The second spine-chilling roar nearly swept Akali off her feet; she felt like a baby first learning to stand up and walk on wobbly legs. She followed Shen's lead as the three of them snuck out her back door, but she hurriedly swiped the biscuits on her dinner table and discreetly put them into her pocket. She would be damned to die of starvation in battle.
"Fire at will!" a faraway voice commanded. Irelia and her men were already awake and kicking.
There was a tacit understanding among the ninjas that their first move was to somehow find Irelia and join her ranks, but the blanket of darkness that the night laid over them had different ideas. Creeping blindly against building walls wasn't thrilling to say the least, but the more walls they scaled, the louder the screams were
"Mind the tentacles!" Another caution echoed through the night. "Aim at its heads!
Tentacles?! Heads?
The only image that Akali had managed to create in her mind was of a huge, demonized octopus with a hundred heads and red eyes.
The town square was finally in view. It was absolutely chaotic. Most of the men had absolutely no blood circulating in their faces and looked as if they had defecated in their pants. All their gazes were fixed in one direction, so Akali slowly twisted her head to see the most terrifying beast she had ever laid eyes on. Its purple, slimy body easily stood over one hundred feet. It did have multiple heads—three to be exact—and each one had protruding fangs that oozed a dark green liquid. As if that wasn't horrifying enough, each tentacle had its own set of razor sharp teeth that chewed up concrete like it was putty.
"You find out anything?!" Akali had to scream over the battle cries that emanated from the soldiers, but Irelia's bat-like hearing did its part.
"See the greenish saliva coming out of its mouth?" Akali nodded and nearly vomited as Irelia pointed at a group of quite literally melted corpses that stank of death. "It's acid that burns right to the bone. One touch can turn your arm into a puddle of liquid flesh."
The monster leered at Akali, though it was difficult to pinpoint its gaze since it had hundreds of beady eyes. She was really beginning to despise purple now.
"What it lacks in quick reflexes, it makes up for in sheer power."
A shadow shifted amongst Baron's bulbous head. As Akali surveyed all one hundred feet of Baron, a flash of white and purple straggled in her vision. In response, she grinded her molars in both fury and anxiety. Syndra's silhouette was dancing wildly.
"The book says that the first step to un-summoning Baron is to challenge Syndra and-" Kennen's reminder was cut short.
"I will challenge her." Akali could barely recognize the murderous intent in her own voice, but it masked her growing unease. "This is a rematch I've been waiting for."
"Are you-" Shen interjected almost immediately, but one fiery stare from her shut him up. "So how exactly do you plan on challenging her?"
"We need her away from Baron so we can fight them separately, but it seems to have formed a large force field around her," Irelia stated. "It's brittle, but it regenerates in about seven seconds once it has been breached."
The adrenaline rush from encountering Syndra for the final time caused a new conviction to swell within Akali. "I can do it," she whispered.
"You're joking, right?" came Shen's interjection.
She merely ignored him. "Kennen can shatter the barrier with a charged shuriken if he stands on that building right there. That will save me time and energy, considering the huge leap I have to make. Given my weight and the direction of the wind, I should be able to reach Syndra within seven seconds and push her off."
"You can't make a fifty feet jump! Are you insane?!" Akali knew to expect Shen to object to her admittedly psychotic plan, so she had a side dish of physics to serve him.
"I can dash three times in succession, ten feet per dash, and that's without any momentum. If I run the span of that building's roof and gain enough momentum, I can leap off the walls of the surrounding buildings to increase my speed and grab Syndra." Or so Akali hoped.
"And if your calculations are wrong and you don't make the jump?" Shen queried.
"She will make the jump," a new voice entered the conversation. Akali turned around to see the Enlightened One herself.
"Karma!" she exclaimed, a smile emerging on her lips. "I thought you were going to leave the city with the rest of Ionia!"
In response, Karma shrugged nonchalantly. "I had a vision you needed my help, and based on what I just heard, it seems like you could use it."
Another wave of screams disturbed Akali from her recalculation of the jump. "I hate to interrupt this reunion, but we really don't have any more time to waste. I'm going to get ready. Once you hear me whistle, give me some sort of signal. You'll have a five second opening from there before I throw the shuriken," Kennen explained before running off, presumably to the building that Akali had pointed at.
"My troops will distract the beast from all sides, so Syndra will be completely vulnerable," Irelia voiced before turning back towards the struggling army. "Remember Akali: seven seconds or you're done for. Good luck."
That left Shen, Karma, and Akali the only ones standing in the midst of a battlefield. The three of them clambered up the fire escape of a nearby building, though only one wanted nothing more than to climb back down and formulate a safer plan.
Brown, calculating eyes scanned the rooftop, but there wasn't much to see save a few roof turbine ventilators and a towering chimney. The distance from one edge of the roof to its opposite ledge was approximately twenty five feet. With the wind blowing in her favor and Karma's buff, Akali could definitely take down Syndra once and for all.
A birdcall in the distance turned her attention away from her daze. In response, Akali pursed her lips and whistled clearly. The kamas that were in her hands were quickly fastened to her back.
"He's ready," Akali confirmed with Karma, who nodded with fierce determination.
"My mantra will greatly empower your body's physical abilities for a few minutes. We have only one chance, so I'm giving everything I've got."
The last sentence sounded more like a reassurance rather than a statement. In any case, Akali nodded and stood thirty feet from the ledge of the roof. Her heart was practically pounding in her ear, but if she faltered in her leaps, then she would plummet forty feet to her death. Nausea blossomed at the thought, but Akali did her best to ignore it.
"Good luck." Her ears almost didn't catch Shen's parting words. She smiled warmly, if not to reassure him, then to comfort herself.
The once still air transformed into a strong gust as Karma's pupils disappeared into a sea of translucent viridian.
"Gaen Na Kyri Vi."
Akali's body hummed with the sheer power that Karma had bestowed, a force so great that it was ineffable. She inhaled slowly, basking in her new, but temporary strength. She tilted her body forward at a precise angle, all while trying to calm the hammering of her heart.
A crackle of electricity ripped through the air. All eyes turned to the yellow shuriken that pierced the wind itself.
"Never falter!" Karma shouted before Akali broke out into a sprint.
Her heart was at her throat as she neared the ledge. It was difficult to concentrate, considering that her instinct was screaming at her to halt.
Ten feet remaining. Akali couldn't do this; if she kept running, she would surely fall to her death. She had to turn back now before it was too late.
Five feet. She would realize how stupid she was being and stop mid-run, only to have the momentum she picked up act against her and lurch her body over the rooftop. Either way, safety was no longer an option.
Never falter.
"Fly!" Shen's one word command reached her ear as only one foot separated her from the ledge.
Akali's eyes narrowed with piercing tenacity, despite how her heart hammered against her chest, and as she made the final leap and her feet left the safety of the roof, time stilled to a stop. She didn't look down—no, the only thing in her tunnel vision was Syndra.
Her toes touched the eroded bricks of a building, and she used her weight to push off of it and onto another building. The burning of lactic acid in her thighs reminded her that she only had enough energy to jump three times in a short span of time, but it also propelled her more toward her ultimate destination.
The shuriken was but a few feet away from Syndra.
One last building came into contact with her feet. There was only a distance of fifteen feet separating Akali from the infamous Dark Sovereign, but those fifteen feet would change everything.
The barrier around Syndra shattered like broken glass and dissipated into thin air, but Syndra paid no heed at what she thought was another pathetic attempt to hurt her and continued maniacally laughing at the puny insects below her. There was Akali's opening of only seven seconds.
The air whipped her cheeks painfully as she mentally counted the seconds that passed by. The shield around Syndra was already beginning to materialize, absolute horror chilling the blood in her veins. She would be too late, just one mere second too late.
The faint shimmers of the barrier enclosed Syndra once more, but Akali's lips formed a smirk: the shield had formed around her too. Syndra's head snapped in her direction as soon as the getas she wore touched Baron's slimy skin. Akali very much enjoyed the way Syndra's sneer turned into a bitter frown in a matter of seconds, but she gave Syndra no time to counter her presence. A swift left uppercut to Syndra's jaw left her ungainly stumbling on her heels; Baron's body vibrated from an ear-piercing screech. Lurching forward, Akali placed her palms on Syndra's shoulders and shoved her off of Baron's main head. Her body flailed wildly until it disappeared into a speck of nothing below Baron. Loud cheers erupted from the Ionian soldiers, so Akali gave a slight wave.
The fleeting high she had just experienced was beginning to dull, so there wasn't much more time before Karma's spell fully depleted. Akali could have inflicted some serious damage on the serpent below her, but that wasn't her duty; plus, she had a more important agenda on her list.
Before the viridian sphere around her could vanish, Akali dove head first into the open air that Syndra had once occupied, with a lust to kill in her eyes.
"She's gone!" Kennen hollered from the rooftop, allowing everyone on ground level to hear him. Shen couldn't contain the sigh of relief that escaped him, but a new problem was beginning to surface. After Syndra was pushed off of Baron, the creature began to flail mindlessly. In its current state, it would be even more difficult to stop it than before, especially since no one had an inkling of how to approach it.
Irelia screamed at the top of her lungs, "Blind the damned thing!"
A flurry of arrows ascended high into the air, but only a few made it past Baron's defensive tentacles and into its eyes. Baron opened its jaws wide and let out another terrorizing scream. It elongated to its full height before slamming its head into the ground to dig a huge tunnel, the ground undulating with its slithering movements.
"Disperse!" Irelia barely managed to edge in before the monster erupted from the ground like a geyser, hooking a few men between its fangs. The impact of its resurfacing caused the roof below Shen's feet to tremble unstably, and gravity consequently worked against Shen's weight as he fell bottom first onto the ground. He muttered out a series of profanities before standing upright once more.
This monster, no matter how indomitable it seemed, had some sort of Achilles heel—any fool would have known that. But as far as Shen had witnessed, it had none. He needed to find its source of vulnerability soon, especially since now that Syndra was out of the picture the creature only grew wilder.
His legs picked up momentum, and one graceful leap had him on a different building just five feet away. At least thirty different buildings came into contact with his feet before Shen finally stopped, his chest lightly heaving. His rooftop hopping encircled the entire body of Baron, but much to Shen's dissatisfaction, he discovered absolutely nothing. No matter how many times he circled the damned hellion, his trips would be unsuccessful.
His ears caught the faintest shuffling behind him, and before his mind could comprehend his actions, Shen brandished his ninjatos defensively. They nearly fell from his hands as he saw the monster in front of him.
"What are you doing here?" Shen seethed, barely managing to form a proper sentence.
The metallic mask that shone under the rising sun didn't budge as its wearer answered his question. "I'm here to help."
His response was less than satisfactory, causing a low growl to tear from Shen's throat. "You've done more than enough. I would deal with you now, but clearly there are more important things to do right now."
It was ridiculously difficult to walk away from the shadow puppeteer without inflicting any serious damage, but Shen somehow found the blessed strength to turn his back and lea-
"You know, I helped Akali-"
Zed wasn't able to finish his sentence before a flash of silver came dangerously close to his mask. He just managed to dodge the attack at the last millisecond.
"You don't have a right to even think about her after what you've done." Shen's eyes narrowed with repulsion. "You should be rotting somewhere with the brainwashed followers you've managed to acquire. All of them must be remarkably blind or senseless to think that you can provide the solutions to their problems."
"But that's exactly why I'm here." Zed hushed his voice to a mere whisper. "You need help, and I have the answers you seek."
Shen's body quaked with sarcastic barks of laughter. "Please," he replied between guffaws, "helping us will not shorten the sentence you have in hell."
"Akali would accept my help." Zed knew that his words would pluck a nerve, but anger seemed to be the only way to get the fool before him to listen.
Shen felt a vein burst in the side of his neck. "She nearly died because of you!"
He lunged at Zed with such ferocity that even the Shadow Master only just managed to manipulate a shadow behind Shen and teleport to it, but even then he stumbled on his heels.
Shen's ninjato sliced the air with deadly speed, but he grunted with annoyance as it was deflected by a shuriken. Shen flung his weapon straight towards Zed's heart, but another shadowy trick guaranteed his escape. With only one ninjato left in his hand, Shen braced himself for an onslaught of shurikens in his vulnerable state, but it never came. The Shadow Master stood so eerily still that he could've been mistaken for a statue, but the crimson glow that hid Zed's eyes reminded Shen, to his displeasure, that the body before him was still breathing.
A discordant clattering of metal against concrete took Shen aback, especially when it finally registered that Zed had dropped his shuriken and lifted his palms to the air. "I'm trying to help. If you let me leave without using the help that's right in front of you, then you are still the same damned idiot you were all those years ago."
There was an audible hitch in Shen's breathing. Zed was lying—Shen knew of his deception like the creases in his palm, had experienced it .Given a chance to hurt people, Zed would seize it; his murderous ways had not changed a bit, and the events that transpired in the temple all those weeks ago sure as hell didn't do anything to convince him otherwise.
But the fact that Zed had voluntarily surrendered his weapon puzzled Shen, since the first thing the both of them had learned as aspiring warriors was that their weapons were their only ways to survive in battle. Zed had to have some ulterior motive, but what could it be?
ROAURGH!
Baron's howls were becoming a commonplace reminder of the lack of time everyone had.
He cautiously lowered his ninjato back to his side. "Mark my words, one step out of line, and you will see death sooner than expected."
Zed merely nodded his head with understanding before dropping his arms to pick up his shurikens.
"Well?" Shen impatiently prodded, picking up his ninjato.
"Well what?"
Zed's clueless reply made Shen's blood simmer. "How do we stop this...thing?"
"We wait."
"For...?" Shen was so sure that fate had cruelly decided to try his patience by parading Zed into his life during the chaos of war.
"For Akali to defeat Syndra in battle. Don't even think about helping Akali, for it must be a fair duel. If Akali wins-"
"Once Akali wins," Shen corrected with a terror-inducing glare.
"Once Akali wins, she will possess full control of Baron. From there, I will decide what to do. But for now, the most we can do is distract it."
Shen begrudgingly muttered in agreement. He could only imagine that Irelia and Kennen would be oh-so-ecstatic about the newly arrived guest.
The wind whistled in Akali's ear as she plummeted one hundred feet, small crater forming around her once she hit ground with Baron just a few yards away from her. It was dumb luck that the viridian shield encircling her disappeared just seconds after her landing. Her hands found the handles of her kamas and clutched them firmly.
A faint whistle in her right ear warned her of someone's presence. A black sphere came hurtling towards her with the sole intention to murder. Akali looked up like a deer caught in headlights, but instinct caused her to tumble out of the way at the very last moment. She found herself back on her feet, only to greet the repulsive grimace of Syndra.
"You..." menacingly drawled Syndra. "You just had to interfere with my acquirement of true power..."
Her lips curled back into a feral snarl. "I'm going to rip off that pretty little head of yours and send it to your lover."
The tone in her words that might have bordered on psychological insanity caused horror to sluice down Akali's spine, but it was the dark red that Syndra's pupils had morphed into, which rivaled the color of Zed's, that made her want to flee pathetically. There was something very wrong with the person standing in front of her.
Despite the pangs of fear deep within her gut that threatened to escape via projectile sickness, Akali knit her eyebrows defensively.
"And you," she flaunted a kama in front of her, "need some serious alone time to calm the fuck down and think rationally about what you're doing. This power you currently have is going to consume you. Destroy the control it has over you now before it's too late."
To say Syndra looked as if she wanted to bludgeon Akali and drag her down to the fiery pits of hell in reaction to Akali's comment was a severe understatement.
The hysterical sorceress hissed venomously, "People fear what they cannot understand. You are one of those fools who cannot recognize the great things that can be done now that I have unleashed this power." A purple string of ancient characters began to orbit around Syndra's frame. "I will have no more opposition. All those who defy me will die!"
She drew her arms back and launched an onslaught of attacks in Akali's general direction with the accuracy of a blind person, but it was more for entertainment rather than serious harm. Syndra threw her head back to release a heinous cackle, but Akali's focus was trained on the purple sphere that was hovering above Syndra's bloody palm.
"I'm going to change this world, Akali. It's such a shame that you won't be alive to see it happen."
The sphere flew at Akali, which she easily dodged, but she didn't anticipate that the sphere would multiply several times. She flipped backwards onto her palms in an effort to dodge the perpetual attacks from the spheres. It hadn't become apparent to Akali, but the Dark Sovereign (who smirked when she saw) noticed her uneven breathing. A single bead of sweat dripped down from Akali's right temple before she finally understood the sneer on Syndra's face: the damned witch was trying to exhaust Akali's energy, and Akali was foolish enough to let her succeed.
Shit!
Without thinking, Akali threw down a layer of thick smoke to waltz around in. Catching her breath in this ephemeral cloud of smoke was only a temporary solution. Akali could see that at the very edge of her smokescreen, Syndra was wading toward the center of it all, completely undaunted.
"I never expected the next Fist of Shadow to run like a coward," her voice was muffled by the smoke, but her words were still unfortunately lucid to each syllable. "I thought you'd be a better fight," Syndra continued, "but what was I expecting from a little girl who fled from her own temple?"
Don't listen to her, Akali repeated as she tried to stabilize her angry breaths. The skin on her knuckles was beginning to split open from how tightly she gripped her kamas.
"Zed has told me several times about how he murdered your father right in front of you." Her taunt was accentuated with another snigger. "It's hysterical how you were too weak to save your own father. You couldn't put that decade's worth of training to good use. Honestly, how pathetic can you be? Haha-"
In a blind rage, Akali lunged from the dissipating smoke. The sheer power in her leap surpassed that from her rooftop jumps, but as she flew through the air, she noticed that Syndra's sneer never once faltered.
Syndra had something devious up her sleeve, but Akali wasn't about to wait for her next trick. Her kamas sliced through the air with a piercing whistle, but to her frustration, her attack was easily sidestepped as Syndra disappeared from her line of vision. She whipped her body around with bloodthirsty resolve, but there was no one.
A powerful blow to her back sent her reeling forward, her neck suffering from whiplash. There was a clear sound of bones snapping, much to Syndra's sadistic pleasure. A singeing sensation spread across Akali's ribcage as she slumped into a heap on her side. The friction that her body and the ground created seared a hole straight through her sleeve, and judging by the caustic pain that shot up and down her arm every time she shifted, there were probably patches of skin missing. A sharp cry escaped her as she found the strength to stand up again.
"Even after a decade of learning to control your emotions, you're still so easily riled up by a few words!" Rapid bouts of gleeful applause shoved away all thoughts of the staggering agony in Akali's arm. "How incompetent."
Luck had turned against her. There was no way in Ionia that her ribs would be able to support her upper body, especially with the added detriment of her arm which she could barely raise higher than two inches. This battle was over.
Raw terror mutilated her heart. She was vulnerable.
Unwelcomed memories flashed in her vision.
The way she wavered on the brink of insanity for weeks, praying that her anemic body would succumb to death.
The rotting cell she was caged in.
The torture.
She would experience everything again. Her heart began to race, her head dizzy and delirious. It couldn't happen again, not when her mind still hadn't recovered from that.
The deriding sneer on Syndra's lips said everything. She was enjoying her agony; no, she was breathing it in like heroine.
Not again.
Something in her pocket brushed against her thigh which pulled Akali out of state of hysteria. With her eyes still glued to the unmoving Syndra, Akali dipped a hand delicately into her pocket. Whatever was in there was crumbly and soft, like—
Like a biscuit.
'They'll rejuvenate your spirit.'
Akali wasn't sure how effective the biscuits would be, or if they would help her at all in this situation, but it couldn't hurt to try. Her fingers enveloped one biscuit as she took it out and promptly shoved it in her mouth. The warmth of hope spread in her heart as the excruciating pain in her rib and arm ebbed away into a mild sting.
Syndra's eyes narrowed menacingly. "What are you do-"
Mid-chew, Akali laid down another smoke cover. Nothing short of death would deter her now, not when the entire world was depending on her.
Syndra's voice was laced with haughtiness as she scoffed at the smoke. "Smoke? I thought you would have learned from your mistakes, but it seems that twits don't know any better."
Her attention was completely dedicated to the shroud of smoke before her, so she could have never foreseen what was to come.
"You're going to need a lot more than just smoke to defeat-"
Akali dashed through the smoke stealthily and positioned herself to stand right behind Syndra. The bloodthirsty mage must have sensed something, for she turned around, but the kama that Akali had flung with all her strength was but a few inches from her face.
Syndra tilted her head to dodge the blade, bringing her arm to deflect Akali's next melee attack. Face to face, the two warriors struggled to make sure the other didn't gain the upper advantage. Suddenly, Syndra shoved Akali's shoulders hard enough to make her stumble. Another magic sphere with which she was going to bash Akali's face in grew in the surface of her palm. However, just as the it was about to make contact with her skull, Akali dove underneath Syndra's extended arm and tumbled to the ground, springing up and dealing Syndra a nice and powerful uppercut that made a little crunch before hurriedly snatching the kama behind Syndra's now crouching form.
The profuse stream of blood running down from Syndra's nose to her lips almost made Akali forget about all her injuries, because to her, it meant only one thing: even with the godlike powers of Baron assisting Syndra, she wasn't untouchable. Her overconfidence would bring about her inevitable defeat.
A cloak of darkness slowly crept over their heads like a cloud, blocking out the light from the sunrise. Akali's eyes widened as she cautiously tilted her head towards the sky to meet the repulsive spectacle of a large tentacle oozing dark and acidic pus.
"Stop, you brainless thing!" Syndra's protests landed on Baron's disadvantageous lack of ears.
It stopped trailing above their bodies, just as Syndra had commanded. A sigh of relief left the both of them but it was short-lived, for the giant beast slammed its limb into the ground, razing skyscrapers and destroying much-walked on concrete all in one fell swoop.
Akali could barely run from something that was at least fifty times her size, so her body was swept away and flung into the sky from the sheer impact.
It wasn't long until jagged branches, or rather what she thought were branches but couldn't discern since her eyes were clenched shut through her pseudo-flight, lacerated every inch of her skin while innumerable leaf-like feathers brushed harshly against her face.
Her backside took the brunt of the landing as her thoroughly mangled body smashed against spongy terrain. An explosion of stars invaded her blurry vision once she tried to open her eyes, and a pained moan resounded through her surroundings.
Her clouded perspective of the world shrunk to darkness, her body soon after fading into unconsciousness.
Let me tell you guys something that you all probably already knew based on experience: being sick sucks. Last night when I was just about to blissfully fall into sleep, I was jolted out of rest because I couldn't breathe: my throat was so dry that it was hard to breathe.
Complaints aside, I am absolutely terrible at updating. Honestly, I was planning to update at the end of August, but obviously that endeavor wasn't all that successful… Apologies for the inconsistent and somewhat shorter than usual updates. I hadn't anticipated school to be quite so challenging.
Hope you guys enjoyed this chapter. Have a sunshiny day, even though a hurricane is about to hit us right in the tush. C;