I kinda feel like I miss an opportunity in this chapter of the special to have Rachel and Ria meet and clash. You know they would. And then they'd make up. Maybe hug a little. And then their eyes would meet, and their aggression would reveal itself to be something else, and they...wait, wait, that's a different idea that I had.
Sorry.
But in all seriousness, I could have had them duke it out a bit, but what could I have done? I could make them fight, like martial arts fight, but I already did that with Rachel and Rocky. I could make them duel, but I already did that with Rachel and Rocky, and Rachel and Kimi, so I don't really see the point. This chapter is long enough anyway, with all kinds of exposition, some of which is pretty redundant if you read the source stories. I simply can't bring myself to pad it out any further.
Chapter Five
Coming Together
When I woke up again I was
lying on a cot in a different room, decked out with the kind of stuff
that you might find in a hospital room or a clinic. Me being me, this
freaked me right the Hell out. I don't like doctors much, and I
especially don't like hospitals, or places that resemble hospitals.
I sat up quickly, instantly
awake, and looked around, a little frantically, only calming down
when I saw Karen standing nearby, moving to stand beside me. She'd
been talking to Rocky and the girl with the long dark hair, but when
she'd heard me jostle my bed, she'd turned immediately to make sure I
was alright, sounding relieved as she said, "John, you're
awake."
"Far as I can tell,"
I agreed, "but my head's still pretty fogged up."
"You put out a huge
amount of magical energy all at once," the dark-haired girl said
as she and Rocky joined Karen directly at my bedside, "It's no
surprise that you'd feel weakened."
She smiled, looking rather
impressed, "I never knew any one person could have that much
magical energy. You're just as strong as Rocky always said."
That's when it clicked that
I knew who these people were, "You guys are the Duelists Elite."
"That's right,"
Rocky answered, gesturing to the girl, "this is my friend
Rachel. The others who were with us were Kimi and Marcus, of course,
Rachel's brother Charlie, and Marco."
"What's going on here?"
I asked, feeling like the last guy to hear the latest gossip. "What
was that thing that attacked us?"
Rocky did his best to
explain, but he kept veering off on tangents to explain his
explanations, which included too many terms and too many names of
people that I simply didn't know. Finally I stopped him, "Maybe
you should just start at the beginning, and tell me everything that
happened since you joined up with the Elite?"
So that's what he did,
starting with his duel with Prof to prove himself worthy to join, and
then moving on to explanations of Elite and it's mission, and then to
the story of his first mission with them, where he'd lost his new
friend James. He told me about the rise of Emperor, the revelation
that Emperor was trying to bring together the seven most powerful
Shadow Items to reshape the world in the image he desired, the
mysterious arrival of Marco, who Rocky didn't seem to want to talk
about much.
He told me about Prof and
his crazy, but accurate, calculations, of Greg's power to place his
soul in objects all over the globe, via the Shadow Millennium Ring,
and about the invasion of the Elite. He told me about the kidnapping
of Greg's brother, Tim (Rachel went red in the face at the mention of
this name), the death of Greg at Emperor's hand, the mission to
rescue Tim from Emperor, and finally, the difficult revelation that
Tim was Emperor. He told me, with a pained expression, of
Emperor's death at his hand, and Rachel gave him a funny look which
told me there was more to that story, but that I shouldn't try to
learn what it was.
"After that,"
Rocky explained, "I decided that I'd had enough of fighting, of
tearing things down. I decided to build something instead. So I went
and found Kimi in Japan. It was the only ending that made sense for
me, and we've been together since."
"It's about time,"
I told him. He was smiling happily. I looked over at Karen,
understanding exactly how he felt.
"But then," Rocky
continued, "Rachel showed up just today and asked me to come
back. She said that a new threat had arisen, and that she needed my
help to face it."
"We tried to fight it
without Rocky," Rachel explained, "using the Shadow
Millennium Items, but we failed, and Prof was absorbed into that
thing."
"Prof's the one with
the crazy calculation skills?" I asked.
"Yeah," Rachel
answered, and looked over at another cot. I followed her gaze and saw
the man who I'd pulled from the creature. He wore a black metal ring
around his neck, and had a metallic eye.
"That's Prof," I
realized, "and that ring pendant is the Item that Greg used to
put bits of his soul all over the place."
"That's right,"
Rocky said, "but no one since Greg has been able to get that
particular power to work. Prof was using it simply for it's superior
power as a Shadow Millennium Item."
"Did you guys kill that
thing?" I asked hopefully. I'd seen that thing's powers first
hand, and I wasn't eager for a repeat demonstration.
"Not even close,"
Rachel answered, crossing her arms.
"Then it's going to
attack again," I told them. "Do we know if it wants
something in particular?"
"That's the funny
thing," Rachel answered, giving me a mildly suspicious look, "it
seems to be after you."
"What?" I stood up
too quickly and nearly collapsed. Karen and Rocky caught me and
helped me to steady myself.
"It attacked us here
first," Rachel told me, "even before we could consolidate
our forces and move against it, and then it went right for you on
your ship. We think that it's because of your huge magical energy. It
must have been drawn to it, like a bee to nectar,"
"Okay," I said,
accepting her point uncontested, "but why. Why Prof, and
why me?"
"Does it need a
reason?" Rachel asked indignantly. "It's a monster. It
sensed that we were a threat, so it came after us. It saw that Prof,
with his intellect, was the real threat among us, so it removed him
from the equation. It sensed your power, and tried to make your
power its power."
"Basically," Karen
summed up, "the best they can figure, it's acting on instinct.
If there's more to its behavior, it isn't the kind of thing that
would make any sense to us. All they do know is that, once it's
recovered fully from its last encounter with us, it'll be back. If
it's still after you, it'll be back here specifically. That's
what we were discussing when you woke up."
"We need to prepare,"
I reasoned. "We have the Souls. You guys have the Shadow
Millennium Items. Thomas has his Duel Monster spirit. We'll just have
to hope it's enough."
"The Shadow Millennium
Items together couldn't do a thing to it," Rachel argued, "and
now we're three Items short. Maybe with your Souls added to the mix
we can hurt it. After all, that's why I brought Rocky in, for his
Soul power. But we used our plan on it on the ship, and it just kept
recovering as quick as we could hurt it."
"I can carry one of the
Items in addition to me Soul," I told her. "So can Karen, and I'm
sure Kimi or Rocky would be too. That way none of you guys will have
to double up and risk being corrupted."
"That'll work for the
Ring and Raph's Pendant," said Rocky thoughtfully, "but the
Eye is part of Prof now. It's one of the strongest Items, so it has a
steeper trade-off. Prof is the only person who could safely remove it
now."
I looked grimly at my
allies, "Then two out of three will have to do."
Karen took the Shadow
Millennium Pendant from the unconscious Raphael, and I received the
Shadow Millennium Ring from the unconscious Prof. As I put it around
my neck, I felt my own energy flare, so much so that I had trouble
reining it in. It was unsettling, but also kind of a rush. It's hard
to explain to someone who has never used the power of either a Soul
or a Shadow Item, but where the Souls really feel like a part of us
Soul Wielders, like something completely natural akin to an arm or
leg, Shadow Items are different. They're more raw, and less
controlled. They feel like something apart from the wielder, like a
tool, and a pretty clumsy one at that, and this was my first time
using one.
I could feel my own energy
being amplified, but unlike with my Soul, I could feel the Item
amplifying the energy of the dark me as well. On any other day, this
would have bothered me, but I'd just seen a kid, a kid,
control his dark side perfectly. I felt that I should be able to do
the same. Between that feeling and the anxiety of the coming battle,
I simply didn't see my darkness as a reason to worry today. In fact,
I'd allowed a truly horrible idea begin to form in the back of my
mind that maybe, just maybe, I could do the same thing that
Marco did.
Of course I was wrong, I
just didn't know it yet.
"Where will it attack?"
Kimi asked Rachel and the other Elite. The ten of us were gathered in
the room with the Duel Disk arenas, which Rocky called the Arena
Room, to discuss what was to come next.
"Last time,"
Rachel's stern, unemotional brother Charlie answered, "we sensed
it outside the installation, right above us out on the mountain. We
went outside, to the runway directly above this room, to meet it in
battle so that it wouldn't try to break through the rock face and
cause a cave in. We expect something similar to happen this time."
"What should we do?"
Ria asked, referring to herself and Thomas.
"From what I
understand," Charlie answered, completely unsympathetically,
"you can't do anything. Only one of you has any magical
power, and it's insubstantial."
"My magic might come
from a Duel Monster instead of a fancy necklace," Thomas argued,
"and I may not like the whole magic thing much in general, but
I'm going to help my friends fight if I can."
"And I can handle
myself," Ria added. "In fact, I'm sure I could make a real
difference if you'd give me one of those Shadow Item things."
In that moment I could have
backed Ria up, and even offered to let her use the Shadow Millennium
Ring, but I hesitated. I was still wrestling with the idea of
releasing my darkness, and I wanted the power of the Item to put
toward enhancing my control, and my powers. So instead it was Karen
who spoke up, "I may not agree with Ria often, or ever
really, but she does have a point. She's easily the most stubborn and
tenacious person I've ever met. Let her fight, and she won't stop
until the enemy falls, or she simply can't get up anymore herself."
Karen removed the Shadow
Millennium Pendant from around her neck and handed it to Ria, who put
it on, looking a bit awed.
"Just concentrate,"
Karen explained, "and you shouldn't have a problem making it
work."
"Are we handing Shadow
Items out to just anyone these days?" Marco griped. The others
more or less ignored his bad attitude.
"Alright," Rachel
said thoughtfully, eyeing Ria with uncertainty, "now that we've
got that worked out, for better or worse, let's go over our strategy.
Once this shows up, we'll-."
"Give it what it
wants," I interrupted.
"Excuse me?"
Charlie asked, looking at me like I'd grown a second head.
"It may or may not want
Prof, but it definitely wants me," I explained. "If I'm
there waiting for it, it should make me the focus of its attack. If
I'm there to distract it, maybe your original plan can work, and if
not, with the power of the Ring added to my own power, I should be
able to manipulate this thing like I can manipulate any other
shadows. I don't know if I can kill it, but I should be able to draw
it into a Shadow Game. If it's really an unintelligent animal, it
should be simple for me to beat it, and use the Penalty to destroy
it."
"You're crazy,"
said Marco, astonished. He looked to Rachel, "Please tell me you
aren't considering this."
"Hey," I said,
before Rachel could respond, "this is what I do. In the last
three years I killed a Shadow Demon and an evil God. And that's just
the tip of the iceberg. I've practically got a black belt in
killing-things-with-Shadow-Games-fu."
"John's right,"
Rocky said, backing me up to his friends. "I've seen him in
action. If anyone can pull off something like this, it's him."
"Well," Rachel
said with a little smirk on her face that said she still wasn't
convinced that I wasn't crazy (and of course neither am I), "It seems like you've got
everything figured out. Will you even need the rest of us?"
"Of course I will,"
I told them all. "Like I said, Our first course of action should
be to try your collective attack again, and if that does fail, this
thing can still multitask like crazy. If I'm going to fight it
one-on-one, I need backup there to make sure it stays
one-on-one. Maybe you can even continue your attack against it while
I fight. Hit it on a second front."
"I still don't
understand what you mean," Rachel said, "when you describe
what this thing is."
I paused, struggling to put
into words something that I didn't fully understand myself, "This
creature isn't just one thing. It's dozens, maybe hundreds, of
creatures all acting together as one. They all have very similar
goals and methods, but they aren't exactly the same. They all
communicate, coordinating their efforts to further the efforts of the
creature as a whole, allowing the entire creature to multitask
effortlessly, but at the same time it's completely unpredictable,
because it's not just one mind that you have to predict,"
"That does explain why
we had so much trouble fighting it directly when it first showed up,"
Charlie decided.
"That's right,"
said the injured Marcus, his bandages matting his short, light brown
hair, pushing it up at the top, "it wasn't until we had Rocky to
hold it all in place that we were able to damage it at all, but even
then some of it still leaked out of Rocky's shield circle, avoiding
our attack and keeping the thing alive so it could regenerate."
"Then this time I'll
lend my power to Rocky," Karen suggested. "I'm the only
person here who doesn't even have their cards with them, so if it
comes to direct combat I'll do as much good as a guy with his arm in
a sling."
She looked at Marcus
apologetically, "No offense."
She looked to the rest of us
and continued, "Anyway, my Soul of Imagination has a huge pool
of energy to draw upon. It's unfocused, and therefore difficult to
utilize, but if I use Rocky's Soul as a lens to focus that power-."
"-It'll make my Soul
much stronger," Rocky agreed. "It's worth a try."
The others looked at Rocky,
Karen and I with mixed expressions. Kimi was on our side, but the
Elite members, Rachel especially, clearly weren't too sure. It was
obvious to everyone present that the direction this battle took would
depend on Rachel. This was her house, and that made it her party, and
she didn't really strike me as the kind of person who would just step
aside and let someone who she'd just met lead her and her people into
battle. Then the mountain began to shake, and I saw Rachel's
indecision disappear. She looked at me, "Aye aye, captain."
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