Chapter 24: Of Weapons and Magic
The calm air is replaced with a chilling arctic breeze that encompasses the skin on the body and leaves me feeling relaxed as I entered the temple and was greeted immediately by the walls laced with ice plates and light blue bricks alongside the Doric style columns that keep a mosaic style ceiling from falling down against the ground. I let out a light breath, causing a small cloud of fog to emerge through my lips. "You know, why can't an ice temple just for once be warmer on the inside?" I let out an exasperated sigh in response to the temperature. "This is going to prove detrimental to my next battle unless I can adjust to things before then…" I noted with a scoff at the beginning of my sentence before I began to casually walk across the walkway to the next room.
I was now in a hallway, where the temperature didn't feel nearly as chilling on my nerves as it did before, quite possibly because I was farther away from the entrance that was the main source of the wind. There was barely any light to illuminate the area, so I couldn't note any of the details on the walls beside me. Not that it mattered really, I don't feel like wasting time looking at architecture. I entered the next room, which was a maze without an open ceiling. I honestly do admit that were it not for the fact that I'd probably be punished for doing so, I'd summon a boulder and kick it through the walls to get to the other side with ease.
"Man, I just realized how quickly these temples go by when you're all alone and neglect all the unimportant details in the temple, heh…" I said, happily quipping about my situation while I take my hammer over my shoulder and hold it out beside me, since otherwise it would prove difficult to maneuver the corridors of the maze. "Got to wonder what the Overlord was thinking when he made these temples…The only difficulty lies in the battles. The 'puzzles' are pretty piss easy when you get down to it…" By the time I finished my little comment I had already made it halfway through the maze, proving my point with each passing step.
"Then again, I got Alex's memories to help me navigate the familiar locations… With them its just the new stuff that is even marginally difficult." With a smile on my face I confidently reached the end of the maze and continued down the hallway to the room on the other side. Speaking of memories, I specially recall that there was something major I had to remember about the next room. "What was it…" As I pondered to myself about the obstacle I'd have to face, I recalled that there were only four in this entire temple, the entrance, the maze, the next room, and the throne room where the Ice stone once laid.
Its strange…No matter how hard I tried to recall it, all I got was that the next room was the largest of the four. That could mean anything about the dangers I'd have to face in there, really. "Lets think here, maybe I have to-" As I take a step past the exit of the hallway, my foot declines past the normal level of the flooring and the rest of my weight follows suit not long afterwards, causing me to sink downward and land on an icy slope. My body was hurtling towards a gigantic, empty chasm, leaving me little time to react as my heart beat rapidly. I couldn't use my hammer to grind myself to a stop because of two factors, the vulnerability of the ice and the velocity of which I was sliding.
Sure, there was my flight, but who knew if that would even work, especially after what happened with my boosters in the Terra Cave. I focused on the edge of the slide's bottom, dirt and rocky chunks churning in the air like a tornado as they combined together into a solidified platform for me to land on. It was a three foot square, rugged in design yet strongly built enough for me to land on it sitting down with only my feet going slightly off the edge. I lay my hands against the left and right sides of the platform, keeping the tips of my fingers against the side so my hammer doesn't fall off without my consent. I caught my breath while sweating profusely from all parts of my face.
"I guess…That's why…He doesn't remember…That part…" I said with a bit of exhaustion due to how cold it was in the room, realizing that the excitement probably left Alex paralyzed for a bit and thus incapable of recognizing what he fell down. "Well, with that scare out of the way…" I composed myself and stood back up, using my terrakenesis to move my platform through the air so that I can reach the other side of the room with relative ease. I'm rather surprised by the lack of falling icicles, especially since my platform can't move that fast so it would be rather easy to stop me. "Has Mr. Reality given up on the puzzles by now?" I ask, especially since he left this room untouched after restoring all the other destroyed temple sections to their normal state.
In fact, he left the Terra Cave's chasm alone as well save for the booster problem. "I guess he realized the only challenges for me came from the battles, which is a rather smart move on his part come to think about it…" Why waste his time watching me easily do puzzles when I can get right into the action with little difficulty? After thinking about that, I wondered if that should be considered insulting or not. Either way, I got off the platform upon reaching the next hallway, and immediately noticed an incoming feeling of warmth as I raised my hand up and caused the rocks to crumble and fall into the pit.
Not too hot, but not too cold…That was the best way to describe the hallway I was in right now. I turned around and sniffed the warm, almost autumn-like air with a look of contention on my face. I look at the walls, noticing that the ice is melting off and making the bricks look more brown in color. I continue on my way through the hallway, quietly enjoying the environment contrast as I reach the halfway point of the passage, the incline rising with each passing step. "Alright, got to be careful…Alpha's 'Shadow' is probably really sadistic, cold and calculating…" With that comment, I enter the final room of the Frozen Palace.
It is a grand scale throne room with a tattered ruby rug rolled out on the ground that leads to an altar made out of three crystal snowflakes that shone a bright light onto a mosaic painting that depicts man with angelic wings being devoured by a bloody red beast. Sunlight leaks through the windows on the side of the room, their rays shining on the Ionic crystal columns that support the painting above, which in turn also causes the light to be spread throughout the room. The room had a vigorous sense of elegance to it, which felt nice to see after the rather subterranean beauty of the Terra Cave's shrine.
There was no one standing around, in a way reminding me of the first time I went to on this journey. I looked around at the pillars, hoping to sense any sudden movements via vibrations from the ground. Nothing was active in the area, and I didn't even see the shadow of Alpha's body being cast down from the top of the pillars. "Hmm…" I murmured. He had to be hanging around somewhere, and even if I couldn't detect his presence I had no reason to doubt my feelings. Guess the only way to trigger his appearance was to approach the altar…I cautiously moved towards it, keeping my hammer hung over my right shoulder just so I would be ready to swing at a moment's notice.
The only sound I still hear comes from my footsteps pattering against the floor. I make it halfway across the room without any change in activity from both the shadows or the terrain. "Come on Alpha…Where are you…" I glance back and forth, keeping that thought to myself as I continue to get a peg on his location. If only I could detect the murderous vibes that would be coming off of his body, then it would be easy to catch HIM off guard. As it stands now though, he holds the advantage. Everything has been aligned in his favor to get him the first strike against me, and all I can really do is hope that I'll have enough time to defend against it with my weapon.
I'm only a few steps away, and as I take my hammer and hold it horizontally with the rod in the grasp of both hands I hear movements in the air that remind me of the flapping of wings. I quickly turn my whole body around while flipping the direction of my weapon so its held backhanded behind me. The smooth steel of the hammer itself collides with a bulky, metal arm that I briefly see in the midst of my spin, and the person the limb is attached to backflips away with a surface to kick his arm off of before the blow of my hammer can do the job for him at the cost of damage to his arm. As I maintain my balance by stamping the top of my hammer into the ground and kneeling somewhat, I look up as the being descends and lands on the ground.
He is a golden-brown Goomba of above-average height who has two onyx-black, mechanical arms that are too complicated in design to describe. He wears an eye patch over his right eyes that has a band that wraps around his head. He also wears a shiny silver trench coat around his curved body, and has a pair of angelic wings attached to his backside. His right arm has currently been converted so a laser blade is sticking out through a small, energy producing barrel. It doesn't take me long to put two and two together and realize that he was planning on stabbing me through the back while I was assumedly unaware of his presence, but when I caught on he quickly changed tactics and flexed his arm to avoid breaking his weapon. Really, I expected this type of quick thinking from Alpha, but that just made it worse now that I was…
Before I finished that thought I looked at Alpha's body. He was missing the grim aura that all the other "Shadows" had worn thus far, and his eyes lacked the yellow tint that they had as well. He also wasn't saying anything, which was rather curious all things considered. Taking all these facts into consideration, it was obvious that I was fighting that real Alpha and not his "Shadow", but that didn't make sense. Mr. Reality clearly stated he didn't mind control any of the heroes, and their antagonistic behavior stemmed from the 'Midnight Channel's' influence on their true selves. "What's going on here…" Was what I asked myself after spending a while thinking about all that.
Whatever the case may be, I had no time to think about things as Alpha sped across the ground and headed my way with his sword still out. Though my hammer would be effective at damaging his arms, at the speeds he was currently going at I would eventually be caught up in the momentum of my swings and likely get cut in half for my troubles. So for the time being I kept my weapon stamped firmly into the ground, raising my right arm into the air and coating it from the fingertips to my elbow in pure, hard diamond. As Alpha then slashes in an arc I bring my arm down like a sharpened guillotine, moving just fast enough to break the energy off of his sword in half.
This leaves the Commander in a position where the rest of his blade's energy scrapes against my hardened skin, grinding it up bit by bit until the barrel itself is all that's left. However, while I was busy distracting myself with his sword, Alpha raises his left fist above the length of my arm and strikes me square in the jaw with the force of a pounding jackhammer, sending me flying through the air sideways with my eyes widened in surprise until I smash right through the pillar closest to me. Thankfully that breaks my momentum enough that I don't end up going through the nearby wall as well.
With a bit of soreness in my jawbone I lift my head up as my head starts pounding from the impact against the wall. My vision has become relatively blurred due to Alpha's well-timed attack, and as I try to focus on his figure he vanishes from the stop where he once stood. He was using his speed to keep me from perceiving where he was at, but that doesn't mean that I was without a way to counter his next attack. Though I still struggled to maintain vision, I stamped my foot into the ground, causing spiky rocks to shoot up around me in order to trap myself in a cave devoid of all light. However, the thickness of the rocks provided me a momentary guard against another blade slash from Alpha.
Letting out a relieved sigh as I can feel the pain in my head subsiding, I stood still for a moment and felt as Alpha landed on the ground outside of my protection. He was seven feet away, standing firmly in place as silence ominously shrouded the area. That was broken quickly by the light clicking of gears and the whirring of energy that was far too familiar for my liking. I knew what Alpha was about to fire at me now that I was a sitting duck inside of this stony, self-made prison, so I quickly swung my right foot out blindly to break through the closest stone spike, where I then ran through where it once stood even as the rocks crumbled into dust around me. I then curved my movements sharply to the left, skidding across the floor before I dashed out of the way of a massive, pulsating beam of ionic energy.
It's a good thing I moved when I did. Any second later and both of my feet would've been disintegrated, the wounds cauterized by the heat of the beam. Alpha's ionic energy was the most dangerous thing in his arsenal, bar none. It could burn through pretty much everything that got in its way, and its size made certain that any off-guard opponent would barely have the time to dodge once its fired. As I spin myself around, my bare feet burning from the roughness of the floor grinding against the skin, I see the results of Alpha's destructive attack. A huge chunk of the wall has been burned away along with the floor, leaving a scorched chasm in its place and a small cloud of steam rising out from all sides.
"To think that that could've been me…" As I worried about that, I looked towards my weapon and then past the curve of the pillar towards Alpha, noticing that he has been knocked back a few inches from the recoil of his blast. He was a bit stunned as he tried to convert his cannon arm back into a fist, so I chose to take advantage of that. With a brandish of my right arm my hammer pulled itself out of the ground and immediately spun rapidly towards the Commander's general direction. I made sure to keep it levitated so the act of it grinding against the floor wouldn't alert Alpha of its presence. Within seconds the hammer comes straight down upon Alpha's skull, hitting him with force that once the weapon moves away the Commander is bounced a few feet above the ground.
As he begins to fall I charged at my weapon, calling it back like a boomerang so it arrives back in the grasp of my right hand once I reach the halfway point between where I and it were. The backside of the hammer is held downwards so it can scrape up bits and pieces of the ground to increasing my weapon's already impressive girth, and as I near Alpha I swing it upright, smashing him in the face with enough force to send him flying straight up through the glass ceiling, crumbling all the debris I had built up in the meantime. I continued my run, creating a rocky incline with a mere thought so I could start running up the wall in front of me.
I was able to stick to the surface thanks to it being composed of rocks, and it also gave me the added bonus of not losing any traction so long as I kept moving. I saw the shadowy outline of Alpha's body descending towards my shadow, and I swung my hammer up so it could strike him. However, it was not going to be a simple matter of hitting him as it was before. He had recovered from my previous blows in the time it took for me to scale halfway up the wall. He summoned a rainbow colored energy shield from a socket in his right arm to block my hammer and launch it away with a quick swing.
He then charges ahead, keeping his right arm held beside his folded wings, and with a burst of speed he strikes me in the neck with the bulk of his left arm. My air circulation is briefly cut off with the blow to my larynx, and I am dragged away from the wall and slammed into the ground in the time it takes for me to flinch in response to the devastating blow. As dust and debris rises up around the impact zone, Alpha glares at me through the his eye patch, his body twitching as he grits his teeth and looks as though he is struggling to maintain control of his actions. He keeps me pinned to the ground for a few seconds, my vision becoming blurry the moment I notice the dust contorting around an invisible figure that floats behind Alpha's body.
Once he lets go, I'm allowed to breathe once more, a cough following the sudden inhaling of a few dust particles as he rises into the air and prepares his cannon arm once more. As the energy charged I had only a few minutes to react, and though my left arm was plastered to the crater made from my impact I used everything in my power to pull it out and swing my fingers to the right. An uneven pillar of rock flies out of the wall right next to Alpha, hitting the arm with enough force that it shoves it out of alignment the moment he fires the beam. The pulsating red energy burns through the air diagonally, the edge of the beam crashing ten feet away from my face and spreading the energy outward along the floor for two feet as it tries to smolder through it.
While Alpha is dealing with the beams misaim, I pulled my other arm out of the crater, using the hands on the edges to push myself out with relative ease. Once the five seconds it takes to do that have passed I'm sitting up again, getting on my feet not long afterwards. I then see the crimson light from the beam disappear from the corner of my eye, and knew that I wouldn't have long before he launched another attack. In the midst of everything else, I had lost track of my hammer, so until I could see it I would have to rely on my fist and the environment to attack, since the Commander wouldn't give me a moments notice to concentrate and create my own rocks.
I stamped the ground, cracking an area in front of me that sends a chunk of rock into the air until the top is level with my head. I raising me knee up, breaking apart the bottom of the massive chunk but at the same time it allows me to say "Screw it" to gravity and cause it to launch up higher than it did when it was first created. But Alpha was ahead of me, and though I don't see where it comes from I hear a ticking object attaching itself to the top of the chunk as I watch Alpha swiftly fly away from the path of the girth-y projectile. The ticks increase in both speed and intensity until a sudden explosion blows it up entirely.
The burning chunks of rock flying my way, but even with the fire element added to them all I have to do is hold my hands up to stop them in place just milliseconds before they touch my palms. The molten rain is dispersed as I swish my arms out, just in time for two sharp blades to strike me square in the back. I'm frozen in place by the pain, my skin beginning to leak blood that I feel dripping down me until it goes to my shirt and soaks into the cloth. While my body was reflected in the smoke and smoldering rocks, I held my dirty hands behind my back and reached around for the objects that impaled me. There were two shurikens that I quickly pulled out, even though I was forced to wince for my troubles.
Had these projectiles dug any deeper into my body, they would've paralyzed me with pain via the nervous system, and that just couldn't happen now. I turned around, casually flinging the four-pronged metal objects away as I see Alpha on the ground once more with two slits in his palm that the projectiles obviously were fired from. I took my shirt and pulled it off momentarily, raising it so I could proceed to wrap it around the area where the wounds were inflicted just to decrease the amount of blood loss. "Come on Mew, you can't let him get the best of you…" I thought to myself, gritting my teeth and steeling my mind with determination as I thrust my right fist out beside my hip the moment I finish tying the shirt around my gut.
I could control metal too, since it was based around the Earth element, but I wasn't planning to use the shuriken until it would prove beneficial for me to do so. I stood in place, motionless in all of my limb's movements as I kept my eyes sharply focused on Alpha's position. The moment he moves, I will still be able to follow him, that I was certain of. "Make your move, Commander." I taunted the Goomba, even though he likely couldn't hear me the way he was now. He hesitantly moves his right arm back, sealing the slits he created while his facial features quiver in an attempt to make a discernable expression of his anger.
But after his hesitation has ended he pulls his left foot back, kicking himself forward at me while drawing a sword out of both of his converted arms. I meet his attack by coating my arms in diamond, swinging one out to match the arm that was sent my way and blocking the sword as it is swung at my face. What follows is a flurry of blows from both ends, with the tips of his two swords poking and scratching at my diamond arms to try and break through. After hovering in mid-air for a bit, Alpha plants himself on the ground and increases the speed of his slashes to try and find an opening through my arms that thrust outward like bullets. His body becomes surrounded by a field of bright, crimson light created by the afterimages of his slashes, and the mesmerizing sensation caused my glaring at them for even a few seconds forces me to close my eyelids and rely on instincts to keep going in order to avoid making a costly mistake.
He wasn't letting up, but I had no intention of backing down either even though he had the stamina to keep this up forever. I kept my stance firm by having rocks crawling up below my feet, wrapping their hardened forms around them until they finally locked into place halfway between the ground and my kneecaps. It would now take a lot more effort from Alpha to push me back, and this little maneuver gave me more time to figure out how to counter his furious onslaught. There was just something not right with how Alpha was acting. He may be many things, but there was no evidence beforehand to suggest that he would act like such a berserker.
The real Commander would be crafty in his movements, even as a "Shadow". He would use his smarts and arsenal to outwit and overwhelm his opponents, I had gone over this beforehand, but while this Alpha knew how to use his arsenal he just simply wasn't using it as well as he could be. Once again I see the Commander gritting his teeth firmly, his left eye wincing in pain as he forces his blades to grind against the ground in order to slow them down. At first I thought he was giving me an opening to strike him with, but as the dust was kicked up from his blows I was able to clearly see the outline of the same invisible figure standing behind him as I did earlier.
Everything made sense at that point. The reason for Alpha's erratic behavior stemmed from being controlled by someone else. After widening my eyes slightly out of surprise over the fact that the Commander was able to resist long enough to assist me, I nodded to thank him for the hint to his puppeteer's existence, and immediately focused all of my strength into my right foot. I pushed forward, keeping the pressure light on the stony root while I waited for an opening between the storm of slashes that Alpha kept going. When that time was nigh, I broke apart the rocks with ease, kicking the Commander straight in the face and stopping his swords by punting him through the air.
Alpha fell down, but regain his composure quickly enough to land on his feed, skidding across the ground a few inches while his arms turned back to normal. After lowering my foot I looked out at the space where the invisible figure presumably stood, brandishing my finger towards it with a furious look in my eyes. "Show yourself, Shadow Alpha!" There was a bit of silence amongst the battlefield, disrupted rather quickly by the familiar, menacing laughter that echoes off of the walls around us. "EHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHE!" That very noise sent an ominous chill through my spine, my body stiffening up as goosebumps pop up all-across my skin. I lower my arm down as I watch the air behind Alpha spasm and distort to reveal the being responsible for the laugh.
Wearing a foggy, purplish cloak with yellow embroidery that hid the violet robe she wore underneath, the being raised her thin, lime-green, wrinkly, four-fingered hands into the air and gave me an arrogant smirk with the callous, yellow-eyed glare on her face piercing deep into my memories and my soul. She was Cackletta, a witch of unimaginable power that brought about many of the troubles for Alex Whiter and the others heroes during their journeys. But if my assumptions were correct, she was supposed to be dead by now, never again to be seen by mortal eyes. Yet save for the eyes, she had been brought back in full before me. It was with her presence that I remembered what the Chronicler had told me the moment we met, about how Mr. Reality has no influence over the dead, a theory which was shot down with Cackletta's sudden return to the living. This raised plenty of questions about the legitimacy of the Chronicler's identity, and as I slanted my eyebrows down in anger and confusion I murmured to myself "What the hell is going on here?"
Next Time: Desperation Against the Chessmaster