Author's Note: I apologize for the spacing in this chapter, but it looks like ff.net has twisted around some of their systems. I've fixed most of it, but I'm not sure about everything.
(Dew): Took you long enough...
(Char): After cliffs like that?
(Dew): You evil, evil little author.
I had exams. EXAMS, you diminutive, sadistic, egotistical gnats!
(Char): ...those vocabulary lessons are really helping, huh?
Oh, indubitably.
(Dew): ...let's get on with it.
Review Responses:
Tetra Seleno: Yeah... the Windies seem to over-think everything a bit too much, don't they? It kinda leaves them with a disadvantage now...
Cloud-123: Define 'soon'...
Akachi: So Mokol's starting to bug you right now, huh? ...are you sure you want to keep reading...?
Falyse: Thanks for the praise... I'll keep working at it, no worries there. I'm just... really lazy, so you'll have to wait a bit...
MercuryAdept: No beating stick! Beating stick bad!!
Fire Dragons: ...whoever said it was ending?
Jupiter Sprite: I never said they would be fighting against each other... necessarily. They're just... uhh... engaging in unwanted combat on unfamiliar terrain... unexpectedly.
0==R=a=g=n=a=r=o=k=: I'm quite glad you enjoyed the suspense. I wasn't sure how well it would work. Oh, and for the record, Praise be to God. Amen.
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"What's a leveler...?" Mia asked the man running beside her. He blinked at her, then pointed ahead and frowned. Ahead of them, at the edge of whatever village Mia and the others were sent to, was another giant cuttle creature.
"How many of these things are there?" Felix muttered aloud, pulling up beside the two of them. Mia glanced sideways at him, then focused ahead.
"That doesn't matter," she said dryly, looking past the leveler. "That does." Felix looked forward, beyond the leveler, and noticed a veritable battalion of at least a hundred Keunam Fighters come storming over a hill. Realizing they were completely outnumbered and that he hadn't taken the time to observe their surroundings, Felix afforded himself a quick glance in all directions to scope out the battlefield.
To their rear was a small village, not much larger than Vale. Jenna and Garet were waking and rising behind and to the left of him, and Picard seemed to be up and approaching from behind and to the far right. The terrain was mostly dirt, and the surroundings seemed to be very hilly farmland, except it was barren, and nothing seemed to even have started growing. The village gates were behind him, and the Keunam Fighters were approaching the village from behind one of the numerous hills. The leveler was attacking a building that lay on the outskirts of town.
"Frean Resistance!" cried the evident leader of the Fighters. "Lay down your arms and return to your village. We will deal with this threat." The man at Mia's side scowled.
"We'll do no such thing," he cried out. "You'll do nothing more than injure it and send it on a rampage toward the city!" Felix sent a sideways glance toward Mia, but she didn't return it.
"What do you mean, a rampage?" Felix asked of him.
"These so-called defenders have found a weakness in the levelers," the man explained to them. "Do you see the spears they all carry?" Felix made a closer inspection and found them all to be carrying long spears with glowing purple heads.
"Why are they-"
"Glowing? The tips of the spears are coated in a chemical that injures levelers especially."
"A chemical... you mean, it poisons the levelers, or something?" Mia wondered. "Isn't that good?" The man scoffed at her, and clenched his hand into a tight fist.
"The poison slowly kills them, true, but it also causes them to lose most mental functions and sanity while they die. They go on a rampage. They end up destroying half a city because of the Fighter's effective method of slaying them!" he fumed.
"Tell them it doesn't work!" Felix said, trying to pacify him. Jenna and Garet arrived beside him, but he was more concerned with dealing with the situation at hand.
"They don't listen!" he raged. "They go on with their lives, believing that everyone in the world is happy with their solutions, believing that they can run every single aspect of our lives and that we will take it!"
"I agree," Mia said, staring down and tightening her grip on her staff. "I'm tired of this." Garet frowned and tilted his head.
"Tired of wh-"
"Of everything!" Mia burst, feeling a fresh wave of tears threatening to emerge from behind her eyes. "I'm tired of being pushed around by whatever psychotic power hungry jerk comes along! I'm tired of these stupid adventures, these quests and goals..." She clenched her hands around her staff even tighter. "I... and... I..." Jenna moved over and gave her a sisterly hug.
"And him. Right?"
Mia nodded sadly and tears flew again from her cerulean eyes. Jenna tried to comfort her, but Mia seemed to remember where she was and just shrugged her off.
"I'm... sorry," she whispered, starting to walk toward the battle. "I'm just... sorry. It's just... first that long quest, and then rebuilding Vale, and then... then..."
"...him," Jenna whispered.
"I've had... enough," Mia said through clenched teeth. "All that, and then... this..." she stared over the impending battalion with frosty eyes. The surrounding temperature dropped noticeably. "I've had... enough. I'm tired of this... all of this!" Mia's eyes snapped wide open, as if she was seeing the world for the first time. "I've lost my life, my history, and I lost Isaac." Jenna put a hand to her mouth to stifle a sound, though her eyes began to water. "That's right, Jenna," Mia continued, "I damn well lost Isaac because I wasn't strong enough to save him. And I wasn't strong enough to fight back, and I wasn't strong enough to heal him. What kind of Mercury Adept am I if I can't even save the one person who really, really meant something to me?!" Mia brandished her staff and dashed off to the front lines, crying, "Damned if I'm going to lose anything else!!"
Garet stood, dumbfounded at the pain of their friend. "The frost queen speaketh..." He put an arm around Jenna, who was visibly shaken and ready to cry as well. "She'll be okay." Jenna looked up into his eyes.
"Isaac won't be," she said darkly. Garet stayed silent, but held her a little closer.
Picard came up behind them and drew his blade. "You know, Mia's a healer by trade... she's not accustomed to direct fighting, and it looks to me like she's heading right for that leveler."
"That she is," Felix said calmly.
"Shouldn't we-"
"Help her?" Felix interrupted him. Picard nodded. "Mia's mad. She's not dumb. She's only going to fight what she knows she can handle."
"She's going for a leveler! It took nine of us to take one down before!" Picard exclaimed.
"She's mad now," Felix said, still calmly. "Just watch."
"I don't see what-" Picard started, but Mia's voice, coming from near the leveler, cut him off.
"Diamond Berg! Ice Horn! Drench! Freeze Prism! Froth Sphere! I summon Boreas!!"
Picard shielded his eyes from the onslaught.
"Maybe we should just handle the soldiers?"
"That we can do," Felix said.
- - - - -
"So," Ivan started to Mokol, who was leading them down yet another twisted passageway, "what exactly is your problem here?" Mokol flung a door open and led the four Adepts through to another room where more of the glowing boxes lay.
"Pull up a map of the area, Ensign," Mokol ordered someone using a box. The worker tapped some buttons and a detailed map of an area came into view. "This," Mokol said, "is a map of a village about a 2-day march from here. As you can see," he continued, gesturing to large masses of red and blue on the map, "we are here, at the outskirts of the city, moving in. The enemy is here, inside the city." Sean looked at the map in closer detail, and noticed a green square behind the Fighter's ranks and a small yellow circle between the two armies.
"It looks to me like there's more on the map than you're telling us, Mokol," Sean said. "And since you've already tricked us once I'd like to know what we're getting into..."
"I haven't tricked you at all," Mokol grunted, apparently displeased. "I saved you from having to deal with the incompetence of those other... so-called elements." Sean clenched his teeth a little. "Don't tell me, after all this, you still feel some affection for those... people?"
"Of cou-uugh!" Sean grunted, as Ivan removed his elbow from a sharp jab to his stomach.
"What Sean was about to say was, 'Of course we feel nothing for them. They're not even Wind-aligned. I can't believe we even spent as long as we did with them,'" Ivan said smoothly, giving Sean a shut-up-and-work-with-me scowl.
'Ivan...' Sheba commented to his mind.
'The last thing we need right now is to have all of the Keunam Fighters angry at us when we're right in the middle of one of their installations,' he replied calmly.
'And that means we can just shrug off our friends?' Feizhi interrupted into his mind. 'Many of them have risked their lives many times for you.'
'Do the ends justify the means, Ivan?' Sheba questioned. 'Can you justify-'
'You two have picked a really lousy time for a philosophical debate,' Ivan reminded them. 'Let's worry about one thing at a time. This we can argue later.'
'The way things are going, let's hope we have a later,' Sheba commented darkly.
"As I was saying," Ivan continued, as though nothing had taken place in his mind, "you can count on our co-operation, completely. Having said that, I would like to know what the green and yellow parts of the map are." Mokol nodded his satisfaction and turned to the map.
"The yellow circle shows the location of a leveler. This one in particular is here, between both sides of the battle about to break out," Mokol explained. Suddenly, the yellow circle disappeared. "Ah. That's odd. I suppose our forces have focused their efforts on destroying it, to start with."
"What about the green square over here?" Feizhi inquired.
"The green square here is a sacred place. I'm afraid we can't let you get in. We can take you near it, but you cannot enter it," Mokol said, waving a hand as if to move the topic along.
"What is the sacred place?" Sheba asked.
"It's an ancient shrine," Mokol said, "devo-"
"A shrine!" Sean exclaimed. Mokol stared at him oddly. "I mean... I've just always found shrines... interesting."
'Do you think it's one of the four we need to light?' Sheba asked through Mind Read.
'I'm sure it is, but we can't light it, anyway,' Feizhi reminded her. 'We need two different elemental attacks, and there's not even a guarantee this shrine is partly wind-related.' Sheba frowned.
'How bothersome...' she commented.
"Okay, then," Sean said, trying to divert attention from the shrine. "What do you need us to do, Mokol?"
'Some grandiose scheme to take over half the planet, no doubt,' Feizhi remarked dryly. Sheba stifled a laugh.
"Well, certainly not a part of any grandiose scheme for world domination, or anything. That's not what I want at all," Mokol answered, with a grin on his face. Sheba and Feizhi exchanged looks. "However, if you were to go here," he said, pointing to a point behind the Fighter's ranks and well past the shrine, "you could get to the battlefield if necessary, but also get back here if we need you in a hurry."
"A halfway point, huh?" Ivan said. "All right, we'll wait there."
"Very well," Mokol said. "But stay away from the shrine!" Feizhi frowned.
"Why? What is so important about the shrine that we must leave it be?"
"The shrine is considered sacred ground for both the Fighters and the Resistance. If you disturb it, you will, in all probability, find yourself enemy to both sides," Mokol said, with no trace of jesting.
'Better and better,' Sheba muttered to Ivan.
"Are you all ready to go, then?" Mokol asked them. Ivan looked around the group, then nodded his assent.
"We may as well," he sighed.
"I should warn you," Mokol said, leading them to the teleport pad, "that the Freans are ruthless savages. They don't believe in government having total control and thus are extremely violent and cruel. Be careful if you approach them; you should leave them to us."
"We'll keep that in mind, Mokol," Sean said.
"Don't let us down, now," Mokol smiled, leaving the four Adepts standing on the teleport pad. "We're counting on you!"
"Don't worry about it," Ivan said. "We'll take care of everything."
"I bet you will," Mokol said, signaling to the Ensign to Teleport them. The familiar circles whisked around them and in a brilliant flash of light, they were gone. Mokol turned to the Ensign. "Contact the boss. Tell him the four new ones are trying to pull a fast one on us. We might have to kill them soon. Snotty Jupiter Adept brats thinking that I don't know how to Mind Read..."
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(Char): I'm starting to really, really hate Mokol with a passion.
(Dew): Me too. He really insulted us non-windies pretty hard...
Technically, he insulted the Adepts.
(Char): [Pyroclasm] Technically, you're a moron.
(on fire) A hot moron?
(Char): I will die before I call you hot.
Hehehe... How about cool?
(Dew): If you insist... [Glacier]
(frozen)
(Char): Great... now I have to beg for reviews. ...hey, you! Psst... review!!