Well, this is long overdue!
Disclaimer: I do not own Grand Chase, but I do own both Kieran and Hannah. Though Fata does a better job of writing Kieran than I do.
I sat back down in my desk, knowing full well there was a test that I had only barely studied for during the lunch break. I was confident in my abilities, however, so I wasn't nervous. I was hardly the best in my class, but I knew I'd pass.
"Nervous?" an annoying voice piped up from behind me.
"No." Answering the voice always led to more trouble than it promised, however, and like a curse, it continued to pester me.
"Did you study?" I could hear the cocky smile in the voice without having to turn to see it.
"No." I knew this was a bad idea, but as always, something always urged me on to respond.
"Oh don't tease her too much!" A high voice pitched in.
But thankfully, before the voice could ask another annoying question, Elena walked in to start the class, and the voice was silenced by a glare from her.
"You all ready for the test today?" Her bubbly voice floated from the front of the room, and students straightened in their desks, pulling out materials to start the test.
I was just about to pull out my own pen when she dropped news that shocked us all. "Well too bad! There's not going to be a test today, after all!" She smiled brightly, and I knew there was something awful coming up instead.
A few of my classmates began to holler in joy, including the voice behind me. I froze in fear when Elena began to laugh manically at our joy.
"No… No test. Instead… I have another wonderful surprise planned for you all." Her smile was not genuine, and as I feared, not many in the class realized what was coming.
"What is this wonderful surprise, O Beautiful Elena?" the voice behind me teased, shamelessly hitting on Elena in a pitiful attempt to woo her favorable opinion.
"Why Kieran, I'm so glad you asked! There will not be a test today, but an exam! A physical exam! So put away your pens, we're all heading to the Battle Dome!" She laughed loudly, tilting her head back as she did so, like some sort of wicked witch. Which was actually partly true in this case.
The whole class paled. A physical exam meant not only knowing the skills, but proving you could show them off. For mages, it was extremely demanding. To make it worse, it was in the Battle Dome. There, there were all sorts of mechanisms that would throw all sorts of attacks at us, usually of the elemental variety, and we were expected to know how to deflect or beat each and every thing that was thrown at us. The room was designed to test one student or group at a time, throwing attacks from all sides. For more physical classes, they'd throw out machines that wielded weapons and would attack, and perhaps they'd still use those on us as well. It had happened in the past. It was never fun.
"And Kieran, since you did the class the favor of asking, you shall be the one to go first! Pick a partner, this is a partner exam!" Now the smile hit her eyes, though it was a positively evil one. Elena was known to have mood swings; she could be the nicest teacher in the school some days. Others, she was positively… Well, there weren't words in English that could describe her evil side.
As soon as she said this, though, I knew exactly who Kieran would pick. He was, by far, the strongest mage in the mage class. He was also the smartest. He passed these exams with flying colors every time. Every kid in this class would pay, even, to be partnered with him.
"Oh, Kieran~" The high voiced from earlier cooed at him.
I, however, would not.
"Arme." His cool voice stated confidently. I shivered, and Elena simply nodded, proceeding to jot it down in her notebook. "Sorry, Hannah, but Arme's more fun to play with." I heard him whisper to the high-voiced girl.
I now took the time to turn around. His straight brown hair was pulled up into a pony-tail. His hair wasn't Ronan-length, but it was still long by guy standards. It reached past his shoulders when he wore it down. His gold eyes glowed with a confident light, and he smiled wider when I turned to look at him. The girl beside him, Hannah, who the high voice belonged to, growled at me, and narrowed her black eyes.
Now, I rarely swear, but I figured this was an appropriate situation to do so. "I fucking hate you."
"And I love you too." He quietly chuckled, and winked at me, standing from his seat and easily strolling to the door, his long black cloak dragging behind him. "Sorry, toots." He whispered to the scowling black-haired Hannah. As the rest of the students began getting up and retrieving their weapons, remained seated in my desk until Elena called me to go.
"You'll pay for this, Arme." Hannah snarled at me as she pushed by me.
In the Battle Dome, armed with my simple purple short-staff that I twirled nervously while I waited, Elena explained the rules of the exam to us, and the terms for passing. She made it sound relatively simple, but I knew things would be a lot more complicated than what she stated. Kieran didn't seem phased, but things rarely phased him as far as I was aware. Elena then booted us out of the waiting room, and into the actual Battle Dome. The exam started instantaneously.
I actually fought relatively easily with Kieran, and we naturally fell into a pattern for watching each other's backs. He specialized in summoning magic and black magic, where I specialized in elemental and white magic. This gave us good coverage of all the basics, and the skeletons he summoned acted as great meat-shields to the attacks that were harder to dodge.
Necromancy was a hard magic to master. Most people went mad, the power eating away at their soul. It took someone with a seriously strong soul to be able to become a powerful, sane Necromancer. The Grand Chase Academy of Knighthood didn't let just anyone practice Necromancy. If someone wanted to specialize in such dark magic, they underwent serious testing to see if they could handle it. That alone was hard to pass. I had wanted to simply learn about black magic, but even that required passing a serious test, as even the knowledge was enough to destroy a person. I hadn't passed that test, so the fact that Kieran could be considered a Necromancer at all was a serious testament of his powers.
However, aside from summoning, his magic was only really useful on living targets. I quickly realized why he picked me as his partner. I had the spells that could take out our targets, and I could heal when either of us got hit. We made good partners, and unsurprisingly, passed with flying colors.
After the exam, Kieran offered me his hand to shake. I tentatively grabbed it, but "Good game," was all I got out of him. He let go of my hand and turned and left without another word. I shook my head; there was no way I could ever understand Kieran.
Kieran and I were allowed to leave after the exam, unless we wanted to watch. Kieran left right away, and I had a spare next block so it gave me almost 3 hours to myself. I didn't feel like going outside, so I went to the west wing of the school. There wasn't much of anything in the west wing anymore, except a few storage closets and some lockers. There was a staircase that no one used anymore at the end, so I went there. I didn't normally spend my time here, I normally went to the cafeteria or outside during my spares. I wasn't sure what force drove me so far away from my routine, but I didn't question it.
When I opened the door to the staircase, the first thing I heard was crying. Curious, I looked under the stairs and found- huge surprise, Dancer extraordinaire, super-popular Amy. I could not hide my surprise, and I let out a small gasp. This caught her attention, and her eyes widened when she saw me.
"Wh-what are you doing here?!" She shouted, clearly troubled. Her brown eyes were still full of tears, and she made no attempt to wipe them away.
"I could ask you the same thing," I sighed, looking at the pathetic girl. I couldn't fathom why she'd be crying, she had everything she wanted, and was everyone's envy. Though I honestly couldn't fathom why a person would envy this poor girl.
She leaned forward, took hold of my arm, and quickly pulled me under the stairs with her. "You can't tell anyone about this, you understand?!" She sounded desperate, so I couldn't help but comply with her absurd wish.
"Ok, if I can't tell anyone, can I at least know why someone like you would be crying under an abandoned staircase?" Her eyes darted away from me, and she looked down, letting go of me.
"You wouldn't understand…" her voice trailed off, and I knew she desperately wanted someone to understand.
"Try me." I had never been strong for someone before, had never tried to understand someone else's problems before. But I've been doing a lot of firsts this week, so I figured I'd give it a try for the clearly distressed dancer.
"Are you aware of when I dated Jin?" She looked up into the distance, not meeting my eyes.
"I wasn't aware you two broke up." This shocked her, and she turned to me and expressed this.
"What?! You never heard about me dating Sieggy?" I shook my head. I didn't keep up with gossip. "You don't listen to the gossip?" she asked a lot more quietly.
"No. I'm usually daydreaming when people are talking about that stuff."
Again, this shocked Amy. "Then maybe you will understand…" She trailed off, and I waited for her to continue. "I never actually dated Sieggy. He agreed to help spread the rumors to get people off my back about Jin."
"I know no one approved of you dating Jin, if that's what you mean."
"That's exactly what I mean." She then went into the tale of how she never broke up with Jin, and that they still dated in secret to this day. But the pressure of not getting caught was getting to her, and some of her closer friends were beginning to catch on that there was something going on between the dancer and the fighter. She told me about how she was teased and bullied about it, and how she could hardly take it anymore.
I tried my best to comfort the girl as she shared how she felt about Jin, as she told me she could never just end things with him, that that would be even worse and more painful than the bullying. But she knew that the teasing would get worse. Again, all I could do was try my best to understand as she poured her heart out to me. Not once did I judge her for any of her choices; I just listened. I was surprised; she seemed so strong on the outside.
When she finally finished her story, she rested her head on my shoulder and just cried for a while. I held her hand and rested my head against hers. I didn't know what else to do or say, but somehow it was enough for her. She finally finished crying when my spare was half over, and at this point she realized she had been crying for a good hour. I told her I didn't mind it.
"You won't tell anyone about this?" she still sounded worried.
"Of course not. This isn't exactly something that'd make a good story. Not that anyone would believe me, anyways." I tried to sound convincing.
She then looked up at me. "Tell me something, then, about you. A secret you don't want someone knowing. And then we'll be even." I knew she wouldn't let me go now until I did. I sighed, and tried thinking of something that could be held against me.
When she realized I was taking a while to think of something, she decided to start spouting off ideas. "Any love drama? Fights with friends? Enemies? Anything?"
Love drama gave me an idea, and I decided there couldn't be harm in sharing it with her, as she wouldn't tell as long as I didn't tell about her. "I know who's writing the love notes that Lass finds in his locker."
Amy sighed, and shook her head. "I don't want gossip, that's not something I can hold against you. But I am curious to know who that is; the best I've heard is that it's not a joke."
"It isn't a joke. And it is something you can hold against me, because I'm the person writing them."
A/N: I've had this chapter sitting on my laptop for... Oh gods, uh... A good few months. I wrote it before I submitted Chapter 5, so it's clearly been a while! I know I wrote it during maintenance, because when they take my Grand Chase away, I've got nothing better to do.
So I'm now posting this because I started working on Chapter 7 tonight, though I've grown tired and am only half done that chapter now. But hey, at least I'm still writing!
I'm honestly not sure how I feel about this chapter, or my writing skills in general lately. After all the amazing stories I read here on about Grand Chase, I feel like I shouldn't even be trying. So call it a bit of writers depression that's been keeping me from writing. Whatever it is, it's making it super hard to find the motivation to write. It also doesn't help that I hate my characters that I had to add in. No one supplied me with OCs of their own, so I had to use two of mine, and make them sort of out of character to fit them into my needs for the story. Which means I only hate them even more now. I feel like this entire chapter centers way too heavily on Kieran hitting on Arme, but I want to assure you all that there's a reason behind this that I literally JUST made up because I've changed the plot yet again so I'm sure you'll find out eventually but trust me there IS a point to it.
I really don't know what else to say about this story. Does anyone actually read this anymore...?
-Barrows