Chapter 15
Ace
He dreamed of fire. A great fire. A roaring inferno that stretched from sea to sky and devoured everything in its path.
He dreamed of that fire, but he woke to darkness. Ace stared out his visor in muddled confusion. His brain was full of fog and half-remembered pieces of whatever his mind had conjured up while he was out. What had he been doing?
A planet abruptly entered his line of sight, only to disappear a few moments later. He was spinning fast. Really fast. And moving fast. Hadn't he and Marco been in the Grand Line? Why was he by Farrow? And where in the hell was the ship?
"Marco?" he tried. The radio only returned static. Ace scowled. It had been damaged in the explosion.
The explosion.
Ace's chest clenched. The ship was gone, Marco was probably gone too, and Ace was hurtling through space with one day's worth of oxygen left and no way to signal for help.
The next time he spun around, there was something blocking his view of Farrow. Something big. Something like a moon. And shooting out of that moon, heading directly for Ace, was a column of lava hot enough to melt his suit.
"Shit!"
Damaged thrusters sputtered but provided just enough force to get Ace out of the way. He was still going to hit Bovekk hard, and he desperately tried to slow his descent, but it was fruitless. His jetpack was shot.
Lava-veined ground loomed. Panic and helplessness eclipsed each other and left numb resignation in their wake.
Ace closed his eyes.
An alarm blared. Groaning, Ace squinted against the red light that painted the alien sky. "What?" he mumbled, voice thick and throat aching. His whole body ached, actually. The HUD slowly came into focus. His…his left wrist was…what was it? Oh. It was "reaching dangerous temperatures."
Ace tried to move, but a tidal wave of pain knocked the idea right out of his head. Panting, he tried to catalogue the sources, but there were too many, and his suit was too compromised to give him an accurate idea of what was going on.
The alarm intensified, now warning of a possible suit breach. Fear shot fire into Ace's veins. He yanked his left arm up, crying out into the silence of his own helmet. He caught a glimpse of something orange and black flying over his head.
Lava. Elevated environmental temperatures. He'd landed on Bovekk, and he was alive. Somehow.
Ace tried to move again. He was in the way of a lava flow. He needed to move. The instant he tried, his muscles locked.
"C'mon," he whispered. His arm had fallen back by his side and the warnings were blaring all over again. Frustrated tears leaked out of his eyes. "Come on, move, dammit."
After ten agonizing seconds, Ace managed to get his fingers to twitch. Squeezing his eyes shut, he heaved with everything he had. Joints popped, muscles twinged, and broken bones splintered, but he was up. Spots danced in his eyes. If he focused on any of them, he'd get sucked in. He swallowed, lightheaded and soaked in sweat.
A trickle of lava had been pooling against his arm. Ace forced his other arm over and brushed off the bits that had hardened against his suit. In the most agonizing minute of his life, he rolled over, got his hands and feet under him, then slowly, so slowly, so terribly, painfully slowly, got to his feet.
The world went gray at the edges. For a second, Ace thought he was done—but he stayed up, and his vision cleared, and he thought he was okay.
Then the pain hit.
He screamed. It was all he could do. He screamed until he ran out of air and the first wave of agony had crested and passed. Blood pooled in his mouth. He gagged on it.
God, he could barely think. He began to walk—stagger, really—towards…he didn't even know. Somewhere. Elsewhere. Away.
Time twisted and slipped. He would blink awake only to find that he'd been walking the whole time. The bouts of unconsciousness kept increasing until he was out of it more often than not. Every time his eyes closed, he saw fire.
So much fire.
He opened his eyes one last time to see a cavern. In the center hovered a fruit covered in violent orange swirls.
After that, nothing.
Please review.