Review Responses:
itsblippingJBH - I'm glad it works! I was a little worried it would be too out of nowhere, so I really tried to set it up in previous chapters.
Pt35 - I tried to put a little of that confrontation in this chapter, but because of the tight schedule with its release, I didn't exactly have the time to put a lot of thought into an interaction like that. Maybe in the rewrite I could expand upon it, along with every other interaction in this story, though that's still a long ways away.
Chapter 37: The Horde
The Tower of Doom
Level 4
The stage ground to a halt, the bright white grid that had once adorned it having disappeared during the dark ascent. Light flickered from dim fluorescent bulbs hung from the brown brick ceiling of a wide, arched tunnel. The walkway was paved with smooth concrete, the path forward slightly curved, obstructing the view of what lay ahead.
Darkstalker watched Ricky, Xavier and Reggie step off of the dark stage, and quickly grabbed Hidden by the frills before he could join them.
"Ah! What...hey!" Hidden shouted in protest as Darkstalker held him in place.
"Listen here SandWing!" Darkstalker snarled, "I've had it with all this fun nonsense. You're gonna pay for what you did to me back there!"
Hidden grinned, and before Darkstalker could react, he'd latched onto Darkstalker's foreleg, spinning out of his hold and knocking Darkstalker's legs out from under him with his rear talons. The NightWing tumbled to the stage floor, smoke swirling out of his nostrils as he glared up at Hidden.
"Looks like all that battle training with Lin's starting to pay off." Hidden said with a smirk, stepping down to join the others. "Now could you wait to have your vengeance 'till after we're done here. We've still got one more challenge ahead of us, you know."
Darkstalker growled, scrambling to his feet, and stepped off of the stage to join the others. He noticed Xavier holding back a chuckle, and shot the RainWing a glare, picking up his pace to take the lead.
"Let's just get this over wi…." Darkstalker began, before promptly walking face first into an invisible wall. He fell back, rubbing his sore snout as he irritably watched the ripples of his impact spread across the invisible forcefield to the sides of the tunnel.
This time, the other's couldn't hold back their snickering.
Darkstalker slowly got back to his feet once more, staring up at bright white text sprawled across the barrier reading Waiting for Players.
"So, what do you think this challenge will be?" Ricky asked, stepping up next to Darkstalker. The others followed suit, and the text quickly vanished, replaced by a ten second countdown.
"Some kind of obstacle course, perhaps?" Xavier asked, nervously looking up at the numbers slowly ticking away.
"Race you to the end." Hidden said with an excited grin, dropping down as he prepared to sprint.
The last second ticked away, a loud siren sounding off the start of the challenge, and the other four shot off down the hallway. Darkstalker sighed, and sprinted off after them. He briefly hopped into the air, attempting to catch a little air beneath his wings, but just as in the pinball machine and ghost house, they were utterly useless.
Typical.
Darkstalker could see the others just ahead of him, as they continued down the curved hallway. He could have sworn that they were running in circles, the same brown brick flashing by in an endless spiral. He was about ready to stop, and wait for them to run back up behind him, when he heard the faint sound of electronic dance music echoing off of the curved brick walls.
The others seemed to have noticed as well, and had picked up their pace enthusiastically. Darkstalker shook his head, and sped up as well. He couldn't let that SandWing upstage him again, could he?
The music steadily began to grow louder, at first no more than a faint thrumming, but soon growing to a soft beat in the background. Every now and then he'd catch bright colors flashing across the walls in the corner of his eye, and were the bricks...shaking?
The tunnel began to straighten out, the path ahead cloaked in darkness. The music had grown to a mild roar now, beating through Darkstalker's head. The brown bricks were jittering wildly, and Darkstalker half expected them to start falling out of place. Vibrant colors danced across the walls, streaming towards the empty abyss at the end of the tunnel in a dazzling display.
The bricks began to fade away into darkness, and Darkstalker felt the ground fall out from underneath his talons as he leapt out into the abyss after the others. For a brief moment, the music grew silent, and Darkstalker wondered if they'd somehow failed the challenge.
Right on the beat drop, color surged fourth, blanketing the abyss in a bright spasm of light. Colorful beams light shone out from all sides, as if giant spotlights were hung just beyond the nebulous sky. Floating streams of water reflected the rays of light, casting swirling dots of color all about. In the distance, large chunks of buildings and roads floated about, a city torn to shreds amidst the chaos.
The barrage of lights and colors temporarily stunned Darkstalker, and he felt himself slam down onto a hard platform, rolling over onto his side. He groaned, his muscles aching from the sudden impact, and clambered to his feet for the third time.
He'd landed on a flat, glassy platform, its color rapidly shifting along with the music. An innumerable number of similar platforms floated about, dancing and twirling as the ear piercing wail of EMD blasted across the chaotic plane.
Darkstalker felt like he'd entered the mind of a hyperactive RainWing that had accidentally eaten a poisonous jungle frog. He could hardly get his senses straight amidst the cacophony, just barely hearing Hidden call out to him from up ahead.
"Come on Dark! You wanna finish this or what?!" the SandWing shouted, he and the others hopped across the platforms towards the torn up city beyond.
Darkstalker grunted, steadying himself on the thin platform, another drifting over closer to him, and leapt out over the endless void below. He just barely managed to land on the next platform, his rear talons scraping against the edge as he scrambled to regain his balance.
The next few platforms weren't much easier, especially without the help of his wings, yet Darkstalker eventually managed to scramble up onto a large chunk of highway drifting on the edge of the shattered city.
He paused to look around, half of a skyscraper drifting overhead, its glass paned walls glimmering in the flashy light show. Darkstalker swore he saw a dark shadow streak past the glass, but he shook his head, rubbing his eyes. He'd be surprised if this challenge didn't make him blind.
The others were nowhere to be seen, likely already deep within the city. The music continued to play on relentlessly, and Darkstalker sprinted across the rest of the fractured highway, leaping onto the side of a building that happened to be drifting by.
The further he went, the faster the debris seemed to become. Darkstalker barely managed to roll out of the way as a thick I-beam swung down towards him, scraping across the floating roof he was standing on and spraying bits of concrete up into the air.
He shielded his eyes from the spray, and as he lowered his talons, he noticed a dark figure perched on a floating mailbox just a short distance away. It had a vaguely human shape, though it seemed almost as tall as he was. Its body was pitch black, with colorful bars of light twisting across it, pulsating along with the music. It seemed to have no face, yet its stare was chilling nonetheless.
Sparks of electricity began seeping from the nodes along Darkstalker's body, as he felt his muscles tense up at the sight of the bizarre creature. He looked around, noticing another balanced atop a brass lamp post to his right, two more stalking him from the left.
"Stay back!" he growled, eyeing the creatures warily, "You don't know who you're messing with!"
The creature on the mailbox didn't seem to care, and leapt off in tandem with the music's beat, spinning through the air and extending one of its legs for a dive kick. Darkstalker quickly raised his foretalons, blocking the attack, and sent energy surging through the cables into his jaw, letting loose a stream of electricity from his mouth. The assailant was sent flying back, but before Darkstalker could celebrate his victory, two more had fallen upon him.
Darkstalker spun around, throwing the creatures off of him as he unleashed a surge of electricity from the nodes on his body. Yet still more came. No matter how many he pounded with a supercharged talon, fried with a burst of white hot lightning, or threw over the edge into the abyss below, more quickly came to take their place.
He saw one of the creatures sliding down to attack from below, and attempted to crush it beneath one of his talons, but it quickly rolled out of the way, swiping one of its legs across his snout. He spun around, swatting it away with his tail, only for another to dive in from above, smashing his head against the roof's hard pavement.
More and more of the creatures surged toward him. Darkstalker desperately fired off blasts of electricity, but he could already feel himself growing weak. Even in a combat situation, he could only go on for so long.
One of the creatures drove its knee straight into his lower jaw, nearly sending Darkstalker over the edge as he fell to the ground. Pain erupted through his jaw, despite it surprisingly not feeling broken. His mind began to slip, his eyelids growing heavy as the dark figures began to close in on him, when he heard the sound of someone shouting in the distance.
"Eat some of this suckers!"
A flash of pale yellow scales slammed into one of the creatures, sending it flying back into another of its comrades. Darkstalker watched helplessly as Hidden fought off the horde of adversaries, ducking back as two attempted to dive upon him and slamming them into the ground.
The creatures began to fall back, cautiously watching the newcomer from the edge of the rooftop. Hidden grinned, turning to Darkstalker and extending a talon down towards him.
"Come on, we've gotta catch up to the others!"
Darkstalker groaned, rolling over onto his stomach as he struggled to stand up. "Wh...why…? Why did you come back…?"
"Hey, we wouldn't have made it this far without you." Hidden replied, "We're all making it to the top of this tower, whether you like it or not!"
Darkstalker eyed Hidden's extended talon, and shook his head, sighing. "Why won't you just leave me alone for once?" he asked, slowly standing up on his own, casting warry glances to the creatures surrounding them. Pain still throbbed through his body from the onslaught moments prior.
"'Cause it's fun to bug you." Hidden bluntly stated, "And because you looked miserable locked up in that bunk."
"I'm still miserable!" Darkstalker replied irritably.
"And whose fault is that?" Hidden asked with a sly grin. He lunged toward the dark creatures, leaping over their heads towards a section of roadway drifting by. "The end is just up ahead! This'll all be over with before you know it!"
"Let's hope so…." Darkstalker grumbled, leaping off of the rooftop after Hidden, as the dark creatures surged after them.
AN:
This week's been way to busy for me, with tons of school stuff to do and the ACT, so I only just got started writing this chapter on Thursday. I decided to cut it short and finish up this episode in the next chapter so I wasn't pushing myself too hard. I feel at times like the pacing is going too fast and that I should slow down on some of the character moments a bit, though I've come up with the idea that this story is only a rough draft, designed to put the story out there and see what people think. Then I start worrying that thinking about it that way will cause the quality of the story to drop and that I'll put less effort into it, and I get into an infinite loop of wondering how much time and effort I should be putting into it. Do I continue with my one chapter per week schedule, even if I've got so much else going on right now and it could result in somewhat rushed chapters? I really want to finish this, and even at this pace that might not happen until March. I could change it to a chapter every two weeks, or simply upload them when they're ready. It would probably help with burnout, and give me more time to flesh out the chapters. Though I'm still reluctant to do so. What do you think, should I slow down on the current release schedule?
On another note, this particular challenge was pretty hard to describe in text. In my mind, it's a crazy run through an abstract dubstep world where the characters have to move along with the beat of the music (the visuals would be something like the climax of Into the Spiderverse, but even crazier). That's a little tricky for me to describe in text with my current writing skills, so I decided upon a somewhat more grounded layout, with an array of moving platforms as the first section of the course, and a torn up city as the second. The strange creatures that attack Darkstalker are also a callback to one of the crazy parts of the original version of this story (the one from long before I'd started writing on this site).
The next chapter will be the conclusion of the team's adventures in the Tower of Doom! What reward awaits them at the top? Stay tuned!
