast magic back at them! But hey, good job on getting out of there in one piece. Did ya tell your parents what happened?”
“Heh, yeah. My mom freaked out, she was so upset about me going off into the mountains alone, but my dad was pretty impressed. He said that most people who go wandering into the wilds beyond the forest don’t come back, and not always because of raptors. Then my mom got mad at him for not being mad at me!”
“Haha, hilarious! Were there any big ones among those scaly freaks? They say the biggest, and meanest, ones get bigger than horses or stags. Can you imagine one of those jumping through the air at ya?”
“Ah, I didn’t have to. I saw one or two of that size do just that! Let’s see, one was black with red marks all over it, I wasn’t sure if they were spots and stripes or battle scars, and the other was silvery gray with black marks and a big scar across its left, blind eye. It was weird, what happened when they attacked me. The rest of the raptors backed off, and the two of them would either go after me or suddenly turn on each other, lunging and kicking at each other like angry birds. But they were tough, fast, and smart. Even with my techniques, I had a hard time trying to wound or kill them, and without my clones to distract them or protect me they could have torn me to shreds!”
Alkalians Page 27