Chapter Two
His fingers shake violently as Sora falls against a wall, struggling to even breathe. Even his teeth hurt from the exertion and again, he feels the urge to throw up. The only good part of this world is that the monsters tended to be alone and far apart. They don't seem to like groups and instead wandered around in pairs or small parties of less than six in a clustered area.
Of course, if they scream, they call more of them to him and the fact that they normally roamed alone quickly becomes meaningless.
His eyes flood with tears, the dark blue filling with fear as he stares off into nothing, struggling to wrap his mind around what he had seen. This isn't the first one of them he had decapitated. Of course, he'd mutilated more of them and bashed in the heads of countless more. Fire magic doesn't work against them... or rather it works a little too well on the extremely flammable creatures. Sora found that out the hard way when it turned out that it just makes them that much better at hurting him. There are oozing burns all over his back and shoulder from when a flaming person had grabbed him and tried to tear his throat out with its teeth. He remembers it had been at least twenty minutes before its brain had finally boiled over and that its speed nearly matched his despite the flames.
That is also the one that let him discover that ice magic, with its many geometric and far more importantly pointed barbs, is quite... effective when hurtled through an undead eye socket.
Sora leans over and retches, helplessly puking up a few mouthfuls of congealed yellow liquid at the disturbing thought. The bile splatters on the ground with a nauseating sound that makes his stomach churn and makes him throw up even more. Flashing through his mind are the crunching noises of ice magic into a human, though undead, skull. The sharp blast of ice makes a final tinkling noise in his memory, a nasty contrast to the mashing of brains that followed its path through the skull. He stands there, leaning on the wall for support, for a few minutes before choking down the burning stomach acid that threatens to come out after. It stings his throat but he can't afford to get any weaker. Not as long as he's trapped here for the week or so that Riku and the King had given him to explore the world alone.
A grim smirk twitches across his lips as Sora remembers his arrogance in asking Donald and Goofy to stay home with their families.
He'd thought he was being so generous, letting his friends have a week's vacation from the war. No, he couldn't have foreseen that he would have needed both of them. He even admits after a moment that the entire group of former Nobodies and the rest of his friends would have been better to have than being by himself.
Goofy would have been helpful in shielding him against a group of those monsters and preventing the burns that are currently sapping his strength and leaving smear after smear of blood and pus whatever he leans his right side against. Donald would have been a lifesaver against the flaming and fast ones, with his furious casting of thunder and blizzard attacks in order to protect everyone. Sora definitely wouldn't say no to a healing right now either. And... he wouldn't be so lonely if either of them were here with him.
Sora wipes his mouth with the back of a shredded glove before glancing up at the stars above. The worlds sparkle down at him and he realizes that he's only been here for a day. He has six more to go. Then he'd be back up there with his friends instead of here on Gray Rock. He sits yet again, taking a moment to catch his breath before he can struggle back onto his blistered feet.
As he walks away from the burnt building he had rested near, Sora's feet somehow find a decapitated head and kick it away from the moss-covered roots it had been lying beneath. As he jumps back away from it, the undead woman's brown and gray eyes blink at him once, twice, before it opens its mouth to scream. Even as he watches in stunned silence, the thing attempts to make the screech that called its brethren to her. Sora can only relax when he realizes that due to the way the head had been cut off, it didn't actually have vocal cords anymore. He allows it a few seconds of snapping its teeth at him before holding his hand out to the side.
With a single swipe of an increasingly heavy Keyblade and a loud shatter when he steps on the girl's now useless glasses, Sora bashes the silently snarling head into a fragmented soup of bone and brains and keeps walking. He walks for miles. The silence is only broken by a hiss of blizzard magic, the hollow crunch of his weapon against a human skull, and the moans of the creatures pursuing him. His own footsteps are muffled by the wet mossy, leaf and needle-covered forest floor; the young Keyblade master is more than careful enough to not snap twigs underneath his feet.
Every so often, usually a fair distance from the last one he encounters, Sora has to dispatch or run from another enemy.
All the activity seems to do is slowly drain his stamina and when he runs out of magic, it's all Sora can do to keep himself from throwing the Keyblade into the nearest patch of trees and falling over in despair right then and there. The weapon feels like it weighs a thousand pounds. His limbs are weak, rubbery with pain and effort, and his eyes droop constantly from lack of energy. If anyone could see him, they would easily mistake him for one of the creatures that he was running from.
He slams his palm into his forehead, cursing violently with the added pain before looking around helplessly. If Sora can't find a place to sleep and soon, he would probably end up killing himself in the next enemy attack. Food can only be a secondary concern as the exhaustion is enough to make him want to pass out right where he stood. The boy scans the area rapidly, tearing up when he can't seem to find a cave or a clearing or something, anything, to keep him safe and hidden while he slept.
In desperation, Sora stumbles over to the tallest tree in his nearest area and forces himself up into its branches. Twigs and dried leaves crumble and collect into his spiked hair as he rubs the skin on his arms and legs raw on the rough bark. He's sure he can feel himself bleed onto the branches but he keeps climbing, only stopping when he reaches the highest one he can safely rest on. When he's finally up there, Sora figures that he better secure himself properly or risk a nasty skull-splitting fall.
The belts from the three fairies work well enough as make-shift safety harnesses, especially since his sleepy mind somehow figures out a way to clip them together without tying them.
Finally feeling at ease with sleeping in the branches of the pine he'd chosen for safety, Sora's exhausted body shuts down, leaving his mind to rest for now.
He dreams of his friends, of walking with Kairi down to one of the several beaches of their island home. But slowly, ever so slowly, his fantasies of playing in the sand and water warps into the forest that is his reluctant sanctuary. His simple beach blackens and twists into a vast pine forest as far as the eye could see. Clean white sand turns into leaf-covered ground, palms into pines with bloodstains on each and every one of the innocent-looking branches.
He screams in agony as a darkened version of his friend attacks him, forcing him to wield his weapon against her. Sora's voice cries out her name as Kairi's shade rips apart his chest, knocking him to the ground and splattering blood over the rotting leaves.
Sora wakes up with a start, very nearly tumbling off his branch and onto the ground below. For a moment, all he can hear is his own racing heart pounding blood through his veins, each hard beat reminding him that he is still alive. He catches his breath slowly. Sweat pools and then cools on his burning skin. Shakily, he undoes the first of the two belt contraptions he fastened himself to the branch with and sits up.
Kairi, in his dream at least, had ripped his heart out of his chest and devoured it whole. A lot more merciful than the creatures that always went for the throat or a limb first. He doesn't know either to be grateful that it had done that or terrified that even his dreams aren't a safe place anymore.
Sora glances down the leaves to spot a single boy standing beneath his tree. The child seems blind and he immediately realizes that he is in fact one of the undead. As if sniffing him out, the maybe five or six year old boy raises its head and stares emptily up at the needles. Its yellowed teeth snap and snarl towards the heavens and towards the teenager hiding safely within the tree's branches.
Sora stays silent, his hands on the belt buckles keeping his legs pinned to the tree branch. He is still, unmoving even as the boy's hands claw at the bark. Blue eyes follow and stare into gray as the creature circles the tree once, twice, and a third time. After this last loop, the undead seems to give up and wanders away, its teeth clicking and chattering and its voice growling into the distance until it finally fades away into nothingness.
He waits for a long time until he is sure that there is no other unexpected "company" trying to sleep over with him.
When Sora finally regains the strength and assurance that he won't be attacked as he climbed down, he undoes the final strap and returns his belts to their proper places on his clothes. He stretches and examines his stiff body. Upon checking the burns, he finds that they had healed into a hard, yellow crust and if he sniffed his arm, he couldn't quite make out the scent of rot. He spits out a curing spell, the strongest in his arsenal, and even this faint smell fades. He's still pretty sore, though.
Back to more or less full strength, the young Keyblade master rummages through his pockets to see exactly how many healing potions he had brought with him.
It takes a few minutes to scour each pocket and make sure he didn't miss the smallest ones, but the end result is a decent number of restoratives, a sad handful of magic replenishers, and four elixirs that he'd been planning to use in an emergency. He's afraid of them now.
The familiar medicines have changed on him. When he had first gotten here, he had been surprised to see that the gummi-like candies changed into test tubes and syringes. Only the potions have stayed the same, and even they're so off that it makes him queasy to think about drinking one. The bright red liquid, cheerful in an odd way, has turned into a shade closer to that of blood than the soda-like drinks he used to sip with ice on warm Destiny Island days. To take an Ether, he has to inject himself now. It frightens him to see his familiar friends turned into something darker than their old selves.
He doesn't want to take them. He's scared of what'll happen if those liquids make their way into his bloodstream. But Sora hooks one of the Ethers to his belt loop anyway, wrapping the tube up in one of the smaller straps that originally had been around his chest and arms.
As soon as he's done that, he removes a potion for breakfast and starts the day by walking forward.