The night continued to stir, trying to keep itself awake. The audience of guilty, exiled clouds continued to sway reluctantly, loathingly. The moon's crescent smiles hid beneath another smile upon smile, keeping its happiness a secret, for if others knew of it, they would take it away in an instant. The darkened shadows of the night seemed to be everywhere – in the sky, the ground, even the air seemed thick with the heavy darkness of past midnight. Derek's team found themselves, bodies cool and unbaked, preserved in the comforting darkness that would soon infect them, watching the idiot Zachary pray for forgiveness, kneeling religiously on the floor, eyes forced to wince and bury themselves away in shame. They were in some kind of trench, an open grave that waited with a widened open mouth for its dead bodied feast. The ground was smooth, steady, and thick with a hard texture that couldn't seem to be punctured through. No trees surrounded them, only the trees at the higher ground, above the gigantic, waiting grave.
And the twelve marble monuments stood, clean and pure with their strange appearances and weird stances showing off their immobile techniques of beauty, of power. They stood, names scribbled microscopically under their feet, their frozen bodies acting as the only coffins to be put in this wide grave. The walls were crisp and cragged, distant from the team as they stood in the middle, watching, waiting. The bushes stirred beyond their heads. The rustling of leaves was inevitable. Derek turned his head with certain alertness, alarm filling his every move. He looked to the darkened bushes far from his place, watched them for any suspicion that may arise from them, jump out at them. Nothing.
Seconds passed. Zack had not finished praying; one could imagine the words he was thinking right now, those begging, pleading words. Derek seemed amused at that; he always liked to see Zack get in trouble for being the foolish boy he was. The funny thing about that Minor was, though, that he always seemed to never care, always seemed to want to be Derek's friend. One time or another, Derek began to wonder if he was treating him the right way. But that was from his mind right now. Derek backed up with small, unnoticeable steps as he kept his eye on the ground above, still watching the bushes and trees from far away, darkened upon their own grievous shadows that infected them so with a paradise of parasites.
The Shadow Minor breathed, sharply as he slid to the closest statue and slid behind it, muscles tensing as he felt the cool marble touch against his just as cold skin. He swallowed unevenly, breathed unevenly. "Back down," he whispered softly to Mark, who had still been watching over Zack's shoulder like a security officer. Mark immediately noticed with a certain automaticity and followed, hiding his presence slowly. They waited in silence, waited as not even a cool murmur of air gossiped by, not even a slight tickle of the moon above changed. No sound. No movement. No breathing. Just wait. Soon their answer came; soon their real prayer was answered.
With a burst of energy, the bushes and plant life above them spat out a blur of shade into the air that soon disappeared into its most agile speed. Everyone seemed alert of its presence; everyone seemed prepared. The presence blur rushed right into the deep grave and ran quickly, swiftly towards the unknowing Zack. A deep shimmer of a dagger's blade seemed to accommodate with the lustrous moonlight that faintly tickled the ground below.
The ground seemed to crack at the godly speed as it rushed towards the Wind Minor with surefire agility. The night continued to howl indistinctively around them, a soft grey of clouds continuing to watch with boredom eyes and miserable tears, miserable from the monotone process it had to go through every single night, for almost half the day! Sometimes even longer than half the day, it had to go on. For once, there was something to entertain them with a bare amusement. This was better than nothing; the whole night seemed to agree on this together. The knife reeled in with sinful, impure gloved hands. It glimmered faintly with a dusky luster. The body charged forward – so did the dagger. Zack was an inch away before…
A sudden sound of physical impact filled the night. No blood spilled, no pain seared, no cries uttered from demised lips. A seventeen year-old's hand tightly locked another in stainless white clothing; a silver dagger barely missed this boy's toned forearm. No longer were his hands folded in prayer of faked forgiveness, no longer were his eyes closed in act. A smirk of success lingered on his lips, a narrowing of eyes for the first, cool time. Nonbiri Zack held the wrist of White Cloak, the prestigious Scholar that seemed to be always after them, locking him in a hold of his own. "Plan…succeeded," Zack muttered out in a strong whisper as everything that concerned silence, suspense and boredom of night seemed to break down like a crackled mirror and seemed to crazily jump out in random, hyperactive motions. The tension broke out; war began. "Now, Derek!" he cried out, calling out to his teammate.
Derek soon followed. The Shadow Minor seemed to jump from nowhere, coming before the white clothed Scholar and appearing between his own rival teammate and his own team's rival. He placed a delicate hand on White Cloak's unmoving, inorganic chest and began his new move. His tense confidence drove out his powers. "Maina-Kage: Amimono Kansen! –Web Infection-" he shouted with declaration, dark, thin lines erupting from his fingers and spreading all over White Cloak's clothes. It seemed to rip apart his skin from the inside, growing like a real infection over his exterior body and setting him ablaze with intense shadow energy that hissed at his skin, evilly like a devil snake filled with venom. The unspeaking White Cloak backed up; brought over the knife and held his chest. He didn't make any noise, even when he moved. His presence almost seemed… surreal, unskilled, abnormal. Derek sensed there was something wrong.
Then, with a second's worth of passing, the prestigious figure vanished, and faded into thin air. His silhouette was no longer presence, nor was he in general. Confused faces washed over the team. "What!?" Zack cried out in shock, eyes broadening in surprise. The beginning of the battle seemed to get the night hyped up, no longer tense, no longer bored, no longer miserable from its life-long waiting. It would savor every moment of this beautiful fight.
"Over there!" Mark cried out in alarm, gesturing towards a clear point of where he was now. Had he teleported? Was this the real him? Derek muttered out a cry of just a beginning preparation, ready to charge for him, having only a millisecond passing from since he heard the message from Mark. However, someone beat him to it. Zack leaned forward quickly, skillfully as if he had done it all his life and zoomed, rushed with amazing speed that was none like Derek had seen before. He had even gone without Derek noticing, and with a bare second, Zack found himself ready to attack the newfound presence of White Cloak. Derek widened his eyes in shock, a bit of awe in there, too, somehow knowing that Zack had indefinitely grown during training. He got fast! Derek called to himself with an open mouth.
Zack snickered a humored hypocritical smirk and said one thing, and one thing only: "Die." Placing his palm near White Cloak's slowly backing up chest, Zack demanded the name of his new move with the loudest, strongest voice he could ever give: "Tenkuu Kirite! –Air Cutter-" A burst of slicing wind emitted from his palm, pushing White Cloak backward with amazing, eye-catching force. Everyone was confident that that move had made a tremendous amount of damage. The sound of splicing wind against his limp, seemingly uncaring body wouldn't seem to stop as he was dragged farther away from Zack. Then, once again, White Cloak faded, unharmed as he left the slicing air to die away. Zack scowled. Where was he now? Everyone had to be alert; eyes wandered back to back, not knowing what to do until White Cloak showed himself.
"Another one?" Mark asked in his own disappointment, scowling at the team's misfortune. Derek narrowed his eyes in suspicion.
"Guys, let's stop it," Derek called out to them. Mark and Zack gave curious, non explanatory looks to the black-haired Minor. "We're giving him information about our techniques – use your regular moves until the real one comes out."
As if on cue, another faker of the ominous White Cloak figure jumped from a monument's head and came down on Derek. The Shadow Minor was tackled downward, and with a hateful kick, shot the cloned body off of him. He sent the silence of White Cloak fluttering through the air as Derek got himself fixed back up with a scowl, dusting his clothes. The faked image stopped its fall with frog-like feet. It seemed to wait, and not even watch them. It just stayed still, waiting yet not waiting, moving yet not moving. "Is that the real one?" Zack cried out in suspicion, confusion.
"No," Mark told his teammate. "It has slow reactions. It doesn't move like a normal human being. That's how you know," he explained thoroughly and quickly, not taking his eyes off the figure of the fake White Cloak for a second, as if watching to see if it were to move or speak or do anything of interest at all. It did nothing, yet it did everything, all of its characteristics were unsure of, and just by doing that one nothing, he wowed everyone, just by standing, kneeling there.
"I see," Zack gestured. "But… White Cloak's not a normal human being," he said with exception. He gulped, swallowed unevenly, nervously. Everyone seemed tense as they stood, not knowing what to do but watch. They saw perfect chances but hesitated for a reason even they couldn't figure out. Then, suddenly, from the imitator's back came out another White Cloak. It seemed like a fungus, a fungus of another copy of him that grew out of his own body and cloned him. It jumped out with incoherent speed and toppled over Zack. Mark came to the rescue, kicking with great force from his life-long training of his physical skill to get the second clone off Zack's body. The brown-haired Minor helped the other brown-haired Minor up from the floor. "How many are there going to be?" Zack asked as he dusted his clothes and brushed the perspiration off his brow. He squinted rather nervously, sighing a sharp, hesitant breath. His eyes showed their hesitation in a hard squint.
Now, watching the two sit side by side in different motions of moving and unmoving, more tension piled upon the air, and they wondered what they would do, hesitating throughout all their wait. They didn't know what was the right thing to do. They didn't very well know which one was the real White Cloak, or when he would appear. "He's playing with us," Derek scoffed in certain blank thoughtlessness. The team sighed as they watched the two clones stumble on their feet, and get ready.
PoVS
The dark of the room and walls seemed to drag away from them, seemed to pull them towards another dimension, another place in the world. It seemed so surreal, so fantasized and blistering with new thoughts and ideas that it was almost refreshing to experience. The metallic, thin bars gave their way and bent, distorted themselves in fresh curves so that they could become something more than they were. The darkness lit up and the hesitation wore out, eroded by the new breathtaking motions around them. It had all began with one cry of, "Visible Darkness!" from Minoa, the Mind Council. The distortion of dimension took them away and put them in their own illusionary dimension where they would be safe.
The orange, darkened walls became hot, sizzling horizons of blurring, hissing air and distant, cloudless blue skies. The dark musty plaster ground became unsteady, dementing of their innocence and becoming soft and sedimentary, soft with a baked, golden brown of hot hissing sizzle. The dark, unseen ceiling was demeaned from its proper dignity and brought down to a distant vertical sky, a cloudless bank of blue that had nothing to show for, nothing to work for but the hot, blazing sun in which it held its greedy fingers in, carrying it like a pearl, its one and only possession now. The councils and two Minors along with Jeremy, if you could still calm him that, were now finding themselves in the hottest of the hottest.
"Wh-What?" Dylan muttered to himself in awe. "Where are we?" he asked, voice blank with pure curiosity, not knowing just what the heck was going around him, now knowing what had happened in just a matter of minutes, seconds that seemed to warp and wrap around him with certain puzzlement and confusion. He looked around in his own naiveness. His eyes couldn't seem to comprehend anything anymore.
"Somewhere safer," came his answer from Hanabikai, who brushed his brow once from his former perspiration of nervous anxiety. Somewhere safer was right, but technically, they weren't safer – for there were no metal bars to protect them from Jeremy's raging cries and devilled attacks, demonic blasts of whatever he might do. Only dunes of deep fried sand protected them now, barely. It was a desert. They found themselves in a desert.
Jeremy looked around with hardcore, possessed dark eyes, the opposite color of what they used to be. They were pure black, purely dark with the depths of hell found inside them, roaring with the hellish black lava of grudge and hate washing over the once innocent molten plates of igneous intrusion. They growled, they gurgled with their deep, darkened murderous attempts and grave, over-exaggerated sins stuffed into their every bubble, too many to count so that a million had to be put in one tiny little atom that swam in the shallow depths of bare time, shunned life. The eyes looked around, scanned the desert area with hateful eyes, and realizing where it was, it screamed, screamed as if the desert was poisonous, as if it had been infecting him with the sounds of good… or was it just the grave thoughts of his own human memories?
Jeremy's getting wilder, Dylan realized. "We should hurry," council voices conversed with each other beyond his consciousness. Dylan was caught in his own thoughts, his own trance of memories and future predictions. "Yeah," the voices answered back beyond his own realization, beyond his own years. The words he heard had no meaning; he barely even recognized them as words – he didn't try to decipher them. They were just syllables, sounds of old letters and sounds muttered from… was it human, mouths. The Botany Minor just stood there, watching, eyes horrified in their own petrification of fear and disbelief. The hot, sizzling air seemed to burn and spill the blazing venom over his skin, baking his not too tanned skin into a crisp tone. A tan would do him some good. He was paler than most of the Minors, but he wasn't pale.
Slowly, he remembered all those times he shared with Jeremy. He remembered when he had first met him, when he had first coughed uneasily with dust from his lungs. He remembered those smiles he always used to nervously smirk and that long hair always blocking his eyes, which he had so easily, simple-mindedly brushed away from his face to reveal his innocent, childish eyes. And now… he was… this thing that would tear apart dimensions and worlds in half. Now, he wasn't Jeremy… was he? This… this is Jeremy…? Dylan thought with an exasperated thought. Was he like this… all along? He had to ask himself, taking himself back to the time where Jeremy had protected him from that… that girl who he had hurt – no. He didn't just hurt her, Dylan remembered. He killed her with that giant black hole that almost ate Dylan up, too, until there was nothing left but a splotched puddle of blood on the floor, proof that someone had one existed but now died into eternity, locked forever in the sea depths of life as we know it now, only knowing the meaning of life that she was so uneager, unable to share, swimming around aimlessly in her own demise, her demise being every second, her resurrection of bare soul being every other second.
He had killed her, yes, he had, with those same dark, demon eyes that he had now, staring at him before him, roaring with no memory or recollection whatsoever. The fiendish roars of malevolence brought him back from his flashbacks. Dylan blinked, once, twice, to make sure he was alive. The echoing roar of Ikimichi Jeremy screamed through the hot, blazed desert. He was screaming… screaming for help? Was he screaming to be saved, cries echoing from the normal Jeremy from within this beast that continued to grow and dominate his soul with eager, demonic bites? Or was it roars of preparation, roars of hate and anger and detestation getting ready to rip these council and Minor bodies apart? Which was it? Which?
That time… Dylan remembered back then when he had killed that girl without realizing it right after. That was him…now? No, it's different, he told himself. It's not just that his appearance and powers have changed like last time; it's almost as if his whole personality has changed, flipped upside down to become close to its opposite, Dylan recognized, watching this demon roar, getting ready to rip some souls apart, readying itself to kill. I'm almost… scared of him.
"Everyone, watch out!" Shintenmaru sensed as he cried out horridly, Minoa getting closer to Jeremy and holding out her arms, not in a savior position but in a defending position. Dylan seemed to awaken from his trance, blinking and gasping as he was just in time to see a small sphere of sucking black hole rising in purple and green streaks of enigma, a baby black hole beginning to rip space and time apart. Minoa stood, the only being there able to cancel out the black hole with her powers.
A horrid roar gave from the demonic Jeremy as the sucking pit began to grow from its open mouth of hunger. "San-sou Genkai! –Three-Layer Limit-" Minoa called out as she held her arms out, the purple energy rising from her own palms and blasting out before her in a great wall as thick as the world itself. It was like a net, a net that captured and went against the black hole it stood before, and defended the rest of the team from it. The sucking hole continue to breathe in with devious whorls, greatly breathing in the first pane of force field with tremendous energy, almost about to shatter it like a strong wind did to a window pane. Minoa seemed to struggle, trip over her own stance over the hot, sizzling sand. Why had she picked such a hot place to go to? No specific reason; she just picked the first thing that came to mind to get out of the Inner World as fast as possible and bring them into her own illusionary world of fantasy. She guessed she just wanted a vacation.
"I need you guys to help us knock him out!" Shintenmaru explained, shouting over the roar of the spacious terror and paned force field. His red hair fluttered greatly with the drawn wind. His voice was almost sucked out completely.
"Us? Why us?" Dylan demanded just as loudly, his hair ruffling, his hand holding his orange headband of the sun with great effort as to not let it go and die away into the hazard. "Aren't you guys stronger than us anyway?" he shouted through the wind.
"You're closer to him, though; you have a closer, thicker bond with Jeremy than we ever did. We usually just ignored him without realizing it. I could imagine how he must've felt," Shintenmaru cried out over the roaring wind, roaring cries of the sadness Jeremy shared deep inside.
"What about me?" Lance cried out. "I've never talked to the kid; how can I have a closer bond with him? I had nothing to do with him from the start!" he declared over the growing wind. Minoa struggled beyond them. They felt the sand being drawn away from their feet and wanting to make them trip.
"That may be true," Shintenmaru agreed, screaming. "However, we needed your eye for detail! That characteristic belongs to you and you only!" he called out.
"Oh, that's just great!" Lance yelled in agony. Soon, the black hole was cancelled out. The desert returned to normal and the howling winds, the only coolness that the Council and Minors shared in this blazing hellhole died away. Minoa breathed heavily, panting tiredly as her hands remained put out and ready, her hair more ruffled than anyone else's with her crutched hands sizzling with tremendous energy.
"Go! Now you have your chance!" Minoa called out, demanded with heavy breathing.
Dylan gulped. "Any advice before we –"
His voice was cut short; there was no time to waste, the Council knew. "Don't die," Hanabikai suggested. Dylan gulped once more, and leaned forward, hesitation filling his every muscle and every movement. He resented doing this, and Lance was just worried for his own safety. What would happen from here? There was a very good chance that they would die, and somehow, the Council just knew they'd be all right. What would become of this battle? Dylan thought no more, deciding that he could do nothing to make him feel better, and charged for it.