Disclaimer: I don't own Kingdom Hearts, its characters or storyline. This story is mine, as are McCallister, Lolly, and Banks. After this, just one more chapter to go. We're in the home stretch. Constructive feedback is welcome and appreciated!
..:-X-:..
Part Four
As the blue flash ended, the familiar icy crash was disrupted by a scalding heat that slammed across Leon's arm, where Private McCallister had grabbed him when Banks was shot in front of them. Nausea slammed through his torso, and Leon doubled over as he staggered free of the surge's grip. His knees buckled, and he jerked away from McCallister's touch. She recoiled simultaneously, hissing as her hand burned from the contact.
McCallister.
Leon straightened, shoving the nausea aside, and faced the soldier. "You're here."
They were alone in the hallway. The bullets, the SWAT team, and Banks were all gone. The emergency lights were back online, and McCallister stood a few feet away from him, nursing her burned palm and staring back at him with wide eyes.
"You're still here." She whispered back. "How?"
Through every surge, through every blue flash, and through every change in the ship, Leon had always found himself alone afterward. This time he and McCallister had moved through the surge together. He looked down at the red patch of skin on his arm: a mild burn where McCallister had been holding onto him when Banks was shot. Touch. That was it. You only took what you had with you when the surge took you. That seemed to apply to humans too.
The soldier appeared to reach the same conclusion as he did, but neither dwelled on it too long. They couldn't. The ship shuddered around them. He angled the Gunblade ahead of him and glanced up and down either end of the hallway. McCallister regripped the silver Glock with both hands, and mimicked his perimeter scan for herself.
Footsteps echoed down the hallway on Leon's left. Both he and McCallister swung to face the corridor in unison. He lifted his Gunblade, and she aimed the gun at the darkness. A blue flash briefly lit the corridor behind them, but it was too far away to pull them in. Instead, they faced the darkness, waiting for the footsteps to reach them.
"Who goes there?" Leon demanded. "Show yourselves. This is Commander Leonhart of the Alliance."
The footsteps slowed until two figures stumbled into the cold light of the emergency bulbs overhead. One was a man, ragged and disheveled and built like a truck. The other was a woman in uniform. Both were covered in grime and sweat.
It was Lolly and…Banks.
Both lifted their weapons when they saw Leon and McCallister: Lolly with a machete, Banks with that same red fire ax, only now coated with something like blood. Banks lowered her weapon first as she recognized Leon and McCallister.
"Fucking Hell." She panted, out of breath as her posture relaxed. "How did you get here?"
McCallister gawked, but Leon held his weapon steady.
"Surge." He replied tersely. "Just like the hundreds of blue energy pulses that have been occurring in this ship." He narrowed his eyes at her. "How did you get here? I saw you disappear in that red surge." I just saw you die.
Banks gave a full body shrug. "I don't have a fucking clue, Leonhart. After…THAT…I saw some messed up SHIT." She side-eyed him abruptly. "You weren't you."
McCallister, who had yet to lower her weapon, chimed in. "Name your direct superior officer."
Banks deadpanned. "Shit's a little too fucked for these validity questions, McCall—"
"Name your direct superior officer." McCallister cut her off.
The taller woman narrowed her eyes. "Cid Highwind." She didn't offer a reciprocal question, and a single raised eyebrow dared McCallister to question further.
McCallister didn't look placated, but she exchanged a short look with Lolly, who bobbed his head in greeting. She lowered her gun.
Leon continued. "You saw another me? From a different timeline."
"No." Banks shook her head, "I wasn't…here. Not on the ship. I was back in Radiant Garden…But it wasn't…right. It wasn't the right Radiant Garden."
"You left the ship?" McCallister asked.
Banks ignored her, pointing at Leon. "You're married." When Leon only quirked an eyebrow at her, she pressed. "But not to Rinoa, right?"
"What? No." Leon blinked. "What does that have to do with—"
"The you I met in that…other place…beyond the red surge…was with Rinoa Heartilly. Tifa was with Cloud. Sephiroth was…sane." Her gaze slid to McCallister, "You didn't even exist."
"Yeah, you'd like that." McCallister grumbled, her gun twitching upward again.
"Stand down." Leon said to the private, facing Banks. "How did you get back?"
"Again, fuck me if I know." Banks shrugged. "All I know is I woke up back on the Bridge. You were gone. Lolly just found me there. We accessed the classified historical logs of this ship."
"And?" Leon pressed.
Banks ran a hand over her disheveled hair. "It's an anomaly. It has all the basic framework and structure of warships pre-dating the Alliance, but it's been outfitted with some seriously anachronistic technology. The whole planetary heart thing? Yeah, this ship wasn't designed to be powered that way. It underwent a full overhaul, but the details of why were deleted from the logs." She nibbled a fingernail. "Best I can figure, it was completely overhauled for the purpose of enabling it to perform time travel."
"Who does it belong to? What army?" Leon asked.
Banks shook her head. "That was erased too. There were a few words, some snippets, nothing that made sense. All I could really get out of it was the name of the ship. The Chasm."
"Chasm?" Leon repeated.
The ship listed sideways, abruptly cutting off conversation and causing all four of them to stumble to the left.
"Are we done?" McCallister snapped, shifting her grip on her shoulder bag. "We have to destroy this place."
"Whoa." Banks lifted a hand. "What happened to escaping?"
Leon pursed his lips. "McCallister's right. The surges are getting worse. We've been pulled through time for hours…years." He glanced at Lolly, who averted his eyes. "Banks, you were pulled into some entire other damn dimension. A planetary heart is powering this ship, and it clearly shouldn't be. We can't wash our hands of this."
"Abomination." Lolly muttered under his breath.
Banks gawked. "All right. Okay. But with what? I'm not exactly packing heat here. Unless one of us is toting around a shit ton of—"
McCallister unzipped her bag, revealing her small stockpile of explosives.
"Well, fuck me." Banks grunted. "So what's the plan?"
The ship quivered again, and Leon glanced down the darkened hallway. The shadow was still roaming the halls; they still had hardly an idea what the creature even was. Blowing the monster up with the rest of ship sounded like a good idea. But they needed to lessen the number of people running around on the ship. The fewer of them running around, the less likely it was that they would get pulled through another surge and get separated.
"The plan." He started. "Banks, Lolly, get to the Gummi. Prepare to detach from the Chasm and book us the Hell out of here." He faced McCallister, "You and I will set the explosives in the Engine Room, set the timers, and then double back through the hangar to the port where the Gummi will be."
The three of them exchanged brief digestive looks and then Lolly nodded.
Banks lifted her axe. "Let's get shit done. How long?"
Leon squinted and looked to McCallister, at her bag of explosives. "One hour."
Banks nodded, and without another word exchanged, she and Lolly turned and headed down the corridor toward the port where the Gummi was docked. Leon shouldered past McCallister down the opposite end of the hallway, and she fell in line after him. They doubled back, making their way to the Engine Room as the ship continued to groan and whine around them.
Blue forks of light branched into the air periodically around them, and Leon picked up the pace until the two of them were nearly running down the hallway. A low groan reverberated through the floor, causing them both to skid to a stop. The sound clawed up the hallway like a moan in a throat, making the pipes in the ceiling shudder and clang against each other.
Deep in the bowels of the spacecraft, something cracked and gave. The floor under their feet trembled violently. The groan persisted and the emergency lights flickered. It sounded like the Chasm was breaking apart or imploding on itself. Leon stared down the hallway. They were running out of time.
The Engine Room was one level down from where they were currently, and still several dozen meters ahead…directly where the ominous sounds were coming from. Leon gritted his teeth and glanced back to McCallister.
Before he could open his mouth, the floor under their boots cracked. They both looked down. A jagged crack had sliced out of the darkened corridor up ahead, forking toward them and fanning out in a web of broken flooring under them. Leon felt the integrity of the floor disintegrate, and he locked eyes with McCallister.
"Back up." He pushed one hand out toward her. "The floor can't handle—"
The tiles underfoot collapsed, and Leon found himself once again sinking through the hole in the floor along with bits of tile and concrete. He gripped the Gunblade like a vise involuntarily and his free hand wrapped around a naked pipe hanging from the broken floor as he dropped past it. A blue flash whirred across the lower hallway that he had half-fallen into.
Leon jerked to an abrupt halt, hanging from the pipe by one arm, and lowered his gaze. The crack in the floor extended through the lower hallway and what looked like several more stories into the ship, possibly all the way to the bottom. The groaning around them intensified but the immediate area began to still. The pipe that he was hanging on began to slide forward, unable to handle his weight with its already-abused body.
He started to glance around to find another grip or a foothold, but then McCallister was there, sprawling on her stomach and reaching down, clapping both hands around his arm and shoulder. The pipe could take it no longer, and it came forward through the splintered concrete. Leon grunted as he dropped a few inches, and McCallister hissed as all of his weight suddenly hung from her upper body.
She wouldn't have the strength to hold him long. Realizing this, Leon glanced down and continued to try and find a foothold or a way to land safely in the lower hallway. The floor around the crack looked shaky at best…capable of crumbling under the slightest weight at worst. With a low curse, he looked back up at the soldier.
"I'm going to try to swing under the floor to the second level. The hole is pretty wide, but I think I can—"
"No." Her face was already red, and the veins in her forehead were bulging with the effort of keeping a hold on him. "The whole floor might collapse."
The jagged edges of the broken floor were pushing against her ribcage where she was leaning over to keep a hold of him. Leon quickly released the useless pipe, reciprocating her grip by wrapping his forearm up around her bicep, trying to find leverage. The pipe clanged as it hit the floors and walls on its way into the bowels of the Chasm. McCallister was breathing in harsh bursts of pain as his weight overextended the muscles in her arms. Her breath was hot on his neck, and he could feel her arm shaking, desperately trying to keep a steady grip.
Thinking fast, he reached up with his sword-arm, swinging the Gunblade up to the safety of the upper floor where McCallister was sprawled. Now with a second free hand, he reached up and gripped the edge of the floor. The broken tiles bit at his skin, and he had to use McCallister's weight as an anchor to lever himself up. She yelped but didn't let go.
Leon managed to claw his way up until his head cleared the floor and he could see the hallway that he had fallen from. McCallister wriggled sideways, angling her body away from him as a counter-balance. She huffed and started to roll backwards, physically dragging him up from the gaping hole in the floor. His grip on the floor began to falter as the tile continued to crumble away.
Adrenaline flooded his veins as his center of gravity started to shift again, and without warning McCallister, Leon pulled on her arm, using her as a balance. He managed to swing one leg up onto the floor, though he couldn't find purchase. He started to skid back again, but McCallister rolled hard, grimacing as she removed one of her arms from his shoulder, causing all of his weight to hang from her left arm. From there, she reached over, hooking her right elbow under his knee and stopping him from skidding.
"Okay." He panted. "If you can hold there, I can climb—"
McCallister wasn't listening. She exhaled hard once and began to pull back, aiming to physically pull him up on her own. Bones in her shoulder loudly and distinctly popped a few inches away from Leon's ear as she did so. She seemed to have entered a fugue state with one thought in mind. And damn it all if she didn't do it. She cried out as parts of the broken tile and concrete dragged across her stomach as she moved. As soon as he could grab purchase on the floor, Leon clawed at the floor, rolled away from the edge, and inadvertently nearly collapsed on top of the woman as they both landed on their stomachs on the unbroken portion of the floor.
For a long moment, they both just lay there, panting. Leon was the first to rise, popping up onto his knees and looking back at what he'd just escaped.
The hole in the floor stretched from wall to wall and had swallowed nearly eight feet of the hallway. There would be no going forward from here. They would have to find an alternate route to the Engine Room.
"Are you all right?" He asked, turning toward McCallister.
The soldier exhaled in a rush and sat up, rubbing her shoulder before also popping up onto her knees, reaching for the bag of explosives. "Fine."
She didn't look it.
"I got those." He swatted her hand away, taking up the bag so she wouldn't further injure her arm. "We'll have to find a way around this."
She nodded with a grimace. Leon frowned and reached out without thinking, briefly grasping the round of her shoulder to make sure it wasn't dislocated. She flinched, and he let go. She rolled the shoulder a few times to uncoil the kinked muscles, giving him a brief nod. He tersely returned it and took up the Gunblade again.
He gestured to the hallway. "Lead the way."
McCallister wordlessly took point, taking them back and then down the first stairway that they came across. Left, right, right, forward, left, double back two lefts, right, right again, and down a long stretch of corridor until they reached the Engine Room doors.
"How's our time?" She asked, knocking open the doors and stepping inside.
Leon glanced at that watch that he had salvaged from his spacesuit. "We have twenty minutes. Let's make this quick."
He moved to the center of the chamber, where the eerie blue glow of the power source crept across the floor and walls, and dropped the bag, rummaging through it and pulling out the piles of explosives.
"All that, and we end up right back here." McCallister grunted, taking two handfuls of the dynamite and hurrying over to the bars that separated the power source from the rest of the chamber.
Leon quickly set his half of the pile of explosives, rigging the triggers to activate remotely by the device that he would keep with his person. Straightening, he glanced over to make a remark to McCallister, but when he turned, he saw an unnatural shadow descending toward her.
"Drop!" He barked, already swinging the Gunblade.
Without looking at him, McCallister fell to her chest on the floor. Leon drove the blade of his sword into the unfurling shadows that descended from the ceiling. The Gunblade sliced through it as though it was smoke, but the shadows let out a wounded scream. Leon followed through with the blow and spun around to deliver a second attack. The shadows recoiled and darted to the left, to throw him off.
McCallister rolled her body away from Leon's feet, and without having to worry about tripping over her, Leon focused on activating the trigger in the Gunblade as the sword peaked in its arc through the second blow. The chambers in the heart of the Gunblade clicked, and the entirety of the blade vibrated as the mechanism activated, doubling the damage.
The scream intensified, and the shadow creature imploded in on itself, splashing the floor like water as it tried to slither away from him. Halfway across the chamber, McCallister was back on her feet, hastily setting the remaining charges from the bag. The creature lurched towards her, and Leon took two steps to the right, casting out an arm.
"Thunder." He roared.
The spell ejected lightning the air between the shadows and the soldier. A branch of jagged fingers from the lightning caressed the darkness, wrapping around the tail of it and illuminating the shadow. A face violently leered out of the shadows. Large empty eye sockets stretched out of the skull-like visage, and those same sharpened teeth chomped at the air as the pale jaw opened wide, screaming at the pain of the spell.
Drops of blackness like blood dribbled to the floor under the creature. It was wounded, maybe dying, but it wasn't slowing down. Leon shifted his stance, keeping the Gunblade level in his hands. The blue light from the energy core flickered, and the ground under their feet trembled. The ship was falling apart as the planetary heart continued to de-stabilize. They were running out of time.
The shadow creature launched forward at him in a counter attack. The shadows seemed to be spilling away from the core of the beast, pooling over grotesque arms and shoulders and flowing down the floor past a gaunt torso and bent legs. The figure under the inky smoke was nearly skeletal, with waxen skin stretched over lumpy bones and joints. There was only enough flesh and tissue to distinguish the creature as a female. A female corpse.
The screaming dropped to a hissing whisper, gurgling out of the creature's throat in a tongue that Leon didn't at first recognize. Only a few words were clear through the raspy voice.
"Keep…going…Swallow…the…world…whole…"
The voice rang through the engine room like a cathedral bell and nails on a chalkboard simultaneously.
"What are you?" Leon demanded.
The creature reared and hissed, lashing out its left arm. The coiled shadows under the figure followed at the creature's bidding, rushing towards him. Leon ducked and rolled away, swinging the Gunblade through the attack. The blade sank through nothing, but the smoke dissolved just the same.
Rather than slinking back to rejoin the figure, the shadows pooled at the floor, solidifying into vines that suddenly wrapped around Leon's ankles, yanking his legs out from under him and causing him to hit the floor.
"Fira!" McCallister's spell slammed into the creature's back.
The monster roared in anger and spun on the soldier, whose eyes widened at the sight looming before her. Leon sawed the Gunblade through the dark vines, kicking them away and rolling back up onto his feet. The creature's jaw yawned wide and it screamed. A thickly coiled vine ejected from the monster's chest, jettisoning across the chamber and impaling McCallister just under her collar bone.
The force of the blow flung the soldier off her feet, and the dark vine went taut, shoving her backwards until her back slammed into the wall. The vine pushed completely through her body, and Leon heard bones break and tissue tear as the vine broke out of McCallister's back, digging into the concrete of the wall behind her. McCallister screamed and clawed at the vine, but she was pinned. Dark red blood blossomed out of the wound, copiously staining her shoulder and shirt front.
While the shadow was engrossed in the crimson liquid gushing out of the human woman in its grasp, Leon dashed toward the long hollow column extending to the bowels of the Chasm. He was almost out of ideas, so this last one had to work.
"Aeroga." He dropped the Gunblade, letting it clang to the floor beside him, and lifted both hands, extending his palms through the steel bars.
The wind spell sucked the air from the ceiling of the chamber, rushing down at his command toward the massive blue flickering planetary heart housed in the massive column. Heat sizzled up as the air warmed, but the wind whipped downward, cutting through the outermost atmosphere of the heart. Feeling the tug at the end of the spell like a fish on a hook, Leon took a wide step back, turning to face the beast that was advancing on McCallister. He pushed his last reserves of ether into the wind spell, forcing the wind to whip the severed outermost atmosphere of the heart up, out of the column, through the bars, and directly at the creature.
The blue mist rode the air current, but instead of drifting upward like fire smoke, it abruptly rained downward as though weighed down by stones, colliding with the coiled furls of black smoke around the shadow creature.
It was as though a lit match had touched a line of gunpowder. The creature shrieked as the blue mist connected with the black shadows, igniting the darkness like fire and swallowing the skeletal creature inside it. The monster staggered backwards, withdrawing the lance-like vine from McCallister's body with a sickening squelch before the monster darted away, becoming one with the shadows once more as it retreated out of the Engine Room.
The blue mist faded, spent, and Leon's knees gave out from under him momentarily. He dropped to the floor and landed on his hands and knees, drained from the ambitious spell. It had been reckless and only half-thought through, but it had worked. He blinked hard to force his eyes to retain their focus, then he straightened and hurriedly crossed over to McCallister, who had slumped to the floor and was clutching her shoulder.
"We have to go." He said, meeting her pain-glazed eyes.
He started to lift her, but the soldier grunted her dissent and unsteadily got to her feet, determined to stand on her own.
"The explosives…" She rasped, her voice broken and hoarse.
"Good enough." Leon hastily retrieved the Gunblade, returning to McCallister's side. "We have ten minutes to get to the Gummi. Can you run?"
She nodded, and to her credit, she moved a lot faster than Leon would have thought possible after sustaining such a wound. Not that it helped to slow the bleeding at all. Far from it, it seemed to make it worse, as they left the Engine Room and started to make their way to the hangar. They navigated around the large crack in the multiple floors, when McCallister abruptly skidded to a stop.
"Private." Leon barked impatiently.
She grabbed onto the wall to steady herself, removing the hand that was clutching her shoulder and smearing the blood on the wall in a red, garish line. Leon was tempted to scoop her up and carry her to the Gummi, but his throat clogged when he realized what she was doing.
"You'll need direction," She panted. "…to find us later."
Her hand wavered as she finished writing the bloody letters on the wall, ending with an arrow under the words "Engine Room." That done, she wordlessly faced him, and they continued on.
Every few turns, she would stagger to a stop and paint more of her blood on the walls, drawing an arrow to direct Leon to the Engine Room when his past self would need to find her again. The ship's increasingly frequent shudders made a few of her arrows more jagged and uneven, but they were coherent enough to read.
Leon spotted the entrance to the hangar just as she was finishing the final arrow, the first direction that he had found hours earlier when he left the hangar by himself in search of his squad. McCallister stumbled after him as he bolted into the hangar.
The bodies were as he had last seen them: dusty and decomposing on the hangar floor, scattered around the old, decrepit scout ships. A blue flash zigzagged around two of the small ships, fading within seconds of its birth. More blue flashes were occurring concurrently throughout the cavernous space, appearing and disappearing at exponentially increasing rates.
From deep within the corridors of the Chasm, the shadow monster screamed again, giving chase after them. Gunfire and human screams echoed through the energy surges taking place around them as Leon and McCallister hurried across the hangar: pieces of the history of the Chasm were leaking through the blue rifts and bleeding into their timeline.
Leon saw a few silhouettes of people as they stumbled out of one surge only to topple forward into another. It truly was Hell breaking loose around them. Reality was coming undone on the Chasm. A massive blue surge of energy exploded overhead, and the ceiling imploded downward, crashing to the floor of the hangar in a rush of plaster and concrete.
He and McCallister dodged it, and he sprinted the last few steps toward the hangar's doors to the Gummi port, but he did so alone. McCallister hadn't moved with him. Instead, he looked back to see the soldier running toward the pile of debris that had crashed through the ceiling. Pipes and broken rafter beams were jutting up out of the mess, but as the dust cleared, Leon saw that McCallister was moving a specific jagged piece of iron away from a fresh corpse.
A large crack sizzled across the hangar floor, causing the back tire of one of the scout ships to sink into it. Blue light bubbled up out of the crack. The stabilizers on the energy core were failing fast. They had less than five minutes before this was all over.
"Wake up!" McCallister abruptly yelled.
Leon's senses jarred as deja vue hit him. He spun toward McCallister again, but she was on her knees, kneeling over the body in the bloody spacesuit.
Oh no…Holy shit…
"Come on. Wake up." She shook the body, examining what Leon could now see was a massive stomach wound that was gushing blood.
His vision tunneled slightly, and he looked down at his own shirt front, where the blood had dried from his own healed wound.
"Cura." McCallister snapped, drawing glowing green magic from the air and healing the would-be fatal wound on the stranger.
The two survivors that he remembered from his first awakening…
"McCall—" Leon wheezed, and cleared his throat to regain his voice. "We have to go."
The crack on the floor expanded, and the entirety of the scout ship disappeared into it.
"NOW." He ordered.
McCallister started to stand, but faltered, blood loss combining with the strain of conjuring the healing spell. "We can't just leave him here like this—"
Leon mouthed soundlessly for a moment, staring at the limp body on the pile of debris. The suit was torn and bloody, and the visor was broken open, giving him a good look at his own face under the helmet.
"I'll—" He started, but began again. "…He'll be fine. Trust me."
Before McCallister could argue, the floor jolted violently, and the entire stern section of the hangar dropped, collapsing into the innards of the ship.
"It's falling apart." Leon glanced around, remembering that McCallister still had her radio on her belt. "Give them the go-ahead."
Lolly and Banks would be able to detonate the explosives with an override code on the Gummi. McCallister nodded curtly, leaving her only weapon—the silver Glock—with the other Leon before standing. She tugged the radio from her belt and sprinted toward him. Together, they rounded the corner and left the bay of the hangar, moving toward the port.
"Banks, Lolly." McCallister yelled into the radio. "We're here. Light 'em up!"
They swung out into the port, and the battered side of their Allied Gummi was the most beautiful thing that Leon had seen all day. He and McCallister rushed toward it, and Lolly leaned out of the open door, extending an arm and swiftly helping McCallister up into the hold of the ship. Leon swung himself up in after them, and Lolly stood, slamming the door closed.
"Go!" The man screamed.
Banks, in the cockpit, jammed the accelerator down. The Gummi Ship violently detached from the body of the Chasm. They broke free, and the three of them in the hold toppled over each other in chaos as the Gummi Ship shakily fled the Chasm's port.
"What about that monster?" Banks called back.
"It's the spider." Leon grabbed onto the wall for support. "The ship is the web. We're the flies. It'll die with the Chasm."
Lolly scrambled for the cockpit, accessing the remote detonator override and punching in the code. His half-glance back to the hold was all the warning that they were going to get. McCallister wrapped her legs around the piping of the Gummi wall, and Leon grabbed a hold of the bolted down legs of the table in the hold. Lolly detonated the explosives.
For a single, eternal moment, the universe was quiet.
Then an explosion ripped across the fabric of the air, blasting the Gummi away from the Chasm and sending them tumbling across the void of space, careening out of control toward the atmosphere of The World That Never Was.
A ring of blue aftershock reverberated out of the shattering ship, and it rushed over the Gummi like a wave of ocean water. Every cell in Leon's body felt electrified and painfully so.
"Holy balls!" Banks swore. "Hang on!"
Lolly was pinned in the doorway between the cockpit and the hold, desperately holding onto the frame of the door to keep from being flung across the hold or through the windshield.
Disorientation spun through Leon's head. He lost direction of which way was up or down, and where to even begin to look to see if the explosion had fully obliterated the Chasm. He could only assume the sudden friction in the air was the heat of the Gummi pushing through the atmosphere of The World That Never Was, and not the hellfire of the explosion deciding to obliterate them as well.
In a gust like a sharp exhale, the rush and the friction and the heat ended, and the Gummi ended her tumbling and abruptly righted itself, with Banks cursing the cosmos and praising the universe in the same breath.
The blue glow from the explosion bled through the portholes in the sides of the Gummi, and Leon hardly had time to register the blinding light before the sensation of ice water crashed over his body and plunged the entire interior of the Gummi to oblivion.