.The hot fizzing sun would never stop blazing in the sky. I guess it's finally time to stop remembering the past and think of the future. I'll finally get that power I need to get rid of people like Sankuro and Hiboshi, and help people for once. I need to rid the world of groups like Void Core.
We kept walking like snails, dragging our feet across the fragile sand dunes. The blonde one and black haired one were ahead, walking along side with me while the kid was looking like he was dying. He looked like he was in pain, unable to drag his feet faster like the rest of us, none of the other two being able to notice him. His expression was frozen in horror, looking like he had seen someone die.
The air around us shook wildly, appearing to shiver in the outrageous heat. Hot sand was getting into my shoes, and beads of sweat would start to come down from my forehead. The desert seemed to never end, no sign of water anywhere. I was staring at the kid, trying to figure out what was wrong with him, until that blonde one interrupted my thoughts with a question.
"You all right?" he said, looking at me with a sweat drop running down the side of his face, showing that he was too cooked by the flaming sun. "It looked like you've been in a trance for the past half hour," he told me in the blazing heat, turning to me with his yellow eyes.
"Yeah, I'm fine," I lied. Why should I tell them anything? I can't trust them. Plus, they wouldn't care anyway. There was no use or point in telling them anything about myself.
"What's your name? Mine's Rick," he told me, putting out a hand to introduce himself, offering a shake. His hand was large, manly and sweaty. He put on a friendly smile which made my insides churn.
I looked at him suspiciously. Can I trust his stare? Is he hiding something behind those friendly, defending eyes? "Mine is Walter," I said, turning away from his hand as I resumed pacing. The fact of me ignoring his handshake didn't seem to bother him. He just drew it back and kept walking with the rest of us.
"Jeremy, you all right?" Derek, I guessed his name was, said as he turned to find the small child gripping his temples like he was having a major fever. I turned back and stared again with a bored look, wondering what he could be doing. "Jeremy, what's going on?" Derek repeated again, turning the other way to go to Jeremy's side, Rick turning around with a worried look as to what was going on.
PoVS
"Jeremy?" I heard someone's voice keep calling out to me. I think it was Derek who kept frantically calling my voice, but I couldn't seem to pay attention to him. Something was wrong. I tried to answer, but my voice kept getting caught in my throat. It was like all the sound from my body was gone. My words got caught in my chest, unable to get out. I had a major pain in my head, and all I could do was nothing as I looked to the worried faces of people around me and the shaking desert air surrounding us with its hot, burning touch. I felt churning in my stomach, and something burning inside my chest. Something was pounding inside me, like it wanted to get out, but I don't know what. Just being around this hot desert sand and the warm, beaming sun made me sick inside. I felt like it was hard to breathe for me, and the headache continued to grow. I felt something cold run down my lips and into my mouth, and almost immediately I tasted blood. I felt more of the cold, red liquid stream from my nose as everyone around me seemed to panic, except that Walter guy.
Unable to get one word out, my body began to sweat and I fell to my knees. The hot sand burned my forelegs and kneecaps as I tried to get rid of the horrible pain in trying to rip my body apart from the inside. What's going on? Why does this sand and sun bother me so much? What's this feeling inside me… that makes me panic?
I had no way of answering my questions, and felt like I was going to fall unconscious when all of sudden, pictures began to fill my mind. Memories, almost. The images flooded my mind, flashing from one to another, changing with every second. I was beginning to get lost in everyone's worried voices as the flashing images reigned my inner thoughts.
The images inside my mind portrayed a thing – a monster of some sort, in hot desert sand like the biggest thing you've ever seen. It growled and roared; swinging its large black tail against the sand dunes, crashing into them and making them fly everywhere. It made a black hole in front of him, which sucked in all the sand in the area as it thundered its huge, unbearable roar amongst the desert heat. With every image, my head began to fill with more and more, my mind beginning to get a bigger headache, and the feeling inside my chest beginning to grow and take over.
I felt myself quickly losing my mind, my senses going numb until I heard someone's voice call out to me. It was much louder this time, and I recognized it. But who was it? I couldn't decipher it. My eyes were closed in pain, providing no sight whatsoever for my eyes. Slowly, I was brought back to my usual state, lying on the desert grounds, sitting on my legs.
The headache began to die out as the voice continued to call out to me, the horrible pounding feeling inside me shrinking back down to the size of a seed. My mind slowly drifted back to normal, and I had control over my senses once again. "What… What happened?" I asked, looking up in a confused manner.
The voice had stopped calling out to me, and I realized who's it was. It was Rick's worried one. Of course, I thought. The other two were much too silent to talk as much as Rick would. "Jeremy-san! What's going on? Are you okay? Do you need a doctor?" Rick said, putting both his hands on my shoulders, assuring me that everything was going to be okay when he, himself did not believe that very same thought.
"Yeah… I think so," I told them, feeling my forehead for any feverish difference. "I-I think it was just a headache," I stammered as I stumbled back on my feet, Rick's strong arms helping me back up. I looked up to Derek and Walter who had similar stares, looking at me in boredom. But I knew that inside, they really were worrying about me. Well, at least Derek. I really don't know much about Walter yet.
"It better be," Rick said, taking a piece of tissue out and wiping my mouth and upper lip, cleaning up the blood that had stopped streaming like a river. "Some weird reaction you have there," he told me, crumbling up the paper and putting it into the cure bag that Shihou had given us back at the hospital. "Maybe you should hold on to this, just in case something happens again," he said, giving me the bag.
I accepted the bag without much care and strapped it around my shoulder, the one long strap going across my chest. I still felt a small headache, but it wasn't as bad as before. I still felt we had to get out of there as fast as we could, though. "Shall we keep going?" Rick said, getting back up on his feet, wiping three drops of sweat from his forehead that was hidden by his blonde hair. He didn't look as blonde as other people, I realized. It was yellow, but it wasn't blonde. At least not exactly blonde.
He turned the other way and began walking again, and the other two followed, with me all the way in the back, trying hard to keep up with them and their teenage long legs. I felt weak but I knew that I couldn't stop moving. We had to get out as fast as we can. That was something I still believed through instinct. "How long have we been walking so far?" I asked them as I ran up to Derek's side, then stopped pacing so fast since I had finally caught up to their speed.
"About an hour I guess," Rick said, his lips seeming dry. His voice was choked out.
I breathed in the heavy, hot air of the desert as I paced across the unsteady ground below us. The sand slowly sunk into my boots which I was still wearing, no sign of wind in the air to caress us with its cool touch.
"So," I asked Rick, running past Derek and towards the side of Rick. He turned to me with a wondering look, glaring at me with friendly eyes that sometimes would remind me of Dylan and his hyperactive eyes. "Just what is your element? I know that Walter's water, and Derek's shadow, but I suddenly remembered, I've never seen you use yours yet, not even back at Hanayuki," I told him, giving him a friendly stare back which could've been identical to his.
He laughed. "That's right, isn't it? The last time I've used my powers, it was when I was trying to get your locket to start beeping so you would know we were around," he said in a realizing voice, Derek and Walter turning to watch him as he revealed his element, Derek looking curious and Walter looking like he looked down on him. I guess that was the difference between Derek and Walter's stares.
"Yeah, so what is it?" I said, pushing my slight headache to the back of my mind. I waited for him to tell us the element he had been chosen to be stuck with. What would it be? Fire? Earth? Would it be the Life one, like Shintenmaru?
"I guess you could call it… electricity," he told us, figuring out a good way to put it. Lightning? That was one of my favorites, I realized. He looked to me to watch my reaction. And he was pretty pleased.
"Great," I told him, giving him a knowing smile, tilting my head to one side.
He laughed. "Yeah, I guess," he said. That moment, I realized that by talking to each other, we had become a lot closer, and an addition to that would be that we didn't notice the heat around us.
"How well can you control it?" I asked him, wanting to keep the conversation going, but still interested in what he had to say.
"Not very good," he revealed the truth, looking kind of nervous to be telling us. "I had to work on it for days to get my powers to work enough so the locket would pick it up," he admitted.
"Its okay, Dylan was like that too, at first. Then he got better. So much better he actually saved Derek's life," I told him, making him feel better, but also seeming like I made Derek feel worse. I felt like I should apologize, but the stare he always gave off seemed too… unforgiving. Just like Hibiyomi, I thought. Great, more proof that the Half Spirits chose their own personalities. But one thing that still goes against that… is Walter.
I looked to Walter's side as he continued to walk silently, his eyes deep in thought and his movements not wasteful. Tsukansu seemed totally different than what Walter is. Tsukansu was wise and kind, sometimes shy and sometimes joking around. While Walter seemed to be mean, heartless, and his stare ruthless, like he wouldn't give the smallest being in the world mercy. I gulped down a nervous knot just looking at the guy. He scared me, but I knew that there was goodness inside his heart. I could easily sense it.
As my thoughts began to drift off, we all saw something that we thought would never come. The end of the desert! We saw the sands end at some point, and lead to a dry, rocky plain. We saw houses in the distance, the wind finally beginning to pick up a little. "Yes!" I heard Rick mumble under his breath.
"No more hot sand!" I shouted, jumping up in the air, feeling a head rush when I came back down on the unsteady sand.
"Don't cheer just yet, we're not even there," Derek said, bringing our hopes down.
But Rick countered that by saying: "So then, let's hurry up and get over there all ready!" He laughed as he said the words, turning back to us to look at our faces for a moment, then running off through the sand, not caring that it began to fill his sneakers.
I ran after him, and eventually Derek did, too. But something that made me worry was that Walter didn't follow suit. He didn't run with or after us in anyway. He just kept his normal walking pace, and eventually met us at the beginning of the town KuroSabaku.
When he finally caught up to us, dry wind blew across the town behind us as I watched the sign overhead of us that had the words "KUROSABAKU" swinging with the small wind the town had.
"What now?" Walter said, being the second time he had spoken in the whole trip, coming up to us with a mean stare. He didn't seem to mean his words at all. But if he wasn't interested in what was about to happen, then why would he ask?
"I guess we look for Tsukansu, the water council," I told them. I looked to Walter's facial expression as I told him this and his eyes went into shock for a second and a second only. His expression looked like it was meant to ask, "Water Council? As in, the original owner of the Water Free Spirit?"
The look I gave him shouted, "Yup!"
We continued to pace throughout the town, everyone following me for once, and I began to search all over for Tsukansu. There was no sign of him, and we eventually had to stop walking since we were tired. We had practically been walking for over an hour.
I plopped onto a rusty old bench on the city, the cold metal remaining cool to my skin even in the glazed sun above.
Rick put a hand up to block his eyes from the intense sun. He looked around, and then asked, "Where is that guy? Didn't Shihou-sama say that he would be here?"
"Yeah," I told him, lying on the bench lazily and hungry. I call being hungry a lot the "Dylan Disease." Wouldn't you agree? "But I can't find him anywhere," I told them, practically drooling with my head on the seat, my whole body covering the green dusty old bench.
We were in a clearing part of the plains, nothing around us but flat land. I guess this is where the kids usually come to play, but they were missing today. How come we can't get any trace that they're here anywhere? I asked myself in my thoughts.
As if on cue, we felt a strong wind blow by, which was abnormal considering that we were in a dry, desert-like area. Places like that don't usually get lots of breezes of wind. Only short puffs and huffs of air every now and then. But this wind was strong. It even knocked me off the bench a little, telling me to get off.
I got up on my feet as I heard a loud beeping noise from inside my clothes. The locket! I realized as my hair swung to the right because of the sudden raging winds. The howling of the gust tried to drown the siren out, but it failed.
The wind grew to such a high rate, it even blurred our sight and Rick and the rest of them were standing still, looking into the distance for any sign of what was causing the sudden wind blow.
I quickly took out the locket, fumbling with it in my hands for about the fifth time, and opened it. It usually opened with grace, but in unison to my panic, it seemed to open faster this time, like the lid of a cell phone. I tried hard to keep it from being blown away.
I looked at the screen of inside the locket, and saw the twelve piece chart again, seeing a white piece blink over and over again, as if desperately trying to give a seizure. Then I was taken to a map of land. The map showed lots of flat landforms, and showed little differences in elevation. It also showed a red blinking dot telling me once again where the Minor was, and according to the map, the Minor was only a few yards away from us. But we couldn't see him anywhere. Just where was he?
Then, all of a sudden, something could be seen far away. A twisting kind of wind that was carrying dust from the ground around it, gathering it like a crazed collector was coming toward us, twisting and turning like a cyclone.
We soon found ourselves wrapped in it, our clothes and hair swinging wildly inside the cyclone, the three other Minors trying to figure out what to do about it.
But there was no time to think. Just as the wind began to disappear and die out, the ground ahead of us only a few feet away broke into pieces, creating a hole large enough for a person to fit through.
"What the hell is going on here?" Derek said, looking angry.
From the hole could be seen someone's fist from underground. At first, I thought it was a dead body's, but when it began moving and lifted itself up from the hole, revealing a person followed by another, we knew that it was just some people fooling.
As the sun's light poured down on the six of us below, we saw another figure come into the picture, his image blocked by the sun behind him. But I knew who it was anyway just by tracing the outlines of his shadow.
"Hey," he called out, waving his hand.
"Tsukansu-sama!" I shouted in happiness, running past the other two teens and going up to him as he picked me up and swung me in the air, then placing me back down.
"Miss me?" he said, smiling and tilting his head. See? That's how Walter should be.
"Yeah!" I shouted in happiness, my small hands gripped around his shoulders. "But you came at the wrong time. A Minor just used his powers around here," I told him, putting a pouting look on my face hoping that Tsukansu would help us do it.
"Yeah, I know," he said, surprising the four of us. "Isn't it amazing? I've taught him how to basically control his element all ready, and my element isn't even wind!" he shouted happily, making me think that he was about to dance on his feet.
"What do you mean?" Rick said, interrupting the reunion between Tsukansu and I.
"I mean, these two are part of my surprise," he said, motioning for the two teenagers who had played around with us for a moment before to come closer. They followed, and stood side by side next to Tsukansu. "Meet Nonbiri Zachary," he said, pointing to one of the kids with a sky blue cap on.
The boy was wearing a white hoodie, but unlike Dylan's, his didn't have a zipper. His cap was on the right way like a baseball player's, his eyes blue and innocent. Tufts of carefree brown hair showed from beneath his sky blue cap, seeming to sway in the air. He gave a small nod to us, as if to say hi. The long sleeves of his white hoodie sweater were stuffed into the pocket where his hands would meet that was actually embedded into the hoodie at the bottom. "And this is Samakuro Mark," Tsukansu continued, pointing to the other teen.
This one looked a bit more interesting. His arms were wrapped in a kind of bandages up to the middle of his forearms. Only his fingers were shown, and he was wearing a brown traveler's vest with a collar that was unbent and reached the top of his neck. Underneath he wore a camo shirt, and he was wearing beige cargos. He looked really outdoorsy, and his eyes were round but mean, his mix of emerald green and brown eyes friendly and manly, and his brown hair shaped at the front. The front of his hair was made so long it was made into three long strands that were not as thick as Walter's, but three long strands of brown hair that went up, and pointed upwards, the top slanting towards the back of him. The rest of his hair was not long and was normal and short, like a regular person's.
I could tell just by looking at him that his body type was a fighter's, all athletic and strong, his tanned skin proving it even more.
Everyone exchanged looks, saying hi except Walter, who seemed to be staring straight at Tsukansu with his same old boring look. But you could tell that he was thinking something behind those brown, hazel-like eyes. "So let me get this straight," I told Tsukansu, turning back to him after saying hello to the, apparently two, new Minors. "You mean to say, that these two guys are Minors, and that's the 'surprise' Shihou was telling me to come here about?"
"No," he replied, smiling his young smile.
"What?" I asked him in a high pitched voice, getting confused. "What do you mean? You're making me puzzled," I told him, letting him know how I felt.
"These two aren't the surprise I was planning. It was five," he said with enthusiasm, as if to say "Ta-da!" He turned to me to look for an expression on my face. But he never found one. "Well?" he asked.
"But-," I told him, more baffled than ever.
"I know what you're thinking. If I say it's five, but you only see two, then what's the big idea, right? Well I sent three of them who weren't that strong yet to the Inner World. You'll be happy to know that the Metal, Earth, Wind, Ice, and Life Minors needn't to be worried about now. These two are part of the five main elements of the Council. That's why I decided to let them go search for the two Minors left with you," he explained to me, the second longest explanation I've heard in my life time. The first was the one Shintenmaru gave me when I was starting this whole thing.
"Okay, so if there's only two left, then which ones are those?" Derek asked, interested in the conversation as everyone listened for the answer. Including the two Minors that were going to join us on the little search we had left.
"That means…" I began, counting off the elements we had to find the two we needed to get. "That leaves Mind and Fire," I said, looking up to Tsukansu who was shining a Dylan like smile. I'm going to name that one Dylan Disease number two, I thought in my mind. Smiling too much.
"Got that right. You better hurry up. If they can hide from the Council, they've got to be pretty good. Maybe they're all ready skilled in using their power, so you better watch out. That's why I made four of the five Minors that belong to the five main elements, or the Base Elements to help you. I would've sent all five, but we're missing Fire, which is the last Base Element you need."
Ooh, that one makes the third longest explanation. "So what now?" I asked, confused on where to go now, realizing the large group we had now.
"Now, we take a rest. You guys can leave in the morning," he said, walking back to the town. "You'll need all the energy you have left for the last two."