Chapter 5: Flight!!!
Tear, the replicas of Sync and Natalia, and a dozen Oracle Knights... yes, Luke and his two friends were totally surrounded, no exit in sight.
"Well, what shall it be? Are you going to surrender without a fight and survive, or will you fight and die?", Dist´s voice was to be heard through the city.
"I choose neither!", Luke yelled.
"Ah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah!!!", Dist laughed. "Everything concerning this situation speaks against you, my ravishingly dense barbarians! I have eliminated the leader Kimlasca´s, queen Natalia! Und all royal forces - generals and co., to be precisely - are confined to the castle as well! Thus Kimlasca´s has lost its every protection and is at my mercy!"
"That´s what you think! Once we´ve entered the castle saved Guy, you won´t have anything left to laugh at!", Luke yelled back at him.
"Guy? Guy who?", Dist giggled. "Oh, you mean that cute lapdog of queen Natalia! Who knows if he´s even alive anymore! And even so, first, nobody is going to listen to him anyway, second, it will be impossible to enter the castle, and third..."
"Third?", Anise repeated.
"Third... um... uh... Third... I... well, the third fact is qu-quite easy... it´s... I mean... that... Third... uh... YOU´RE ALL STUPID BARBARIANS!!!"
"Äääh....", was Luke´s, Anise´s and Florian´s only answer to that while Tear and Sync were sighing deeply.
"Anyway, I win, you lose!", Dist cackled.
"I think he´s right.", Luke said.
"What?! Luke, you can´t be serious!", Anise shouted, enraged. "You can´t just give up!"
"Of course not! I just mean he´s right about us not being able to enter the castle.", Luke corrected her. "So we´re just going to..."
"Yes...?", Florian asked.
"SCRAM!!!", Luke scramed and punched the ground with his fist. Seventh Fonon streamed inside the ground, and mere second later said ground split open and a giant circular wall of stone surrounded Luke and his friends, protecting them.
"What the...?!", Tear shouted while Sync was aiming at the wall and shouted: "Thunder Blade!!!" A sword of thunder flew at the wall of stone and exploded, the wall still standing.
"Tch! What is the meaning of this!? You idiots have practically built your own prison!", Sync snarled.
"He´s right, Luke!", Anise agreed, worried. "We may be save in here, but we´re not going to get anywhere with this!"
"Maybe so, but this way they can´t see from where we´re going to attack next.", Luke whispered. "On the count of three, you´re going to storm towards the harbour, got it?"
"But what about Guy?", Florian asked.
"That´s exactly the point.", Luke said. "If we want to safe Guy, we have to reach the harbour first!"
"O... Okay...", Anise said, hesitating.
"One...", Luke started and looked at the castle. `The harbour lies south east of the castle, so...´, he thought. He turned towards south east. "... two..." He aimed with both hands at the stone wall. ".. THREE!!!" A gigantic ray of light - a hyperresonance - shot from his hands and destroyed part of the stone wall he had aimed at as well as part of the Oracle Knights standing behind it. He, Anise and Florian started running immediately, using the enemy´s confusion, and Luke knocked out the Oracle Knights in his way.
"Thunder Blade!!!", they heard Sync yelling behind them.
"Don´t stop now!", Luke shouted at the other two while storming inside one of the elevators that would transport them to a deeper area of the city.
"Cut off the elevator´s rope!!!", Tear bellowed.
"Uh-Oh!", Luke said, not having thought of that.
"Great!", Anise who would have liked to strangle him now screached, leaned with her body out of the elevator, aimed with her staff above her and screamed: "Limited!!!" A ray of light shot down from the heavens and hit the Oracle Knights who were trying to cut off the rope.
"Idiots! Do it!", Sync shouted, having nearly reached the elevator.
"C´mon! C´mon!!", Anise begged the elevator to speed up, and knocked out more Oracle Knights, trying to cut off the rope. Sync was nearly there.
"What´re we gonna do?! What´re we gonna do?!", Florian shouted, desperate.
"Thunder Blade!!!", Sync shouted again, and the sword of thunder cut off the elevator´s rope, the elevator falling down and crashing on the ground, destroyed.
"Take one of the other elevators and search for their corpses!", Sync ordered the Oracle Knights who did as told.
But they could search as long as they wanted: Luke, Anise and Florian had jumped out of the elevator and had clung to one of the many roofs of the houses the elevator had passed.
"Theeeeeeeeeeeere you go!", Luke groaned as he lifted Florian onto the roof before running over the roofs of the city towards another elevator that would take them deeper inside the city.
The castle of Baticul seemed like there was nobody in it anymore, the hallways totally destroyed because of the steady sephiroth tree´s steady shaking while lifting the building higher and higher. Only the numreous bloody corpses of military officers and other members of the military showed what had been going on moments before inside the castle. But the castle wasn´t empty, no... Several corridors away from a dead liger, Guy, his unconscious son on his shoulders, hobbled through the hallways, the leg the liger had grabbed, broken.
"Damnit...", Guy panted and finally, hidden behind a pillar, sank to the ground. `I was lucky the person who had been ordering the liger had gone away.´, he thought. `Whoever that was must have thought I was done for when that monster had grabbed me.´ He looked at his son whom he had leaned against a wall, happy to see that at least he was okay. `I hope Luke and the others are okay. I´m sure Baticul isn´t the only city that´s going to be attacked. Now that Kimlasca is in their hands, their next destination will probably be--´ But he couldn´t finish his thoughts, because he noticed just in time that something came crashing down towards him. He ducked just before the giant scythe hit him, instead destroying the pillar. The destroyed pillar wavered and was about to fall onto Guy and Kamui. "Damnit!", Guy shouted, grabbed his son and rolled to the side.
"This is where your little adventure ends!", a giant person with an even more gigantic scythe shouted and aimed again at Guy and Kamui who where still laying on the ground.
"There!", one of the Oracle Knights who had spotted something pink behind a house wall shouted and stormed with his colleagues towards the dark alley. But only a pink frazzle of cloth that had been glued to the wall greeted them. "Argh!"
"Honestly! Why do we have to use my clothes for such a stupid decoy!?", Anise grumbled while they were running through side streets and climbing over houses instead of using the elevators.
"Just think about what Jade had once said when we´d entered the Tower of Rem.", Luke explained. "Replicas are, when created, actually like newborns. Just like me when Master Van had created me. I didn´t know anything, neither how to speak, nor how to walk. But if you implant information inside a replicas memory, they can do basic things. It must be the same for those replicas. They all have basic information, like how to walk and that they have to obey Dist and his minions, but nothing else. With other words, they´re not really smart."
"Ah, I understand! And since Anise´s pink clothes are the most obvious about us, you used it as a decoy, because they would even remember that colour with their small intelligance and would fall for it!", Florian said.
"Hmm... I´d never thought you´d remember something the Colonel once said.", Anise teased.
"Instead of making fun of me, you should rather be quiet and run faster!", Luke snarled and jumped from a roof deeper inside the city, towards the harbour.
"What exactly are you planning to do at the harbour?", Florian asked.
"Well, Dist has actually given me the answer to the problem of how to reach the castle.", Luke explained. "Once we reach the harbour, we´ll take a ship that´s headed toward Sheridan."
"Sheridan?"
"Yes. And there we´re going to ask Aston to lend us the Albiore II, so--"
"-- so we can fly up to the caste!", Anise shouted loudly, finally understanding.
"There they are!", an Oracle Knight who had heard Anise shouted.
"Ooops!", Anise said while Luke and Florian were glaring at her.
"You won´t get away!", the Oracle Knight shouted and stormed, his weapon raised, together with several colleagues towards the group.
"Did anyone see what´s behind that wall?", Luke asked the other two and pointed at the wall behind them.
"Huh?!", Florian started.
"We´ve just jumped down from there! What´s behind this wall?! A house?!"
"N-No, a street, I think. Why?", Anise asked.
"Good!", Luke yelled, punched the wall and released Seventh Fonons out of his body that destroyd the wall who now blocked the Oracle Knight´s way. "C´mon!" An arrow hit the ground mere centimetres before them.
"Not so fast!", a feminine voice shouted, and Natali´s replica jumped down from a wall and landed in from of them, an arrod pointed directly at Luke´s heart.
"Out of the way!", Anise spat.
"I don´t think so.", the replica answered. "If you want to pass, you have to fight me. But the question is: Can you fight against someone who looks like you´re frind? Well?" She smirked triumphantly.
It was just like back then with Frings, Iemon and Mary... Even though they know that she was merely a replica, they couldn´t just fight against someone who looked like somebody who they´d once been friends with...