Alkalians

by Caleb S. Bugai

  Amelia knows she was playing right into Buster’s hands, or guns to be precise, when he volleys grenades at her. What he doesn’t know, however, is how she’s ready for that, spinning to cast out the twister before her. It intercepts the energy grenades, whirling them around in itself as it races towards Buster, sending his attack back at him. He looks surprised, but recovers quickly enough to side thrust clear of the twister and its explosive package, delivered when they go off in the vortex and consume it in their blasts.

  Grinding to a stop on the arena floor, Buster raises a grenade launcher and sends a few grenades at Amelia again, intending for them to catch her while she is in the open. She turns to face them, the spheres about to reach her, and flicks out a flash of a spell at them. Instead of exploding near her, they suddenly freeze in place in the air, solidified into orbs, before they descend and rotate around her under her mental control.

  Buster’s mechanical eyes blink, again surprised, and he watches Amelia smirk back at him, twirl on air balance, and then cast the orbs back at him like cannonballs. He should have expected that, but was still trying to figure out what kind of spell she used to capture his grenades, and so could only grunt when they smash into him, bending and cracking his chest armor with dark orange energy bursting from his wounds.

  Staggering from the consecutive impacts of the orbs, Buster admits to himself she was good as she follows up the orbs with a direct bolt of energy, penetrating his torso through his wounds and turning them red, but he goes to show that he was better with a sudden, wild, perhaps desperate move. With another air balance thrust, he charges straight at Amelia, taking her by surprise, and his left fist crashes into her as an uppercut, throwing her into the air with her misty aura trailing behind her, her wounds bleeding dark yellow. She flips in mid-air a few times, but instead of reaching the floor gets grabbed by Buster’s right hand, his mechanical gauntlet crushing her around her waist and hips.

  Cringing with her hands curling at his fingers, Amelia looks up to Buster’s helm, no mercy in his machine eyes, and down to his left arm, a shotgun, before it spits bullets into her, the mist on half of her chest shattered and replaced by a red wound. Going limp from the blast, she’s as good as done when Buster drops her to the floor, steps and turns to loom over her, a statue of fire and steel, and his right gun mount aims down at her as a cannon for the final shot.

  ***

  The instant the cannon fires a mortar into the ground, a red demorph flash coincides with the blast, and Amelia is left in a crater, sprawled in her human form and barely conscious as she coughs and clings to her aching chest. The smoking gun mount bends back, and Buster remains standing tall in his battle morph as the speaker announces, “The winner is Wilson Harmada,” and the audience roars with applause, at which he waves and fist pumps back to them. Once he demorphs, though, he bends over, coughing and clutching his chest as well, before turning back to Amelia, shaking his head and wiping some blood from his mouth. “Well, that was fun, eh?”

  Managing to roll onto her side and look back at him, also with blood spittle by her mouth, she replies, “Yeah, sure it was. I almost had you, there.”

  “Heh, yeah, you did. Lucky for me, then, that I’m quick on my feet! But hey, sorry if I got a little rough at the end, like that.”

  Sitting up and wiping away her blood, Amelia says, “Oh, you were fine. It’s not like I haven’t been handled roughly before.”

  “…Was that an innuendo?”

  “Huh?”

  “Ah, never mind.” He reaches down to her, adding, “Seems you learned a few more tricks since we last had a match. It was much to my dismay we haven’t fought in awhile, then I could have known about them!”

  Smiling, she accepts his hand to pull her out of the crater and onto her feet, saying, “Yes, that is a shame, I guess.” While Buster continues holding her hand to raise her arm up with his, inciting more cheers from the crowd, she speaks into his ear, “I’ve also learned a few more tricks for the other thing I’m good at.”

  Buster’s beaming grin cracks when he hears that before he says, “I see. I suppose that means you’re gonna surprise me with them later tonight, then?”

  “Of course, if you think you can handle them. But hopefully, we won’t get as rough as we did today!”

  “Hah, yeah, agreed!” He glances to her, seeing her smirk and the twinkle in her eye, and tries to shake it off as they continue absorbing the audience’s applause.

  Chapter 14

  Glory in the Arena: Rumbling Reds

  ***

  A few minutes after the blue division is finished, with the presentation and announcement of the finalist pair, Sean and Buster, the red division’s semifinals begin. Into the arena appears another freshman-and-senior pair, contrasting the other in ways besides their classes. In his officer’s suit of long-sleeved vest and pants, the same shade of black as the sunglasses on his face, is Tony, a scowl present beneath the glasses as he hears the ruckus of the audience, some of which are booing at him. Meanwhile, in her green outfit, with her family crest hanging from her neck, Rose isn’t sure what is making her pale with anxiety more, being before such a large audience of her peers or the fact they are cheering for her.

  The two come to stand about thirty feet apart in the center of the gym with the crowd in the stands yet whooping or sneering around them. As Rose looks all around, meekly smiling and waving, Tony’s voice reaches her through the noise. “Hard to believe you’re such a natural at fighting. Right now, you’re not much of a rose, and more like a lily, by how white you are.”

  Grimacing, Rose looks back to Tony, at the black visors he has for eyes glaring at her, and remarks, “You can’t blame me for being somewhat nervous. I’ve never had to fight with so many people watching me, until now.”

  “So many people, huh? You mean them?” He gestures to the audience. “This is nothing compared to the number that will be watching the finalists. They televise the event, so that nearly everyone across the country, from every state, can watch the Alkalian College Championship Match.”

  Rose’s complexion becomes so white a lily would be jealous, but she swallows the lump in her throat before replying, “Well, I’ve anticipated getting to that point, sooner or later. Seems it will have to be sooner, if I win here.”

  “Heh, yeah, if you win. If you think I’ll just be some pushover for you, I’m afraid to tell you that’s a terrible assumption to make.”

  “I would never make that assumption, especially of you, Tony. I’ve seen you fight, I know what you’re capable of, and you can be quite the formidable foe if I’m not careful.”

  “Hmm, complimenting me, eh? I have to say, I wasn’t expecting that from you. After all, I wasn’t going to compliment you, since I plan to rip you up and stomp you down before all of our fellow students, like the ugly weed you are.”

  Puzzled, Rose shakes her head, asking, “I’ve come to understand that you’re not a very, uh, friendly guy, Tony, but why are you showing so much hate towards me, here and now?”

  “Towards you? Hah, it’s not just you, ‘Lily’. It’s all of you. You, Matt, Sean, Dante, and others. You’re all nothing but insolent trouble makers, threatening the order and leadership that has sustained the student community for so long. However, I am not ignorant of this. I am well aware that you’ve all pretty much won the revolution. All you have to do is best Cain here in the finals, and Matt’s victory is complete. And unlike Cain, I know how to accept losses. But if I, if we, are going down, then I’m going to try and take as many of you with us as I can.”

  He points at Rose, going on more ominously, “Starting with you. If I can beat you here, no matter who I pair up with from the other semifinal, then I can completely mess things up in the finals for you lovers of Matt. The best case scenario, Cain and I coordinate the defeat of everyone else, and I give him the victory. Worst case scenario, I’m stuck with Matt, but I can let the others overwhelm and crush him, just so he doesn’t become immortal among us. The on
ly thing keeping me from such a chance to humiliate you all, to give us some kind of accomplishment in all this, is you, ‘Lily’ Alamence.”

  Rose is no longer a pale white, and instead blooming red. Her sense of stage fright gone, the audience around them forgotten, she grimly says while glaring at him, putting her palms together in a meditative stance, “Then your hatred blinds you, making you no better than Cain. And I am not Lily. I am Rose Alamence, and you’re about to learn just how sharp my thorns are.”

  Tony’s response is to snicker, reaching up to pluck and put away his sunglasses, his green eyes gleaming at hers. “Big talk, for a little flower like you. And I am going to show you that everything, even pretty little flowers, wither and die.”

  ***

  Once the siren goes off, the two morph, Rose in her green battle suit and Tony decayed into a Zombie, and the fight is on. His undead face leers at her as he makes the first move, casting a gale of grave air at her. She dodges the spell with a quick dive to her right, rolling onto her knees, and retaliates by throwing leaf shurikens. Before the leaves hit him, Tony blocks them with a tombstone sprouting from the ground, and then he becomes lost among a small legion of Zombie clones, slowly making their way towards Rose.

  Not intimidated by their numbers, Rose prepares a large, four-bladed leaf shuriken, and flings it into them, the spinning razors mowing down a wide sweep of them before returning to her. After catching it, she spins once and throws it again, this time rotating vertically, and it buzz saws through a line of the clones, preceding her charging into their broken formation. She makes quick work of the rest of them, her leaf daggers slicing and stabbing them, without any managing to get a swipe at her, and then she finds the real Zombie, near the back of the once swarm.

  Rose thrusts with her left dagger in a reverse grip, intending to pierce and rip through Tony’s rotten chest, but is startled to find it deflected by some kind of malevolent aura containing him, her dagger literally withering and deteriorating after the contact. Seeing the sneer on his expression, then the flash of magic from his hand, she instinctively springs backwards, avoiding the stone spike bursting from the floor that would have impaled her.

  Skidding to a stop a safe distance from him, Rose looks on at Tony, observing the necrotic aura shielding him as a new technique he must have recently obtained. Her planning on how to approach it is cut short when she feels something unnatural happening to her, and looking back to her left hand she gasps. It, just like her weapon, was afflicted by the aura, paling to a dead gray and cracking open with green wounds. Watching as the affliction spreads up her arm, the situation becomes worse when a thread of magic reels out of the wounds, and she follows it to Tony’s grasp, knowing he is draining her health energy out of her.

  Appearing unable to respond for a moment, Rose then groans, kneeling down while the affliction crosses her chest, from there spreading to the rest of her body, and Tony delights in her suffering while drawing another thread out of her chest to his other hand, doubling the draining rate. He ignores the gasps and outcries of the crowd, planning to enjoy the slow, horrid way of breaking down Rose, and can taste victory when her figure is a blend of gray and orange. Intent to drag her health down to red, he almost doesn’t notice a plant sprout and rapidly grow around him, its many shoots and branches attempting to ensnare him, but his necrotic aura stops its growth as rapidly as it restarts until it outlines his aura like a cage.

  Sneering at the pitiful attempt, Tony looks back to Rose, and the sneer twists with shock and disbelief. While her body is still a dead gray, her wounds had healed to be green in color, reflecting the energy pulsing from her right hand yet free of the decay. Before he can accelerate draining her health, the dead plant around him twitches, and then truly becomes a cage when it seizes him, the spindly wood bending and binding him into an awkward shape. When he looks again at Rose, picking out the smug look on her face, it’s his turn to be horrified as he realizes she had planned this. Her wrist twists, and the thicket ensnaring him responds by snapping free of its roots and hurtling his gawking form away, ending his draining spells upon her.

  The gasping in the crowd turns to laughing as they watch Tony tumble all over the arena, trapped in something like a tumble weed, the bouncing off the floor and wall, and tugging against him in any random direction, accumulating small wounds on him, while Rose guides it along, smiling with cruel satisfaction. After tossing him high into the air, she takes a moment to focus on herself, more fully healing her wounds and affliction as they close up and her figure regains its healthy gleam, before retaking control of the tumble weed after Tony slams back into the floor from the fall, his decayed body bursting with yellow wound energy from the impact.

  Getting back to business, Rose has Tony and his cage float through the air to her while she summons a long, wooden spear in her left hand. Once he is a few feet from her, hovering helplessly in the weed, she coordinates rotating him and thrusting the spear through gaps in the weed’s branches and into him, keeping herself from contacting the cursed aura yet on him with the spear’s length and leaving deep wounds in him glowing dark orange. After thrusting a few times, poking through his chest, back, and head once each, she pushes him further away, his cage dropping on the floor, twirls her spear above her, and throws it at him like a harpoon, the long shaft going through him and pinning him to the ground.

  Rose is confident that she’s won the fight, looking at Tony yet immobilized in deadwood with red wounds blurring his body, until she watches his necrotic aura expand and thicken, consuming him, the cage, and the spear before sinking out of sight into the floor. She suddenly knows what Tony is up to, but instead of being afraid remains calm, besides rushed, as she sprints over to the darkened ground and prepares a large mass of energy between her hands. She knows what Tony is going to do, and she has just the thing to match him. Not panicking as one, then two, giant skeletal hands with barbed fingers sprout out of the ground on either side of her, pushing up the rest of Tony’s hyper morph, a skeletal golem with huge fangs protruding from his lower jaw and rage burning in his empty eye sockets, she finishes the charging of her technique just as he stands tall over her.

  Rose shoves the sphere of energy into the floor, and an instant later a huge tree with red bark and no leaves violently emerges, one of its large branches during the rapid growth impaling Tony through his ribs, staggering him and leaving him stuck to it. The other branches, their edges and points sharp like sabers, lash out at him, carving and chopping through his stony bones, until the crown of the tree, bending back with Tony’s skull gaping at it, snaps forward into him, shattering his lower jaw and decapitating his head from his crumbling body.

  ***

  After the quick and thorough job from the tree, a demorph flash swallows up the skeletal golem’s remains and spits out Tony in his human form, thumping against the floor on his back, barely conscious with a blank look on his face. Before him still looms the angry red tree, its branches searching hungrily for a new victim, with Rose kneeling on the crutch of one branch and the trunk. Some of the crowd was stilled with awe at the sight of the tree, and there is still silence after she leaps off from the tree, sticks her landing, and makes it disappear when she demorphs, her skin streaked with sweat as she pants from exhaustion. Only when the overhead voice announces, “And the winner is Rose Alamence,” does the silence break with the cheering and roaring of the audience, bringing Rose’s attention to them. She forgets her fatigue from the fight as she feels something else, pride and joy. Taking it as this is what it feels like to win before so many, she waves back to the crowd, knowing this could be the first step in her young career towards honor and fame.

  ***

  A few minutes later, the next pair for the red division is in the arena for their match. The crowd of mostly students cheers wildly for the most anticipated contestant of the tournament, in his black pants and green vest, who feels quite small as he gazes all around at them. Rather than following Lyn, appearing calm as she s
trides in her uniform of white bolero and pants with blue stripes, towards the center of the arena, Matt wanders off course for a moment, trying to get used to all of the spectators, before realizing he fell behind and hurries after her. When he’s caught up by her side, he says, “Wow, I’ve forgotten there are so many of us students, here.”

  Lyn laughs, patting his shoulder, and tells him, “I sometimes forget, too. Don’t worry about them all watching you too much. Once we begin our fight, you’ll forget they’re all there, I’m sure.”

  Matt nods, still uneasy, as they near the center of the arena, Lyn taking more steps to put distance between her and him. He calls to her, “You know, I don’t feel so good about having to fight you, Lyn.”

  “Oh?” She turns back to him, her eerie pale eyes fluttering at him, and asks, “Why’s that, Matt?”

  “Well, I just don’t want either of us to hurt the other. I mean, we’ve become friends and such, but if we get too much into this fight, we might end up harming each other beyond our battle morphs. After seeing how James and Tony ended up, I’m worried you or I could end up like that.”

  “Oh, Matt. That’s sweet of you to worry about, but unnecessary. You and I are both good fighters, and we know our limits.” She looks to the audience, stretching with her arms above her head, and adds, “But I’ll admit, it wouldn’t be pleasant for me to be carried out of here, for my first and only time here.”