Second update. Woot. This is the shortest chapter in the entire story so far...and will most likely still be the shortest chapter in the whole story once it's done! o.O Plus, it has a nice, little cliffhanger thing at the end. ^-^ CLIFFHANGERS, YAY! xD ...I think... o.o
Usual disclaimer: Seit, Seit's mom, and (since he's in this chapter briefly) Skeleios are mine; the rest belongs to Naughty Dog.
Though, some of us wish we could have Erol (coughcough me) or Jak all to ourselves, sadly, we can't. Blargh.
Reviews are love! :)
Enjoy! ^-^
The prison monster known as Jak had crossed the finish line a fraction of a second before Erol did, causing the stadium to fill with deafening cheers and blinding camera flashes from across the stands. The few surviving racers that remained zipped past the finish line seconds later. Erol, for whatever reason, had decided to do another lap around the track as Jak pulled to the side to be greeted by the cheering of fans and, later, the Baron while the other racers disappeared into their entrance into the garage.
Seit, who had been sitting in the front row directly next to the Baron's special box watching the race as closely as he could, was a little surprised at Jak's win, especially one this close. He glanced into the box and noticed the Baron had gotten into his moving platform and started floating down to the track with the month's supply of Eco right behind it.
The Baron started giving some sort of speech while Jak kept his back towards him, but Seit decided to allow the crowds to drown out what he could hear of it. He barely heard the Baron mention something about the war and how good men are either bought or broken, and then saw Jak turn around and surprise the Baron with his true identity.
As his mother and sisters gathered what they had brought with them and stood up to leave with Skeleios, Seit decided to look and see if he could find his brother anywhere on the track. He glanced down the home stretch and noticed Erol still on his bike, backing up as if he accidentally might have left something nearby on the track.
"What the hell are you doing?" Seit grumbled to himself.
"Come on, Seit, we're going to see if your brother's made it back into the garage yet," Seit's mother said, grabbing his arm.
Seit quickly pulled away and pointed down the track towards the home stretch where he had last seen his brother. "No, Mom, he's down there, I saw him. I think he might've dropped something and went to go back and look for it."
Seit and his mother both looked in that direction in time to see Erol driving a beeline towards Jak. He heard one of the Baron's bodyguards yell, "Look out!" while the Baron's platform moved upwards in case the barrels of Eco exploded.
"What the hell are you doing, you goddamn son of a bitch?" Seit yelled as he jumped over the fence that separated the front row of the audience from the track about ten feet below him. His mother yelled for him not to jump and possibly get hurt, which was a typical act for her. She tried to grab him so she could pull him back up, but she had started reaching out a hundreth of a second too late to save him.
Just as Seit hit the ground, Jak leapt up into the audience as Erol hit the barrels of Eco. There was an almost-deafening explosion, and a large cloud of Dark Eco surged through the air, almost completely wiping out everything it touched, including Seit.
The front of his body and both of his arms surged with a tingling sensation that was not at all foreign to Seit's memory as the force of the Eco thrust his back against the wall. He remembered this feeling just after the doctors took the special cast off of his left forearm a few weeks after his accident when his wounds had healed as much as both his body and the medicine of that time would allow.
His conscious quickly snapped back into the present the moment he heard the crowd screaming in horror and the sounds of their feet against the floor as they ran for the nearest exits and tried to escape. He could barely feel anything on his front side, but he was somehow still able to see. He looked above him into the stands and saw chaos in the crowds. He then looked around the track to see if he could find Erol, or what was possibly even left of him, anywhere on the track. The only thing he could find of him at the time was his metal face-mask, its blood-red eyes leering at him and gleaming in the sunlight that leaked through the open roof of the stadium. He tried to walk towards it and pick it up, but ended up nearly blacking out and collapsing at least three times. When he finally reached it, he picked it up with what little strength he had and stared into its eyes.
"What the hell were you thinking, you son of a bitch?" Seit softly asked the mask as tears rolled down his cheeks and he cradled the object in his tingling hands, hardly able to feel the cold metal as it softly brushed against his fingertips.
The next thing he knew, everything went black as his body fell backwards onto the silver-colored metal track.