Chapter 27- Moving On

"Drake! Drake! Are you okay? Drake! Wake up!" a voice came from somewhere Drake couldn't see. Actually, he couldn't see anything, because he was still hovering somewhere in between consciousness and unconsciousness. Someone was shaking him. He felt sore all over. His heart hurt most of all. He felt only marginally better from when he had collapsed. He still felt as if he had no energy. "Drake! Wake up!"

With an incredible amount of effort Drake opened his eyelids. Julie was shaking him, and Keith and Flynn were kneeling next to him. "Ughh… what's going on?"

"Oh, you just collapsed and went unconscious. Nothing huge." Keith said facetiously. "Just your everyday thing. How do you feel?"

"I feel terrible." Drake sat up and looked into Julie's eyes with immense purpose. "You know what you said about Matt helping you in your Shadow Game?"

"He came to you too?" she asked.

"What the hell are you taking about?" Flynn said. "I never saw Matt or anything that looked like him anywhere near you."

"No, seriously, he was there!" Drake said. "I swear!"

"Bull shit." Flynn said.

"How would Matt get here anyway? He's either dead or locked up somewhere." Keith said.

"I know what I saw. How else would I have been able to win? After those last two direct attacks, how could I have had the strength to go on?" Drake asked. No one answered. "So? What do we do now, Sarge?"

"I don't know!"

"Wait… what about the Keeper's key?" Julie asked. The mentioned object was lying on the floor. Drake picked it up and hung it around his neck.

"Wasn't he the Keeper of the Vault?" Keith asked.

"Didn't Matt mention a vault of souls?" Sarge asked.

"Yeah, he did. You think this is the key?" Drake asked.

"Yeah, it probably is. Though I don't know why they would bother sending him at us. Wouldn't they want to keep the key safe somewhere, somewhere hidden, where it would be hard to find, so we would never get it?" Sarge said.

"That would be the logical course of action." Said Keith. "It seems that whoever is leading these guys lacks a logical thought process."

"Yeah." For a moment there was silence. Again Drake raised the million-dollar question. "What do we do now?"

"Well, we may as well go down this path." Flynn said. "If you haven't noticed, the one behind us mysteriously vanished after that duel."

"Whoa! I didn't see that." Drake said. "Let's roll." He checked that his M-24 was loaded and set it to auto. "Something tells me we'll have to fight our way out of this hell."

Flynn snapped his 203 up and set it to burst fire. "Got that right. Let's go." They began to walk along the path. As they went on, Drake noticed that the path they had walked along was vanishing. He mentioned this to Julie.

"Yeah, I noticed. By the way, what did Matt look like to you back there?" she asked.

"Well, all those bandages were gone, and his eye was fixed. On top of that, he was actually good-looking, and he wore all white." Drake replied. "Why?"

"Because that's how he looked for me too. But how did he change like that? We should ask him when we find him."

"If we find him." Drake pointed out.

"We'll find him." Julie didn't seem very convinced that she was right about it. "He's a tough guy." Still not a very convincing tone, though, Drake thought. At that moment, several of the brute force fiends dropped from the ceiling and surrounded them. To Drake's surprise they were armed.

"OH SHIT!" Drake heard Flynn yell. "GET DOWN!" Drake threw himself to the ground, steadied his rifle, and cut down one of the fiends. A random spam shot hit him in the leg. He twitched convulsively into a sort of fetal position, clutching his bleeding leg. He managed to grit through the pain and take down the fiend. The others seemed to be having more luck. In a short time all the fiends had been killed. Blood flowed freely from the wound in Drake's leg.

"Great." Said Keith when he noticed. "Now Drake can't go anywhere."

"I'll be fine." Drake said through gritted teeth. He tried to stand up but his leg just wouldn't hold his weight. He fell back down.

"Who are you kidding?" Flynn said. "We can't help you here. We don't know anything about medical treatment."

"Er, I know a little." Julie admitted.

"Can you fix a gunshot wound?"

"I can try. I need some strips of cloth or something." Flynn tore the sleeves of his shirt off.

"There's your cloth. Get to work!" He said. For the next ten minutes Drake sat with his back to a wall (Keith and Flynn had dragged him over and set him up), gritting his teeth against the pain and occasionally letting out an involuntary scream when Julie touched a particularly tender point. After that time Julie had removed the bullet and wrapped the wound in the cloth from Flynn's shirt. Drake stood up gingerly. The leg still hurt but it would now take his weight. Julie had done a good job.

"That probably won't hold for long." Julie admitted. "You have to go easy on it for a while."

"Let's get going again." Drake said. They began moving again, Drake limping along at the back. They wandered through the Shadow realm for what felt like an hour, finally ending up at a long hall lined with doors. The doors seemed to be made of metal, very heavy thick stuff, and locked shut. A thin line of blood lead to one of the doors.

"That's got to be where Matt is!" Keith said.

"Tautology." Flynn said.

"What?"

"Stating the obvious."

"Oh." Flynn walked up to the door and pulled on the handle. It was locked, of course.

"Back off." Julie said. She walked up to the door and stuck something into the keyhole, then ran away. An explosion rocked the hallway. The door was blown clean off its hinges. "A little explosive that Matt gave me."

"I see." Flynn said, and walked towards the door. An intelligent fiend jumped out from behind the door and knocked him back. "Hey!"

"Ha! Did you fools think that we would actually keep someone who has been a pain in the ass to us in such a low security as a single door?" the Fiend said. "Of course we left a guard! And you will have to duel me to get him back!"

"Fine. I can take you, freak show." Flynn said, tossing his deck into the slot of the duel disk he had picked up after he had broken his old one.

"Let's duel!"