Clash of the Elements Part 4 Interlude: The Chaos Training Arc
Chapter 1: Setting up a Home
"How long has it been now since we've been trapped in here?" A gruff, echoing voice says in a distorted tone through a blank, empty realm. "Two-thousand years…Does your memory fail you now, brother?" A voice as calm and soothing as a prolonged serenade replies.
"Do not mock me for that, sister!" The gruff person exclaims in a flustered tone, continuing on by mentioning "You know that the flow of time is hard for me to gauge in this empty void. In fact, your estimate is likely incorrect as well."
"I would assume so too, were it not for the distortions in this realm that have been occurring as of late. After all, have we both not been hearing voices similar to that of our former mentor for the last few months?" The gentle voice replies with.
"…Yes." The gruff person begrudgingly admits to his sister.
"And last I recalled, you even briefly projected your image into the world of the living at the behest of that voice's cries for help." The gentle sister says as her body floats closer to that of her brother.
"…What are you getting at, sister?" The brother asks in puzzlement.
"The legacy of the Elemental Overlord has finally been passed on to another, and that very person seems to be the one destined to free us from this realm at long last." The sister happily states.
"Do you truly believe that? If not even our mentor could free us from this state, then what makes you believe that a mere replacement will be able to save us?" The brother states in cynical stride.
"Because without even realizing it, he has already made more progress in opening up a gate to our realm than our mentor did with all of his effort. There is potential buried within this child, and who are we to not nurture it should he succeed?" The sister says.
"Nurture? That is ludicrous. I am not playing the role of a parent to this child! For him to be worthy of us, he needs to learn things the hard way. Should he free us, I shall be grateful, but at the same time I refuse to just let him be our master so easily. He will earn that right the hard way!" The brother firmly states.
"…Do whatever you desire brother. You will have my support, but only so you can see that you are wrong to doubt the child's worthiness." The sister says, and the brother merely scoffs and says not a single word more afterwards.
Meanwhile, far detached from the blank realm these two mysterious siblings rest in, the teenage Elemental Overlord Riku Mew flies through the starry depths of space. With a barrier of air preventing the cold pressure from killing him in an instant, he makes his way across the cosmos to planets he has not visited before. As he pushes onward with a smile on his face, he glances off to the right as a bright yellow-red light shines his way.
The radiance of a solar system's sun shines through the black depths of space, the surface lashing out waves of heat at periodic intervals just as it was meant to as he flies out of sight of the massive celestial body. The sun reminded him a lot of the one from his own solar system, but with his connection to the elements he was able to tell the difference between the two suns. The one he viewed before him was older by a good couple centuries, but still had millions upon millions of years left in it before it would start to die.
As he thought about the age of the sun though, he looked away from the celestial body and pondered how much has passed since he began this journey of his. "…Out here, I can't really gauge the flow of time. I figure a few months passed between Hyrule and Samus' galaxy, but between that and Pop Star I can't tell because I was unconscious all that time. And who knows how long it has been since then?"
Riku stopped flying for a moment and positioned himself upright, suspending himself with his hands floating on both sides of his body as he glanced over himself. His clothes still fit him, even if they were a little tighter than before, so a fair enough amount of time has passed for him to age, which felt rather odd to him considering he has only managed to get food once since starting this journey. As the teenage Overlord touched his stomach region with a flattened right hand he quietly said "Maybe my elements are keeping me nourished…It would explain why I suddenly felt a mass amount of hunger upon crash landing on Popstar."
Then the boy both feels and hears a growl coming from his stomach, and with an embarrassed smirk he says to himself "…Or I guess they only do that when I'm incapable of feeding myself."
The teenage Overlord shifts his head back and forth and tries to find a planet that he could land on, but the closest he could find was a field of about fifty or so giant asteroids in the distance. "…You have got to be kidding me. There's no planets around?" Riku quietly bemoans.
Closing his eyelids and hanging his head slowly as he sighs, the boy says to himself "I guess I can land on one of these asteroids and try and find another planet with my elemental powers."
Removing his hand from his stomach, Riku kicks against the emptiness of space and flies off towards the closest asteroid, which was roughly in the middle when it came to size amongst the asteroids. It had a fairly decent gravitational pull for its size that Riku was pulled towards as he flew to it, but once the teenage Overlord landed he was actually surprised to find that his body didn't feel any lighter.
"Huh?" The boy noted briefly as his eyebrows flinched upward, and after blinking twice at this strange phenomenon he said to himself "…Then again, my body never feels weightless even when I go through space, so I guess its just a perk of being an Elemental Overlord…"
After quickly finding a satisfactory answer to his question, the teenage Overlord sits down atop the cold asteroid and folds his legs, closing his eyelids and focusing intensely on the depths of space around him in search of any bodies of water or greenery to signify a lively planet. He sits there for a good hour or so, concentrating as well as he could while the growls of his stomach try their darnedest to interrupt him. But no matter what, he couldn't find even an iota of either water of greenery in any direction.
Widening open his eyelids and breaking his concentration in a hard and heavy pant, Riku quietly thinks to himself "You've got to be kidding me…There's not a single planet in range…At least, not one with any food or water."
The teenage Overlord was a bit puzzled at the fact that he couldn't sense any planets. Surely a part of the solar system with a sun in it would have an inhabited planet or two nearby, and surely plants would be growing on such a world. "…Maybe I'm not in-tune with my powers enough for me to be able to detect planets from far away." Riku considered.
Planting his hands on both of his kneecaps and putting a reflective expression on his face, the teenage Overlord recalls past events and comes swiftly to the conclusion that whenever he detected any other elemental forces, they were usually within a few miles of where he was at, and even then he had a little difficult picking up on them. Letting out an annoyed sigh, Riku said to himself "Yep, that's all there is to it. "
Unfolding his legs, Riku stands upright and hears his stomach growl again, which does little to help keep him calm as he thinks about what he should do here. "Ugh, if I don't know where any planets are, how can I get any food?"
Hunger wasn't helping his thoughts either, and as he folds his arms in front of his chest the teenage Overlord taps one pointer finger against his skin and goes over his options. "I could try and find a planet beyond the scope I scanned, but that would just get me lost and worsen my hunger…"
Careful consideration made Riku realize that he only had that one option to go on. "…That can't be right." The teenage Overlord quietly notes as he draws his arms away from his chest and holds his hands in front of his body, staring back and forth at the palm of each one as he considers other possibilities beyond the simple solutions he had mustered up before.
"…Actually, maybe there is something else I can do." Clenching his fingers against his palms, the teenage Overlord nods his head as inspiration struck his mind, and after turning around he looks at the ground of the asteroid and continues his earlier sentence by saying "This is going to be a crazy idea, but I believe I can pull it off if I use the right elements."
Focusing entirely on the ground in front of him, the teenage Overlord uses his Earth element to analyze a large rectangular patch of the asteroid's surface. He closes his eyelids and watches his surprise as he visualizes the area he wants in a three-dimensional grid. "Not surprising that this asteroid is just a large chunk of metal and rock…But maybe, just maybe…" As Riku ponders some thoughts quietly to himself and finds himself in awe in how he visualizes part of the asteroid, he focuses intensely and blocks out all other outer distractions.
Using the Earth element, Riku imagines a landscape of pure, fertilized dirt within the three-dimensional landscape and tries to impose this landscape where the metallic rock is in hopes of transforming the composition with his powers. He keeps his focus up as hard as he could, but it takes only a few seconds for something to snap like a broken twig inside of his mind and break his concentration in an instant. Opening his eyelids wide and flinching backwards in pain, Riku loses the three-dimensional grid in an instant and feel an almost thrusting pain inside of his head.
As he grabs the front of his head with his right hand and takes in steady breathes, the teenage Overlord then feels something leaking down the front of his face, and quickly picks his left hand up and touches the part of his face where the liquid was coming from and pulled his now wet fingers in front of his eyes to reveal blood at the tips. It was then that Riku took pause and lifted his eyes up to look at the area he wanted to transform, saying to himself just a moment later "…Was changing such a small area too much for me to handle?"
Riku thinks about his question for a moment, and comes to realize that "No wait, even though I visualized a specific area to transform, I didn't specify in my mind that I wanted to change the material in just that area…So even with the grid visualized in my head, my powers interpreted the command as though I wanted to change all the asteroids around me into dirt…And consider how many of them there are and how heavy they are, it probably strained my body to do that."
If a mistake in scope was going to prove to be an issue, Riku decided that he needed to make sure that only the area he wanted to transform would be changed. Thus he swung his right arm out beside his body and summoned forth his sword, which as always was shaped like a black-and-white double helix without a handle. Walking towards the area he wanted to change, the teenage Overlord ignited his blade with the compressed heat rivaling that of the sun, and made certain that the asteroid would not start melting in its presence until he wanted it to happen.
"Until I can get strong enough to actually control a specific area, I'll have to do this the long way…Be still my stomach, please." Riku tries to ignore the growls of his gut as he shoves his heated blade into the surface of the asteroid, the hardened metal becoming nothing more than mere paper in its presence. The teenage Overlord then extends the heat of his flames down to length he wanted the area to be before and proceeds to start walking forward, carving up a line through the asteroid with relative ease.
After going along a certain length, Riku pulls his sword out and swerves his body so he is pointing to the west of where he once stood, planting his sword back down at the tip of the line and carving forward to create the width of his area. Two more swerves and carves later, and the teenage Overlord has carved out a rectangular shape into the asteroid. However, now came the hard part of this task. Riku dispels his sword for the time being and looks down upon the shape he carved and raises his hands up, saying to himself "I hope the heat weakened the bottom of this metallic chunk, otherwise I'm going to have to try something else…"
The teenage Overlord, after lowering both of his hands beside his hips and flattening the palms, focuses all of his might on the shape he carved into the asteroid, this time making certain that he just targeted that and not all of the other asteroids in the area. As Riku tugs mentally on the part of the asteroid he wanted to heave out of the ground, the entire space rock trembles, forcing the teenage Overlord to steady his body on the surface.
Riku felt a bit of strain in his head, but as he heard cracking coming from the bottom of the rectangle he pushed himself to continue onward. Grunting slightly in pain, the teenage Overlord pulled his hands above his head with one final push and as his mind snaps again the chunk of the asteroid he wanted to pull out is thrown into the gravity-less depths of space, where it slowly flies off into the distance at the same time as the teenage Overlord is thrown onto his back.
The impact hurts quite a bit, not just because of the sharp pain thrusting through his head, but also due to the hardness of the asteroid itself colliding with his back. Riku's eyes jolt open in pain, and though he wanted to yell he grit his teeth shut tightly and screamed internally as his arms fell flat on both sides of his body.
Though he strained his brain again to get this job done, no blood leaked from his nose this time around. It was an improvement to say the least, even if pain was now echoing across his spine. As Riku laid there and looked up at the floating chunk of the asteroid becoming smaller with each second, putting a smile on his face as he sarcastically notes "Well…I'm definitely working for my food here…"
The teenage Overlord lets himself rest for a few minutes, as he places his right hand against his forehead and continues to stare into the starry depths of space, thinking to himself "I've traveled so far away from Earth…But these stars still look so small…"
Riku reaches towards space and hovers his five right fingers above his body, saying to himself afterwards "I wonder if I could travel fast enough to see each and every star in the universe…"
The teenage Overlord, smiling at his probably impossible dream, suddenly musters up the energy to kick himself into an upright sitting position and look over at the pit he made in the asteroid. With a light chuckle, Riku says to himself "Well, one step at a time I guess…" and optimistically gets back up onto his feet. Now that the hard part was out of the way, the teenage Overlord stood in front of the pit and held his right arm out. Focusing once more on his Earth element, Riku shot out from his palm a heavy stream of pure, fertilized dirt that didn't at all touch his skin as it fell into the pit.
Moving his arm around only a couple inches every now and then, Riku made sure to fill in each and every square inch of the pit with dirt. Once this task was done, the teenage Overlord flips his right hand around and extends his fingers outward, making an almost cup-like shape with his hand as he thinks to himself "Alright, now lets see how well I can make this work…"
Drawing on the memories given to him by his creator, Riku thought about the seeds of many fruit, rotating through each and every option available to him before deciding on something rather simple. "An Apple tree might be easy to grow." He says confidently, and after smiling he focuses on the area above his palm and works in conjunction with both his memories and his Grass element, creating a tiny field of sparkling green particles coated in an opaque shade of brown, and by borrowing on the very powers of mother nature herself Riku creates in his hand a perfect apple seed.
The teenage Overlord grins happily and tightly clasps the seed between his fingers as it falls onto his palm, making certain not to ruin his progress by crushing the seed itself. He then opens his hand and tosses the seed into the center of the dirt pit, manipulating the dirt afterwards to bury the seed underneath. "And now for the water…" Riku snaps his fingers towards the patch of space above the dirt pit and creates a cloud in the air that immediately bursts at the bottom and releases a fair torrent of raindrops down upon the dirt pit.
The cloud was able to defy the laws of gravity and lack of oxygen in space simply because Riku commanded it to do so, and it continued to hover above the dirt even once the teenage Overlord moved on to the next step. Turning to face the sun in the distance, Riku flicked his left fingers towards the asteroid he stood on, directing the rays of light towards the dirt as he quickly flipped back to the face the pit and readied the final step.
"Alright, now that I've fed the seed…Time to see if this has all been worth it…" Riku snapped his fingers as he concentrated on the presence of the seed inside of the dirt. With fertilization, water, and eventually the healthy rays of the sun feeding the seed the teenage Overlord is able to safely accelerate the growth of the seed for his purposes. In mere seconds, the roots and trunk of the tree grow out opposite from each other, with the trunk and branches extended up from the dirt at a rapid pace. In due time, leaves form across the branches of the tree, followed by apples sprouting one after the other as the cloud is consumed by the very top branches as it continues to deposit water to feed the rapidly growing tree.
Riku takes a couple steps back in awe at the tree as it grows before his very eyes, feeling a hint of pride growing inside of him at his accomplishment. When the luscious green leaves and round red apples meld with the black, starry depths of space behind it, the teenage Overlord breaks his concentration on the growth of the tree and walks over to it, reaching up towards the lowest apple and plucking it off so he could bring it to his mouth and take a swift bite out of it.
The taste of the apple was fantastic. Just the right amount of juiciness and flavoring settled on the teenage Overlord's taste buds, which was only amplified by the sensation of satiation that settled upon his stomach as he swallowed that bite down his esophagus. Riku then looked down at the apple he had just started eating, and then up at the tree that was born from his own hands. "With just this little understanding of how my elements work, I was able to create this tree…" The teenage Overlord whispered.
Thoughts then began to brew through his mind because of this, and in but a few seconds a very serious expression crosses Riku's face as he tightly clasps the apple in his hand and boldly states "…Its time for me to stop beating around the bush. I'm not unconsciousness, traumatized or anything at the moment. While I have this freedom to myself, I think its time for me to learn how to use my elements to their full capacity." The teenage Overlord then lifted his apple up and took another bite of it, keeping this vow close to his heart as he sat down and prepared to come up with a plan to get to know his elements better.
Next Time: The Seven Elements