Alkalians (68 page)

The flamethrower crashes into the leaf
storm and ignites it into a swirling inferno, incinerating whatever
is caught within it. “Hah, now isn’t that a pretty sight!” exclaims
Buster to a nodding Cynthia. When his zoomed-in vision locates Rose
beyond the inferno, and someone else tumbling out of it, he adds,
“Huh. It seems I missed Rose, but got Dante.” He looks back to
Cynthia, his eyes gleaming. “What was that about you protecting
your prince, earlier?”

Cynthia turns on him with a glare,
fire magic burning in her hands, and as he propels away backwards
she casts a flurry of fire bolts after him, his shotguns stopping
some of them and his rapid hovering dodging the others. He returns
fire with his gun mounts as gatling barrels, but Cynthia puts up a
special defense to such an attack. Superheating the air around her
with her fire magic, the aura splits the energy bullets into sparks
that sting her, rather than piercing through her, and she counters
by mentally stopping more of the broken bullets, combining the
sparks into a focused point, and launching it into the air where it
explodes, its own sparks raining down like arrows at a further
retreating Buster.

***

At that moment in the fight, with Rose
and Dante escaping the inferno and Cynthia and Buster engaged, Sean
has a bird’s eye view of it all. High above the field through his
air balance, his armor bleeding red with the vital wound in his
chest, he sighs and complains to himself. “Look at them, still
going at it like pros. And where am I? Hiding in the sky, like a
critter under a rock! There must be something I can do!” He
observes the others, considering their conditions. “Rose’s wounds
are healed, a fresh green, and Dante got flame-broiled, so his
armor’s scathed a hot orange. Cynthia’s got green scratches, but
Buster’s leaking health, his wounds a deep orange. And me? I’ve
lost so much health I’m in the red zone, and I can only last maybe
a minute more before I should demorph!” He shakes his head,
disgruntled. “And here I was hoping to win this thing, or at least
go down in, er, flames. Now, it looks like I’ll have to sit myself
out. Heh, so much for my gamble on who to…”

While the fight had been going on over
the past minute or so, Matt, his human form unconscious on the
ground, has been forgotten by the others. At that moment, in the
middle of the battlefield, while Sean speaks to himself, his eyes
open, and instead of deep purple in color are now a dark red. He
suddenly morphs, and the black flash is immense in size and power,
its shockwave rocking the others on the field around it and
reaching the audience in their stands far away. As startled as
everyone else, Sean gapes below at Matt, his battle morph fully
healed, and exclaims, “Whoa, whoa, what the hell? Why is Matt back
in morph!?”

The others can only gape as well,
staring at Matt from their four corners of the field around him,
and the audience, having had their share of surprises so far in the
fight, are most surprised by this. A voice rings out across the
field from the loud speaker, “Matthew Calamos, you have already
demorphed and been defeated in this contest. Demorph now, or you
and your partner will be disqualified.” Matt, meanwhile, is
oblivious to the warning as he stares back at his fellow students,
his red eyes like a predator’s containing deadly calm.

Buster then calls out, “Hey, Matt,
what’s wrong with ya? You heard the announcer, you lost, fair and
square. Now demorph and let us finish this fight!” This seems to
reach him when he turns towards Buster, glancing between him and
Cynthia, before he raises his hand to charge up a spell. The others
only watch, bracing themselves, unable to believe he’s serious, and
Matt casts the Blastion spell across the field.

At first, to Buster and Cynthia’s
confusion, it isn’t aimed at either of them, instead gliding
towards a spot on the field between them. But when Matt clenches
his hand into a fist, the black sphere crackles with volts and
splits, thunder booming as lightning bolts simultaneously strike
Buster and Cynthia. Buster hits the ground hard, knocked off his
hovering air balance with his wounds a searing red, while Cynthia
staggers back with a jagged yellow wound upon her chest.

After the opening attack, Rose, Dante,
and Sean are shocked by Matt’s decision while he follows it with a
large troop of his shadow clones, dividing up to go after his two
targets. Quicker to recover, Cynthia faces down the clones
approaching her while casting intricate spells. From the charred
grass and ground her fires left behind, which the clones trace in
their advance, she raises glowing embers, letting them drift
through the air or stick to the clones like dew. Before they reach
her, brandishing their large black swords, Cynthia sets off her
trap with a spark from her fingertips, and the embers instantly
ignite into a conflagration, wiping out all of the clones against
her.

On his half of the assault, Buster
struggles to stand up while his gatling guns mow down the clones
coming for him. As he manages to stand on his crippled legs, his
guns stop firing, their cores needing to cool down, and only a few
more clones are left before him, armed with their dark blades.
Growling, he readies his arms into shotguns, and as they leap the
last few yards at him he shoots them down in order. Just as he
takes out his share of them, he notices the flash fire obliterating
Cynthia’s, and glances to her before they both focus on the real
Matt, still standing where he remorphed.

Before either of them can return fire
against Matt, Buster and Cynthia notice something happening before
each of them. The particles of black magic that made up Matt’s
clones, rather than vanishing after they had been destroyed, linger
in the air as they gather and condense into two separate energy
masses. To Buster and Cynthia’s dread, the masses unfold into new
forms, and they find themselves looking at dark reflections of
their own morphs. Cynthia’s clone is black except for her fiery
hair, colored a dark blue and violet instead of red, orange, and
yellow, and Buster’s clone has red mechanical eyes that glare back
at him.

While their models are transfixed by
seeing dark versions of themselves, the clones attack. Cynthia’s
clone casts a huge boulder of shadowy flames, blasting and
disorienting her, and then readies an invisible guitar between her
hands and plays wicked music, causing the flames lingering on
Cynthia to rapidly flare and consume her, making her wounds quickly
descend to red in color, until she demorphs and extinguishes them
in the flash.

Buster’s clone fires both his gun
mounts as cannons, hitting Buster’s own gun mounts and bursting
their barrels, sending him staggering. With his gun mounts’ cores
also broken, and his health already low, Buster knows he’s as good
as done while his clone aims grenade launchers and fires a volley
upon him. As the grenades go off, he demorphs, negating the most of
the blasts, but while dazed by them he spots with horror one last
grenade sphere drop near him before it explodes.

***

After defeating their models, the
clones of Cynthia and Buster fade away while Matt still remains
where he stands, his stare over and beyond them. From behind him, a
fair distance away, Sean drops in behind Dante, the two of them
covered in red or orange wounds, and yells, “Hey, Matt, have you
gone mad? You already demorphed, you’ve already lost, so why are
you cheating? You should demorph, right now, before you get into
big…”

Sean comes up short when Matt whirls
around, his left arm a rifle aiming at him through Dante. Both men
blink before a single black bullet hits them, piercing through
Dante in a burst of red and smacking Sean in the shoulder, and they
both demorph before Matt shoots again, collapsing unconscious on
the ground.

Unlike the others, Rose, the last one
left in morph, is calmer about the situation in her worry over
Matt’s actions. Approaching him slowly, she calls to him, “Matt,
can you hear me? You did it, Matt, you defeated them, they
demorphed. You can demorph now, it’s over, and we can…” The rifle
arm turns on her, and she stops, bracing herself.

Rose is oddly not
surprised. Ever since he had remorphed, she could feel something
was wrong, something was ominously different about him, and when
she sees his eyes, red rather than purple, she understands. The
Dark Warrior Paladin before her is
not
Matthew Calamos, not the one
that she and others knew.

Matt fires the gun, and Rose barely
dodges the bullet, bending back to have it scrape past her shoulder
and leaping away in retreat. Matt improves his assault by sending
shadow clones with their swords after her, keeping his rifle fixed
on her to try and snipe her while they distract her. Desperately
defending herself, Rose has to fend off the clones by throwing leaf
shurikens or striking back with leaf daggers while constantly
moving, avoiding their blades and Matt’s shots.

She gets a close call when some of the
clones circle around to flank her from behind as one of the shots
pierces her left side, her wound energy bursting orange, and its
impact twists her around to them as they lunge at her. Reacting
quickly, Rose dodges the chop of one clone, spins to slice through
the few others, and grabs it from behind to use it as a shield
against the next bullet, its form shattered by it and the impact
knocking her over.

As Rose lies on the ground, more of
Matt’s clones move in while he exchanges his left arm rifle, its
core overheating, for his right arm, aiming the gun in Rose’s
direction to pick her off when she reacts to his clones. Dazed on
the ground, Rose gets the feeling she’s in trouble and needs to do
something fast. As she wonders over what ability in her arsenal to
use, she then remembers how Matt had used one of her abilities
earlier in the battle. Does that mean she could use one of his, in
turn?

She focuses upon her right hand, to
form an energized blade from it, but no blade appears. Rose
switches to her left hand, willing it to twist and turn into a gun,
but all it does is flex her fingers and knuckles. About to give up
and resort to one of her techniques against the incoming clones,
she then feels it, faintly but surely flowing in her body through
veins. Knowing she has the internal system that allows one to
charge and cast magic spells, she would have panicked over what
spell she should use if she doesn’t suddenly recall a conversation
she once had with Matt, during one of their showers
together.

Matt, I’m curious about
something
, she had said to him.
I’m already aware of how you use your spells,
that you need the vein-like system to charge and expel the energy.
So, how do you do that for making your clones?

Chuckling, Matt
asked,
What do you mean?

Well, for most spell casters, it takes
at least a few seconds to prepare and cast a spell. But with your
clones, you can make one instantly appear, within a second. And not
just one, but many at once! How is that possible?

Oh, heh, it’s simple. It’s kind of
like, uh, breathing.

Breathing?

Yeah, like, you take a quick inhale,
and then exhale. In my case, that means I surge the magic through
me, outlining my whole figure to copy, and then, well, breath out,
letting the clone come out of me. For as long as I could exhale,
then, that’s how many clones I can make in order.

Half way through the
memory, Rose is already following the instructions, feeling the
magic energy flush through her, and as Matt’s clones converge over
her, their swords raised to fall upon her, she breathes out, deep
and long.
In brilliant flashes of green,
clones of Rose spring up and clash with Matt’s, blades from both
sides cutting through ethereal flesh while Matt, his red eyes
searching, aims and shoots randomly at the clones, unable to tell
them apart from the real Rose.

The green clones, outnumbered by the
black but faster than them, carve through them before their brutal
bouquet is broken by Blastion spells, the explosions blooming to
consume all the clones and clear a path to the real Matt. The
source of the spells, the real Rose, sprints down the path, and
before he can get a shot at her she collides into him, the leaf
dagger in her right hand thrust deeply into his chest.

Time seems to stand still after the
impact, and Rose, panting, looks up to Matt’s face in their near
embrace. To her dread, it’s not Matt’s face she sees, but yet
another clone’s, its glowing red eyes glaring down at her. Whirling
around, she spots the real Matt a few yards away, preparing a spell
as energy crackles in his hand, but before she can retreat the
clone grabs her arm, locking her in place. Wincing from the grip,
Rose glances back, knowing her moment to flee was gone, as Matt
casts black lightning upon her, the bolt striking her and his
clone. The clone is shattered, and Rose, her body torn with red
wounds, collapses upon the ground.

Lying on her back again, Rose has a
harder time moving as she tries to sit up. With her heavy trauma
and spell system crippled by the wounds, she doesn’t have time to
recuperate before Matt is looming over her, the barrel of his right
arm gun pointing between her eyes. Unable to blink, unable to
breath, she can do the only thing that suddenly comes to mind, and
demorphs in a flash of red.