Atakku

x

x

x

Chapter 9

xXx

Kaiba sat up keeping his disgruntled watch. The others were all asleep; Joey had made a not-so-valiant effort to stay away and not-so-discreetly keep an eye on Seto, whom he apparently felt was untrustworthy after that little mishap with Change of Heart. Except, of course, that Wheeler had no self-control and had passed out almost immediately.

Seto poked the fire with a stick, watching moodily as it caught up in flames. He held it until the fire burned nearly up to his fingertips, then tossed the twig into the heart of the fire.

Anuba had apparently been sitting up while Bakura took his watch, for she'd been awake when Bakura roughly shook Kaiba up for his shift. When Bakura retreated to a bare patch of ground and laid down, she had padded over next to him and nuzzled his wounded cheek. Then, after Bakura was apparently asleep, Anuba quietly returned to Seto's side and laid down at his feet.

Seto lit another branch on fire, glancing down at the jackal. Anuba stared back at him with deep, soulful eyes.

Seto let out an exasperated sigh. "All right, all right… I'm sorry for before." He ran a hand down her silky fur. "I have a vague recollection that I kicked you. Are you all right?"

She licked his hand eagerly, seemingly ready to make up. Seto smiled slightly and scratched her ear absently. "I wish I knew what was the matter with Different Dimension Dragon. I don't suppose you know what happened?"

Abruptly, Anuba stilled, staring at him intently. She didn't flinch, didn't bat an eye. Seto stared back at her quizzically.

"Too bad you can't talk…" he muttered, giving up and breaking eye contact. "And am I insane? Why am I acting like the jackal knows something?"

Anuba nipped his shirt sleeve. He glanced down at her, then away. Finally, she laid her head down on her paws and stared at the fire. He joined her, moodily tracking the moon's progress through the sky until it was time to wake the Pharaoh for his watch and get what meager rest he could.

xXx

"Hey, Mai?"

She forced her eyes open. She was lying on her back on some very uncomfortable dirt; a root was sticking in her back. Her neck was propped up on rolls of rough cloth. It didn't hurt as much as the night before; in fact, she could barely feel pain.

"Mai?" the uncertain voice asked again. Joey Wheeler's concerned face swam into view. "You feeling okay?"

"Better than ever," she started to reply perkily. She struggled to sit up, propping herself up with her hands. But the second she moved her neck, pain shot through her entire body; pain so white-hot she actually saw dark splotches creep across her vision.

She was thankful she had the self-control not to scream in agony. But her face contorted horribly, and she froze, afraid to move.

"She's still hurt," Yami's voice came from behind her. 'Thank you, genius,' she thought, near hysterical, but didn't budge. She squeezed her eyes shut.

"What do we do?" Joey sounded panicked. If she'd been feeling any better, she would have smiled slightly. He was such a goof, even when he didn't mean to be.

"There's nothing we can do." His voice sounded grim. "Mai, are you okay? Give it a moment. See if you can move. Your neck has been still all night, but it should get a little better, maybe okay enough to walk."

"How do you cure a sprained neck?" Joey asked. She opened her eyes a little bit. Yami was right. The pain, while still considerable, was becoming more bearable.

"Wait until it heals itself," Yami responded, but softly.

Her neck started tingling. Not where she'd sprained it, in the back; that still hurt like crazy. A warm sensation was spreading in the area around her throat…

"What the-" Joey yelped. "Yami, what's going on? Do you see that?"

The background noises started to fade away, but she did hear Yami say in a hushed voice: "The Millennium Necklace is lighting up!"

The girl was lying on the ground, unable to move. Mai looked down at herself through different eyes; she was hovering over the scene. Her neck, apparently, hadn't recovered. She lay comatose on the ground, mostly forgotten by her companions.

She couldn't really fault them, however. They were all preoccupied with other things. Ryou was running around a small fire, dumping wood on it and desperately trying to urge it into a larger blaze. On closer inspection, he was sobbing quietly, his round face tear-streaked. In between sniffs, he let out a few quick sneezes. "Don't you get sick, Ryou," Yami cautioned, his voice even grimmer than usual. "You're the last one left to help me."

Mai's eyes quickly scanned the scene. Joey was lying next to her, nearly on top of the fire. She squinted… did his skin have a faintly blue tinge to it? He wasn't moving, except for a slight rise and fall of his chest.

The jackal was sitting next to a misshapen heap, staring intently into the woods. The Necklace around Mai's throat glowed again, and she could suddenly tell exactly what was under the blankets. Seto Kaiba lay there, seemingly unharmed except for a small gash on his upper arm. But his heart was slowing down and he was near death.

Ryou ran around the fire and gently fanned the flames, stopping to look down at a fourth body on the ground. "Bakura," he choked out. "Please don't leave."

Mai took a look at the boy's face and would have thrown up, if possible. The cut on his cheek from when Harpy Lady's claws accidentally caught him had turned completely black. The entire right side of his face had swelled up. Bakura was breathing laboriously, as if it hurt him to do so.

Expecting the worst, she glanced around for Kimo, but couldn't find him. Puzzled, she started to hover over the woods, but something was prodding at her shoulders and she was abruptly jerked back into her own body.

"MAI!" Joey bellowed in her ear.

She would have sat up if she could have, but as it was her eyes flew open and she fixed him with a glare. "Joseph Wheeler, I was finally having a vision from this Necklace and you had to go and interrupt it!"

Instead of looking sheepish and guilty, as she'd fiercely hoped, Joey broke out into a smile. "Glad to see you're back," he said, squeezing her hand.

She swatted it aside and clambered to her feet, keeping her neck carefully still. "I'm okay to walk," she announced.

"That's fantastic!" Joey responded jubilantly.

"Mai, what did you see?" Yami asked, but his voice sounded pleased.

She blinked slowly. "…It was us. In the future, I can only suppose. We were still in the forest. A… lot of us were wounded, actually. You and Ryou were trying to take care of us all. Except…" her brow furrowed.

"We were all sick?" Joey asked, a note of panic suddenly creeping into his voice.

"I, for one, was not sick," Seto mumbled from behind her.

"It couldn't have been true," Mai said with finality. "Because in the vision, my neck was so bad that I couldn't move. But I can walk now. And sprained necks only get better."

"Unless something else happens to them," Bakura cautioned. He was somewhere to her right, and she shifted her entire body to look at him. Her eyes widened slightly.

"Your cut…"

He brought a dirty hand to his cheek and swiped at it roughly. "It feels fine," he assured the group in a gruff tone.

"I mentioned that you should watch out for infection," Yami remarked, his voice tense. "Let us know if anything starts to hurt."

"What are you, my nursemaid?" Bakura demanded. "Why the sudden concern?"

Ryou broke the uncomfortable silence. "Because, Bakura. It's starting to turn black."

xXx

Odion let out a heavy groan. There seemed to be a great weight on his back. How long have I been asleep? he wondered, before he remembered. Not asleep. Unconscious.

Struggling, Odion pried his eyelids open. After a few minutes he was able to start shifting some of the stone off of his body. He was lucky to escape relatively unharmed, considering the white marble wall had collapsed, literally on top of him. Two big pieces had fallen to his either side, effectively stopping anything larger than his hand from landing on top of him. Even so, he was covered in rubble and dust.

He stood, groaning, and stretching his muscles. From the feel of it, he had been out for a long time. He squinted at the sky: it was about midday. So he had to have been out for nearly a full day- maybe it was even two days. His stomach was empty enough to make that believable.

A soft grumbling noise came from behind him. He spun quickly around, on high alert, but it was just a goat. A rather strange looking goat, in fact. It was small and roundish, and had a very dark gray body. Its eyes were round and completely green, half-dead looking. The tail was huge and fluffy, and the goat had two tiny wings perched on its back.

Odion swallowed hard. This wasn't a goat…

…it was a Duel Monster.

And he was no longer in the desert. There were trees growing all around him.

The Monster, a Dark Gray, gave him one last look and ran off. A second later, something collided with his back and knocked them both to the ground.

"Aah!" the thing gasped. "What- I'm- you- Odion!"

Still bewildered, Odion sat while the thing hugged him fiercely for several long seconds before it clicked in his mind that this was Téa.

"Miss Téa," he said warmly, resorting back to formality in his delight at seeing her once more. "I feared the worst."

"So did I," she laughed breathlessly. "But- oh." Her expression changed to a slightly worried one. "Where did you come from? What happened to you? Were you okay when all the Monsters started appearing?"

Odion frowned, genuinely confused. "I don't know what you mean," he said honestly. "The Pharaoh was dueling Masters- I mean, dueling Marik and Bakura. His friends were with him. I had started to return to fetch you when a section of the wall collapsed on me, and I've just woken."

"Then you have no idea what's been going on," Téa said flatly, glancing nervously over her shoulder. "Come on. I'll explain while we run. He's been gone a while now, but he could be back at any time."

"Master Marik?" Odion wanted to know as she yanked him to his feet.

"No," she said, glancing over her shoulder again. "I mean R-"

And then they stopped short. The two of them had come face to face with a tall, golden man, dressed in fine robes and regarding them lazily. He waved a hand, and suddenly they were back on top a building, standing on a smoothed-over floor. Odion glanced around quickly; there were no staircases or in fact any means of escape.

"So, you tried to run away, did you?" the giant of a man asked, directing his question towards Téa. She glared back at him, her eyes burning.

"You left me alone for a whole day," she spat back defiantly. "What did you expect?" Then, a second later: "You can talk?"

The man snorted. "Of course I can," he responded with dignity. "And I rather thought the location would be enough to prevent any unwarranted escapes. How did you climb down?"

"I'll never tell," Téa retorted.

"Who is this?" Odion asked Téa under his breath. The man across from them was giving him the chills.

She bit her lip, directing her gaze away from the man. "That's Ra," she whispered to her friend. "Marik accidentally unleashed him."

Ra?

Ra chuckled, lifting his arms. "I hope you realized that, even had you gotten farther, I would have found you," he addressed towards Téa. "You'll never escape."

"So why are you keeping me here?" she shot back. "What do you want with me? Or are you just going to send me to the Shadow Realm like the others?"

He met her eyes in a fierce glare, and the next second she was stumbling back shielding her eyes. "Ow," she whispered under her breath.

"Very good," he sneered, suddenly cold and foreboding. "You figured out what I've been doing with your fellow humans?"

"I could see the Shadow Magic when you were on top of that mountain," she whispered. "You've unleashed all the Monsters. What other explanation is there?"

"Your precious Pharaoh trapped all of us in the Shadow Realm for five millennia!" Ra suddenly bellowed, and Téa flinched. "You've been there, girl. You know what it's like. Dark, cold, lonely… for five-thousand-years my kind was imprisoned in there while you humans smugly walked the earth. Now it's payback time, little girl. Duel Monsters will inhabit the earth, and man will be shuttered away!"

Odion physically reeled back, trying to process this information. Téa stared at Ra, composed again. "So you are going to send us to the Shadow Realm," she whispered.

He sneered. "Is it not true that the most powerful humans kept several Duel Monsters on hand, to do their bidding when they pleased?"

"To fight for them," Téa acknowledged, sorrow briefly flitting through her blue eyes. Ra saw it and grew angry.

"Don't you dare pity us, little girl," he said coldly. "You who have only contributed to our pain. Do you presume to tell me you've never Dueled before? Never picked up a card and Summoned forth a Monster to serve you to the death?"

She bit her lip and chose not to answer. "So, what? You want Odion and me to fight for you?" Her voice was challenging.

"No, indeed," he responded, his mannerisms changing into something more amused. "I have legions of angry, oppressed Monsters willing to fight by my side. But I take on this form from time to time… it tends to make things easier. It's easier to find somewhere to sleep… something to eat…" he grinned. "And I do need to eat."

She stared at him fearfully for a moment, but he shook his head. "I hate to disappoint you, little girl, but I don't eat human," he informed her sneeringly.

In another moment it clicked. "You want us to cook for you?"