(…Hmm… Bah, you don't wanna hear me talk. Let's just get back to the action!)

Kate and Nami stare at one another for a moment, shifting their weapons in their hands with some anticipation. Suddenly, Kate runs at her and swings her ridiculously-oversized Swiss Army blade at Nami, to which Nami raises her knives and blocks the attack. Kate pulls back and lashes out again, and Nami continues to block a few more of these attacks before jumping back a safe distance.

"You'll have to do far better that that to impress me." She says.

Kate doesn't reply and instead dashes at Nami and swings her sword a full horizontal circle. Nami, in a feat of really impressive physical agility that could only be improved if the move was done in slow motion, jumps, leaps off of the flat end of Kate's blade as she swung it, and kicked Kate directly on the forehead. Kate staggered back and fell to the ground.

"That's not a good fighting tactic, falling down so many times." Matthew says observantly.

"Shut up." Miro replies. "She's just getting warmed up."

"No, she's just getting beat up." Matthew corrects him.

"Anna, kick his head again." Miro requests. Anna nods and dashes Matthew across the skull with her ankle.

"OWW! Just because Miro says to do it doesn't mean you have to!" Matthew says.

"Yeah, but I felt like it." Anna replies, smiling.

"Well, what if I did whatever I felt like doing, huh?"

"I don't see any problem with that…"

"Okay, well as long as you don't-"

"EEK! HEY!"

"OWW! Quit kicking!"

"EEK!"

"OWW!"

"EEK!"

"OWW!"

"EEK!"

"OWW!"

"WILL YOU TWO QUIT THAT?!" Miro yells at them. "I'm trying to watch the fight!"

"Oh…" Matthew says.

"Sorry…" Anna says.

Indeed, the fight was picking up again. Kate had gotten to her feet and she held her forehead tenderly for a moment. She then turned to Nami and lowered her hand back to her blade.

"Okay, NOW I'm getting angry!" She yells.

-

Ricca strikes out at William with her fists at a rate that would stun most people in disbelief, but William merely swats her blows away like flies intruding his space, keeping one hand in his pocket almost as though to mock her. Ricca only intensifies her attack, with more anger and general emotion than she had shown in a while. William finally tires of this and, with a sudden forward motion of his arm, pushes Ricca a startling five meters backward and causes her to hit the ground pretty hard. However, she uses the momentum of the fall to roll herself back to her feet.

"You… had better put both of those hands out… if you know what's good for you…" Ricca warns him, breathing a bit heavily.

"It is unnecessary." William replies. "Your current output does not require both hands to counter, so I will instead conserve energy by using only one."

"Heh. But I thought you wanted to get me out of the way as quickly as you could." Ricca says. "You're not going easy on me just for my sake, are you?"

"Correct. I am not." William says. "However, from previous experience I know that you are capable of more than you are currently doing. You seem to be 'going easy' on me for my own sake."

"You kidding me? I want to see you chewing topsoil, I'm not holding back!" Ricca says angrily, and then she runs toward William again. With a quick movement, she swings her leg around and kicks him directly on the side of his head. This one connected, but William was almost completely unaffected. It looked like he had let that one hit. William casually reaches and grabs Ricca's ankle, and with a feat of unnatural, uncanny, and completely unfair strength he swings her a full circle around and throws her into a large tree. The old wood that Ricca crashed into cracked and splintered slightly, and left an imprint of Ricca behind as she fell to the ground, landing on one knee.

Although now injured, Ricca lifts herself slowly back to her feet and looks at William coldly.

"Was that supposed to be… a finisher?" She asks. "Don't make me laugh. I once had three cows sit on me at the same time! Do you remember that? I was just small. I called for help and finally, ten minutes later, you found me and got them off of me. Do you remember?"

"Irrelevant." William says, finally taking his other hand out of his pocket. That move really was supposed to finish her. He was planning on her falling unconscious due to it. Perhaps she was going to take more effort than planned. "You are stalling for time, trying to keep me occupied. That event has nothing to do with this situation."

"Oh yeah?" Ricca retorts, walking… well, kinda half-shuffling, half-limping towards him. "Well, if you didn't ever save me from those cows, I might have never learned that sometimes you have to trust other people around you to do things that you can't."

"Incorrect. You would have learned that moral with or without my aid." William says. "Now cease this and surrender yourself."

"I'm not giving up, William." Ricca says. "Not until I've seen the Place."

"You're a fool. There is no 'Place'." William says, to Ricca's surprise. "I was told, by the parents, that the Place is just a story passed down by the family that Anna belongs to. It does not truly exist."

"…I'll just have to see that for myself." Ricca replies stubbornly, getting closer and closer to William. "If I do, I'll gladly return home and continue my boring life."

"I was also told that there are dangerous beings where your destination leads. This is why I am here to return you all to your homes." William says.

Ricca grins slightly, stepping face-to-face with William. "I'm going, and you can't stop me."

"Untrue. Stopping you is my reason for being here." William replies, looking at her unflinchingly.

"William…" Ricca mumbles, putting her hand on one of his shoulders and her chin on the other, looking unhappy. "…What happened to you? You're so different, so empty, so much more powerful, with such cooler hair, but… you still have two weaknesses."

William, remaining as still as a stone carving, turns his eyes to Ricca's head. "You lie. There is no weakness to this power."

Ricca shakes her head slightly.

"Yes there is. One, you're still gullible, I've been talking to you for nearly two minutes now. And two…"

"There is no 'two'." William begins.

"Yes, there is…" Ricca says. Sighing, she pulls one of her legs back slightly and mumbles.

"Sorry, William…"

With that, she fully pulls her leg back and swings it forward again with as much force as she could. It was at the exact right trajectory and it hits its mark perfectly, making a crunching halt in the mid-region of William's blue jeans.

-

The Jacks, Kai, Cliff, Gray, Miro, and Matthew all flinch at that exact moment.

-

William, making the first emotion seen in a while from him, widens his eyes a noticeable amount and falls slowly to his knees, crossing his legs slightly, as Ricca stepped away from him.

"That was… crude…" William chokes out.

"But effective." Ricca adds with a near-evil laugh. She holds out one foot and presses the toe of her shoe against William's forehead, pushing him backward gently until he fell to his back, his eyes still open but looking to be unconscious. With another smirk, Ricca turns around and walks off, down the path toward the others.

-

As Nami and Kate continue to trade blows between one another, the three trapped in the net wait patiently for the battle to end.

"Who's winning?" Miro asks. The net had rotated so that Miro was facing the wrong direction.

"Kate-" Matthew begins.

"YES!" Miro cuts him off, a bit too soon.

"…is losing." Matthew finishes. "She's giving it her all, and it's tied up, but… your mom isn't. She's playing a more defensive game, dodging and making Kate look like an amateur… which she is."

"…Anna?" Miro says.

"Okay." Anna replies, already knowing what Miro was going to ask.

"OWW! What?! I was just making a point!" Matthew says, holding his freshly-kicked head. "You asked me who was winning, and I answered!"

"Yeah, but you put it into a bit too much detail." Miro says. "Next time, just state the facts, that's all that I care about right now. I'm too busy trying not to give myself a net-rope-wedgies to care about the small things."

"Look, I was just trying to be helpful, you don't have to bite my head off! Or… kick it off, as the case may be." Matthew replies.

"Give him a break, you'd be pretty tense, too, if that was me getting shown-up by someone about twenty years older than me!" Anna states.

"Says who?" Matthew asks.

"What's that supposed to mean?!" Anna yells. "That you wouldn't even care?! I'm important, too, y'know!

"Yeah, but you put ME in this very net the day that you lured me and Miro to you and Ricca with chocolate! If you didn't bring this with you, we wouldn't be in it right now!" Matthew retorts.

"How was I supposed to know?! You're the one who fell for it, and you're the one who brought it with you all the way to the train tracks!"

"That's because you told me to!"

"Well, you didn't have to listen!"

"Yes, I did! You said 'Listen, Matthew, I want you to bring the chocolate with you in that net'!"

"You didn't have to listen to that, either!"

All this time, Matthew and Anna were struggling in the net, making Miro more and more uncomfortable. At one point, a rope from the net was pressing against his face, giving him good reason to protest.

"Hey! HEY! Watch the cuts! My face is still cut, remember?!" He demands, looking quite peeved himself.

Nami, overhearing this, instantly turns her attention to Miro.

"What did you say? You're cut, honey? Let me take a look…" She says, abruptly leaving the battle with Kate and walking to the net, turning it so that Miro was facing her.

"Mom, it's alright, It's not bleeding…" Miro says through clenched teeth, obviously embarrassed by this display of maternal care.

Nami ignores him and gets the rope out of his face, seeing the claw mark cut across it. She suddenly gasps lightly, and puts a hand to it. She then removes her hand from his cheek and puts it against her own, seeming to recognize the mark.

"No way..." She mumbles.

Kate hadn't just been standing there, however. She hadn't moved from where she was, but she had a plan. With a yell, she raises her giant blade and… stumbles as it falls backwards and sticks itself into the ground behind her. She now had the handle over her head, in a vertical slashing position. With all of her strength, she then swings it forward.

"WIND SCRAPE!" She yells, as the blade crashed to the ground.

Nothing.

"Kate…" Miro begins.

"What?" Kate asks.

"You watch WAY too much TV!"

"Well, you never know… It's a big sword, I have a bad attitude, all I'm missing is-"

"REALITY!" Miro finishes for her.

"…Well, I was gonna say 'the ears'." Kate says.

Nami turns to face her again, re-focusing on the fight. She lowers her hand from her face and grips her knife again.

"Don't think you can beat me with cheap tricks." Nami says.

"Or with anything, really…" Matthew adds. "You probably can't win at all…"

"WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?!" Kate yells, beating Miro to it.

"I'm just being factual…" Matthew says innocently. "I thought that showing your chances would make you try harder."

"I'LL SHOW YOU FACTUAL! THIS IS FRIGGIN FACTUAL!" Kate replies, swinging her sword and slicing a nearby tree right off of its base.

"Oh, she's vexed now…" Miro says.

"Vexed?" Anna repeats.

"Yeah. Angry, POed, ticked off, woke-up-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-bed-ish." Miro explains.

"Oh… What does she do when she's mad?"

"Well, it's more of a 'what do we do when she's mad' kind of thing."

"Okay. So… what do you do when she's mad?"

"Pray that whatever she breaks has insurance."

Kate suddenly lunges at Nami and slashes with her sword once, faster than most people could believe possible for a weapon of that size. Nami dodges it by ducking and then has to quickly dodge to the side to avoid a vertical swing. Both of these swings came uncomfortably close to shaving the nose cartilage from Miro's face, but he was too busy praying to notice.

Nami gets back on the offensive by intentionally hitting her knifes against Kate's weapon to get her to back off from the offense. Kate tries to thrust her blade at Nami, but that proves to be a mistake as Nami makes a close dodge, kicks the side of Kate's bade and causes her to whack herself with it. Kate staggers backward and recovers just in time to see Nami's fist make contact with her teeth. Kate then staggers again, nearly falls over, and remains still for a while. Nami walks back to the net, looking at Miro.

"Kate nearly had me there." She says. "But she just isn't good enough to defeat me."

"Uhh, Mom…" Miro begins, seeing Kate raise her head slowly and look at Nami with an extremely unfriendly disposition.

"Don't interrupt, Honey. Anyway, I suggest you call her off before I am forced to-"

"Mom, I think you should kno-"

Kate grips the handle of her blade tightly.

"I told you not to interrupt. Anyway, it's for your sake and safety as well as mine that you come home and-"

"Mom, Kate's not-"

Raising her sword up again, Kate holds it directly above her head.

"sigh Listen, you have to learn not to interrupt your parents when they're trying to warn you-"

"Mom, I'M TRYING TO WARN YOU!" Miro suddenly exclaims. It wasn't so much of a warning for Nami's sake, but more in hope of Nami moving and Kate directing her wrath away from where he and the others trapped in the net were.

Nami turns to see what it was, but a bit too late.

"EAT THIS, YOU OLD WASHBOARD!" Kate yells, swinging her sword downward in a sheer torrent of rage. This time something happened, as well, as a wide crease of powerful energy arced in their direction at a furious speed.

"Okay, how is this happening…?" Miro asks.

"It's possible that the attack is a huge outburst of energy, probably tens or dozens of Kilojoules worth, that were being charged and expended at such a massive rate due to the anger fueling Kate right now that they forced themselves out of her body, traveled through the metals of the sword, and were released into the environment by the swing." Matthew says, sounding quite calm for the situation.

"Oh… Do you think it's damaging?" Miro asks.

"Judging by the way it's tearing up the ground beneath it, yes." Matthew replies.

"Should we be screaming right now?" Anna asks.

"Many people in our situation would be… and we're no exception." Matthew says.

"Oh, alright." Anna says. They all clear their throats and take in a breath.

"AAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!"

Nami, rather than scream, runs to one side and tries to dodge the attack, but the entire area is engulfed in light before the question of whether she made it or not could be answered.

A minute or so passed, and when the dust cleared, Kate stood there. There was a path of upturned dirt in front of her, which trailed forward like a dry riverbed for quite a distance.

Directly in the path of this, Miro, Matthew, and Anna hang there in the net, all looking to be charred to a pretty even black. Miro coughs out some soot and ash, Anna remains still and blinks once in a while, and Matthew remains limp, not having regained his consciousness just yet.

Nami was nowhere to be seen for a moment. Kate looked around for her, and suddenly spots her again, walking forward calmly from a dark batch of trees near the path of the attack. The left shoulder of her vest had been torn beyond patchwork rapair, and some hairs had been singed, but not in a majorly noticeable way. She approaches the slightly exhausted Kate and stops when she was directly in front of her.

"This is my favorite vest, Kate." She informs her, anger rising up in her. "I hold it very close to me, about as close as Jack. You damaged it. In fact, you wrecked it. And you called me a WASHBOARD?!" She suddenly strikes at Kate, which Kate blocks, both of which are done at an astounding speed. Nami seemed to come to some sort of realization at that moment.

"Ah, I get it. You're not going to give up, are you? You're not gonna lay down and let me win." She says, stepping back. "You, Kate, are going to keep on fighting until one of us is down. And you won't let it be you. That kind of willpower is dangerous to go against. You'll just keep on coming, and I won't be able to take you in without hurting you more than I feel is necessary. As Miro's girlfriend-"

"Mmmmoooommmmmmm… cough"

"-, you put me in a tough situation. I can't possibly continue this without the whole thing ending up on some daytime TV special about abusive mothers-in-law, so that leaves me with only one other choice."

She walks toward the net again, and brushes some soot off of her son's face.

"Be very, very careful, Miro." Nami warns him, looking at the cut on his face again. She turns and faces Kate once more, putting one knife away and reaching for something in her pocket.

"Oh, but… don't think this is over." She adds. "We'll be coming for you soon. All of us. And at that time, you will not be spared for bravery as you have been today. However, you do impress me, Kate. Goodbye."

And with that, she pulls out the Teleport Stone and vanishes, but not before throwing a knife in the direction of the net. As she is removed from sight, the small blade slices the supporting ropes that hung the net up on the tree off, and then sticks into the tree itself. Everyone in the net comes crashing down to the ground, the good news of this being that it woke Matthew up. Once they had untangled themselves and brushed all of the ash, soot, and burnt hair off of their person, they look at Kate.

"Did you catch any of that?" Miro asks immediately. "Mom had us right where she wanted us, but she let us go just like that. What the heck was she talking about?"

"I impressed her." Kate says. "She said a bunch of stuff about me not giving up and… stuff…" She yawns widely, lazily re-sheathing the huge blade back into the Swiss Army Knife handle.

"Works for me." Matthew says, still trying to get ash out of his ears.

"Yep." Anna says. "But… now what do we do? Should we wait for Ricca?"

Matthew sighs and shakes his head. "I wouldn't bother. All odds say that Ricca's doomed. We should just keep goi-"

"'Doomed'? Jee, glad to know that you had high hopes." Comes a voice from behind them. They turn around to see Ricca walking toward them, beat-up but not to the degree that they all expected.

"Ricca!" Anna says happily.

"You're back!" Kate says.

"But… You couldn't have won that…" Miro says in half-exasperation, half-awe, and half-total amazement (Miro's math is a bit shotty after the blast). "Where's William?"

Ricca smiles in a happy-but-sinister way. "Our friend William is suffering from a most unfortunate case of… scrambled eggs."

"Ohhhhhhhh…" Miro and Matthew groan, getting the message right away and cringing, instinctively crossing their legs a slight amount.

"Did you really have to do that?" Miro asks.

"Oh, right, because I had such a huge list of other options right at that moment." Ricca says, rolling her eyes. "The next time you duke it out with William, try to find a different way to bring him down, and I'll try to keep it in mind."

"Okay, okay, point taken." Miro says. "Now can we get going? We're nearly there and we still have to find Lumina!"

"Right, let's go." Matthew says. And with that, they continue on their way, hoping that they had finally gone through their last obstacles to find the Place.

(Ah, and now for what I promised. William's description, for those who would like to draw him. He has blue jeans, which was already mentioned in this chapter but I'll mention it again anyway, black sneakers, blue eyes, a white tee-shirt (but he could be wearing something a bit more elaborate since he has that new power), and slightly spiky, silver-white hair (but his original colour is brown). One more thing, his original personality was quite - as Midnight-Phoenix000, the creator of William says – sweet. However, his current personality is… close to non-existent. That's all that I've been told. Anyways, I hope you enjoyed the chapter! Remember to review!)