And only one third of the way through the entire special, the two casts come together...kinda. They really come together in the next chapter. Hmm, maybe I took this story a little too slow.
Chapter Four
The Minds of Darkness
John
The cloud of darkness
swirled lower and lower, forming a miniature funnel cloud that
reached toward the deck of the ship. Karen, Thomas, Ria and I, as
well as the staff members who had been on deck working, watched
through the small window in the door leading from the deck into the
command section. The staff members were terrified, and Thomas wasn't
too far off.
"Thomas, Ria," I
said, "get the staff below decks, and sound an alarm. Then get
back up here with your cards. We'll fight this thing back as long as
we can, but it's powerful. We're going to need help."
Ria nodded, grabbing Thomas
by the arm, snapping him out of his stupor, and the two of them led
the crewmen deeper into the bowls of the ship. Karen and I stood with
our hands on the hatch release, steeling ourselves up. In that
moment, I looked at Karen and paused.
"Karen-," I began.
"I'm going out there
with you," she interrupted. Her determination was unfaltering,
so I didn't complete my thought. Instead I nodded, pulled the handle,
and the two of us stepped outside. I summoned up the powers of my
Soul of Darkness, and without thought, without meaning for it to
happen, my Soul reached out for the mind of the thing hovering above
us. I cried out in pain as my mind connected with dozens, maybe
hundreds, of erratic, disjointed, chaotic minds, each one similar to
the next, but still very different from the rest.
I collapsed. Karen caught me
and helped me up as I concentrated as hard as I could, forcing my
link with the thing, or things, to break.
"What happened?"
Karen asked fearfully.
"Later," I told
her, "I'm fine, and I've discovered something about swirling
friend up there."
Lightning built in the
swirling cloud and lanced toward the two of us, only to be deflected
at the last moment by a shimmering, unstable yet strong barrier
projected by Karen's glowing Soul of Imagination. We dove to the
side, under an overhang.
"Whatever that thing
is," I told Karen, continuing my previous thought, "it's
not just one thing, it's a whole bunch, like some kind of hive."
Darkness, in the form of
twisting tendrils, swirled out from the still-forming cyclone and
reached toward us. I raised my hand to try to disrupt the shadows
making up the attacking tendril, and I was surprised when the spell
failed. I didn't let it distract me for more than a moment, though,
and commanded my own shadow to reach up and become solid, deflecting
the darkness before it could reach us. Then my shadow reached up and
wrapped around the Duel Disk on my arm, transforming it into the Dark
Duel Disk, which I separated into a sword and a buckler.
"Be careful," I
told Karen, "this thing could come at us from any number of
directions at once, and I can't control it with my magic."
Immediately I ran from the
overhang, Karen close at my heels. Another two swirling tendrils
reached toward us. I turned to meet them, Karen keeping just behind
me, and I caught one of my blade and one on my shield, holding them
back, and pushing forward, until the tendrils fell away, and Karen
stepped out beside me, her Soul glowing, and raised her palm,
slinging a wave of shimmering light, blowing the tendrils apart. What
was left of them drew back, and two more thrust forward.
I couldn't bring my
implements up in time, but as a knee-jerk reaction, my shadow rose up
and shielded me from one, while the other curled around me toward
Karen. I looked back, unsure of what to do, just in time to see the
tendril hit another shimmering barrier from Karen's Soul. She
struggled, her Soul flickering uncertainly, but when she met my eyes,
renewed determination found its way to her face, and her barrier
stabilized, taking on the form of a transparent version of the Duel
Monster 'Millennium Shield', holding the shadows back without effort.
Still, we were moments away
from being overwhelmed. The shadows were swirling even faster, and
more tendrils were forming, preparing to strike at us en masse. Like
many times before, I felt a dark power swirling within me. An evil
power. Usually I had no problem shoving that power, and the dark mind
which came with it, back down into the depths of my heart, but this
time, in the midst of my growing desperation, some of it got out.
Energy exploded out around me, dispersing the tendrils and knocking
Karen off of her feet. I didn't really care, though, evil power still
burning around me. Even while I still struggled to force the power
back down, my body reacted, driven by the dark mind that was the
source of that power. I shot forward, practically skating across the
ground on my black aura.
I launched myself upward, my
sword wreathed in the same aura that surrounded me. I threw it,
tethered to me by that aura. It spun through the air, plunging
through the shadow entity, beginning to disrupt it. I guided it
mercilessly, until, suddenly, I sensed a presence within the entity,
a presence separate from the entity itself, protected by strong
magic.
I snapped out of the
darkness' influence, and reacted, directing my sword to wrap the
presence in my aura, and I pulled as hard as I could, giving the
effort everything I had. After only a few moments, my sword burst
forth from the funnel of darkness, dragging a lanky human figure
behind it. I shoved my darkness back down, and melted my sword into
my shadow, drawing it back to me and rejoining it with me shield,
launched forward, and caught the falling figure. I fell with him back
to the deck, and rolled, pulling him with me out of the way of a
desperately reaching tendril.
The dark entity went wild,
lashing out randomly like a wounded animal, putting a hole in the
deck nearby, and crushing a poolside structure. The funnel cloud
finally touched down on the deck, drawing water from the pool into
itself, creating a churning, swirling typhoon, complete with
battering wind and rain. I couldn't do anything. My energy was spent,
Karen was still down, unconscious or worse, and I couldn’t just run
away, leaving her and the man I'd freed behind.
I thought I was finally
finished when, out of nowhere, a group of six people appeared in a
flash of light. Three of them I recognized as my friends Rocky and
Kimi, and the War Ruler, Marcus, his head bandaged, and his arm in a
sling. The others, a young Latino boy with long, straight black hair,
an attractive, brown-haired girl in a brown jacket, and a boy a few
years older with the same color hair, I didn't know. Kimi and Rocky's
Souls were alight.
As I watched, the six took
action. Kimi's Soul glowed bright yellow, her light pushing the
shadow entity's tendrils back. Meanwhile Rocky gestured toward the
swirling darkness and circular arrays of light formed, floating in
the air, surrounding the entity and holding its loose mass in place.
Rocky was straining, and his allies seemed to know it because they
went to work instantly.
The older boy, the girl, and
Marcus spread out in a semi-circle around the darkness. A necklace
around the girl's neck glowed, the boy held up a familiar metal rod,
and Marcus held up a set of back metal scales in his good arm. I
could feel energy pouring from the three items into Rocky's Soul, and
suddenly he wasn't straining so much anymore. The glow of his circles
grew brighter as well. Then the Latino boy stepped forward, standing
between me and the darkness, held up an oversized key, shaped like an
Egyptian ankh, and he changed. His hair stood straight up and its
color drained away until it was stark white. I felt an energy flow
forth from within him, an evil energy that resembled a far weaker
form of the energy locked within me, bolstered by the energy of the
key-shaped item. A Duel Monster, the fierce and powerful 'Dark Armed
Dragon', appeared at the boy's side, and the boy's energy poured into
the dragon. It unleashed a swirling blast of pure dark fire from its
mouth, right into the swirling entity, causing it to begin to break
up, ever so slightly. I could have helped him. I should have. But
aside from being pretty much spent, I was too taken aback by what I
was seeing.
He-he's the boy's dark
side. That boy's controlling his dark side!
The boy and the dragon
poured more and more magic into their attack, continuing to blast the
darkness, forcing it apart, but it was too slow going. It just kept
reforming further up, and pouring back down into the core of the
cyclone. The attack was hurting it, and it might have killed it, but
I could sense that the boy's energy would give out long before that
happened. None of that mattered, though, because it became clear very
quickly that this wasn't an attack, it was a rescue mission.
It was about then that
Thomas and Ria rejoined us. Neither had changed out of their swim
stuff, but they had taken the time grab Thomas' favorite
flame-decaled t shirt, as well as their cards and their Duel Disks,
from their cabins. When they saw the new arrivals, Ria exclaimed
"Whoa, what did we miss?"
The Latino boy backed up
until he was standing right with us, the others joining him only a
few moments later. All at once, they lowered their items, and the
boy's dragon disappeared, his hair and his aura returning to normal.
The entity began to rally, but it didn't matter. There was a flash,
and by the time the darkness' attack reached the place where we'd
been standing, we were gone, appearing a moment later in a cavernous
room with several duel arenas marked on the floor, and some tables
against the wall off to the side. It was a rough teleport, I hadn't
managed to recover yet from using up so much of my energy, and I was
kinda freaking out a little. I'm embarrassed to say, I passed out.
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