Chapter 17- To Defeat a Fiend…

The shaft leading down to the base must have been at least 30 ft long. Drake's arms hurt by the time he reached the bottom. When he did, he realized that he was surrounded by computer equipment and other such technology. He moved in and looked at one of the many screens sitting on the desks around him. As soon as he got near it he heard a voice.

"Don't touch that!" it came. "It could blow up in your face or something like that. You never know with Matt's stuff."

"Brooklyn, shut up." Matt said as he came down the shaft. Flynn, Keith and Julie had all made it down by now. He was behind them all. "You can come out. I've brought a few…friends." A short tubby kid on a rolling chair rolled out from behind a shelf. He was holding a stack of papers. "Ah, is that the report I requested?" The one called Brooklyn rolled over to him and handed Matt the papers. Then he rolled back across the room. "Brooklyn, you're a moron. This is the wrong report!" Brooklyn rolled back across the room, grabbed the papers, flipped through a few of them, and rolled back behind the shelves.

"You're from Brooklyn?" Drake asked.

"No."

"But you call him Brooklyn, and you're his brother."

"That is true, but I only call him Brooklyn after another guy in a game I played."

"Oh. What's his real name?"

"His real name is Chris." Brooklyn rolled back around the corner with a new stack of papers. He handed them to Matt. "Wow, second try, Brooklyn, that's an improvement." He flipped through the papers.

"Wasn't he at the other duel academy?" Flynn asked.

"Hm?" Matt said, focused on the documents in his hand.

"Wasn't he on the little piano on the side?"

"Yes, he was. Very astute, Flynn." Matt continued flipping through the documents. "Great."

"What's going on?" Drake asked for what seemed like the millionth time that night.

"Okay. You know those arches that surround the duel academy main building?" They all nodded. "Well, those are actually gates between this plane of existence and the shadow realm."

"The shadow realm? I thought that was only a myth." Flynn said.

"No. It's real. I've been there before. Not a nice place, but it isn't actually that bad either."

"I thought it was supposed to be a place of torture." Keith said.

"It can be. But only if someone with a millennium item warps it to be such. Someone possessing a millennium item not only gets the ability to use the item's power, but can also send people to the shadow realm and warp reality there, as well as escape from the shadow realm on their own power. Most of the good people who possess an item will not send people there on general principles, but the evil ones use it as a place of torture. Hence how it got its bad name. Actually, it is a rather convenient place to hide, if you can find a way back out."

"Okay, so what about the creatures?" Julie asked. "What does the shadow realm have to do with them?"

"Those are the shadow realm beasts." Matt flipped back a few pages. "They are ferocious beasts that, instead of killing a person, banish their soul and inhabit the body. The banished soul is sent to the shadow realm, where it is locked in a vault of souls. Not a pleasant experience, I might add. However, the methods they use to do this are varied. As we guessed before, there are intelligent ones, who attempt to duel their victim. The less intelligent ones simply use brute force. It is impossible to kill the intelligent ones with force, but fortunately the extra intelligence prevents them from using brute force, which they see as too low for them."

"What would they want with human bodies?" Flynn said.

"That's open to speculation. I would presume that they would need something like that to survive in light. As Keith discovered by accident, they seem to burn up when hit with strong light. That's probably why they attacked at night, as well as for the element of surprise. The real question is why would they want to invade the earth realm in the first place? Shadow realm too small for them? Or perhaps something else? It could be a lot of things."

"Yes, so how are we going to deal with them?" Drake asked. Matt smiled, and reached over to a rack on the wall. He grabbed a double-barreled shotgun.

"Hey, that's my shotgun!" Brooklyn said. Matt cracked the breech and slammed it shut, creating an ominous clicking sound. "B-but you can borrow it."

"Where's that ammo belt, Brooklyn?"

"It's under the rack." Matt picked it up and slung it around him.

"This should do." Matt said. "And for the intelligent ones, well, we'll just have to duel them, won't we? The others I will… take care of. Now, let's get out of here." With that he forced them back up the shaft that had lead to the secret base.