Chapter Thirteen: Borderlands, Phase 02
Minutes passed. Naomi withdrew her hood, no longer needing it in the weatherless vehicle, allowing her shoulder-length brown hair to finally breathe. Glancing to her right, she saw Ienzo, the youngest of her survivors, sitting soundlessly in his seat, Naomi's 8mm video-camera and Ienzo's photographic one resting in the backpack on his lap. This wasn't his usual mute pensiveness, but a dead-eyed hopelessness she never wanted to see again in a child after Sora and Riku dealt with the loss of their home-world. She called soothingly to the boy, "We're going to be alright. I know…" she paused to swallow the grief rising in her throat, then continued, "…it was terrifying, but we're still alive. You were really brave back there, and smart to run to the truck when you couldn't find me. You're a very bright young boy."
But he was also scarred for life. She saw it in his eyes and the way he held himself. If left untreated and neglected like Even so recently handled him, he would be stunted as an emotional cripple—more so than he already was. He was far too young to see the ugly side of existence and lose all faith in the goodness of life. She had to reach in and pull him back. "And maybe—" she hesitated, wondering if this was the smartest way to help him, "maybe there's a reason for all this—why we survived when so many others didn't. …Maybe there's a role we still have to play, and whoever out there's guiding our destinies isn't done with us just yet. I want you to think about what that, what this second chance means, because I'm certainly glad you're still alive." But not even she fully believed her own advice. Not since Destiny Islands. When her home-world fell, she questioned if its native pantheon had perished as well, and if her gods were no longer with her or had never been there at all, who was protecting them? Was it some greater, incomprehensible force of Light that guided them to safety as so many refugees and Gummi-capable civilizations now believed, or was it all random acts of luck and chance that influenced their lives as so many others believed? She may have been losing her faith, but Ienzo was far too young for that.
And again, the boy's silence was unsettling. C'mon, Ienzo, talk to me!
But what remained to be said? She wasn't even sure the advice she gave him was helpful. Maybe it pushed him farther away. Her own sons were far easier to deal with when they lost their world, but someone like Ienzo, who concealed almost every emotion and rarely spoke, only fell further beyond her reach. Say something! Anything to let me know you're alright!
As if he read her mind, the morose child turned his silver hair-obscured gaze to the driver beside him, opened his mouth to speak…
…and was instantly seized upon by a new wave of terror, bolting upright in his seat as he screamed, "NAOMI!" and pointed past the driver's window to redirect her attention. Alarmed by his outcry, Naomi veered her gaze out the glass portal to the dark forest thicket at her left and found a monstrous pair of bouncing, flaring crimson eyes staring back at her as the large, shadow-obscured beast to which they belonged kept an even pace beside the truck. The monster's silhouette was that of a massive quadruped racing at speeds Naomi didn't imagine mortals could naturally run. The visage of the Heartless was hidden enough by a web of branches and blustering snow to reduce human perception of it to a nightmarish contour, and it was this that respawned the terror in Naomi that she thought she'd escaped when they fled the precipice.
She felt no shame in screaming at the sight of the monster or when it rammed its ultra-dense bulk against her side of the truck, shattering glass and crushing steel as the vehicle momentarily tipped on its side wheels before concussively returning all tires to the ground. The soldiers in the separated back compartment shrieked as well, caught completely off-guard at the surprise attack, and the first of those to reorient themselves swarmed their driver with a bedlam of frenzied questions, the most clearly heard among them being "Driver, what the hell was that?!" and "Is there something out there?!"
But assessing that another impact was imminent, Naomi screamed back to them, "Brace yourselves!"
And the reptilian mammoth smashed the full force of its weight against the truck yet again, the whiplash preventing either Naomi or Ienzo from getting a good look at its features. But mid-jolt, Ienzo noted in his mind: Since when do the Heartless have red eyes?—they're always yellow.
When the truck recovered from the second tremor, Naomi floored the ignition and gradually passed the towering hunter. She saw the flaring red orbs of the shadow-obscured Heartless pass behind the back of the truck and she bellowed to the handful of soldiers in the back compartment, "It's right behind us! Can you shoot it down?!"
Her answer came when what passed as the rapidly-promoted senior officer ordered her troops, "Open the hatch, boys! We're blowin' this sucker to hell!"
Dreadful hesitation permeated the back compartment until some brave or foolish souls finally moved into position, then the others followed and one nearest to the back pulled a lever that retracted the rear sliding door overhead, and all that remained of the platoon stared directly into the hungry, monstrous visage of the nightmare that pursued them.
"Oh, gods!"
"What is that thing?!"
"Shoot! &#*%ing shoot!"
A deafening cacophony of gunfire roared uninterrupted in the back of the truck. Naomi couldn't afford to glance back or up to the rearview mirror and examine their progress or even see what the Heartless looked like and Ienzo was too frightened to consider it. But a sudden howl from the beast, a tumultuous and unnatural racking in the back of the truck that shook the whole armored vehicle, and the ensuing cries of terror and bloody murder from the soldiers inside made Naomi fear the worst. It's inside! The Heartless—! It's inside the truck! Dear gods, what have I done?!
The beast's thrashing weight repeatedly jolted chained rubber from snow to the dissonance of gunfire and screams until the enclosed maelstrom shook the armored truck over on its right side and sent the doomed vehicle and all in it crashing into the thicket. To Radiant Garden, airbags were a product of inventors' imaginations not yet conceived, so while Ienzo faced no danger of post-collision suffocation due to his unqualified age and height, his side of the truck still took the brunt of the crash when it toppled on its side, and inflated fabric might have been more merciful than shattered glass and sprawling steel. At some point mid-wreck, he lost all consciousness.
But unlike Ienzo, Naomi wasn't fortunate enough to circumvent pain and trauma by blacking-out. Hands clenched ghost-white around the steering wheel, she withstood every tempestuous tremor, jolt, bruise, and slash inflicted upon her, breathless beyond the point of screaming and fearing any millisecond of the crash would be her last.
But when the ravaged truck finally reached the end of its long, skidding halt in the forest's brambly embrace, heart-attacked Naomi found she was somehow still alive. Her seatbelt saved her from a grizzly death and kept her in her seat even with the vehicle tipped over on the passenger's side, and with her frenzied heart settling and when enough breath returned to her after a short expanse of time, she found the windshield was all but decimated as a score of sharp-enough branches were speared through the former glass portal, some dangerously close to having impaled her but instead skewered through other parts of the seat.
Soon, a throaty grumbling resonated from the back compartment of the truck, and the reawakened shock of her circumstances restored every flood of terror within her as the desperate wailing and gunfire from what soldiers remained with the Heartless beast recommenced. At the sounds of carnivorous of roars and fatal disembodiments, Naomi shot her worried gaze aside to unconscious, unmoving Ienzo, beyond her reach against the snow-compressed pile of glass and steel on the other side of the branchy spears between them. Unclicking her seatbelt and feverishly pushing aside and breaking through the wooden bars, she descended to the toppled-over passenger's side until she reached the boy, her feet planted beside him as she hastily crouched down to check his pulse.
It was still beating.
But there was no time to rejoice. The Heartless surely knew where they were and would be upon them in seconds if they remained. So she scrambled her way through the branch-decimated windshield and dragged Ienzo out after her, struggling to scoop him into her arms as she fought to gain her footing on the snowy ground. And before she could, she froze upon hearing a final soldier flee from the open back of the truck. Then, the carnivorous roar followed by a fatal scream, wild gunshots, and the sound of teeth and claws eviscerating flesh.
The resonances of tearing and chewing continued long after all but the blizzard fell eerily silent, and Naomi swore all breath and blood-flow ceased within her in those nerve-wracking moments. There's no way I can grab Ienzo and make a break for it—it would hear everything and be upon us in seconds. Any attempt to fight or flee would be suicide.
She noted then that the Heartless had remained in the back with the now-dead soldiers longer than expected. Why has it stopped to eat? Does it not know we're still alive? Did it even see us in the first place?
And then it roared triumphantly into the storm-obscured sky, boasting its successful hunt.
That answers that.
The situation assessed, she reconsidered her options. If running and fighting are suicide, all we can do is stay hidden and hope it won't sniff us out.
With the Heartless on the other side of the overturned truck, Naomi stealthily, delicately tried to ease Ienzo's unconscious body back inside through the decimated windshield, her gloved hands intermittently trembling from the cold and the fear. Get him back inside. Get in there with him. And stay hidden until it goes away. But I need to hurry before it decides to search the area!
A colossal rush of dark weight and a streak of twin crimson flares rushed past her in that instant and skidded to a grinding halt in the snow as the monstrous shape swerved just behind her. Pupils shrunken and heartbeat hypersonic, Naomi froze in unparalleled terror in the beast's sight, Ienzo only just returned inside the tipped vehicle. Whipping her gaze back to the Heartless, she finally beheld their merciless pursuer and screamed for all her shattering soul was worth as she clumsily scrambled back-first against Ienzo to keep herself positioned between the boy and their predator. In a subconscious motion mid-scramble, she yanked up a dagger-length shard of broken windshield glass and desperately brandished it as though it were a proper sword before the monster.
But not even bullets had punctured the Dark Hide's skin, and she saw the Heartless there in all its murderous glory. Gallons of soldiers' blood was splashed against its giant, midnight-blue face and dripped profusely from its rancorous maw, through its razor-edged teeth, and gathered into puddles on the snow at the indigo claws of its forefeet. Twisted, membranous spikes of bright red protruded from the left and right sides of its skull, and a column of that same material constituted the elongated spinal protrusions on its back. An extensive tail lapped from its rear, and at its end was garnered four lethal spikes made of the same keratin as its claws. And those crimson lights, once thought to be its eyes, were only a vapor emanated from beyond the outlines of its true eyes: a pair of unblinking, carnivorous orbs, yellow and sulfurous. Those cesspools of malice ogled Naomi just as hungrily as it had those slain soldiers, and its blood-soaked tongue keenly licked its dripping fangs.
The longer Naomi beheld the Heartless, the heavier the glass knife became and the more she wanted only to break down and cry.
But it was then, shielding unconscious Ienzo with her back to him, heart pounding faster than her body could support, and staring the Dark Hide in its voracious gold-and-red eyes, that Naomi remembered why she'd been so brave when facing the Heartless—why the prospect of traveling deep into the borderlands that separated the humans from the Darkness' nesting grounds hadn't outwardly shaken her nearly so much as others who joined her on this expedition and those that came before it. It was because she forced herself to be brave—brave enough to inspire valor in every weak link that couldn't provide for itself. That had been her duty as a teenage mother when her family and lover forsook her. It was what she forced herself to become as a single parent when Armageddon came to her world and Sora needed answers and a strong, heroic figure to believe in when their native deities failed. She molded herself into the survivor Riku could admire and follow to the end of days when all he knew was lost forever. It was the role she strove to perfect, as iron sharpens iron, when she met Terra: the hero who first saved them from the apocalypse and then from the refugee camp when he took them into his own home—and he was the man who was always meant to be the father of her children.
By now, the burden of protecting others and giving them strength to believe in had been engraved into Naomi's spirit; so long as there were others in need of a hero, she would never allow herself to be weak, to be exposed when the victims turned to her for guidance. That's why she put on a brave face when so many others feared for their lives and that's why she defended dying Ienzo with only a shard of jagged glass in her grip against a monster she didn't have a chance in hell of walking away from alive. But now that no one else was looking, she was allowed to be honest with herself. The steel bones which always kept her steady in the face of danger devolved into calcium and collagen, allowing terror to tremor through her all-too human form as it did before there were those weaker in her life worth protecting—before she assumed the mantle of warrior and protector that accompanied motherhood. Here in the storm, making her feeble stand before fanged death with all other witnesses deceased or cataleptic, she allowed herself to tremble, to quiver, to cry. And yet, she was grateful Ienzo wouldn't be awake to experience whatever suffering awaited them, and, through stubborn willpower, she re-steeled herself for the doom they faced. Though tears still poured and fear remained, her eyes glared defiance and her teeth grit bravery.
Unable to stand, but between the monster and her boy all the same, she brought her second hand to join the first in gripping the glass shard in an attempt to quell the tremors in her bones, and she dared to meet those flaring, golden eyes as she affirmed to the predator, "If you try to touch him," she swallowed the rising will to break down, then valorously spat, "I'll tear you apart!"
The Dark Hide was undaunted. It prepared to pounce. Naomi braced herself for the finale, determined to see her life's end with her eyes wide open.
Ienzo…Riku…Sora…Terra…forgive me.
Jaws agape, the monster leapt—
—and was abruptly smote into the ground by what seemed either a bolt of lightning or a falling star, majestic and terrible. The midair collision kicked up massive waves of snow and tremored the earth in every direction, prompting a squeal and no small flinch from Naomi, who flailed her arms in front of her eyes as she was jolted onto her back from the shockwaves.
But eventually, the titanic spray of snow subsided and the tremors dissipated, and Naomi slowly returned her gaze to the now-lifeless Dark Hide, its once-yellow eyes murky and void. When breath returned to the shaken woman, it was sparse and heavy, and her eyes dared not believe the miracle manifested before her for fear of falling victim to a divine lark where the Heartless would be restored to un-life the next moment and end her. But when at last she accepted this one stroke of fortune amid a dawn of tragedy, she beheld the form of a cloaked young man atop the Dark Hide's skull kneeling behind the ichor-soaked katana which he employed for the execution, gripping it with both gloved hands clasped 'round the hilt and his hood-covered head bowed behind it. But at length, he stirred, gradually returning to his feet atop his prize as the tattered brown, hooded poncho he wore over his black peasant's clothing fluttered in the turbulent breeze. It was a wonder those were all the layers he needed to stay warm in the blizzard. His right hand returned to the scabbard at his side while the left remained on the sword's handle and forcefully jerked it out from the fallen monster's skull, then swiped the four-foot-long blade astride to remove the creature's black blood from deadly metal, and when his weapon was clean once again, he returned it to its sheathe.
It was upon noticing this warrior was left-handed and seeing enough of his features beneath the hood that awe-struck Naomi began piecing together just who he was.
A left-handed swordsman who wields a katana…
A young man with hair of silver and eyes the color of emerald…
A warrior in peasant's clothing whose power rivals the Keyblade Masters…
Is this really him?—the "Hero of Hollow Bastion?"—the "Wingless Angel?"
The name at last escaped her lips when the champion stepped off the Heartless' corpse and approached her.
"Sephiroth…"
He knelt before her, and Naomi finally saw just how young he was—easily somewhere in his late teens. His long, unkempt silver bangs fell over either side of his face and framed—if not partially covered—his green eyes beneath the hood. A disarming peacefulness adorned his countenance and he spoke with a voice strong yet serene in spite of his youth, "How badly are you injured, ma'am?"
In all the horror endured, Naomi had forgotten the cuts and bruises sustained from the crash. Breathless and awed, she didn't remember her wounds until the young hero placed a hand on her bleeding and welted cheek, and without even a word to activate the enchantment, the restorative glow of a high-level healing spell washed over her, sealing all lacerations and waning every bruise until her entire body was as undamaged as it was before the crash.
An eyebrow raised in mild amusement, Sephiroth spoke, "You can breathe now," and Naomi was flustered a moment for realizing she'd held her breath all that time, and finally exhaled, bewildered at the wonders of the miracle-worker whose sudden appearance was, in itself, a miracle.
But she snapped herself back to full attention soon enough and hastily moved aside, revealing comatose Ienzo just behind her, beyond the virtually nonexistent remains of the windshield of the tipped-over truck. "Can you save him?!" she desperately besought the hero.
His eyes briefly widened just a bit. He hadn't expected to find a child this far beyond Radiant Garden's walls.
"He—he has a pulse," Naomi informed him as Sephiroth peered closer to examine Ienzo's condition. "It's just—he took the worst of the crash and I don't know how long he has…"
But the hero's hand was already placed against the open wounds of the boy's face, where the blood ran most severely and the most cranial trauma was sustained. The radiance of the restoration spell was already at work. Sephiroth reported, "He'll live. But he should still see a doctor. Magic can only do so much." When his work was finished, the silver-haired teen returned to his feet and examined the wreckage. "Are there any other survivors?"
Naomi shook her head. "I doubt it. I heard that Heartless taking its sweet time mauling everyone apart. No one could've survived close-quarters with it for that long."
Half a minute later, Sephiroth saw for himself Naomi's assessment was accurate when he finished checking the unrecognizable remains in the back compartment and surrounding area of the armored vehicle. Naomi, meanwhile, held unconscious Ienzo close to her, relieved for his safety and attempting to keep him warm.
"Bring him over here," the young hero called them to the cadaver-strewn back of the truck. "It's out of the blizzard's way. You'll be warmer here."
She did as he suggested and carried Ienzo in her arms to the nightmarish haven, on the brink of nausea for being so close to death's gruesome remains and sickened further at the thought of Ienzo waking to it. On her way, she reasoned—But at least it'll be warm—but when she arrived, she found that Sephiroth had cleared away all bodily leftovers out of the back with some well-placed wind spells, though much of the blood remained, liquid being more difficult for magic gusts to carry than solid objects.
She thanked him, and as she settled her boy in a spot void of what gore lingered, Sephiroth probed further, "Where's the rest of the convoy? I was told four military vehicles were assigned to this mission."
Naomi shook her head. "All gone. The Heartless ambushed us on the cliff's edge. With the numbers they had, I doubt anyone survived."
But still, Sephiroth glared out into the distance, his eyes narrowed and his right hand clutching the scabbard of his four-foot-long blade ever more tightly. "You saw every one of them fall?"
"No. But we saw enough."
A subtle intensity underlaid the teenager's voice. "Insufficient. There could still be survivors."
The chronicler couldn't believe his words and she sought a way to make him understand the futility of the situation so he would be spared from a possible rescue attempt. "But…there's an entire army of Heartless swarming those cliffs! They're literally coming off the assembly line down there! We're—we're just too close to their nesting grounds, their hive, to survive for so long! Please don't throw your life away—"
"I'm going," he briskly interjected, unconcerned for propriety when possible lives were at stake. He sharply turned his gaze back to her and ordered, "Stay warm," before darting through the storm at an inhuman speed and vanishing into the flurry.
And that was that.
He didn't promise he'd return or inform them how long he expected to be gone. He'd healed their wounds and given them shelter, but beyond that, Sephiroth left them alone and unprotected in the treacherous borderlands, all for a platoon of soldiers who'd most likely been eradicated long ago.
Of course. He's only a teenager. For all that power, he's still got a lot to learn. I just hope his lesson doesn't cost us our lives.
Resigned to the inevitability of whatever uncertain fate their brash champion left them to, Naomi retrieved an automatic rifle and then huddled Ienzo close to her to keep him warm, all while despairingly questioning unto what gods, if any, to call.
A quarter-hour passed before Ienzo finally stirred. When he did, Naomi allowed a small gasp of joy to escape her and she hugged him tight, grateful she was no longer alone.
"Thank the gods," she respired from force of habit, "you're alright!" She knew he would be, but knowing and seeing were two very different things.
Confused though the still-groggy child was, he didn't resist the embrace, but allowed it as his mind raced to comprehend his surroundings. He gathered they were now in the back of the truck and had a terrible accident, hence the gallons of blood sprayed on the walls and floor and the vehicle's immobility as well as its being tipped on its side. More sullenly, he considered they could be the only survivors of the wreck, given how Naomi's was the only voice he heard.
"N—Naomi," he stuttered mid-hug, "wh—what's happened?"
Through tears of joy, she answered. "We're alive. That's what happened."
When their embrace ended, he'd asked for details and she told him everything. By then, the storm had lessened significantly. Though mild alarm continuously held his eyes open and kept him in a state of frenetic thought, Ienzo was otherwise silent and composed: an unnatural gift of his.
At the end of Naomi's update of their situation—after explaining how Sephiroth had brashly left them alone and unprotected in the treacherous woods—she asked him with a heavy weight in her voice, "Do you know how to use a gun?"
It was a question he hadn't expected to hear this soon in his life, but after discovering the Emblem Factory earlier that morning, he knew he'd have to learn in the near future. He shook his head, "No," and at his answer, Naomi pressed the rifle into his arms. Dumbfounded at the sudden action, he clumsily wrapped his arms around the weapon to hold it, then looked up in pleading confusion at his caretaker.
She answered him with a strong yet sympathetic countenance and an unwavering voice, "You will."
The next ten minutes were spent viewing and reviewing every function of the instrument of modern warfare as far as Naomi understood it. She taught him how to hold it, to keep his finger off the trigger until he was ready to use it, to look around and behind the target, to find his dominant hand and eye, how to align the sight and aim, to squeeze the trigger rather than slam it, how to reload, and to always reengage the safety when he wasn't firing. She taught him these things all without firing a single round, as the sound would have attracted the Heartless. And through every lesson, she helped him steady his nerves; not even Ienzo could refrain from shaking the first time he held a gun. Naomi was no soldier, but had learned enough from observation and experimentation since she first started working as a freelance chronicler and scout for the military under Even's command. She remembered far too clearly the helplessness she suffered when her world fell to Darkness and how she had no way to effectively defend Riku and Sora, and had it not been for her rescuers, she and her sons would never have escaped the doomed islands alive. She never wanted to feel that way again and sought to learn what she could about weaponry and warfare in anticipation of the next time the Heartless were at her door.
With Ienzo armed and a replacement rifle retrieved for herself, Naomi instructed him to always keep an eye out through the open back of the truck for any incoming forces, just as she did. Minutes later, she remembered the lever which opened and closed the reinforced door. When she tried to use it, she found it had been broken and jammed from the earlier carnage. She sighed, her plans of a barricade undone, but then Ienzo reluctantly pointed past her to the bodies of their fallen comrades that Sephiroth cleared out of the truck for them, and he asked, "What about them?"
After half a minute of uneasy deliberation, Naomi resignedly sighed and directed her boy, "Come on." They spent the next half-hour hauling the mangled corpses to the opening of the truck's rear and stacking them in such a way that they eventually formed a macabre barrier nearly at shoulder-height with Naomi. Their work sickened them and there were times when Ienzo drew away and violently gagged and Naomi forcibly patted him on the back to help clear his respiratory system. Once, he retched on the snow after his elder clapped him hard enough and that was the end of his pharyngeal contractions.
"You're so brave to do this," she soothed him as the last of the bile petered out. "And we're going to survive. With perseverance like yours, we're going to get through this."
He didn't say anything, but only looked to her with eyes both pleading and determined. Then, he silently resumed the bloody work and Naomi followed.
When their task was complete and they'd barricaded themselves inside the tipped-over truck, Naomi decided to take the first watch, continually scanning the horizon for any signs of Heartless presence while she allowed Ienzo to rest. After twenty minutes, it was Ienzo's turn to stand watch and he observed the landscape through a small opening in the corpse barrier at eye-level with him. He spied a passing Soldier Heartless scampering by in the distance and alerted Naomi. She quickly joined him and kept her rifle trained on the outlying enemy until it vanished in the passing snow. It didn't seem to notice them.
She sighed, grateful a skirmish had been avoided, and spoke to Ienzo, "I think it's time for my next shift. Get some rest."
He accordingly locked the safety back on his rifle and laid down, face turned away from the grisly stack of cadavers, but his mind did anything but rest. He was far too distracted trying to process and justify Naomi's attempted sermon perhaps two hours ago about them having survived when so many others perished "for a reason." No matter how he broached the subject, he found the idea revolting. What makes us more worthy than those who died?
Maybe she'd forgotten a vital detail in her botched delivery that would have made the idea appealing, but there was none Ienzo could imagine. They would have to discuss it later, and he wanted to hear how she could possibly justify it.
Fifty-six minutes later, during Naomi's third watch, the Soldier Heartless returned, this time flanked by four others of its kind, and they seemed to scurry in the immediate direction of the truck.
Alarmed, Naomi sank to her knees, hidden by the barrier, and called to her ward in a hushed tone, "Ienzo, we got company!"
He bolted upright at once and took his place at the small opening where he could see the landscape. His breath halted at beholding the five Emblem Heartless scampering ever closer to his and Naomi's makeshift haven, and just as when he'd first held the automatic rifle, small tremors overtook his small body and made focusing impossible. But then Naomi placed her strong and soothing hand on his shoulder, looked him in the eye while on one knee, and solemnly ushered, "This is what we prepared for. You're smart and you're brave and we're going to survive." She paused a moment, then added, "And if anything goes wrong, you run as fast as you can back to the city. We won't wait for Sephiroth if we don't even know if he's still alive. Come on. Take aim."
By then, the Heartless scouts had halted less than twenty yards away and regarded the corpse-barrier with curiosity and confusion. One had even stopped to investigate the pile of vomit Ienzo had upchucked earlier. Various clicks and other noises which comprised the Emblems' recent language were exchanged between them, and both Naomi and Ienzo felt that had they not constructed the cordon, the first Soldier would have seen and mauled them fifty-six minutes ago. But even though it had returned with reinforcements, they were all within firing range now and completely unaware of who or what awaited them beyond the barricade, though it was evident by their body language that they had some vague impression of danger from the unknown.
The barrels of their guns hidden from enemy view and the safeties disengaged, Naomi whispered to her boy, "I'll sweep them across the right. You take the left. Move from the outside in—don't give them a chance to escape. But wait for my order."
Swallowing enough of his fear, he nodded and then took aim.
The Heartless had drawn closer—fifteen yards, then ten—and as Ienzo's shivers faded away, so, too, did his breathing—and when they reached five, Naomi whispered into the breathless boy's ear, "Fire."