It bit and ripped
As it jumped and dipped,
And fought against Cold's freezing grip,
On that fateful day,
It cascaded down
The dry wood brown,
All spread cross the ground
On that fateful day,
It sent shivering light,
Through the night
To the aid of trying sight,
On that fateful day,
One flame kindled,
One yet unlit,
And would remain
To lie and sit,
One flame kindled,
One yet unfound,
Red would rise, Red would abound,
But Green, Oh, Green,
Never earned its renown
To God be the Glory
Onettsons
Chapter 9: Warrior
"- Yeah! And…oh, look; another corpse!"
"Woooow. Looks like somebody needs to learn some manners. This guy sure…"
...
"And here's another one!"
"Wonder where the victor is."
"Ah, who really cares, anyway?"
"Your right. Let's move on."
…
"Hot enough to fry an Onettson on the sidewalk, eh?"
"Yeah! Maybe we should come by later and see if he's ready to eat!"
"…dude, you're gross."
….
"You don't remember much, do you?"
"No. Something seems very wrong here, and I can't tell what it is…"
"Forget me for a second…you're in pain, aren't you?"
"Uggghhh…yeah, a lot of pain. Whoa – A LOT of pain!"
"It's really warm, isn't it?"
"…yeah, that too."
"You don't feel that fuzzy anymore, do you?"
"Not…really. Everything feels a bit hard…"
The other leaned in. "Try waking up…"
"Yeeeeah!" Ness pulled himself from his dream, back into the hard, cold world of reality. Check that, hard, HOT world of reality. In an effort to conserve his skin, he shot up onto his feet, hoping that he hadn't burned anything.
"What am I doing HERE?!" Then the fight of the previous night came flooding back into his mind. He gritted his teeth at the recollected moment of being hit, again and again and again. But if his memory served him right, he had won, and that was all that counted. At least he hoped.
He quickly looked over his body. His left arm was grey with debris, there was a vicious-looking scrape running up the front side of his right leg, there was a hole in the middle of his shirt showing off a large, ugly bruise, and a woodpecker had made a home in his head (metaphorically, of course).
"Where am I again? Well, I should probably know that…Oh, that's right: I'm lost!" Ness groaned. He already felt half-dead, and so now of course he had to be lost. "Wait a second…" Looking behind him, he saw the Arena, looming, as always, up above all other buildings, clearly signaling where to go.
Not wanting to traverse the maze of alleys, he looked to the main road. It was filled with Onettsons traveling this way and that, but most were heading to the capper's right. So, Ness followed them and went with the flow, guessing that it was going to his destination.
Almost as soon as he got on the street he regretted it. Glances and stares graced him constantly, often carrying the heavy weight of judgment. What made it worse is that he clearly wasn't the only bruised pedestrian, some even walking around with nearly their entire face masked by bandages. Being injured wasn't something uncommon in Onett, so why was he getting all the attention? Ness just forced himself to keep walking.
An intersection in the road came up, and immediately the boy recognized it. Well, at least the other side of it, as it was the path he usually used to get from his house to the domed structure. He then turned onto the Great Road…or the Fighting Road, or the Big Way, or the Popular Path, whatever. The road had many names. The point was that that it was the grand entrance to the Arena. It was wide and open, representing the building it led to in its size, a bold contrary to all the other crammed in architecture of the town. There were even a few healthy plants in the middle where an Onettson would perform 'PK Water' on their way inside. The place was relatively sacred.
Knowing full well that he would get even more looks here, Ness quickened his pace and ignored the inevitable. He shook his head; since when did he care about how he was viewed? "This place is getting to me," he said inwardly as he passed through the entrance. "Well, it's dark in here anyway, so I don't have to worry about it."
…
"Hey! Who let in the zombie!?"
"Myself. And, if you don't mind, I'm gonna go take a look in the mirror," Ness returned with a sarcastic note playing on his voice. There was a mirror which was barely used by the bleachers of the training room; no one knew how or when it got there nor did anyone care. Today someone used it, and it was a very revealing tool.
Zombie turned out to be a very accurate description. Blood had run down the right side of his face, drying and crusting up over the night. The once bloody wound on his forehead was surrounded by a plethora of bruises. His left eye was a black one, and the same side of his lips was puffed up and suspended up above its normal position.
"WOAH! ...your face is the first thing to scare me in a long time, kid." It was Aaron. In return, the capper gave him a glare. "What? Training by yourself to hard for you?" The glare continued.
"No. Those three guys weren't so bad either," he said as he walked away from the mirror and past the Dominter. Just as he hoped, the said Dominter decided to interrogate.
"What three guys?"
"Yeah, on the way back to my house," Ness began with that, and then told the whole story, with the exception of the details. Ness was not particularly a 'detail person'.
Not surprisingly, Aaron did not seem very impressed by his story. The only thing he did afterwards was say "Get used to it," and walk away.
The student scowled at the floor. "At least I won…" he said under his breath, deep in thoughts.
"No, no you didn't win," said Aaron, jerking him back out of his head. "You SURVIVED." He gestured to his body, "Look at you! Does that look like a win!?" There was a silence. "Well?"
"No."
"You're right, believe it or not. There's a difference between fighting off the enemy and beating the enemy. And until you beat them, the score remains unsettled." And with that the teacher turned on his heel and left him.
The bloodied boy pondered over his words. He hadn't won, eh? Well, he hadn't lost either. But the question was does the absence of winning mean losing?
Ness didn't know the answer to that, but he did know this: whatever he had accomplished, it wasn't victory. He looked to the training ring. "Check that. It isn't victory YET."
…
"You ARE aware that I am going easy on you, right?" said Link, a younger Dominter (only 87 years old) with a bad habit of making jokes. He was kinder than the rest of the team, but that wasn't saying much.
"I was hopping so, yeah," Ness answered rather hurriedly, ducking under a yellow lightning-like 'PK Bolt' bent on chiseling out his hair. It passed him and a 'ZAP!' was heard from somewhere behind him. But there was no time to dwell on that, as dozens of purple needles were soaring through the air targeted at and all around his current position. This left him with no time or room to dodge and this left him panicking. In a jaw-like fashion, the wave of spikes sped towards the ground. With some last-split-millisecond thinking, the trainee spread out his body as flat as he could against an imaginary wall, hoping he could fit through the cracks in the line of teeth. He saw a violet streak pass his eyes, felt one graze his hand, and heard one rip through the back of his shirt. The next second all the purple was gone, and that was his cue to catch a quick breather.
"PK Mace!" But only a quick one.
Link had launched himself into the air, a pointy, orange weapon (giving off a slight aura) in hand. Landing not far from Ness, he made eye contact. Then, grinning, he charged. When he was five feet away, he swung to the capper's head. The said capper promptly ducked, uttering the words 'PK Shock'. The mace though, seemed to appear out of thin air and protected its wielder from the blast. However, the collision of the two energies eliminated both from existence. Not that it really mattered. They were all expendable.
Both fighters knew that it was not smart decision to stay in such close proximity with one another. Thus, they both PK jumped back about ten feet each. They made eye contact once again. Link's grin returned for an encore. Ness knew what that meant. Pretty soon he was grasping another glowing, orange handle. And wouldn't you know it, that handle was attached to yet another spiky sphere of pain.
"He must like Melee combat," the younger one thought. "I need a counter…" He searched for such a thing, even as his adversary came and gave him a sharp uppercut, and then jumped up and rammed the weapon into the floor where he had previously been. Then his sought-for idea came to his mind.
He immediately put the plan into action. At least, he would have liked to. To execute it, he needed to somehow land a strike on the opposing force. At least he could have some adequate time to find a way in as he was getting the hang of dodging the attempted blows…which meant that he had found a pattern in the attack…which meant he should be using that against his opponent.
Duh.
So he did. Link had just stabbed at him while taking a step forward, and Ness had evaded to the side. The position they were in added with general attack-pattern he had observed made it clear what the Dominter would try next: swing the weapon toward his face while extending his leg to trip him. Focusing hard, the capper (aided by ringers) jumped over the inconvenient foot, turned over in midair, and managed to jam his left foot into Link's body while diving away from the, ah, safety hazard.
THIS time not running into any obstructive legs of any sort, the diver rolled gracefully (well, maybe not gracefully) into a half-knee position. Meanwhile, the other stumbled back, no longer carrying the glowing arm as it had been canceled out by his lack of concentration after being hit. He regained balance and looked at Ness. Ness stood up, looked back, and grinned. And just as planned, the Dominter charged forward, a new attack already charging up in his mind. But this fight belonged to the youth now, something which this wrathful Onettson could not comprehend.
It was time to pull out the signature move. Ness took in a breath and waited for Link to come into the proper distance; close enough not to be far, but far enough to be out of range. He didn't have a concrete idea of just exactly how many feet that was, but he was hoping he didn't have to. He discarded the thought, though, as instinct warned him that now was the time. With not a second to lose, his hand and knee dropped to the ground as he cried, "PK Landwall!"
His timing could not have been better. From under Link's feet a rumble, then a mass of stone surged up and sent him and his body hurtling up into the air, only to be brought down by a green glowing chain from below. His touching (crashing) down was complimented by a nice 'thud' and a momentarily a short groan too. Ness stepped up to look down into his query's face, all the while maintaining a smirk as he quietly mouthed his finishing blow. "PK…"
"…Mace!"
That wasn't right.
"Ugh!" A bright orange slash of light arched up and Ness cried in pain.
That definitely wasn't right.
First second he was standing in triumph, the next he was lying face-down in the dirt; fate had a cruel sense of irony, did it not? With effort, the hardly capped boy turned his face look at a spiky, glowing orb of light pointed in his direction. From behind this came a statement so bitterly true it caused him to cringe: "You lost."
Again.
…
Despite it being a completely unneeded and probably dangerous observation, Ness wondered who it was that was going to fix the wall. After all, he had been thrown into it countless times. Who DID fix the broken stuff in Onett anyway?
BANG!
Snapping out of the world of broken wall inquires to the real world of hit-them-before-they-hit-you, Ness agilely flipped sideways over a kick as well as its ringer enhanced follow-up. Forming words while still airborne, he sent a frenzied PK Sparkler toward his opponent's midsection, and then landed delicately. The said opponent had similar ideas, and the projectiles shot simultaneously collided in midair and as a result died down smaller and smaller and then into nothingness.
And out of that nothingness an orange whip came, speeding so fast that it easily caught its prey firmly by the ankle. And just like that, Ness's advantage in agility slipped away. The holder of the whip yanked it and what it held bound towards him. Ness gritted his teeth and braced his legs. The other pulled harder. The capper braced harder. Even though they were getting nowhere (literally) with this, the two continued to exert all their strength into opposite directions. It became more of a test of stubbornness than of strength, which really is absurd considering how useless stubbornness is.
Ness, in an act that lost him the test (as well as a bit of pride), jumped with the pull of the whip into his enemy's awaiting arms. This was a simple trick, however, and an expected one. The whip was whipped around so that the human missile missed his human target, and then pulled back toward said target at an angle where direct attack was impossible. Desperately trying to avoid as much hurt as possible, Ness released ringers from his hands and feet (shoes). Still this couldn't protect him from the opposing PK Punch that connected with terrible force. Sprawling through the air, the capper crashed painfully into the wall.
Again.
…
"Check!" said Matt.
"Check!"
Two fighters, ten feet away, four seconds still. Then in question of the necessity of his tense fighting stance, Ness stood up and crossed his arms. This was obviously unexpected, and just what he wanted. Matt gave him a questioning stare, but did not even relax his fighting stance fractionally. The capper gave him a stare that asked, "Well?" The Dominter gave him a stare that answered "What?" They both simultaneously gave stares that said, "Ah, whatever!" Despite what their looks claimed, the only thing that intensified was the younger one's stance. The standoff continued for an age-long fifteen seconds, and then Ness spun around and sprayed ringers on Matt, who was just a tad late on his dodge. He flipped up after sliding a meter, and upon landing on all fours he created a large cloud of dirty dust; Ness knew not how.
Impulsively, yet foolishly, the young one rushed into the brown mist, fingertips blazing. When he discovered no one, he slowly turned around, warily eyeing the foggy walls and sending out PK fires into them. Suddenly he felt a presence behind him, and a hand rushing to his back. Whirling around, he managed to block Matt's right hand, but did not even see is left hand come up and seize his throat. Palm meeting something hard, face meeting something harder, the capper found himself on the ground, his neck still seized, and opposing force raining down on him. Struggling to remain silent against the agonized cries trying to pry their way out of his mouth, he frantically lashed out with all his appendages in every direction. His eyes were closed by pain, but his feet glanced someone several times. That told him approximately where Matt was, and he put all his strength into a donkey kick aimed in that direction. One of his feet met air; one met something's side and knocked it over.
Cracking his eyes open slightly, Ness grabbed hold of the arm that still obstinately clung to his neck. Using his newly acquired anchor, he swung himself up and down into his opponent. The heat of fire passed close by his cheek and burned it slightly, but that was a small price to pay for the blow his elbow landed to Matt's own throat. A kick sent him back up in retaliation, and an instant later the match was on its feet again.
Apparently, the older Dominter didn't like that, because several Landslides rose up very near to Ness. As light as a mutant feather, the capper skipped from the top of one of them to another, and rolled fashionably into fighting position once more. Grinning, he felt on fire. And maybe that was an omen or something; the other clapped twice and then slapped the ground on either side of him whilst shouting, "PK Dragon!" Instantly, there were smoking fields of fire to the left and right of both fighters. Now, from his experience, Ness knew that briefly after a move of that magnitude, one would be a bit out-of-breath. What he needed to do was take advantage of that.
Charging in, the capper activated 'PK Needle' as he closed the gap between him and his target. But an unfaithful target was Matt, and a cunning one. He leaned to the side, grabbed hold of the glowing needle, and raised it and Ness over the fire and into the ground beyond it.
SMACK!
Fervently pushing himself up, the younger Onettson prepared to-
KAZZZACK!
Groaning pitifully, he raised his hand for a PK Landwall-
KRACK! A ringer enhanced back-swing kick knocked him back down.
The finishing blow: "PK-
"ENOUGH!"
Aaron had intervened.
"Dude, just because he annoys you doesn't mean you have the right to kill him." Matt grumpily backed away from the prostrate Ness and crossed his arms. Link jumped down into the sandy ring and stood over the cappless capper. He could tell the newbie didn't want to open his eyes, and sympathized with him some.
Kneeling down, he slapped the boy's face lightly, "Get up." The slapping worked to get him up, but Ness clearly wasn't happy about pushing himself off of the ground. He glared up at Aaron from one eye as he limped to the stairway out of the mini-arena.
He slowly made his way up to the teacher and asked, "What do you want?"
Aaron looked him over; the new kid would definitely need a break from training for a while. Then he looked him in the eye. "Your first real match is in a week kid. Hope you're ready."
Wow. I'm done. Ain't it great? It's great, I know.
Well, I hope you can forgive me this great delay. I do have a few excuses though. Schoolwork has gotten harder, and I've become more attached to playing videogames (specifically, Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword Hero Mode). I also went to two AWSOME concerts: The Legend of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses concert, and the 116 Clique Come Alive tour. Both were absolutely AMAZING! But anyway, I digress. ON TO THE REPLIES!
TheMysticalQ: I sure hope I don't lose interest in this story; I really want to see the conclusion of Onettsons written. But man, you almost cried? And I thought that scene wasn't all that good! Am I good at writing sad stuff? 'Cause that's an essential skill for any writer. Suggestions for improvement welcome! And I hope you were cheering for Ness in this chapter as well.
Roseal: Can you forgive me again!? PLEEEAASE? I sure hope this sort of delay does not become a regular thing for this story. What did you think of the chapter? I'd love to hear from you about it!
PenFullofChaos819: Hey, hope everything works out for you with your stories and profiles. Just know that we all really love your work, and you needn't be ashamed of it. Why, I actually used your writing as a guide for certain elements of my story. I literally go, "How does PoC do this stuff?" and I try to learn from your writing. Anyways, what did you think? Was it worth the wait? How did I do on the characters in this chapter?
PK Auralight Omega: What did you think? I hope there was nothing controversial in this chapter.
oceanlover4evr: How was the chapter? Is the story moving too fast? Sorry for the two-month delay.
Innocence: Hope this one was good. What did you think?
Undearly Departed: Hope to read you next time!
CarlineN: Hope to read you next time!
This is Nacartor of Cut Productions, signing off.
