Chapter 3: Against All Odds
"Survivors aren't always the strongest; sometimes they're the smartest, but more often simply the luckiest."
- Carrie Ryan
To endure the obstacle life threw at him mostly unscathed, Joshua had to be one, just one of many things.
He could be a master in martial arts. A young man with the reflexes of a cobra and limbs conditioned enough to send one reeling blow after another on anything unfortunate enough to receive them.
Or perhaps he could be a seasoned trapper, whose paranoia in the Dragon Realms induced him to prepare scores of deadly snares and traps before even thinking of resting in the berry tree at night. Each one, useful in disposing of the five hounds. One by one if he had to.
It wasn't even so farfetched to imagine Spyro, Cynder, or for God's sake, some random stranger to enter the battle without prior notice and not only tank all hostile strikes but also sweep the forest clearing clean of these five enemies.
True, Joshua Renalia would easily survive this new ordeal if any of these things happened. But there'd have to be something wrong in his head if the teenager actually anticipated these improbable events, as only a naïve person detached from reality, or a recalcitrant youth living in denial, would fixate themselves on these potential avenues of escape, regardless of their improbability.
The Death Hounds surrounding Joshua kept the young man firmly rooted in real life. Rather than wasting the few precious seconds afforded to him on wishful thinking and other stupid thoughts, the human being brought his stick down just as the Alpha went for a vicious tackle.
His automatic reflex stopped death from claiming him at the onset.
A shame it failed to save him from the Alpha's momentum. The impact knocked Joshua off his precarious perch. "Oh crap!" he yelled. His back struck the branch immediately below him—"OW!"—and his descent continued.
Surely he'd fare better with a height advantage. At least he wouldn't have four dogs trying to eviscerate him alive, all at once. He landed on a second branch, and as soon as he felt it, he reached out. Joshua didn't give a damn if he just fractured or cracked a bone. He didn't care if he got cut or bruised. He had to—he needed to get a good grip—and he missed.
He missed!
"AHHHHH!" Joshua screamed. He saw the forest floor in his peripheral vision. It was closer. Much closer. He glimpsed the four—the five pairs of yellow eyes gawping up at him eagerly, a split second before the third bough came into view. It was the last one. He had to make this count.
His hand shot out one final time. Success breathed down on him. Joshua held onto the thin but sturdy limb for dear life. In spite of all his efforts, it could not stop the momentum of his descent. The brown-skinned human continued falling. From his perspective it felt like an eternity before his desperate hold resisted the pull of gravity.
Great agony flared from his shoulder as the sudden stop almost dislocated it from a bone socket. He nearly lost his grip. "F*CK!" Joshua shouted, sweating profusely.
His ordeal had only just begun.
A howl from the Alpha reminded the teenager how he got into this mess in the first place. Viridian eyes glanced down in time to watch one of the wolves fly from the ground and open its massive jaw. Joshua lifted his feet at once. "Yikes!" A propitious evasion.
He tried to regain his bearings, but the Death Hounds knew their prey was struggling. They did not let up. Two more jumped and snapped at his feet. Joshua panted as he raised his feet again, although noticeably slower than the first time around. A third followed suit, and this time it would have enough time to clamp its sharp teeth on—
Joshua smacked its snout with his stick. "Get the f*ck away from me!"
Having recovered, the first made its second attempt at his dangling body. Joshua backhanded the Death Hound's cheeks, hurtling it back to the forest floor whimpering. Heart beating rapidly, the teenager pulled himself up his only lifeline in this entire ordeal.
Or rather, he attempted to and flunked this crucial test. Joshua Renalia was not one of those kids who liked to work out and play sports of the physical sort. He enjoyed video games almost as much as he enjoyed downing a few beers with his high school classmates and hanging out at the shopping mall with his little, five-man clique, if he could call it that.
Someone who couldn't do a single pull-up in P.E. had no chance at making one even if his life depended on it.
Joshua's body dangled down again. He braced himself for another narrow evasion, another well-timed strike at the snout when the Alpha soared faster, much faster than he predicted. Its decayed fangs crunched down on his foot, penetrating his trousers, his skin, his bones with ease. Joshua Renalia shrieked as the shock of something sinking into his flesh jolted throughout his entire body and caused him to flinch.
To let go.
The human knew he was in deep, deep trouble when he felt the soil come up on his rear. Heightened terror seeped in; his first instinct directed him to pummel the butt of the stick on the Alpha's nose. The attack descended hard, and the large Death Hound was forced to release him.
Its malodorous breath wafted into Joshua's nose. He would have flinched from revulsion if he hadn't been so terror-stricken, so focused on surviving this. One of the other wolves dashed for him, and he had only a split-second to duck and roll to avoid getting his head sandwiched between sharp teeth. The third Hound came for Joshua as he rose to his feet.
The boy thwacked it with his stick, and to his astonishment, the dog merely shrugged off the blow. Hell, the way it narrowed its eyes at him, he started thinking all his attacks only annoyed the predators at this point instead of inflicting actual damage. This is bad.
Eyes darted left and right. The pack surrounded him. Pools of purple saliva gathered on the ground as they approached him, as they stalked towards him with the intent to kill and feast on fresh meat—on an animal foreign to this forest and hopelessly lost.
Very bad.
He backed away slowly as the beasts padded closer. Joshua stumbled when he backpedaled on his injured foot, wincing at the pure, utter torture spiking every time he put some weight on this gammy leg. One of the goddamn dogs moved in, but jolted to a stop when Joshua thrust the stick in its direction.
Making sudden moves now, he noticed. Sweat cascaded Joshua's brown cheeks. He couldn't underestimate these predators. There was no way in hell Joshua would put something like anything resembling strategy past them, however basic it seemed to a trained eye. He needed an equalizer of some sort. A way to put as much distance between him and the pack. Maximize the window of opportunity for escape.
Green eyes latched onto the glowing clusters of HP and mana gems, growing out of the ground adjacent to each other, about fifteen meters away. Yes, he approved. That can work. That can definitely buy me some—
"AWOOOOOOOOOOO!"
It came from behind.
Joshua Renalia swerved around to deflect the accursed animal with one good thump on... emptiness.
Nothing was there.
VERY, VERY BAD!
The pitter-patter approached from the right. He rotated in time to catch a Death Hound charging at him. Joshua swung the stick once and landed a solid hit on the dog's neck, forcing it back. Another wolf grunted almost next to him.
"Yiii!" Joshua veered to slap the animal away, but instead his stick headed straight for the Alpha's waiting maw. No words adequately described Joshua's shock, Joshua's astonishment at the turn of events. Compared to The Eternal Night, these damnable canines exhibited much greater intelligence—much greater alacrity in real life.
How could this be? Joshua Renalia recalled many of the times he fought packs of Death Hounds, manipulating Spyro expertly with his PlayStation controller. He fought these dogs expertly, without resorting to Dragon Time. Their tackles could be timed and anticipated. A single blow from the purple dragon stunned them for much longer than a whack with his stick. None of these creatures displayed the acumen Joshua was seeing for himself.
Climbing a tree to dislodge him…
Deceiving him with a feint…
Grabbing his only weapon mid-swing…
Since when, since f*cking when were the Death Hounds even capable of this? The decisions enacted by the programmers at Krome Studios were law. Their work dictated how things took place in the Dragon Realms, did it not?
None of this was in the video games.
These wolves shouldn't—
The Alpha broke Joshua out of his trance when it pulled the stick out of his hands. Fortunately the human reacted quick enough to catch the weapon before it truly flew out of his reach. "Oh no you don't!" He tightened his grip and pulled back. Pulled harder.
His opponent growled menacingly and put even more strength into its pull.
Joshua's only lifeline almost slipped out of his hand. It nearly dislocated his other shoulder just to keep it in his grip. He couldn't let it go. If he lost this, he was defenseless. And if he was defenseless, he was…
He was…
The teenager roared in defiance and tugged the stick back into his grip. Green eyes watched the Alpha hold on still, but he wasn't about to relinquish and let it win this stupid tug of war. He raised his foot, reared it back. It wouldn't seriously hurt his opponent, he knew, but if it meant living for a few more moments, for a few more minutes, then one kick in the snout was worth all the—
More footsteps.
Another bestial snarl.
Joshua Renalia saw one of the Death Hounds coming to help, flanking him with one soaring leap. Its yellow eyes set on him, its every move determined to support its pack leader and secure fresh meat. Adrenaline flowed throughout him now, as every process in his mind concentrated on finding a way out of this.
The way the noisome, furry wolf leaped reminded Joshua of Crystal Dynamics' recent Tomb Raider reboot. A memory of Lara Croft, the game's main character, with her leg caught in a bear trap with nothing but a bow and a handful of arrows to fend off hungry wolves hiding within the shrubs. Every time a wolf attacked, time slowed down to a crawl as it pounced.
As the player, what should have been half a second became five. Maybe even seven. Insufficient time to remain lax throughout the quick event, but just enough to stay on his toes and take out the animals one by one.
If his new life here in Spyro's world was a video game, time should have crawled to a halt.
As the player character, time should have given Joshua the opportunity to sidestep this intruding assailant, if not repel the dog with whatever he could scrounge up in this moment.
But it didn't.
Reality simply was not wired that way. After all, real life never did give a shit about the people it stabbed in the back.
The Death Hound completely blindsided Joshua. In that brief trice of time, its enormous and resilient head throttled him and sent the human being hurtling—he heard the stick snap—and before Joshua could react, the wild wolf slashed at his waist.
Drawing blood.
Two of the other dogs paused and took a few seconds to howl. A howl of victory. There was going to be a hearty feast tonight, with one tender, juicy alien on the menu!
The Alpha spat out half of Joshua's weapon and padded slowly after the two of them. Meanwhile the wolf responsible for the ugly gash running across his left side reared back and snapped at his neck.
Joshua instinctively jerked his arm up as a last-ditch effort. Serrated teeth sliced through the bare skin and he yelped when the Death Hound bit down hard. He felt, no, he heard his very bones crack, and blood gushed out from the new wounds. The saliva seeped in, and Joshua realized it was acidic after everything the fluid touched produced a burning and agonizing sensation. Damn it, damn it, damn it!
He saw the Alpha coming. He saw the HP gems, only a few steps away. Damn it! Joshua grunted, fighting hard to stay calm, to keep the panic from truly ending this life-or-death struggle. A window of opportunity gleamed at him, and the teenager took it before it closed and sentenced him to death by voracious animals. Who cared if it was the right choice? Who cared if it would have killed him a few moments later? For now, for this moment, this was the right choice, and nothing else mattered.
Joshua Renalia thrust his half of the stick into the wolf's throat. He wiggled the torn bough into its salivating mouth and shoved it into the throat as far as his waning strength allowed. He felt it strike the Death Hound's palate. Though it failed to penetrate the inner flesh, it surprised the beast and caused it to stumble and roll over.
Inadvertently obstructing the Alpha and the other wolves.
A few seconds of time. Precious, precious time.
Whenever Spyro's health fell below 30%, Joshua's typical response called for temporarily stunning the enemies with Ice Tail and making a beeline for the nearest HP crystals.
Now, Joshua's instinct commanded him to do the same.
He got up and hobbled to the scarlet crystals glowing in the dark. It took only a couple of seconds for him to reach the cluster of Spirit Gems and pound at it with a hammer fist. "Gggh," he suppressed a squeal of pain. They may be brittle, but they were painful to break off. Joshua ignored the stinging in his hands and grabbed what fragments fell off from the cluster.
He absorbed the Spirit Gems and took in their energy. The crystals would turn gray and structurally deteriorate in seconds, but an idea took hold in Joshua's mind. He threw the decaying crystals at the pack before they dissolved. A few struck between the eyes and caused their targets to fall over, alive but down for a few scant moments.
Okay, he thought to himself. He had a game plan now. Heal up to 100%, toss a few to keep 'em away, grab as many as I can, and then run like hell. He didn't know where he would go from here, but as far as he was concerned, the farther the better!
The instinct to survive alone fueled him. It drove him to do whatever it took.
All of Joshua's wounds vanished after as little as three seconds holding on to fragments of the HP gems. His cracked and fractured bones regenerated—and agonizingly so, but surprisingly the young man held his composure well before the five bloody jaws of doom.
Time for step two.
He elbowed the cluster and caught some fragments as they fell. Joshua haphazardly hurled them at the Death Hounds, aware they couldn't absorb them as he could. He put his faith into his newfound marksmanship and scattered the shards with the hopes of repelling the wolves, even blind them.
Steps three and four followed.
The human snapped off a few large pieces of the HP Crystals and turned to run. Run into the yawning, ubiquitous darkness.
Instead he run straight into the Alpha, which eluded most of Joshua's scattered Spirit Gems. The largest of the five Death Hounds slammed into his solar plexus with such force the human coasted a meter or two until his back crashed into the green crystals growing out of the ground.
He was dazed.
Joshua stirred. His hands quaked, searched for purchase in the grass—
Two paws fell on both biceps and planted themselves there, pinning the boy down. A horrified moan escaped him.
"No."
Glistening teeth filled his vision. A foul tongue hung over him. Acidic saliva pooled on his face, dripped into his mouth. But Joshua couldn't spit it out, for he was too busy reeling from the putrid fumes wafting from the Death Hound's fetid breath. Being so close to this rank animal made him recoil in disgust.
He tried—
He couldn't move.
"No!"
The Alpha licked its chops once more, and—oh f*ck, did it just smile?
Finality descended on Joshua Renalia, who watched the pack leader bend down and open its jaws, wide enough to fit his head from the neck up. "No, no, no!" He tried to block it off, to move the goddamn mouth and all its teeth away from him. But his arms lacked the strength. His posture lacked any sort of foundation.
"Noooooo!" He wasn't going to die like this. He refused to die like this! He didn't trek all this way today in the Dragon Realms just to become f*cking dog food. "Get off me! GET THE HELL OFF ME!"
All his efforts to keep the canine away were useless; the Alpha ignored his annoying, futile scuffles and went for the kill. Joshua's eyes dilated when he felt the Death Hound finally clamp its jaws on him, around his neck. Panic erupted to its maximum point, and Joshua was so far down this rabbit hole he closed his eyes and capitulated.
Unintelligible screams rushed out of Joshua's mouth. He pushed and pulled and flailed, doing everything he could do. Indescribable terror and distress consumed every bit of him. Literally all of Joshua concentrated on ending this nightmare. All his mental processes. All his desperate punches, his desperate kicks. All the mindless words gushing out of his mouth.
Every inch of his body tingled with this yearning for dear, sweet LIFE. It was the only thing the teenager wanted. Right here, right now.
For a moment, he did not care about the Dragon Realms. He did not care about Warfang. He moved away from the thought of meeting Spyro, of meeting Cynder, of seeing everything he once considered fiction turned into reality.
He forgot all the things he took for granted in 21st century Earth. He forgot all his friends from home. Even his girlfriend. Even the normal life, the loving family he left behind. The sweet smile of his mother. His father's knowing grin. The awestruck eyes and affection of his younger siblings.
On the verge of death, Joshua Renalia forgot everything. He distilled his entire personhood away from everything and anything irrelevant to the present. He concentrated his very self on the overwhelming will to live and nothing else.
During that last remaining instant before the monster snapped his neck, with nothing left to lose, Joshua put everything into one last act of desperation and punched the Death Hound on the side as though a flailing, random cuff from a young man a hair's breadth away from dying could turn the tides.
And against all odds…
Against the unanimous cruelty of reality…
.
.
.
Everything changed.
The set of teeth locked on his neck vanished. The massive bulk pinning Joshua down disappeared with it. Even the hungry yapping of the pack ceased.
Huh? I, I'm fine. I'm s-st, still okay!
Joshua slowly sat up, and opened his eyes.
.
.
.
He gasped.
The largest of the five wolves sprawled next to him. Its body was stiff. Its head, unmoving. Its naked chest, discolored by an ugly, unnatural black.
Joshua looked ahead and, to his surprise, found the four other dogs gaping at him, casting a gaze something he thought was fear. Scratch that. It was fear. He knew it as a fact, even if Joshua found it impossible to describe the knowledge in words.
What happened? Why was the Alpha flopped on the ground like that? Why was he still alive—
An enraged and vicious growl made him wince. Joshua eyed the noisy wolf, the largest of the remaining four. By no means was it a close contender with the fallen pack leader, but even he could imagine the damn thing claiming second place.
The rancorous Death Hound rushed the raven-haired teenager with paws extended, with claws aimed for his neck. His life once again under duress, Joshua Renalia had no time to do anything else, to say anything else, except raise his arms and, with hands still stinging, still prickling from a combination of exhaustion and panic, shove the creature back—
Bright light illuminated the entire clearing around him, as though the sun decided to defy the will of the two moons in the middle of the night. Joshua's mouth hung in the air as plumes of white, glowing clouds poured out of his hands. He watched his own palms act as floodgates, allowing the impossible to inundate the space between him and this damnable animal seeking his death.
This strange thing emerged from Joshua's own body with nary a noise. Whatever it was, it impacted the Death Hound square in the face.
Then the wolf fell on the spot.
Death glazed its eyes.
As soon as it collapsed, the three surviving members of the pack whimpered from unspeakable fright and fled into the safety of the shadows, never to show their muzzles before the unexpected threat awakening before them.
But Joshua Renalia no longer paid attention to the fleeing wolves.
Unable to believe, to process what had just transpired in front of him, Joshua Renalia did nothing but gaze at his hands for minutes he did not bother to count. Those were the same hands that killed the Death Hound. The same hands that produced swirling hazes of something, as though they were capable of it all his life. He did not feel a thing when it gushed out of his arms without warning. His limbs did not turn into metaphorical cavities, throbbing with the sensation of ejecting this strange matter at will. The inscrutable feeling corresponded with none of the five senses and also with all of it, at the same time. As if his situational awareness expanded and shrunk to the extremes simultaneously.
All this time the young man thought his unexpected trip to the Dragon Realms changed nothing at all, when it altered his constitution.
When it gave him something.
Something to turn the tables on his enemies.
Something to survive the ruthless world of Spyro the Dragon.
To think he actually had a power! That explained why—how he could absorb the Spirit Gems. Maybe that also explained how he miraculously avoided death when it counted. Joshua smiled at the thought. He thanked God for his blessings.
Now comes the fun part, Joshua thought, forgetting the ordeal he barely escaped from a couple minutes ago.
Remembered exactly how it felt like, just like before the teenager raised his hand and channeled his memory of the unfathomable sensation through his arms. He attempted to call on this strange power…
.
.
.
And just like before, nothing happened.
What was amazement rapidly shifted into confusion. Why didn't it respond to him now? Why wouldn't the power emerge from any of his hands? Joshua believed it too incredible to forget how it coursed through his body, how it contradicted reality as he knew it and both expanded and narrowed his self-awareness.
Then it hit him.
He knew nothing about this power.
Absolutely nothing.
It did not correspond to any of the eight elements introduced in the Legend of Spyro trilogy. Neither did it seem related to Convexity, the native, destructive element of the purple dragon. Now that he reflected on it more cogently, Joshua had never heard of an element capable of instantly killing—
Wait a minute. Instant death?
Only now did Joshua Renalia sweep his eyes across the environment around him, assisted by the light of the twin moons and the soft glow of the nearby Spirit Gems. The Death Hound those enigmatic clouds engulfed completely still lied on the grass in front of him. But instead of something like glass coating its eyes, blood now flowed profusely from all the orifices in its muzzle: its ears, its nostrils, its mouth. Even its eyes.
The entire snout drowned in deep, glistening red.
He turned to the fallen Alpha, and blanched at the sight of the deceased behemoth. Despite the dim lighting all around him, even with limited night-vision Joshua still perceived a black and discolored area covering the wolf's entire torso.
Where I punched it.
He edged closer and touched the darkened region. It felt hard, for it had become a lifeless lump. Regrettably, as a young teenager with very little knowledge of the world, Joshua Renalia did not know what to make of this. Had he been older, had he had some knowledge of modern medicine, he might have recognized the Alpha's injury as necrosis.
The premature and irreversible death of localized areas of the body, at the cellular level.
If Joshua had a blade on him tonight, he could have cut the corpse open and found the Death Hound's heart, stomach, and lungs all turned a repulsive bistre: a dark, grayish black color. They were all rotten and decaying notwithstanding the animal's fresh demise.
Unfit to eat, and just as unfit to see.
Examining the two cadavers to some degree made Joshua Renalia realize what exactly he had done to the two Death Hounds. One was snuffed in an instant. The other must have experienced multiple organ failure in the same span of time. A sickening dread leached down into his core.
This was not a blessing to embrace.
This was not an element to play with.
When Joshua first imagined himself with any of the eight elements, he envisioned waving tongues of fire from his hands, blasting the air with yellow balls of electricity, or conjuring spikes of ice with the mind alone. He even pictured himself as an earthbender, fashioning walls and structures with the very ground he walked.
The fanboy in Joshua dared to dream of sparring with either Spyro or Cynder in a Dragon Temple. He aspired to grow and develop under the watchful gaze of the Guardians, to be a hero like his two favorite videogame characters of all time.
Not once did he ever anticipate this.
A power beyond his understanding.
A power beyond his control.
A power so dangerous he may just kill something without meaning to.
Joshua Renalia shuddered from the dreadful realization. He was so terribly shaken by the sheer brutality he had committed and the atrocities his hands were capable of that he vomited and passed out on the spot.
And against all odds, Joshua never forgot these grisly images ever again.
No matter what he did.
Author's notes:
When I first set forth to make my *ehem* half-assed attempt at a deconstruction of a "Trapped in TV Land" Spyro fic, I wanted to make Aimless play out as realistic as possible, where Joshua's the naïve and excited gamer kid who thinks he's about to have his greatest fantasies brought to life, only to experience the horrors of reality.
But the more I mapped out my outline for Aimless, the more I realized humans simply didn't belong in the Dragon Realms (or Avalar or Skylands or whatever the corporate owners of the Spyro franchise decide to call it), not unless humans were a part of it in the first place. My hand was forced to give Joshua Renalia a power. An element he can call his own.
Why? Because it was the only way he could survive.
To explain my reasoning, let's look at the fans who write the generic Human-Turned-Dragon and Human-in-the-Realms ("HIR") stuff. How many of them practice martial arts every week, and spar with others at that? How many of them shoot guns for a hobby? How many of them have had real-life survival training? If the many HTD and HIR stories I've read as well as all the bashing these people get from Tokowh (the person in charge of the Infinite Loops compilation) and some other members of the community indicate anything, it would be a clear and resounding ZERO.
So if 98% of these writers don't know shit when they write out their wish fulfillment fantasies, how can someone intended to represent them encounter five enemies known in Spyro lore to be quick and deadly and also live to see another day afterward?
See what I mean?
Anyway, now that I made my point across, I am honestly excited for this story. I have a host of reasons for deliberately giving Joshua this unknown element, and they are all connected to Aimless being a deconstruction of the hundreds of "Trapped in TV Land" stories available on the Spyro archives here at FFN. Also, for the record, I already have an outline of what sort of things this power is capable of, and I gotta say, I am liking the opportunities it gives me to play with the characters.
Just imagining all the shit I can do to subvert the common "HIR" and "HTD" tropes, especially after Joshua arrives at Warfang, makes me just want to write this story even more. And guess what? I hate it! Damn it, I hate the fact I feel this way. What began as a side project to take a break from my main story is now serving as a more effective distraction than I ever anticipated, and it pisses me off. Writing the 4.5K words used in this chapter took about three days. Three days I could have used for my main story! Argh!
Ugh. Okay. Soooo, that's my rant for this update. Hopefully I can stay away from the deep hole Aimless is steering me into, just long enough to throw in another 10K into my main fic. I've taken a break from that long enough! DX