Chapter 8: Lost

When we reached the Hideout, we were completely silent as we parked our Mechas and split up.

"There's going to be a strategy meeting in ten minutes in the living room," Mom told me before I walked up to my room.

"Okay," I said simply before I entered my room and closed the door behind me.

"You shouldn't be so hard on yourself," Speedy and Yang told me as I removed my backpack and tossed my blasters on the bed.

"Why?" I demanded. "It's a Shane's job to protect SlugTerra, but we couldn't even protect a single cavern!"

Yang jumped on my shoulder and tried to smack me, although I barely felt it. "Jacob Taylor Shane, pull yourself together!" he yelled. "Did you really expect to waltz right in and beat the Dark Bane without breaking a sweat? If so, you're a bigger fool than the Council—I mean, than we thought."

"What did you say?" I demanded. "What 'Council'?"

He turned away from me. "It's nothing, nothing at all," he muttered.

I glared at him and held him in my hand. "Yang," I growled. "Spill. Now."

He continued to look away from me for over a minute until he sighed. "I just had to go and say something. They're gonna be so pissed that a human found out," he grumbled to himself before he turned to me. "At the beginning of SlugTerra, roughly one year after the Dark Bane were pushed out and down to the Deep Caverns, the oldest, wisest, and most powerful slugs formed together to create a group that would keep an eye on SlugTerra and indirectly influence everything. This became known as the Council, and humans only heard of it from lore. They had direct control of who the Gift, the source of your powers, chose as the recipient of its powers, for they were wise enough to see what a person is like. The moment you were born, a dozen other children were as well. This was also the moment that the Gift had to choose a person to become a Gifted. They debated for over a week for who was to become the newest Gifted, destined to be the leader of them all and keeper of the secret of the Gift. One member of the Council, an ancient Enigma, had the ability to see into the future, and saw that you would grow to be a great person. She had to convince the leaders, the Elemental Slugs, though, but they decided to. Ever since that day, they worked hard to keep you safe yet able to deal with everything you came across. The Flame Elemental Slug even slipped Eli the idea for SlugTerra University, an idea the Enigma saw long ago, when she belonged to one of the first Gifted, who wrote the notes to the five of you in that single hidden chamber."

My jaw dropped from the sheer information. "W-What…?" I whispered.

Speedy shushed me, gesturing for Yang to continue. "The Council continued to pull tiny strings during your entire life," he continued. "When you met—"

"He doesn't need to know that much," Speedy whispered to him, but I didn't pay attention as Yang continued.

"Bottom line, you owe the Council for everything that has happened to you, from your powers to Karina wanting Eli to adopt you, even the name of your Mecha," Yang explained.

"Wait, does that mean they had something to do with my father's death?" I asked him.

He shook his head. "They would never do something that would kill a SlugTerran. As a matter of fact, they were extremely surprised that those thugs even appeared, they should've been robbing a store that would've gotten them arrested," he explained. "Anyways, because we're your main slugs, we've been nominated to join the Council in the future, as it is with the main slug of every Gifted. Because of this, we have to prove to them that they were right to put their faith in you. What do you think they'd do if they saw you freaking out after a single loss?" he demanded.

I sighed and lowered my head. "I see your point," I muttered back at him before Emma ran in.

"Come on, you're gonna miss the strategy meeting," she told me before noticing how serious we were acting. "Did I interrupt something?"

I smiled and walked over to her, kissing her gently on the cheek. "Nope, let's go," I told her, leading the way to the living area, where the others were gathered.

"I declare this strategy meeting started," Mom said when we were all there. The group consisted of Kord, Pronto, Kaiya, Vinyl, Mark, Leo, Luke, Emily, and me.

"First order of business: coming up with a stronger strategy for future battles," Mom stated. "Today, we rushed everything, and that's a contributing factor to our loss."

"'Contributing factor'?" Leo demanded. "We were outnumbered and outclassed, just admit it. We lost because we weren't good enough, and there were too many of them." He continued to go on about how we lost when I grabbed his arm, silencing him.

"Leo, stop," I told him quietly. "We all know this, why do think we aren't arguing with you?"

He opened his mouth again to talk, but just sat down.

"Thank you, Jake," Mom told me before a large holographic screen popped up, showing a general layout of a cavern. "Almost every cavern has a layout similar to this," she said. "What happened today is that we pushed in from a single point," she added, pulling up a simulation of us flooding in from one entrance. "Almost every cavern has more than one entrance, which is how they get reinforcements in. In future battles, though we need to cut off their reinforcements. I propose forming a squad that will search for their reinforcements and cut them off. If they are using a form of portal to teleport them in, the squad will invade from a secondary entrance. We will split the new recruits between the groups. Also, we need to put more work into our equipment. In the first place, the recruits need to select a team to train to MegaMorph abilities, which is when Jake will equip their blasters with accelerators. Kaiya, Luke, and Kord, you will continue to work on upgrading our Mechas and those of the recruits so that they will be stronger and more able to withstand combat, such as increased armor, power, and anything else you can think of. Mark and Vinyl, you will help Jake upgrade the blasters when the time comes, and assist Kaiya, Luke, and Kord with the Mechas. When you aren't doing that, train the recruits with the rest of us. During the next attack, we will split up into designated groups once we make it far enough into the cavern. Kaiya and Kord will lead two separate Mecha Warfare squads, Jake and I will be the heads of the top slingers. Luke, Emma, Pronto, and Leo, you will be behind us providing support. Mark and Vinyl, you will upgrade your drones with these," she told them, tossing Mark and Vinyl each a data drive. "Mario will lead a sniper squadron that will hang in the back of the main invading force, using Speedstingers to take out as many Darkbane as possible in one shot. If any Behemoths appear, Luke and Jake will take care of them, and if any Eels show up, Kaiya and Kord will deal with them with energy lights. Jake, you will have Kaiya, Pronto, and Emma's groups with yours, and you'll be the secondary force. Luke, Kord, and Leo's groups will be with mine as the primary attacking force. In the case that the cavern we have to invade only has one entrance, we will position our forces in a 'V' formation. Everyone with close range weapons will be on the outside covering us, and the rest will fire from inside the formation. Kaiya will lead on Skies, Leo will cover her back with his spear, Luke and Jake will be behind him with their blades, and Kord and I will be behind them. The rest of you will then fill out the formation as the recruits fill in the empty spaces, firing at the Darkbane as we work our way in. Am I missing anything?" she asked us.

We shook our heads, so she nodded and sat down as Mark and Vinyl stood up, bringing up a new hologram of a strange device.

"In our spare time, Vinyl and I have been working on a new project," Mark began. "This device is explosive like a Grenuke, but is much more powerful. I actually got the idea from Jake's use of super-concentrated slug energy. It uses incredibly concentrated slug energy, focuses it into a Vitalis crystal, which could store the energy if our calculations are correct—"

"They're correct," Vinyl assured him, so he continued.

"You see, the main property of concentrated slug energy is the production of energy, hence the use in most power reactors. In high enough amounts, though, it becomes so unstable that a single bump or fluctuation in power could set it off. The Vitalis crystal is great at controlling energy, so the crystal combined with the energy would be an incredibly powerful, yet stable, source of power. If the crystal is even the slightest bit damaged with the energy in it, though, it would cause unlimited destruction to those without the slightest bit of slug energy in them. SlugTerrans have lived here so long that we have very minute amounts of it in our blood, but Darkbane don't. If we could get it into a large group of them, or even their fortress, we could wipe them out of the cavern."

"There are still problems with getting the energy and crystals, though," Vinyl explained. "Slug energy concentrated enough to be that dangerous would be so unstable that it would detonate instantly, so we'd need a source with almost unlimited energy. Second, even though Futuria Cavern has a lot of Vitalis crystal deposits, they aren't refined enough. They're only cut enough to handle enough energy to do their purposes, no more. We'd need a Vitalis Crystal that is cut to perfection so that it can handle the energy, and it would have to be fairly large. The ones they get in Futuria are about as big as your finger, and we'd need one the size of a fist to be useful."

My eyes widened as I remembered a certain hidden cave with several very large crystals of numerous kinds.

"Any one of the crystals from that cave would be more than enough," Yang whispered to me, figuring out what I was thinking, so I stood up.

"I might be able to get my hands on a crystal for you, but I won't make any promises," I told them, cutting Vinyl off mid-speech as she explained the bomb. Basically, once it's in place, a button on a remote triggers a large hammer that would destroy the crystal, releasing all of the energy at once.

"That's great!" Mark told me.

"We'd still need a power source that could handle it, though," Vinyl said, making Kord, Pronto, and Mom look at Kaiya.

"What?" Kaiya snapped when she noticed the staring. "I don't even think I have any discs left," she snapped, but Mom just raised her eyebrow, making Kaiya hold out a simple package from her bag. "I didn't trust anything else to keep it safe," she muttered simply as Mom handed the disc to Mark.

"That's your power source," she told Mark.

"I'll go get the crystals," I told them, grabbing my blasters and walking out.

"You're going to need someone to go with you in case something happens!" Emma called out, chasing after me as I jumped on my Mecha. She kept up with me as I raced out of the cavern, on my way to the cavern Shanai and Red Hook live at.

"Alright, but you can't accompany me past the entrance to the cavern, I need to do the rest alone," I told her. "Only two people know about where I'm going, and I can't tell anybody about it," I explained before I revved the engine and we went faster, almost flying across the ground as we left the cavern.

We arrived at the hidden cavern a few hours later because of how fast we were going, and when we arrived, we stopped at Shanai's house and Emma waited outside as I walked in.

"Welcome, Jacob," Shanai said calmly as Yang hopped over to Ping and they began talking.

I bowed and sat across from where she was. "The first battle for SlugTerra has been lost, but Mark has a plan to save us," I said before I explained the concept of the bomb. "It would cause no harm to SlugTerrans or slugs, but would be deadly for the Darkbane," I finished before she nodded.

"I see, you need to take a Vitalis Crystal from the Gift Chamber," she said calmly. "It is not my decision to make, though," she added. "As current Guardian, you must ask the Gift itself for permission to take its treasures."

I nodded and stood up. "Thank you. If you don't mind, Emma will stay here. She insisted on accompanying me, but could you make sure she doesn't try to follow after I'm gone? "I asked her.

She nodded. "Yes, that I could do," she said, so I walked out.

"So? Where are you going?" Emma asked as I walked toward the woods. She began to follow when I stopped.

"I'm sorry, but you can't come with me, like I told you," I told her. "This is a very important secret that nobody can know," I added before using my Shadow Walker to teleport to the entrance to the Gift cave, where I placed my hand on the wall and it slid to the side, so I placed my blasters on the ground before I walked into the small cave.

"Well, here goes nothing," I muttered to myself before I kneeled before the Gift, its warmth and radiance filling me with energy. "Oh, great Gift, source of my powers, I seek your permission to take one of your treasures so that I may strike down the Darkbane who have once more invaded our lands and are spreading their evil throughout SlugTerra."

I waited for a good five minutes before I saw a Vitalis Crystal the size of my chest dislodge itself from the wall and float over to me. "Thank you for your generous offering," I told the Gift as I took the Crystal and walked out. I never even knew giant crystals filled with power took flattery, but it worked.

"That's huge!" Emma exclaimed when I got back to the Mechas. I wrapped it in several layers of cloth as I strapped it onto Stryker and we got ready to leave.

I nodded as we started to leave, although we had to go at a slower pace because of the weight. "I was surprised I could get such a large crystal," I commented before I revved the engine and we took off. It took us a few more hours than normal to get back to the Hideout, but when we did, I handed the large crystal to Mark.

"Don't ask where I got it," I told him before he could ask. He just nodded, though, and gestured for me to follow him in.

"Since you are so good at concentrating and handling slug energy, we would like you to help us concentrate it," Mark explained. "We could figure it out, but it'd be better to have somebody help us that knows what he's doing."

I nodded. "Sure thing," I replied before they showed me to a completely sanitary room, where there was a huge tub of slug energy. "Whoa, all of that was from the little package Kaiya had?" I asked him.

He nodded. "You don't want to know what it is," he said simply before I began siphoning energy from the tub into a concentrator.

"How strong do you want it?" I asked him.

"As strong as you can get it," he told me, so I set the machine to its highest setting, Vinyl handing me a small piece of Vitalis Crystal that she had managed to cut to perfection.

"We're just going to do a few test runs, so we're using very small pieces," she explained as I placed the crystal in a test tube that the concentration would go into. The crystal wouldn't start absorbing energy until it was submerged, so it would take a while.

"Because of the high concentration you want, it'll take about an hour," I told them before I walked out to the main area of the Hideout, where Mom was waiting for me.

"I need you to do a practice duel with Leo for the recruits, give them an example in their learning," she told me. "No bladed weapons, normal Velocimorph and MegaMorph only, no fusion shots," she added, so I left my fusion staff in the Hideout as I walked out and to a large open area, where Leo was waiting with a large crowd around the clearing.

"Let's do this," Leo told me happily as he loaded his Hop Rock.

I nodded and loaded my Tazerling, Tesla, before somebody blew a whistle, signaling for us to begin. Our first slugs took each other down, so he loaded a Phosphoro and I loaded Yang. Yang's power, even in only MegaMorph, was great enough that he overcame the Phosphoro with a Shadowblak attack, then made Leo back up with a few shadowy stars.

"That was a lucky shot," he growled at me, loading his Sand Angler as I loaded River, my Riviera. As she took her dolphinesque velocimorph form, she created a frozen wave that took all of the Sand Angler's strength to destroy, returning it to its protoform.

"Luck had nothing to do with it," I told him, loading Brisingr as he loaded Burpy. They were both charged to MegaMorph, but Burpy was so powerful overall that I launched an Aquabeek afterward, returning him to protoform before I launched a Lariat, gluing Leo's mouth shut.

"Not funny," he growled as he ripped off the goop, launching a series of five slugs in a row.

"Jump into tubes, now!" I told my slugs, drawing both of my blasters. I'd fire, reload, and repeat until Leo and I were each standing with our original slugs, Speedy (me) and Save (Leo).

"Looks like it's finally time to figure out which of our slugs is the most powerful," I stated as I took careful aim at Leo, charging Speedy to MegaMorph as Leo did the same thing with Save.

"Let's do this the old-fashioned way," I whispered to Speedy before I turned the blaster away from Leo, pointing it at a tree. Leo's eyes widened for a split second when he realized what I was planning before we fired our slugs. Save flew right at me, glowing with green energy, but Speedy raced off, ricocheted off a tree, knocked Save back into protoform, and continued to ricochet around before he hit the side of Leo's blaster, deactivating it.

"And the winner is Jake!" Kord called out, having been the referee of the match without us realizing it.

"Yeah, yeah, that was just a lucky shot," Leo muttered as we gathered our slugs and returned to the Hideout. There was still quite a bit of time left before the Vitalis could completely absorb the energy, so I grabbed Leo's blaster and went to the workshop, where quite a bit of Blaster-Smithing equipment was laid out.

"Your blaster's trigger pull looked a bit sluggish," I said as he began to protest before I carefully removed the trigger guard and the casing, carefully oiling the mechanism before I lowered the tension. "It won't take as much force to pull the trigger now, so be careful," I told him after I examined it. I then went with Leo to a clearing in the forest, where we trained with our weapons.

"You've trained a lot while I was gone," I commented as he spun his spear around expertly.

He nodded before he lunged at me, but I easily blocked it. "Don't be so obvious in your movements," I told him before his eyes began to glow a black and green color specific to the Shadow Clan and his movements become much smoother as he disarmed me within a second.

"What…was that?" I gasped as I tried to keep up with his actions. His eyes returned to normal, but it was still wigging me out.

He shrugged. "It started not long after you vanished, but I kept it secret for a while," he commented.

"Do you know what that power you used was?" I asked him. He shook his head, so my eyes lit up as well. "It felt like the power of one of us, a Gifted," I whispered before his eyes lit up as well, black with streaks of neon green.

He grinned before we reigned in our powers. "I think I know where we can go to get some answers," he told me before we ran to the Mechas.

"Where are the two of you going?" Mom demanded as we raced into the garage.

"We need to go do some investigating for something," I replied before we took off, our Mechas racing through the jungle as we passed through numerous caverns. After over an hour of riding, very gloomy, the edge of the Shadow Clan's territory.

"Looks like it's time for some answers," I commented as a group of Shadow Clan appeared.

A/N: Hello again, everyone! I know, I know, I'm REALLY late on this update, and I apologize endlessly for that. College - mixed with life in general - have made it hard for me to gather my thoughts together enough to write. Anyway, I managed to put this out, and i can make no guarantees as to when I plan to update this again, but I will try my best. Anyway, see ya next time, and I'd love it if you checked out my other stories (horrible advertising, I'm sorry).

See ya!

~dicarten-ice