His First War With Himself - Chapter 4
(;o;)
=X=
Piko hit the floor, a shower of broken glass falling around him. He tried to heave himself off the shiny surface of the roof, but there was a tremendous weight on him.
"Stay down, brat. Don't make me beat your skull in," Someone above him said through a heavy accent. Piko ignored them and squirmed, trying to get them off of his body.
Something hard slammed into his back and he fell to the ground again, gasping for air.
"I told you to stay put! Ann, grab the girl,"
Rin, a few feet away, covered her face with her arms, feeling a few shards of the broken window pierce the bright yellow fabric of her sleeves. She edged backwards until she couldn't feel glass crackling under her shoes, but suddenly, her foot hit nothing but air. She gasped and tried to shift her weight forward, but it was too late.
The world slowed down. Rin's stomach flipped and her arms flew from her face, fumbling for something, anything to hold on to to stop her from falling. She squeezed her eyes shut, oh god, this was how she was going to lose, not by getting PKd by the top player, but by falling off of a damn building in the first few hours of the game.
"Piko!" Rin shrieked. Of course he wasn't there when she needed him. She felt all of the air leave her lungs as her other foot slipped off if the edge of the building, then, she came to a stop.
Rin cracked one of her eyes open. Someone had grabbed her arm, and it wasn't Piko, as she had thought it would be. This was a woman, most likely Ann, the man's partner. She looked like she was in her late twenties, with white-blonde hair that fell over her shoulders in shiny waves. She almost could have been beautiful, if she wasn't trying to kill Rin.
"You should be more careful, honey," She said in a mocking tone, her beautiful features twisted into a cold smirk, "You could have died,"
Rin just stared, trying to look like she wasn't terrified of falling ten stories towards hard pavement. The woman stared back, studying her face with her sharp blue eyes. After a moment, the smirk fell from her face and was replaced by a look of surprise.
"I know you..." She said slowly, leaning closer to Rin. Rin tried to move away, but there wasn't a lot she could do from her position, balancing off the edge of a skyscraper on one foot. A wide grin split open Ann's face "You're Rin Kagamine!" She raised her voice as if she was calling out to a friend she hadn't seen in years, and then looked behind her to call out to her partner, "Yohio, we got Rin Kagamine!"
Her partner hooted and punched the air. Rin looked over the woman's shoulder to get a good look at the man. He had an angular face and straight golden hair, an he was perched on Rin's partner, who sprawled out on the ground.
Rin felt a pang of guilt, she had expected him to help her when she should have been helping him. She had no time to think about it, though. The woman turned her head back to squint at Rin.
"You're pretty good at this game, yeah?" Her bright blue eyes studied her like an animal studies it's prey before the kill.
Rin swallowed and nodded slowly. Maybe if she could make herself useful to these two, she would let Rin and Piko live long enough to escape. That is, if Piko was still alive. She felt her stomach twist again.
"That could be a problem for me and my partner," she said simply and let go of Rin's arm.
Rin screamed and felt herself start falling all over again, but it stopped before she could fall even a few inches. This time, Ann wrapped an arm around Rin's waist and hauled her over shoulder.
"But... Killing you now would be pointless. I have bigger plans for you two," Rin quickly got over her shock and started trying to kick and squirm her way out of Ann's strong grip.
"Put me down," Rin growled, "Put me down, or I swear to god I'll-"
"You'll what?" She said as she started walking back to Yohio and Piko, still lying face down in the broken glass, "Last time I checked, you don't have any weapons, and your partner there looks pretty out of it. Now stop squirming or I might just accidentally drop you back off the side of this building."
She stopped in front of her partner, who stood up and threw Piko over his shoulder like a rag doll. He didn't move, not good. Yohio arched an eyebrow and looked the Ann over once.
"You didn't kill her?" Yohio asked, struggling to make out the words through his accent. Ann waved him off.
"Nah. I figured we could use some hostages," Rin ground her teeth together, seething, "These two have a pretty big alliance, like, three teams. I figure we can make them do whatever we want if we have these two alive." Yohio smirked.
"That's why you're in charge, babe," he said, flashing a wink at Ann, who laughed.
The two of started carrying their hostages towards the edge of the building, when a loud whining alarm went off, and the ground exploded under them.
Rin blacked out.
=X=
Oliver wasn't surprised when his eyes adjusted and he found himself in a dark, run down office building.
His team had trained in a fantasy setting forever, and just by looking at all the mundane things scattered around the room, Oliver could see that this was no RPG. Why would the creators of the war make things easy for him? They wouldn't.
Lui was the first to step further into the room. He stooped to pick up a rusty stapler, a message appearing in Oliver's vision.
"Doesn't look like anybody works here." It said.
"What about ghost accountants?" Oliver replied, grinning. He heard Lui blow air out if his nose from across the room, the equivalent of laughing.
Oliver walked over to one of the many windows, all of them covered by white electronically controlled blinds, and pulled one of them as hard as he could.
It broke off, and the rest of them followed, the deteriorating metal crumbling off of the window. The room filled with a red light. Oliver shielded his eyes and peered out at the ruined landscape.
"Hey Lui," he called, furrowing his eyebrows, "Come look at this."
He walked over and his eyes widened at the sight.
"Look familiar?" Oliver asked, gesturing to the patterns of buildings and the roads, at least ten floors below them. Lui nodded.
"It looks just like TW's town square..." He messaged. To most people, it would look like any other city in the entire world, but Oliver and Lui had spent so long mapping out the ever expanding town square in TW, that they both picked up on the tiny details that set this one apart from the rest. The positions of the stores, the tiny bits of buildings that were clumsily added on to the roofs of other buildings, even the billboards and signs were the same, so it was easily recognizable even though the rubble.
The biggest giveaway, though, was the gate. It was more than a pile of shards of metal and glass, but it couldn't be anything else. The real world didn't have gates, so there was no question. It was the same town square, but as if the net terrorists had succeeded in destroying TW, which brought up a new question.
"Why would the creators put us in a place like this?" Lui messaged after a moment. Oliver was thinking the same thing.
"Maybe that wanted to scare players? Make the war seem more real?" Even as he said it, Oliver wasn't convinced that that was the reason.
"...Yeah, except that the admins like to pretend that the net terrorists don't exist. This seems a little... Counterproductive."
He had a point. The city looked barren, as if the terrorists had succeeded and then everyone just gave up, there was nobody fighting back against them. This kind of thing, Oliver thought, would only make them more compelled to attack.
A new massage appeared in the corner of Oliver's vision, snapping him out of his thoughts.
"Well, we should find a way out of here. We'll need to find everyone else, and we can't do that from in here."
Oliver nodded and latched on to the taller boy's arm, all the dark atmosphere from before completely gone, "There should be an emergency staircase to the lobby somewhere, assuming the elevators don't work!"
The two boys only needed to look for a minute or two before they found the large metal door in the hallway that lead to the fire escape. There was a sign on it that said "EMERGENCY FIRE ESCAPE.
WILL AUTOMATICALLY UNLOCK WHEN DANGER IS DETECTED.
ALARM WILL SOUND WHEN OPEN." in bold red letters. Oliver stared at it. Of course it was locked, of course it was protected by an alarm. If they opened this door and the alarm went off, everyone inside (and probably outside) the building would know where they were. And to get in in the first place they would have to start a fire or something, and even then the unlocking system may not even work, and then they would be dead meat.
Oliver pressed a palm to his forehead. This was a test set up by the creators. They were put here for a reason, would they take a chance and try to open it, or would they wait there and be found by another team? Oliver honestly wasn't sure. Lui put a hand on his shoulder and sent a message.
"...Let's wait it out, I'm sure there's another way to get out of here." He looked down at Oliver, who lowered his palm from his face and nodded.
"Alright. Let's take another look around. Don't touch the door, just in case the alarm does work," Lui smiled, gave him a thumbs up, and turned to go explore down the hall.
Oliver turned in the opposite direction, already not liking being in this place without his friend, and headed into the next office.
It was large and filled with the unnerving red light from outside, as some of the heavy blinds had already fallen off. The black and white cabinets that had once lined the walls had fallen over, the files and electronic papers inside them thrown all over the black tiled floor. A dark marble desk sat in front of the huge half-covered window, mysteriously intact compared to the rest of the room. What caught Oliver's attention first, however, was the single, shiny hologram projector sitting in the centre if the desk.
He stepped closer to it, afraid that if he got too close, it would blow up in his face. As he stepped into the range if it's sensors, the touch screen that took up most of the flat, rectangular piece of metal lit up with a single name in blocky white letters.
"LILY" it said, then under it in much smaller letters was the word "PASSWORD" and an input box.
Oliver stared at the screen for a second. Why would something like this be here? He reached out carefully and tried to lift the projector off of the desk. It wouldn't budge, which meant that whoever had made this area put this in this room for a reason.
Oliver was about to try a random password, when an alarm started blaring. He jumped back from the device. Had Lui opened the door? He ran to the entrance of the office and stuck his head out. Lui was standing in the entrance of another office, looking just as surprised as Oliver.
"I thought we were going to leave the door alone?" Oliver shouted over the alarm. Lui shook his head in the direction of the exit, it was closed.
He hadn't opened it, which mean someone else had, but it only unlocked when-
Oliver gasped and grabbed Lui's arm, pulling him through the emergency exit. Somewhere in this building, something bad was about to happen, and they needed to get out before it did.
Oliver and Lui flew down the metal staircase in the darkness with just the intermittent red floodlights to keep them from falling over each other. They made it down maybe five floors before they Oliver slammed straight into someone.
"Augh, sorry Lu-" he began to say, before he realized that whoever he had run into was not Lui, they were much too short. The floodlights came back on and Oliver could just make out who was in front of him.
The first thing he saw were her huge blue eyes, wide with terror and surprise. Her long blonde bangs fell over parts of her face and the rest of her hair tumbled messily over her shoulders and back. She was really pretty, in a natural, messy kind of way. She stared back at Oliver, but only for a second before the floodlights faded back out and her partner called out to her.
"Lily, come on!" He voice was shaky and filled with dread, "We have to go! Now!"
Oliver felt the girl, Lily, flit away up the stairs, her shoes clanking against the metal. He stared after her, trying to watch her as she disappeared in the darkness. Lily...?
Suddenly, he remembered the situation he was in and the air caught in his throat. Who knew how long they had left?
He fumbled for his partner's hand, letting out a breath when his fingers wrapped around the other boy's. The two continued sprinting down further and further, watching floor numbers on signs fly by, until they reached the ground floor.
Oliver threw himself at the metal door and the two boys barely made it into the bright lobby before the bomb went off.
Oliver blacked out.
=X=
Sorry for the long wait! I may rewrite this later, I sort of rushed the end because I wanted to get this out before tomorrow ehehehe...
=Review Replies=
Cartoon-Slash-fangirl: Thabk you for the review! Heheh, sorry, here's the conclusion, sort of...
Ahah, well, expect a lot of that later on, that's about the only thing I'm good at writing, cute couple things,,
iDontCare: I'm glad you like it! Here's an update!