Chapter 26- Back to the Surface

"So we're going to go back to the Point of Solitude?" Flynn asked.

"Yes." Matt answered.

"How are we going to get there?" Keith said.

Matt waved his hand in the air carelessly. "I'm sure something will turn up."

"That hasn't worked so well in the past." Flynn said.

"Really?" Drake said. "It seems to me it has."

Flynn opened his mouth and raised a finger to argue the point, then looked off to his upper left as if there was something there that was contradicting his thoughts over there. He shut his mouth, then spoke. "I've gotta stop disagreeing with Matt."

"Many people have said that." Matt said, gesturing for them to move forward. "But enough standing around. We'll got off this island somehow." He took a step forward, only to have a fiend attempt to stop him. It swiped at him, only to have its attack foiled by the wall of spirits defending Matt. Matt shook his head in disgust.

"That wasn't very nice." He said, as he placed a single finger on each side of the fiend's head and pressed in. The fiend's head exploded. "Then again, neither was that."

"That was… incredible." MacArthur said.

"I suppose." Matt replied. "You should see it when I do it to a tank."

"Yeah, it's incredible to see a huge metal machine suddenly squeezed as flat as a pancake between two human hands." Brooklyn said.

"I would think so." MacArthur said.

"Enough fawning over my power." Matt said. "Let's go already. I'm getting a bit impatient." He took a step toward another hallway. "Come on, then." Everyone followed.

I wonder what how he thinks we'll get out of here. Drake thought. Maybe he thinks we'll have another problem with the gate and it'll spit us out somewhere else. But that would probably be just as bad as being on the island…

Matt reached around a corner and came back around holding what looked like a black tube. A fiend fell over in front of them. Matt tossed the tube away.

"What was that?" Drake asked.

"The fiend's throat. I thought I would relieve him of the responsibility of breathing. Apparently though, such a responsibility is to die for."

"Clearly." Brooklyn said. "As he just died from being relieved of it."

"You have a weird sense of humor." Helen said. "I think it falls somewhere between the lines of sickening and sadistic."

"Yep. It's always been that way."

"I see."

At the end of the hallway was the gate to the second level. Matt checked it. "Should be clean. Should I go first or come last?"

"You go first. I'd rather not drop into a room of things I can't kill." Flynn said.

"Yeah." Keith said. "I don't want to die again."

Matt chuckled a little and stepped through that gate. Once he had, the stone doors of the gate suddenly shut. Flynn grabbed the handles and pulled. "Oh, damn it…"

"They locked, didn't they?" Ashley said.

"Yeah. And I don't think we can unlock them." Flynn said. "We don't have the key!"

"Ah, but that is not the only thing that can unlock the gate." Brooklyn said.

"Hm?" Helen said. "I thought you needed the key to open the gates."

"The key is one of ten items that can open that gate at the moment. The others are…" Brooklyn started.

"…the now nine Millennium Items." Yugi finished.

"Why are these overlords so hell bent on the key, then?" Keith asked.

"Because to get a Millennium Item from someone, you must engage them in a Shadow Game for it. Currently, there are only two people who have the items. Matt has, or more properly, had one of them. The other is with Chris." Yugi said.

"Don't you have one?" Drake asked.

"I had the other seven, but they're all in the Tablet of the Pharaoh's Memories now. I didn't keep them."

"Ah."

Brooklyn stepped forward, holding out his Millennium Shell. "Let's not do too much discussing now. I'm sure Matt's in a half-panic over the door closing behind him." He placed the shell on the gate and his hand flat over it. The door began to glow around the edges and started to swing open, only to stop almost immediately after it had begun. Brooklyn's eyes narrowed.

"What's wrong?" MacArthur said. "I thought you said you could open this damn thing."

"I can. But someone is trying to shut it at the same time." Brooklyn said, focusing hard on the door. It began to inch open. "Come on, come on… somewhere watch behind us!"

Drake turned quickly and saw some fiends trying to sneak up on Ashley, who had been at the tail end of the group. She's turning into another Julie, getting into bad spots all the time! He thought, drawing his rifle to try and stop them. He was, as usual, too slow. The closest fiend managed to bury its huge claw in her right shoulder before he could shoot it. She screamed, turned, and planted her foot firmly into the fiend's skull with her ridiculous strength. The fiend died and started to fall over, but its claw was stuck in Ashley's shoulder. The other fiends, hoping to take advantage of an apparently slowed target, rushed at her.

Drake opened fire along with all of the others. The fiends in the front, apparently anticipating this, raised what looked like enlarged SWAT shields and deflected the hail of bullets. Drake, frustrated, kicked out his empty clip and reached for another. He would just wait until they put down the shields. Then again, the fiends were so much bigger than them that they would probably just trample them and not bother putting the shields down to attack.

Meanwhile, Brooklyn was still struggling to force the gate open. Whoever was on the other side had redoubled their efforts, or gotten some people to help him. The gate was still opening, but at an almost imperceptible rate. Brooklyn was doing everything he could to keep it moving.

Keith pulled out his bazooka. "This is the last rocket I've got…" He muttered, taking aim at the center of the pack. He pulled the trigger and the bazooka sputtered, then fizzled out. "Hmm… that didn't work…" He threw it away toward the group of fiends. It blew up in midair.

"Good thing you got rid of it." Flynn said.

"Yeah, so I could die the same way as all of you, huh?" Keith said.

"I guess so."

Ashley had been trying to skillfully work the claw out of her shoulder, to no avail. Now she seized the fiend's arm and pulled the claw out forcefully, probably tearing out some of her muscle. Without the huge weight of the fiend to slow her down, she ran toward the oncoming of fiends.

"Wait!" Drake shouted, but she just ignored him. He looked back at the others. "She's crazy!"

"Probably got that from hanging out with Matt and Brooklyn a lot." Helen said.

"Probably." Keith said.

Ashley jumped and landed a flying kick into a fiend's shield. There was a loud dong as the metal that was meant to withstand bullets had a hole punched through it by the tremendous impact. Drake raised his rifle, waiting for Ashley to move so that he could get a shot through the hole. Ashley pushed off the outside of the shield, pulling her leg out of the hole it had created and knocking the fiend over into its compatriots. Drake, seeing the massive opening, began to hammer away at the group of fiends.

The other fiends quickly pulled in to close the hole, leaving some other fiends vulnerable on the outer edges of the group. Flynn, Keith and MacArthur lazily picked them off.

Meanwhile, Ashley made another run at the front of the fiends. This time, she punched the ground so hard that she opened a fissure in the ground that caused the fiends in the center of the group to fall into each other, creating multiple gaps in the formation. She jumped into the formation, throwing sharp objects at the fiends. Drake's clip clicked empty and he ejected it for a fresh one.

Ashley had gotten herself out of the fiend's group by now and had moved at her miraculous speed to rejoin the others. "Boom." She said, and several explosions went off in the fiends, killing each and every one of them. Her right arm hung limp and was bleeding hopelessly.

"Are you okay?" Drake asked.

"I… I'm fine." She said. Drake opened his mouth to protest, but was cut off by Brooklyn.

"You'll have to deal with that later!" He said, the gate open next to him. "I've got the gate open, and you need to get through it before I run out of gas and it gets shut again!" Ashley darted through the open gate, closely followed by Drake. Drake heard someone start running behind him before the sensation of gate travel cut off all sound.

He opened his eyes to see Matt finishing off a fiend that he was holding by the neck. Matt tossed the fiend body aside and turned to see the two of them.

"What kept… what happened to you?!?" He said, dropping down next to Ashley, who was lying on the ground, holding her blown-open shoulder.

"A fiend tore it open… and I couldn't fix it with the time we had. Brooklyn had to try and force the gate open… it shut behind you."

"Did it now…" Matt muttered. "So he tried to cut me off from you? Clever… but as long as we have both Brooklyn and me we should be fine. Let me take a look at that…" He removed Ashley's hand from over her shoulder and looked at it. Drake, with nothing else to attract his interest, looked too.

The wound had somehow turned an ugly green around the edges, and blood was seeping out at a dangerous rate. Her shoulder had collapsed as there was no longer any muscle in it to give it any shape. Drake could see white underneath all the red.

"Hm." Matt said. "That's quite ugly." He placed his hand over the wound. Slowly, Ashley's shoulder began to regain some shape. At the same time, Matt's shoulder began to fall apart.

"Matt! You know I don't like you hurting yourself for my sake…" Ashley said.

"Do you think this actually hurts?" He said. "I'm dead. I don't feel any pain anymore." He removed his hand, Ashley's shoulder completely restored. At the same time, his shoulder healed itself.

"How do you do that?" Drake asked.

"I developed a technique that allows me to take the wounds of others as my own. Because of my quick healing, it was quite a useful thing. Now that I can't feel it anyway, it's even more useful."

"I see."

Flynn dropped in on them. "Sorry it took so long." He said. "We got hung up on some more fiends." Keith and Helen dropped in right next to him.

"This is going to get messy." Keith said. "He just keeps sending more and more fiends after us."

"I thought it was bad before." Helen said. "This is even worse." MacArthur and Yugi joined them. The gate began to slide shut, only to have Brooklyn pop out of it.

"That was close." He said.

"What was?" MacArthur asked. A fiend's clawed hand came through the door, only to get caught in the closing stones. "Ah. That."

"Close the blast door! Open the blast door, open the blast door!" Matt said, laughing. Brooklyn, Ashley, and MacArthur laughed with him.

"What?" Drake said.

"You're too young, I think." Matt said. "It's in a movie. Let's get moving before they do open the door again."

Matt led them down another series of twisting corridors with no resistance (these things seem endless, Drake thought, I've lost track of how many I've been down… man my legs hurt from all this walking) and paused at the end.

"Hmm…"

"What's out there?" Flynn said.

"Let's see… I feel radioactive fallout." He said, and turned to Brooklyn. "You threw that flash grenade I gave you, didn't you?"

"Uh… no?"

"Liar. What did I tell you about that?"

"That it wasn't supposed to be lethal to us but might be… it was only supposed to kill fiends. I think that's it."

"And I told you not to use it in somewhere you'd have to go back through!"

"Oh."

"Stop being so mean to Brooklyn!" Ashley said.

"Well, he's being stupid again. Now, thanks to him, we've got to walk through a nuclear area. You see, that bomb he threw was in fact a sort of nuclear hand grenade. It was only made with about a centigram of Uranium, so it was much less powerful than a full bomb. But it still left fallout. Now we have to walk right through it. Of course, I don't really care about it myself, but I worry about what it may do to you guys."

"Nice going, Brooklyn." Flynn said.

"Hey, it saved our lives earlier!" He protested.

"And now it's hindering us now."

"How do we get across it?" Keith said. "We can walk through it, but it may be dangerous and/or lethal."

"That's the dilemma. The gate at the other end is shut, as I would expect. I have to go across first, and after what happened the last time I was separated from you guys, I don't want to do it again. But it may be necessary…"

"We'll just have to run through it." MacArthur said. "And hope for the best. It won't go away for several years, and we can't afford to wait that long. Especially since this William kid could just mass all of his fiends on either side of us and then crush us that way."

"Okay then. I guess that means I have to go on ahead and force the gate open." Matt pulled the Millennium Star from his cloak, flicked it up in the air, and caught it. "Don't die back here, and wait till I tell you to come." He raced across the chamber and placed the Star on the door. It began to open, slowly at first, then more rapidly as Matt put more effort into it. "All right, go!"

Ashley, the fastest of all of them, was across first. She dove headfirst into the gate. MacArthur, still in military shape and despite being quite out of his prime, was second across. Brooklyn was right behind him, strengthened by his undoubtedly wild adventures with Matt. Yugi, surprisingly fit for someone who played cards more than he got out, was fourth in. Flynn followed him, with Helen right on his heels. Drake and Keith were the last two.

"Come on, come on, get through there!" Matt shouted. Drake dove through the gate and landed in the familiar chamber at the core of the first level. Keith came through groaning after him.

"I need to get out more." He said, gasping for air.

"See? Not doing all your homework has some benefits." Drake said.

"Ha! Even though everyone else was out before you?"

"Hey, not everyone has the motivation to run for three miles every morning, and Helen's in her prime. It's not like she's out of shape, either. And the others… well, they're self-explanatory."

Matt came through the gate. "That went okay. Let's get going before William gets a chance to launch another feeble assault. They're annoying."

"And I think they're a little more than feeble." Flynn said.

"No, Ashley's just injury-prone and quite clumsy." Matt said. "She's almost as bad as me. I think she got hurt on 95 of all the missions she went on."

"I'm not going to deny it." She said.

"What were you, then?" Drake asked.

"100 injury rate. Never could get through one without some bizarre incident." He turned toward the balcony they had come in through the first year. There were stairs leading off to the side. "Does he think we'll fall for the same trick again?"

"Probably." Brooklyn said. "But we now know there are no secure stairs there! So ha! Uh, how are we going to get out then?"

"This way?" Drake said, wandering a short ways down a familiar-looking passage. Matt nodded.

"That way, if I remember right, leads to the Vault of Souls, and I believe it is the quickest way out of the Shadow Realm. So let's go down it."

After an uneventful trip down the passage, past the vault of souls, and through the arch, they were back on Earth. Drake stretched his arms.

"Feels good to be out in the natural light after all that." He said.

"Quite, but we're not out of this yet." Keith said.

"Yes, we've still got to get off this island." Helen said.

"Does anyone have a phone with which we could call my dad?" Drake asked.

"I do." MacArthur said, pulling it out. "Number?"

"Um… 708-681- 9264." MacArthur dialed it up and handed the phone to Drake. His dad picked it up after two rings.

"Yes? Who is this?" Drake's dad said.

"Dad, it's me. Can you come get us off this island?" Drake's dad laughed. "What's funny?"

"You won't believe it, but I'm en route and not even five minutes away. Something told me you guys would need a lift. I had actually planned on waiting for a call after I refueled, but something told me that I needed to get going a while ago. So I got up in the air and came out here."

"See you in a little while, then." Drake said.

"Yeah." Mr. Stizen hung up. Drake shut MacArthur's phone and handed it back to the general.

"Is he coming?" Helen asked. She had gone off a little to stretch.

"He's not even five minutes away!" Drake said.

"No way! How?"

"Something told him to come some time ago… wait a minute… it wasn't you, was it, Matt?"

"Guilty!" Matt said, throwing his hands in the air. "I visited Rick before I came back to get you. That's probably why my heroic antics were so late. Sorry about that."

"Well, it greatly improved the waiting time here, so I think that we can forgive you for that." Flynn said. "Let's get to the airstrip." In about ten minutes they had made their way to the airstrip. Drake's dad was waiting at the other end in the B-17.

"Come on!" He shouted. "I don't want to have to deal with any of those creatures!"

"Hang on a minute…" Keith said. "Will we all fit in there? We've got a couple more people than last time."

"Doesn't matter." Matt said. "Ashley and I can stand."

"That's not exactly safe!" Drake's dad said.

"For us it is. Everyone in!" Matt said. Everyone clambered into their respective turrets/chairs. Matt was standing in the center aisle, with Ashley a few feet farther down the plane. "Alright, go!" There was a loud noise as the plane started up and took off, dragging them upwards into the sky.