Hey, I'm back with a fifth chapter. Sorry if this one seems a bit rushed, but when I heard the season finale was in two weeks, I kinda started to freak out. Anyway, enjoy!
Day 3
Zane's head spun as he felt light-headed and dizzy from running without enough rest. His body ached all over the place, but his legs were by far the worst. His wounds were nothing short of agony. It hurt just to breathe.
He felt like he couldn't go on anymore. He just couldn't. He couldn't lose the ghosts no matter how hard he tried. The farther he ran, the more he couldn't find his way back home.
At the thought of the word home, he thought about his friends and the others he knew in Ninjago. He thought again about what would happen if the ghosts did kill him. Not what would happen to him, but how it would impact his family and friends.
What if they couldn't find his body at all? Then they would never be able to find any real closure.
No. Zane couldn't do that to them. He couldn't give up now. They were ninja, and ninja never quit.
He would get back home, no matter what it takes.
Zane remembered the injury he suffered last night. He ran a system check to see what it had damaged.
"It seems only a few components to my self-repair system are damaged." He said to himself. He breathed a sigh of relief as it hadn't badly damaged anything important.
He went to close his arm panel when he saw his hands, covered in his blood.
Startled at the sight, Zane looked down and saw his gi soaked in silver liquid.
He rolled up the top of his gi to get a better look at his injury. It was a huge slash about the size of his palm, a gaping wound that oozed silver. Zane reached over his back and tenderly felt the cut on his back. That one didn't feel as bad as the first.
But by the looks of it, Zane had lost quite a bit of blood.
"I need to tend to my injuries if I wish to keep going." He said to himself.
He examined his wound. He would need to stop the bleeding first.
Searching his data banks, he saw that in a survival situation, cobwebs would do the trick.
Forcing himself to get up, Zane walked into the forest to search for webs. He looked among low branches that were within his reach, grabbing them and balling them up as he went. As he walked among the trees, he noticed something was...off.
Looking around the forest, he realized he had never seen this place before. The trees were thick and ancient, their trunks and branches long and twisted, towering over him. The forest canopy was so thick almost no sunlight shone on the forest floor, and Zane could not see the sky. Curtains of moss clung to the trees and swayed gently with the breeze. The air blowing through the leaves was cool, not warm like he had felt the day before. The woodland beyond him was dark. He had never seen a place like this anywhere in Ninjago.
"Fascinating..." Zane said to himself. He looked around. "But where am I?"
He tried again to get his coordinates, but they came out scrambled a second time. He sighed.
He continued on and gathered more cobwebs. He also happened upon a small pond. He walked up to the edge and kneeled down. He got another drink before ripping off part of the sleeve of his suit and dipping it in the water. He wrung it out and winced as he cleaned the area around Morro's cut. Then he took the ball of cobwebs and stuffed it into his wound, groaning in pain as he did so.
Satisfied with his work, He sat down by a nearby tree to rest
He was looking up over the tops of the trees in the distance when he saw something he had never seen before. He could barely see it with the thick forest canopy, but it was there alright.
Mountaintops. They were way far away, but their grey shoulders and snowy peaks stuck out against the blue sky.
Zane squinted. He didn't recognize them from anywhere. They weren't the Mountains of Impossible Height steps and certainly not the Golden Peaks. Then what were they? And why didn't he recognize them? Was he really that far away from home?
Zane sighed again.
He started feeling drowsy and let himself drift off to sleep.
...
When Zane woke with a start, he was terrified to see that the forest around him was dark. How long was he asleep for?! Ghoultar and Bansha could be anywhere by now!
"I need to get out of here." He panicked and he scrambled up. "I've been sleeping far too long!"
Meanwhile, Ghoultar and Bansha lay in the cover of the forest, waiting for their prey.
"Where is he?" Bansha hissed as she scoured the treeline.
Ghoultar was looking as well. He grabbed Bansha's shoulder and shook it to get her attention.
"Ghoultar see him!" He said, pointing up the road where Zane had just emerged from the trees and onto the road.
"We'll get him this time!" Bansha said before they sprang from cover and pursued Zane.
Zane pushed himself to keep running through the night. The road had dwindled down into a footpath and the mountains rose higher and higher above the trees.
What if he could cross the mountains? He stood a better chance of losing the ghosts then.
But not in the condition he was in. If he tried now, surely he'd die.
So he ran and ran and ran. He ran as fast as his burning legs would let him. He ran no matter how much his wounds screamed at him to stop. He ran until the morning sun.
And little did he know, he had run into the beginning of land little known by the rest of Ninjago. It was the territory of Ninjago's continental southern tip, Ninjago's last frontier.
And he was headed straight for the heart of it.