Alkalians (67 page)

***

For a moment, the whole battle pauses,
everyone’s attention on the black vine grown out of Matt’s wounded
flank. He himself is slower to notice it, staring in awe at it,
moving and flexing it like it was his own arm, before he glances
across the field to Rose. As confused as he was, she shrugs, and
then Sean, springing back on his feet with yellow cracks along his
scale armor, yells, “Okay, what the hell!? Since when can Matt use
Rose’s techniques?”

Buster, barely standing on his
crippled legs, meets the glance from Dante, a green spot of damage
on his chest, and they both nod. “A morph transfusion.”

“
Huh? Say what,
now?”

“
It’s the rare occurrence
where two individuals, by morphing simultaneously and in close
contact, share some of their morphs’ abilities for as long as they
are in morph,” Dante explains, his fiercely glowing katana formed
from his left hand. “They must have pulled it off without intending
to, by the looks on their faces.”

“
Ah. So, if Matt can now
control the plant element, does that mean…” Sean looks to Rose.
“She’s got the Dark Warrior’s power in her attacks?”

“
Let’s hope not,” growls
Buster while darkening energy pulses from his chest wound, “but it
changes nothing. We take down Matt first.” He prepares his gun
mounts, changed into rocket launchers, and locks on to Matt’s
figure.

Seeing the three about to resume
combat, Rose starts to run at them when a sweeping trail of flames
cuts her off, and she turns back to Cynthia. “Where are you running
off to, Rosie? We still have a piece to conduct together.”
Frowning, she focuses on Cynthia and dashes at her.

To meet her, Cynthia casts a large
burst of fire at her. She doesn’t expect it to hit her, as Rose
would dodge it, and is already focused on possessing the other
flames behind her to come after her when Rose catches her by
surprise. Instead of dodging the fire burst, she plows through it
with a summoned log shielding her, and then smashes it into a
startled Cynthia. As she staggers back, Rose maneuvers past her,
grabbing the log, and swings it around to whack her in the back
like a giant baseball bat, wound energy bursting as she falls
forward.

Face-down on the ground, her dark
yellow wounds contrasting her bright red suit, Cynthia tries to
push herself up when something pins her down, and she screams in
numbing pain as Rose’s dagger carves down through her spine, the
jagged, vital wound darkening to orange, before she flares out her
fiery hair to repel Rose, who leaps off and away from
her.

Meanwhile, after Buster launched his
missiles at him, Matt spends his vine arm to deflect them, whipping
it up to be snapped to pieces by their blasts, with his focus
moving on to Sean and Dante rushing him again. Dispersing among
clones, he falls back while they charge forward, a wall of swords,
and divide Sean and Dante as they avoid them. Drifting across the
grass to take another thrust at Matt, Sean hesitates when he hears
Cynthia’s scream, turning to her and Rose further off. With his
guard down, he gets impaled by Matt’s blade from behind, cringing
as Matt raises him up. But before he could do more to Sean, gatling
fire reminds him of Buster, and he dissipates his sword, dropping
Sean, to avoid the cutting stream of bullets on a rising air
thrust.

As Matt escapes Buster’s barrage,
Dante is not so lucky. Distracted in cutting his way through Matt’s
clones, the ones he had yet to slash are instead shattered by the
bullets, which in turn bite into him, peppering him with yellow
holes from his left leg to his right shoulder. When the bullets
stop, he glares back at Buster, who laughs out, “Sorry!” and hovers
on air balance to surge after Matt, and Dante can only shake it off
and follow.

Looking right to left to see them both
coming, Matt takes note of Buster’s two gun mounts as cannons and
his arms as shotguns, as well as Dante making his katana larger
between two hands, and he quickly figures out what would happen.
Buster would fire his cannons at him, forcing him to move, and he
would either get struck down by Dante’s sword or blasted by
Buster’s shotguns, depending on where he moved.

So instead, Matt casts a black tempest
in Buster’s direction, intercepting the fired mortars and swinging
them way off target to explode elsewhere, and then twists his arm
into a rifle and fires bullet bursts at Dante, making him deflect a
few of them and spin out past the others and him. Dante brakes and
drifts around, intent on getting him, but as he dashes at Matt from
behind another object runs into him, one dagger ripping through his
waist and the other diving between his shoulder and neck, before in
a whirl they tear out of him with orange energy gushing and he
tumbles to the ground.

After Cynthia’s flaring hair forced
her back, Rose watched the flames swirl and grow into an inferno to
cover her. Knowing she couldn’t get through the flames, and that
they meant Cynthia was desperately defending herself, she seized
the moment to cross the field and finally assist Matt, ambushing
Dante and taking him down with her leaf knives. She meets Matt’s
gaze when he turns back, and they both smile before she comes over
to him, reunited side-by-side in the battle. “Hey,” she asks, “how
are you holding up?”

“
Oh, fine,” Matt replies,
“besides my left arm missing and my wounds glowing orange.
You?”

“
Well, I’ve got some
yellow wounds myself, but fortunately no severed limbs.” They both
chuckle before turning back to their foes, with her shielding
Matt’s wounded flank.

***

Shaking his head as he stands, Dante,
his armor tattered by orange wounds, stares at Matt and Rose in
their defensive stance. “They’re proving as difficult as I feared,”
he says to Buster appearing at his side, looming over him as he
hovers on air balance. “And they were just alone. Now they’re back
together.”

“
Aye, it’s not looking
good.” Buster shrugs in his mechanical armor, the hole in his chest
pulsing orange, before surveying the rest of the field. “Sean’s
just getting back up, but he’s got a worse vital wound than me, so
he’ll be no good, and all I see of Cynthia is that growing inferno
over there.”

Dante looks to the large fire across
the field, calculating what she could do with it. “She’s probably
already healed herself, and soon she’s going to unleash that
inferno at whomever she pleases. All of you at once, most
likely.”

“
Yeah. We better make this
quick, then, before she does.” He adjusts one of his gun mounts,
its barrel molding into a different kind of cannon. “If you can
distract them, I’ll take care of the rest.”

“
Hmm. Make it count.”
Dante redraws his sword from his right hand and charges at Matt and
Rose while Buster charges energy in his new cannon, his aim locked
onto Matt. Dante meets with Rose, her knives parrying his sword,
and she spins away from him to expose him to Matt’s rifle, but he
thrusts back to avoid the shot. Dragging to a stop with his heels,
he has to deflect leaf shurikens thrown at him and another black
bullet with his blade and swirling air. While repelling the
shurikens, the bullet leaves a mark by hitting his sword, raised to
defend the largest wound on his chest, and knocking him down from
the impact.

“
Get Dante, and I’ll
handle Buster!” Rose directs, spinning to throw a larger leaf
shuriken at Buster, whose shotgun breaks it as he continues
charging his cannon. She takes a moment to stare at the cannon,
predicting what he could do with that energy being built up, while
Matt hovers into the air to cast dark lightning bolts at Dante, who
has to roll to dodge them. She was going to try stopping whatever
Buster is up to when something grabs her from behind, clamping arms
and legs around her figure. Struggling against the squeeze put on
her, Rose hears Sean say, “I may be limited by my vital wound, but
I can still do this!” before using his air balance to drag her
away, giving Buster a clear shot at Matt.

As Matt descends upon Dante yet lying
on the ground, causing another dead lock between their blades, and
follows it up by spawning a ring of clones around Dante, their own
swords prepared to finish him, Buster takes the shot, firing a
silver, searing laser from his cannon. The laser smashes Matt from
behind and annihilates him and his clones in its passing, and
Matt’s wounds blaze red within the beam before a demorph flash cuts
it off and he drops to the ground, a fleeting gasp on his face
before he closes his eyes and passes out.

***

The battle again pauses with Matt’s
defeat. Rose, aghast with shock, has stopped struggling in Sean’s
bind around her, who solemnly looks on over her shoulder. Dante
stands up to look down at the fallen freshman beside him, and
Buster, cranking his laser cannon as its core cools down, has
satisfaction gleaming in his machine eyes. Only breaths are let out
from the others until Sean remarks, “Well, at least he went out
with a bang.” This warrants Rose into doing something startling,
and he yelps, “Ah, she bit me! She bit my arm!”

Intending to do more than
that as leaves under her mental command form from her hands, Rose
pauses when she notices something happening by Dante. He notices
it, too, as ashes float by him on a breeze not there and into his
wounds, healing them to be green-colored marks upon his armor. He
turns, the others’ gazes following his, and they see on the far
side of the field the massive inferno, where Cynthia, glorious in
her unscathed, burning figure, strides out before it. With a grin,
she raises her arms, and the inferno is unleashed when it splits
and rushes pass her, across the field, like three trains on fire.
As the others are wide eyed in awe, Sean gawks before saying,
“
El fuego es grande, y
muerte
!” and releasing Rose to flee high
into the air.

While Buster also takes evasive
action, his wide thrust on air balance pulling his share of the
flames after him, Rose is too surprised to react as fast, and when
the other two trains, the one meant for Sean then converging upon
her, close in she throws herself to the side. The most of the
rushing flames flow past her, but a few tongues lap at her legs,
and she groans in her rolling as the new wounds spread up to her
torso and burn red. Clear of the trail of fire, she manages to
kneel, refocus herself, and put her palms together and close her
eyes, channeling energy to heal her wounds.

From his side of the field, Dante
peers through the flames that passed by him, spotting Rose beyond
them. When he sees what she’s doing, he moves to stop her, rising
on air balance and surfing over the flames towards her. He clears
the firewall and swoops upon her, his sword between both his hands
for a swift strike, but before he reaches her Rose snaps open her
eyes, her wounds then a shade of green similar to her battle suit,
and from her palms she sprays a swarm of leaves at him. Disoriented
by the leaves, Dante clumsily swings, flips past his target, and
comes to a stop on the ground, more of the leaves already
surrounding him in a blinding blizzard.

Caught within the blizzard, Dante
remains calm and enters a stance with his blade before him and his
eyes closed. Focusing on feeling through air balance, he extends it
around him, ignoring the countless leaves tickling it as they fly
through it and waiting for something bigger to disrupt it. Once it
does, sneaking up on him from behind, Dante’s eyes open and he
lashes out in a spin, barely missing Rose’s neck when she ducks
back and retreats. Sighing, he closes his eyes and resumes his
defenses, and after a few of the leaves flying by scratch or sting
him he reacts by using his own air balance to blow away the leaves,
keeping them from reaching him.

Meanwhile, on the farther side of the
battlefield, Cynthia had been watching her fires at work, the
flames burning across the grass shining in her eyes, and was
wondering whether to direct them at Rose’s leaf blizzard when
Buster drops in near her, both his arms grenade launchers aimed at
her. She whips around to him, a streak of flames she casts
intercepting the blasts of the grenades shot at her, and she adds
their explosions to her own fire to create a burning dome over her,
shielding her further against Buster. He backs off on his air
balance, glowering at the flames as his gun mounts change into a
peculiar pair of barrels, and when Cynthia flips the dome over as a
tall wave of fire at him he uses one of them like a vacuum, sucking
up the flames and storing them in both barrels through a pipe
connecting them.

Surprised by the new function of his
gun mounts, Cynthia isn’t worried by it. With her mental or sonar
command over fire magic, she can make the energy overheat and
explode out of his gun mounts and all over him. When she goes to do
so, preparing her violin, she is again surprised when Buster
gestures with his hands to wait. Curious, she sees him point across
the field, back to Rose’s leaf storm, and when she looks back to
him in wonder, he winks before aiming his other gun mount in that
direction and expelling the fire as a massive
flamethrower.

In the blizzard of leaves, Rose, who
was preparing another way to attack Dante, is able to see the
flamethrower coming, gawking at its approach. Glancing back to
Dante through the leaves, she then figures she won’t have to attack
him and instead runs out of the blizzard, turning to fling a large
leaf shuriken back into it at him. His air balance tripped by the
shuriken, Dante whirls to slice through it, but instead only
parries it when something stops his legs from moving. Looking down,
he sees constricting plants growing up beneath him, rooting him to
the ground, and he frantically cuts at them to free himself until a
burning leaf passing by him turns him to a greater flame, his face
paling in the heat’s light.