Alkalians

by Caleb S. Bugai

  Cynthia cuts him off with a firm grip on his shoulder to shake him. “Stop it, Dante. Don’t do this to yourself. Irene was your older sister, she wouldn’t have cared for your counsel. All you can do now, at the moment, is focus on winning this battle, and then presenting yourself to others as a proper noble heir. She was a senior, she had all the time in the world to heed others and change, but she didn’t. All that’s become of her is her own fault. Alright?”

  Dante blinks up at Cynthia, his gaze flickering between her bronze-tanned skin, her great cleavage so close to him, and her gleaming pink eyes. “Alright. Thank you, Cynthia.” He nods before shuffling out from her grip, clearing his throat uneasily, and speaking up for the others to hear him. “Sean, and Buster. Matt, and Rose.” When he has their attention, he drops his cigarette and steps forward to rub it out. “If it hasn’t occurred to you yet, I shall make it clear now.”

  The others exchange confused glances before Sean asks, “Make what clear, bro?”

  “We have accomplished what we set out to do, when we united at Lyn’s dinner. We have defeated Cain and his allies, undermining their regime, and have secured the six spots in the finals of the Royale Project. Therefore, our fellowship has served its purpose and may no longer need to persist. Our fellowship is broken.”

  Buster snorts, not moved like the freshmen trio. “Well, yeah, duh. This is a battle royale between all of us, after all!”

  “Not exactly, Buster. If you are as wise in tactics as I’m sure you are, you are thinking the same thing that I am.”

  Buster catches the glinting glance Dante points at the red pair among them, nodding. “Aye, seems we are thinking the same thing. I was wondering if you, the most subtle and crafty one here, was thinking of it, but I wasn’t going to risk forewarning them by openly suggesting it to ya.”

  Looking between the blue and green pairs, Rose says to Matt at her side, “Matt, I think what they’re getting at is…”

  “Yeah,” Matt agrees. “I know.”

  Even Cynthia catches on, fixing a sly smirk at them as she strokes back her hair, but Sean, of course, has not. “Whoa, wait, what? Whatcha two talking about?”

  “We’re talking about a temporary alliance, Sean,” Dante explains, “against the greatest threat here. We may all be skilled fighters here, but only one of us is a Dark Warrior.”

  “…Oh. Oh.” Sean looks back to Matt and Rose, shrugging. “Sorry guys, but he’s got a point. It’s only logical that we team up against you.”

  “That’s fine, Sean,” Rose replies, smirking. “Matt and I will be sure to make you pay for it, later.”

  “He-hey, that’s not fair!” Sean objects while Cynthia and Buster burst out laughing. “I have to fight you guys, anyway!”

  Matt, smirking as well, gets an idea and brings it up. “But Sean, don’t you have to make Dante pay for something, already?”

  “…Oh, yeah. Yeah.” He whirls at Dante, pointing in accusation. “I still have to avenge myself for being failed by you, last year!”

  “Ah, that may be true, Sean,” counters Dante, “but who do you think is the greater threat to your chance at glory here? Me, with just my sword and air balance? Or Matt, with his sword, rifle, and magic, all empowered by the Dark Warrior’s ability?”

  Sean hesitates, glancing between both men, before groaning while clutching at his head. “Gah, I don’t know!”

  Buster grins at Sean’s agony before turning his ear to the loud speaker back by the audience’s stands beginning a countdown. “Better figure it out fast, because things are about to get real out here.”

  “And consider this, Sean,” muses Cynthia. “Not only is Dante the prince of Goros, my prince, but I’m also your girlfriend. Would you really attack your dear girlfriend for protecting her prince?”

  “…Dammit, I don’t know! It’s a gamble, either way!” Something suddenly clicks in Sean’s head, his eyes wide with revelation. “Wait a tick. It’s a gamble. A gamble. And I’m good at gambling!” No longer unsure of himself, Sean cackles mischievously, glancing between the green and red pairs while rubbing his palms together.

  Shaking their heads at Sean’s behavior, Matt and Rose look to each other, sobering up for the serious event about to happen, and without a word hold hands tightly. Whatever the other four did, they would fight together.

  ***

  After the siren sounds at the end of the countdown, all six of the combatants morph, each flash separate except for Matt and Rose’s, their black-and-green blending together. Buster makes the first move, aiming his large cannon mounts, and fires both at Matt and Rose, who leap away in opposite directions to avoid the blasts. Sean and Dante sprint after Matt, and upon seeing them Rose prepares leaf blades to throw at them.

  She flings them, but a sudden flamethrower from her left burns the leaves in mid-air, and she whirls to confront Cynthia, who advises her, “I’d be more worried about becoming firewood out here, if I were you.” Biting her lip, Rose knows she’s right, as the fire magic would do heavy damage if it caught her. All she could do for Matt was hope he would be okay on his own.

  Matt has no time to check on Rose as he meets Dante and Sean’s combined assault. Drawing his sword and vanishing among clones, he tries to hold off the swift duo, who dodge the huge swings and thrusts and counter with quick slices, stabs, jabs, or kicks that delete the clones. After clearing through the black copies before him, Dante fails to find the real one and instinctively turns around in time to block a chop from the actual Matt. They struggle in a deadlock until Sean, to both of their surprises, dives in beneath them and does an upside-down split, kicking them through the air in opposite directions.

  After recovering in mid air to flip backwards and land on his feet, Matt, a green bruise on his breastplate, glances to Buster, whose gatling mounts commence firing upon him. Using clone dispersion to escape the bullets, he becomes hidden within a V-formation of his shadows running towards the MechWarrior. Buster, cursing to himself because he has no time to lock onto the real Matt, brings out his shotgun and grenade launcher and shoots at the incoming V. The lead clones are obliterated, but the ones to the rear switch sides of the V.

  In their crossing, a sniper bullet flies out and hits Buster beneath his sternum. When he looks back up from the impact, the clones use swords to cut through his legs when they pass by him, and the real Matt comes straight at him as he staggers, leaps up before him, and thrusts his blade’s edge into the bullet wound, splashing dark yellow from it.

  Meanwhile, Rose and Cynthia are having their own duel. They circle past the other, waiting for an opening to attack. Then, following a malicious glimmer from her eyes, Cynthia launches a wide blaze forward, which Rose back flips high into the air to avoid. While still in the air, she summons a sharpened wooden spear and throws it downward. Cynthia side steps to let the spear land beside her, and then obtains a brilliant idea as she eyes it.

  She pulls the wooden shaft out of the ground, twirls it above her head where her fiery hair lights it aflame, and hurls it into the sky. The burning spear sails high through the air, and splits into multiple flares that rain down towards Rose. She uses her quick agility to prevent them from hitting her, and they leave small blotches of fire around her. Then, while noting their positions, she realizes what Cynthia is really going to do.

  Rose figures it out too late as the Fire Magician prepares her imaginary violin and strums out notes that cause the flames to spread into a grassfire. Cornering her in the converging fire, Cynthia grins as she expects Rose to soon ignite when a gunshot precedes a black bullet sniping her, streaking across her chest, and she recoils, ending her music and conducting of the flames.

  Rolling out of a small gap between the fires, Rose winces at her few burns, smoldering to yellow in color, and looks across the field to the sight of Matt on a bent Buster, his right hand anchoring the sword in Buster’s chest and his left arm the gun that had shot Cynthia. She smiles in appreciation, but drops it when she sees something else. “Matt
, watch out!”

  Alerted by her warning, Matt turns, raising his rifle in time to catch the chop from Dante’s katana. Nearly severing his arm with the blow, Dante follows it up with a quick rising stroke, combined with a gust of wind, to throw Matt off of Buster, who twists around and fires his shotgun at him, grazing his side before he falls. Matt stops his fall with air balance, floating a few feet above the ground, only to get slammed by Sean crashing into him from his left, the impact finishing the severing of his arm and bursting dark yellow energy out of his wounds.

  Grinning, Sean clings to him with one arm around his throat while the other drills punches into his abdomen, intending to give him further trauma, when he twitches as something pierces through his own. A dark tendril of wood, bending like a vine, sprouts from where Matt lost his arm to replace it, binds Sean in its crushing grasp, and he without realizing it uses it to hammer him into the ground a few times before flinging him back towards Buster and Dante.

  ***

  For a moment, the whole battle pauses, everyone’s attention on the black vine grown out of Matt’s wounded flank. He himself is slower to notice it, staring in awe at it, moving and flexing it like it was his own arm, before he glances across the field to Rose. As confused as he was, she shrugs, and then Sean, springing back on his feet with yellow cracks along his scale armor, yells, “Okay, what the hell!? Since when can Matt use Rose’s techniques?”

  Buster, barely standing on his crippled legs, meets the glance from Dante, a green spot of damage on his chest, and they both nod. “A morph transfusion.”

  “Huh? Say what, now?”

  “It’s the rare occurrence where two individuals, by morphing simultaneously and in close contact, share some of their morphs’ abilities for as long as they are in morph,” Dante explains, his fiercely glowing katana formed from his left hand. “They must have pulled it off without intending to, by the looks on their faces.”

  “Ah. So, if Matt can now control the plant element, does that mean…” Sean looks to Rose. “She’s got the Dark Warrior’s power in her attacks?”

  “Let’s hope not,” growls Buster while darkening energy pulses from his chest wound, “but it changes nothing. We take down Matt first.” He prepares his gun mounts, changed into rocket launchers, and locks on to Matt’s figure.

  Seeing the three about to resume combat, Rose starts to run at them when a sweeping trail of flames cuts her off, and she turns back to Cynthia. “Where are you running off to, Rosie? We still have a piece to conduct together.” Frowning, she focuses on Cynthia and dashes at her.

  To meet her, Cynthia casts a large burst of fire at her. She doesn’t expect it to hit her, as Rose would dodge it, and is already focused on possessing the other flames behind her to come after her when Rose catches her by surprise. Instead of dodging the fire burst, she plows through it with a summoned log shielding her, and then smashes it into a startled Cynthia. As she staggers back, Rose maneuvers past her, grabbing the log, and swings it around to whack her in the back like a giant baseball bat, wound energy bursting as she falls forward.

  Face-down on the ground, her dark yellow wounds contrasting her bright red suit, Cynthia tries to push herself up when something pins her down, and she screams in numbing pain as Rose’s dagger carves down through her spine, the jagged, vital wound darkening to orange, before she flares out her fiery hair to repel Rose, who leaps off and away from her.

  Meanwhile, after Buster launched his missiles at him, Matt spends his vine arm to deflect them, whipping it up to be snapped to pieces by their blasts, with his focus moving on to Sean and Dante rushing him again. Dispersing among clones, he falls back while they charge forward, a wall of swords, and divide Sean and Dante as they avoid them. Drifting across the grass to take another thrust at Matt, Sean hesitates when he hears Cynthia’s scream, turning to her and Rose further off. With his guard down, he gets impaled by Matt’s blade from behind, cringing as Matt raises him up. But before he could do more to Sean, gatling fire reminds him of Buster, and he dissipates his sword, dropping Sean, to avoid the cutting stream of bullets on a rising air thrust.

  As Matt escapes Buster’s barrage, Dante is not so lucky. Distracted in cutting his way through Matt’s clones, the ones he had yet to slash are instead shattered by the bullets, which in turn bite into him, peppering him with yellow holes from his left leg to his right shoulder. When the bullets stop, he glares back at Buster, who laughs out, “Sorry!” and hovers on air balance to surge after Matt, and Dante can only shake it off and follow.

  Looking right to left to see them both coming, Matt takes note of Buster’s two gun mounts as cannons and his arms as shotguns, as well as Dante making his katana larger between two hands, and he quickly figures out what would happen. Buster would fire his cannons at him, forcing him to move, and he would either get struck down by Dante’s sword or blasted by Buster’s shotguns, depending on where he moved.

  So instead, Matt casts a black tempest in Buster’s direction, intercepting the fired mortars and swinging them way off target to explode elsewhere, and then twists his arm into a rifle and fires bullet bursts at Dante, making him deflect a few of them and spin out past the others and him. Dante brakes and drifts around, intent on getting him, but as he dashes at Matt from behind another object runs into him, one dagger ripping through his waist and the other diving between his shoulder and neck, before in a whirl they tear out of him with orange energy gushing and he tumbles to the ground.

  After Cynthia’s flaring hair forced her back, Rose watched the flames swirl and grow into an inferno to cover her. Knowing she couldn’t get through the flames, and that they meant Cynthia was desperately defending herself, she seized the moment to cross the field and finally assist Matt, ambushing Dante and taking him down with her leaf knives. She meets Matt’s gaze when he turns back, and they both smile before she comes over to him, reunited side-by-side in the battle. “Hey,” she asks, “how are you holding up?”

  “Oh, fine,” Matt replies, “besides my left arm missing and my wounds glowing orange. You?”

  “Well, I’ve got some yellow wounds myself, but fortunately no severed limbs.” They both chuckle before turning back to their foes, with her shielding Matt’s wounded flank.

  ***

  Shaking his head as he stands, Dante, his armor tattered by orange wounds, stares at Matt and Rose in their defensive stance. “They’re proving as difficult as I feared,” he says to Buster appearing at his side, looming over him as he hovers on air balance. “And they were just alone. Now they’re back together.”

  “Aye, it’s not looking good.” Buster shrugs in his mechanical armor, the hole in his chest pulsing orange, before surveying the rest of the field. “Sean’s just getting back up, but he’s got a worse vital wound than me, so he’ll be no good, and all I see of Cynthia is that growing inferno over there.”

  Dante looks to the large fire across the field, calculating what she could do with it. “She’s probably already healed herself, and soon she’s going to unleash that inferno at whomever she pleases. All of you at once, most likely.”

  “Yeah. We better make this quick, then, before she does.” He adjusts one of his gun mounts, its barrel molding into a different kind of cannon. “If you can distract them, I’ll take care of the rest.”

  “Hmm. Make it count.” Dante redraws his sword from his right hand and charges at Matt and Rose while Buster charges energy in his new cannon, his aim locked onto Matt. Dante meets with Rose, her knives parrying his sword, and she spins away from him to expose him to Matt’s rifle, but he thrusts back to avoid the shot. Dragging to a stop with his heels, he has to deflect leaf shurikens thrown at him and another black bullet with his blade and swirling air. While repelling the shurikens, the bullet leaves a mark by hitting his sword, raised to defend the largest wound on his chest, and knocking him down from the impact.

  “Get Dante, and I’ll handle Buster!” Rose directs, spinning to throw a larger leaf shuriken at Buster, whose shot
gun breaks it as he continues charging his cannon. She takes a moment to stare at the cannon, predicting what he could do with that energy being built up, while Matt hovers into the air to cast dark lightning bolts at Dante, who has to roll to dodge them. She was going to try stopping whatever Buster is up to when something grabs her from behind, clamping arms and legs around her figure. Struggling against the squeeze put on her, Rose hears Sean say, “I may be limited by my vital wound, but I can still do this!” before using his air balance to drag her away, giving Buster a clear shot at Matt.

  As Matt descends upon Dante yet lying on the ground, causing another dead lock between their blades, and follows it up by spawning a ring of clones around Dante, their own swords prepared to finish him, Buster takes the shot, firing a silver, searing laser from his cannon. The laser smashes Matt from behind and annihilates him and his clones in its passing, and Matt’s wounds blaze red within the beam before a demorph flash cuts it off and he drops to the ground, a fleeting gasp on his face before he closes his eyes and passes out.

  ***

  The battle again pauses with Matt’s defeat. Rose, aghast with shock, has stopped struggling in Sean’s bind around her, who solemnly looks on over her shoulder. Dante stands up to look down at the fallen freshman beside him, and Buster, cranking his laser cannon as its core cools down, has satisfaction gleaming in his machine eyes. Only breaths are let out from the others until Sean remarks, “Well, at least he went out with a bang.” This warrants Rose into doing something startling, and he yelps, “Ah, she bit me! She bit my arm!”

  Intending to do more than that as leaves under her mental command form from her hands, Rose pauses when she notices something happening by Dante. He notices it, too, as ashes float by him on a breeze not there and into his wounds, healing them to be green-colored marks upon his armor. He turns, the others’ gazes following his, and they see on the far side of the field the massive inferno, where Cynthia, glorious in her unscathed, burning figure, strides out before it. With a grin, she raises her arms, and the inferno is unleashed when it splits and rushes pass her, across the field, like three trains on fire. As the others are wide eyed in awe, Sean gawks before saying, “El fuego es grande, y muerte!” and releasing Rose to flee high into the air.