Chapter 25: Time locked
The air fell silent as the area once filled with noise of water and machinery silenced, even the sounds of flapping wings from nearby birds ceased. Without all of the noise, I could almost swear my words would echo as if I was in a canyon. But no echo came off of the walls. Dead silence fell after my initial question. It felt as if even time itself had come to a complete stop until the hairs on my entire back stood on ends, sending a wave of sensations through my spine and alerting me of impending danger. I quickly spun around only to see a middle aged man thrusting a knife at me. I shifted my body to the left to avoid his attack but had my left shoulder lightly cut by the blade. As I gazed at my new wound, I noticed that even my blood was halted from ever leaving it.
I turned my gaze back to my assailant and noticed the large round stone in his left hand and a switchblade in his right. The time stone in his left hand was glowing with one of the symbols lit up brighter than the rest. I still had no idea what any of those symbols meant but right now I had a good guess. "Wait, you stopped time?" I yelled to the assassin. He was clearly an assassin because he wore a similar outfit to the others that I had seen. "It's how I became an elite assassin so fast. All I do is pause time while I take out my mark and then start time again to allow the poor shmuck to die where he stands. No one even knew what happened. My question is how come you're not frozen in time?" I, not knowing anything of the workings of time, was unable to come up with an answer, "I... I... don't know." Now my mind was on another problem, did this guy become an assassin by the use of the time stone or does he actually have the skills to back up actual combat? I was hoping the prior and judging by his first strike, it was a safe bet. My only problem was that I never personally killed someone before. However, I never thought that he would be as cruel as his next move.
He paced around using his knife as a pointing tool and flipping it up and down like he was speaking with his hand, "You know we could go right into combat with each other and prove just how big of amateurs we truly are, but I think I have a better idea." He apparently paced himself over to where Luna was frozen in time and aimed his knife at her throat. "Now I'm sure you care for the safety of your friends so I'll give you a simple choice. Either surrender and face execution, or one by one I kill your friends while frozen in time. What do you say?" He said it so nonchalantly that it made me mad. He then pressed the knife closer to her throat and I gave into my fears, "No wait!" I called to him. With no other options, I lowered my head in defeat and solemnly asked him, "Can I at least say goodbye to them before we go?" My request somehow confused him because he lowered his knife with a dumbfounded look on his face. He then stepped away and answered, "Sure, I might be underhanded, but I know how it feels to never see your family again. You have five minutes, but any funny business and I kill them all." "I was now curious to ask him about his statement but I knew that he controlled the entire situation so I walked over to Luna to see if he had cut the skin on her throat and to bid her goodbye before leaving. I took a good look at her neck before grabbing her right paw. Somehow, she now was able to move the moment that I touched her. She blinked twice and startled me when she began to turn her head. The moment my paw stopped touching her, she froze immediately back in her stasis. Luckily that the man with the time stone didn't see since he had turned away to walk over to Rose and blatantly stare at her cleavage with a perverted grin on his face.
An idea then came to me, I placed my paw over Luna's mouth and she instantly was able to move again. I was still confused but now I had a plan to get the time stone away from him. "Luna." I whispered as softly as I could. She shifted her eyes to look at me and I asked, "Do you still have that bottle of gummi berry juice that I gave you?" She silently nodded piecing together that we were all in danger and to be as discreet as possible. "Good, drink it at the same time that I drink mine." I said placing her paw onto my shoulder while I dug into my holding bag and grabbed a bottle for myself. One at a time to keep from breaking contact, we pulled the cork off of the bottles and chugged down the purple liquid. The rush of power and the loosening of her muscles came as quite a shock to Luna but she stayed vigilant to follow my every move and command. I held onto her paw tightly and tossed the bottle aside with Luna discarding her own. The bottles froze in mid air once they left our grasps and I knelt down to lunge at the man with the time stone.
"You know I think that I'll date this one later as long as she doesn't realize..." He began to say until he turned toward me and noticed Luna and I lunging speedily at him. He was too late to react as we both smashed into his gut headlong literally lifting him off of the ground as we sped by. His grip was tremendous as he never dropped the time stone or his knife until the three of us smashed into a wall and Luna and I simply bouncing off of it in another direction. The moment the stone struck the ground, its spell wore off and time began moving again. Sensing that something was wrong, the others turned around to see the 'old man' in his true form. I then released Luna's paw and bounced off of the nearest wall in my direction and sped back toward him and snagged the time stone from the floor just as the formula wore off causing me to lose my bounce and sending me rolling along the rocky ground with the stone in my grasp. I had enough momentum to roll right into the creek which was deep enough to force me to swim back to the surface to gasp for air. By the time I swam to shore, Eric was there to offer his hand to help me out and I noticed that Selina and Ella all had their shuriken weapons aimed at him, effectively keeping him on the ground. Luna made Rose blush with anger by telling her that he was staring at her and drooling. Chills began to run through my entire body as I once again found myself soaking wet. Eric pulled me out of the creek and smiled at me with his usual kind expression, only this time I thought that I could detect a hint of pride. "Good job. You finally got it back." He congratulated me. I recalled the man's words to me and I called back to him hoping that he had regained consciousness, "What did you mean when you said 'you knew what it feels like to never see your family again'?" He turned to look at me with a flustered defeat on his face and said, "I killed them." He then picked up his knife from off of the ground and lunged at Selina. Selina reacted and thrust her blade through his gut and out of his back. Selina was shocked at his careless desperation because his face clearly suggested that he never saw that coming coupled with pain and regret, his arm still extended with the knife clearly aimed at Selina's throat and falling an entire foot short of its target.
Watching another recklessly attempt to take someone else's life I felt sick to my stomach and fell to my knees and actually began to dry heave. Coughing and nearly choking on my own throat, I continued asking myself, 'Why? Why do these people need to simply die? For what cause do people die?" These questions and more ran a race though my head and each lap made it ache more and more, so much in fact that I fainted and collapsed to the ground.