Alkalians (54 page)

Rose’s complexion becomes so white a
lily would be jealous, but she swallows the lump in her throat
before replying, “Well, I’ve anticipated getting to that point,
sooner or later. Seems it will have to be sooner, if I win
here.”

“
Heh, yeah,
if
you win. If you think
I’ll just be some pushover for you, I’m afraid to tell you that’s a
terrible assumption to make.”

“
I would never make that
assumption, especially of you, Tony. I’ve seen you fight, I know
what you’re capable of, and you can be quite the formidable foe if
I’m not careful.”

“
Hmm, complimenting me,
eh? I have to say, I wasn’t expecting that from you. After all, I
wasn’t going to compliment you, since I plan to rip you up and
stomp you down before all of our fellow students, like the ugly
weed you are.”

Puzzled, Rose shakes her head, asking,
“I’ve come to understand that you’re not a very, uh, friendly guy,
Tony, but why are you showing so much hate towards me, here and
now?”

“
Towards you? Hah, it’s
not just you, ‘Lily’. It’s all of you. You, Matt, Sean, Dante, and
others. You’re all nothing but insolent trouble makers, threatening
the order and leadership that has sustained the student community
for so long. However, I am not ignorant of this. I am well aware
that you’ve all pretty much won the revolution. All you have to do
is best Cain here in the finals, and Matt’s victory is complete.
And unlike Cain, I know how to accept losses. But if I, if
we
, are going down, then
I’m going to try and take as many of you with us as I
can.”

He points at Rose, going on more
ominously, “Starting with you. If I can beat you here, no matter
who I pair up with from the other semifinal, then I can completely
mess things up in the finals for you lovers of Matt. The best case
scenario, Cain and I coordinate the defeat of everyone else, and I
give him the victory. Worst case scenario, I’m stuck with Matt, but
I can let the others overwhelm and crush him, just so he doesn’t
become immortal among us. The only thing keeping me from such a
chance to humiliate you all, to give us some kind of accomplishment
in all this, is you, ‘Lily’ Alamence.”

Rose is no longer a pale white, and
instead blooming red. Her sense of stage fright gone, the audience
around them forgotten, she grimly says while glaring at him,
putting her palms together in a meditative stance, “Then your
hatred blinds you, making you no better than Cain. And I am not
Lily. I am Rose Alamence, and you’re about to learn just how sharp
my thorns are.”

Tony’s response is to
snicker, reaching up to pluck and put away his sunglasses, his
green eyes gleaming at hers. “Big talk, for a little flower like
you. And
I
am
going to show you that everything, even pretty little flowers,
wither and die.”

***

Once the siren goes off, the two
morph, Rose in her green battle suit and Tony decayed into a
Zombie, and the fight is on. His undead face leers at her as he
makes the first move, casting a gale of grave air at her. She
dodges the spell with a quick dive to her right, rolling onto her
knees, and retaliates by throwing leaf shurikens. Before the leaves
hit him, Tony blocks them with a tombstone sprouting from the
ground, and then he becomes lost among a small legion of Zombie
clones, slowly making their way towards Rose.

Not intimidated by their numbers, Rose
prepares a large, four-bladed leaf shuriken, and flings it into
them, the spinning razors mowing down a wide sweep of them before
returning to her. After catching it, she spins once and throws it
again, this time rotating vertically, and it buzz saws through a
line of the clones, preceding her charging into their broken
formation. She makes quick work of the rest of them, her leaf
daggers slicing and stabbing them, without any managing to get a
swipe at her, and then she finds the real Zombie, near the back of
the once swarm.

Rose thrusts with her left dagger in a
reverse grip, intending to pierce and rip through Tony’s rotten
chest, but is startled to find it deflected by some kind of
malevolent aura containing him, her dagger literally withering and
deteriorating after the contact. Seeing the sneer on his
expression, then the flash of magic from his hand, she
instinctively springs backwards, avoiding the stone spike bursting
from the floor that would have impaled her.

Skidding to a stop a safe distance
from him, Rose looks on at Tony, observing the necrotic aura
shielding him as a new technique he must have recently obtained.
Her planning on how to approach it is cut short when she feels
something unnatural happening to her, and looking back to her left
hand she gasps. It, just like her weapon, was afflicted by the
aura, paling to a dead gray and cracking open with green wounds.
Watching as the affliction spreads up her arm, the situation
becomes worse when a thread of magic reels out of the wounds, and
she follows it to Tony’s grasp, knowing he is draining her health
energy out of her.

Appearing unable to respond for a
moment, Rose then groans, kneeling down while the affliction
crosses her chest, from there spreading to the rest of her body,
and Tony delights in her suffering while drawing another thread out
of her chest to his other hand, doubling the draining rate. He
ignores the gasps and outcries of the crowd, planning to enjoy the
slow, horrid way of breaking down Rose, and can taste victory when
her figure is a blend of gray and orange. Intent to drag her health
down to red, he almost doesn’t notice a plant sprout and rapidly
grow around him, its many shoots and branches attempting to ensnare
him, but his necrotic aura stops its growth as rapidly as it
restarts until it outlines his aura like a cage.

Sneering at the pitiful attempt, Tony
looks back to Rose, and the sneer twists with shock and disbelief.
While her body is still a dead gray, her wounds had healed to be
green in color, reflecting the energy pulsing from her right hand
yet free of the decay. Before he can accelerate draining her
health, the dead plant around him twitches, and then truly becomes
a cage when it seizes him, the spindly wood bending and binding him
into an awkward shape. When he looks again at Rose, picking out the
smug look on her face, it’s his turn to be horrified as he realizes
she had planned this. Her wrist twists, and the thicket ensnaring
him responds by snapping free of its roots and hurtling his gawking
form away, ending his draining spells upon her.

The gasping in the crowd turns to
laughing as they watch Tony tumble all over the arena, trapped in
something like a tumble weed, the bouncing off the floor and wall,
and tugging against him in any random direction, accumulating small
wounds on him, while Rose guides it along, smiling with cruel
satisfaction. After tossing him high into the air, she takes a
moment to focus on herself, more fully healing her wounds and
affliction as they close up and her figure regains its healthy
gleam, before retaking control of the tumble weed after Tony slams
back into the floor from the fall, his decayed body bursting with
yellow wound energy from the impact.

Getting back to business, Rose has
Tony and his cage float through the air to her while she summons a
long, wooden spear in her left hand. Once he is a few feet from
her, hovering helplessly in the weed, she coordinates rotating him
and thrusting the spear through gaps in the weed’s branches and
into him, keeping herself from contacting the cursed aura yet on
him with the spear’s length and leaving deep wounds in him glowing
dark orange. After thrusting a few times, poking through his chest,
back, and head once each, she pushes him further away, his cage
dropping on the floor, twirls her spear above her, and throws it at
him like a harpoon, the long shaft going through him and pinning
him to the ground.

Rose is confident that she’s won the
fight, looking at Tony yet immobilized in deadwood with red wounds
blurring his body, until she watches his necrotic aura expand and
thicken, consuming him, the cage, and the spear before sinking out
of sight into the floor. She suddenly knows what Tony is up to, but
instead of being afraid remains calm, besides rushed, as she
sprints over to the darkened ground and prepares a large mass of
energy between her hands. She knows what Tony is going to do, and
she has just the thing to match him. Not panicking as one, then
two, giant skeletal hands with barbed fingers sprout out of the
ground on either side of her, pushing up the rest of Tony’s hyper
morph, a skeletal golem with huge fangs protruding from his lower
jaw and rage burning in his empty eye sockets, she finishes the
charging of her technique just as he stands tall over
her.

Rose shoves the sphere of energy into
the floor, and an instant later a huge tree with red bark and no
leaves violently emerges, one of its large branches during the
rapid growth impaling Tony through his ribs, staggering him and
leaving him stuck to it. The other branches, their edges and points
sharp like sabers, lash out at him, carving and chopping through
his stony bones, until the crown of the tree, bending back with
Tony’s skull gaping at it, snaps forward into him, shattering his
lower jaw and decapitating his head from his crumbling
body.

***

After the quick and thorough job from
the tree, a demorph flash swallows up the skeletal golem’s remains
and spits out Tony in his human form, thumping against the floor on
his back, barely conscious with a blank look on his face. Before
him still looms the angry red tree, its branches searching hungrily
for a new victim, with Rose kneeling on the crutch of one branch
and the trunk. Some of the crowd was stilled with awe at the sight
of the tree, and there is still silence after she leaps off from
the tree, sticks her landing, and makes it disappear when she
demorphs, her skin streaked with sweat as she pants from
exhaustion. Only when the overhead voice announces, “And the winner
is Rose Alamence,” does the silence break with the cheering and
roaring of the audience, bringing Rose’s attention to them. She
forgets her fatigue from the fight as she feels something else,
pride and joy. Taking it as this is what it feels like to win
before so many, she waves back to the crowd, knowing this could be
the first step in her young career towards honor and
fame.

***

A few minutes later, the next pair for
the red division is in the arena for their match. The crowd of
mostly students cheers wildly for the most anticipated contestant
of the tournament, in his black pants and green vest, who feels
quite small as he gazes all around at them. Rather than following
Lyn, appearing calm as she strides in her uniform of white bolero
and pants with blue stripes, towards the center of the arena, Matt
wanders off course for a moment, trying to get used to all of the
spectators, before realizing he fell behind and hurries after her.
When he’s caught up by her side, he says, “Wow, I’ve forgotten
there are so many of us students, here.”

Lyn laughs, patting his shoulder, and
tells him, “I sometimes forget, too. Don’t worry about them all
watching you too much. Once we begin our fight, you’ll forget
they’re all there, I’m sure.”

Matt nods, still uneasy, as they near
the center of the arena, Lyn taking more steps to put distance
between her and him. He calls to her, “You know, I don’t feel so
good about having to fight you, Lyn.”

“
Oh?” She turns back to
him, her eerie pale eyes fluttering at him, and asks, “Why’s that,
Matt?”

“
Well, I just don’t want
either of us to hurt the other. I mean, we’ve become friends and
such, but if we get too much into this fight, we might end up
harming each other beyond our battle morphs. After seeing how James
and Tony ended up, I’m worried you or I could end up like
that.”

“
Oh, Matt. That’s sweet of
you to worry about, but unnecessary. You and I are both good
fighters, and we know our limits.” She looks to the audience,
stretching with her arms above her head, and adds, “But I’ll admit,
it wouldn’t be pleasant for me to be carried out of here, for my
first and only time here.”

Matt blinks, almost not hearing her as
he glanced at her cleavage moving with her stretch, and asks,
“Wait, you mean you’ve never gotten into this tournament,
before?”

“
Nope, sadly. With people
like Cain, Buster, and Nicholas around, I never made much of an
effort to try scoring as many points as them to move up. But this
year, with our whole conflict against Cain, I figured I should go
for it, to help out further in case he winds up in the final
match.”

“
Ah. Well, uh, then how
about I just let you win this match?”

Lyn, startled to hear Matt say that,
asks, “What? Why would you forfeit our fight?”

“
Well, since I’m a
freshman, I can have another chance in this tournament next year,
or even the next few. But with you being a senior, this is your
last chance to compete in it, so I don’t want to feel bad taking it
away from you.”

Lyn blinks, and then shakes her head
with a smile. “You’re really being too kind here, Matt. I have no
problem with how well I do in this tournament, as long as Cain
doesn’t win it, and I won’t mind if it’s you or I who moves on to
potentially fight him. In fact, you really can’t afford to drop
out, or it will hurt our campaign against Cain and his kind, so
close to the end of it, when they can use it as a way to belittle
your resolve.”