Alkalians (15 page)

Backing up some more from Ryan’s
approach, Matt glances about to see that other students nearby have
overheard Ryan’s boasts and are gathering around them, curious to
see what was about to happen to the single, lost-looking kid he is
picking on. Clearing his throat, Matt tries again to reason with
him. “Hey, I don’t think Lyn and the others would be too happy with
you if they found out…”

“
Hah, like I would care
how they feel about me putting a piece of freshmen scum back in his
place! It doesn’t matter what they think or feel about anything, as
they are women, after all. Pretty, but stupid. And besides, I’m
just doing my job, as any responsible senior in his right mind
would do. I am teaching some hopeless freshman that the girls
clearly older and in a higher class than him are strictly
off-limits to his presence!”

In a flash of blue, followed by three
other flashes behind him, Ryan and the other three men morph. While
the men become an Axman, a small ax of energy forming from his
right hand, a Handgun Gunner, his left hand bending and hollowing
out into a pistol, and a Magician, his suit being replaced by dark
robes over his figure, Ryan changes into something much more
intimidating.

Standing at least five feet taller
than before, with chain mail armor and skin a deep blue in color,
Ryan has a domed helmet on his head and four arms instead of two
with long, wickedly-curved blades of energy protruding from each
hand. He twirls them around in fancy coordination and eager malice,
saying, “Now get in your morph, so we can tear ya to shreds, little
man!”

Looking between his challenging foes
and the interested crowd, Matt for a moment is afraid and unsure of
what he should do, hoping that there may be someone to help him out
of this mess. Then, something clicks within him, like a switch
flipping on in his mind. He realizes that people like Ryan are mere
bullies, and if he doesn’t stand up for himself they would
constantly harass and torment him whenever they got the chance. And
besides, they are challenging him to a battle, so the honorable
thing to do would be to accept.

Looking back to Ryan’s cocky face with
a hardened expression, Matt says nothing as he enters his battle
morph, coming out of a flash of black in his plate armor. With his
opponent in morph, Ryan’s eagerness to attack him turns into an
all-out frenzy as he charges, his four arms flailing forward with
the curved blades in incomprehensible coordination.

Just before the swords descend upon
him, Matt launches himself backwards and into the air on a thrust
of air balance, escaping Ryan’s deadly entwinement. Then floating
in mid-air, he turns his left arm into a rifle, takes aim at Ryan
below him, and fires a single shot. The black bullet pierces
through Ryan’s chest, the wound bursting with yellow green energy
from the entry-and-exit holes, and causes him to stumble backwards
from the hit. Before the other three men can comprehend what
happened, they too, in rapid order, are pierced through the chest
or head by Matt’s sniper shots, sending them to the ground with
yellow energy pulsing from their deep wounds.

After all four were struck down by his
bullets, Matt drops to the ground, discarding his rifle and forming
his sword from his right hand, and sprints towards them. Being the
first for him to meet, Ryan, still trying to stand up straight,
sees him coming and tries holding the blades of his left arms out
to catch him. The meager effort fails as Matt, in a short dash of
air balance, zooms past him below the blades while spinning once
with his own blade outward, leaving behind a complete cut through
Ryan’s left leg to sever it and have him fall over on his
side.

Not looking back to his crippled foe,
Matt is already bearing down on the Handgun Gunner, who has gotten
onto his knees just in time to look up and see the dark sword
swooping down at him. A second later, Matt dashes away from him on
air balance, raising his sword above him in momentum while the
Gunner’s neck erupts with reddening wound energy as he is
essentially decapitated, demorphing just as the wound energy blooms
a dark red and rolling over to his side with his real neck still
intact.

Still not done with his assault, Matt
moves on to the Magician, back on his feet with a chest wound
pumping out darkening energy, and is in mid-leap with his sword
above his head between both hands. Just as the Magician looks up
with terror in his eyes, the black blade chops through him, causing
a line to appear with gushing wound energy to show where he was
split in half.

As the man falls over backwards,
demorphing when he meets the grass, Matt glances to his left to see
the Axman has recovered from the shock of the gun shot through his
right eye and is upon him, his ax swinging toward him. Raising his
own blade to parry the ax’s edge, Matt then does a quick spin, his
sword’s point lashing outward and slicing a long streak of yellow
energy in the Axman’s waist, before letting his sword fade out and
gathering magic in his right hand.

Once the Axman looks away from his
shallow wound to the Blastion sphere in Matt’s hand, he shoves it
into him, and the resulting explosion sends the Axman’s whole torso
flying through the air. Reddening wound energy sprays out of him as
he bounces across the ground until a bullet from Matt’s left-armed
rifle nails him in the chest, forcing his demorph.

After demolishing his third enemy,
Matt turns back to Ryan, hobbling himself towards him on his right
leg and air balance as he growls, “This isn’t over, you dirty son
of a…”

Ryan fails to finish his cuss when
Matt’s rifle fires a bullet through his neck, the pin-point shot
rupturing his throat and causing him to gag while the wound spits
out darkening yellow energy. The expression on Ryan’s face finally
twisting from anger to fear as he struggles to stay up on his good
leg, Matt puts away his rifle while crackling volts of purple
electricity run down his left arm. When Ryan again falls over onto
his back, Matt raises his hand outward while calling out his
spell’s name:

“
Voltzen
Fury
.”

The dark sparks of electricity jump
from Matt’s arm onto Ryan’s body, which flails and twitches wildly
as the volts surge through him. Making disgruntled screams and
cries of agony from the electrocution, Ryan can do nothing as the
spell zaps him, inflicting multiple wounds all over him and
widening his chest and neck wounds with bursts of depleting energy,
until the violet volts mingle with red wound energy and he finally
demorphs, the flash of red ending Matt’s spell and leaving the
normal Ryan yet twitching on the ground.

***

Once Ryan’s body stops twitching, he
looks up at his conqueror still in morph, his black armor an
ominous hue and his violet eyes glaring down at him. Scrambling
back onto his feet, he gets out, “You’re sick, man, you’re a sick
freak!” before running off into the open fields away from the
scene, followed by the other three men. Watching them leave for a
moment, Matt sighs before demorphing and resuming his walk back
towards the cabins.

To his curiosity, Matt notices that
the other students who watched the skirmish unfold are awe-struck
and murmuring to themselves as they scatter, casting him fleeting
looks of fear much like the one Ryan had. Rather than bothering
himself about it, Matt ignores their behavior as he continues on
his way back to his cabin, again thinking about his peculiar
situation with Lyn and her lady escorts.

Chapter 3

Meet the Enemy

***

The next day, whether he is in his
classes diligently working, walking through the halls in between
classes, or passing through the cafeteria on his way to lunch, Matt
notices something odd and disturbing. It seems like all the other
students around him, from the freshmen like him to even some of the
seniors, are afraid of him as they would stay away from him or send
fearful or scornful looks at him in quick glances. While through
the most of the day it was a faint, nagging feeling of uneasiness
for him, it becomes a painful blow when in gym he and the rest of
his class are randomly paired to spar with each other in battle
morphs. But, instead of fighting him, the student he is supposed to
fight begs Professor Serpanz to not fight him. Narrowing her dark
eyes at the student, she tells him, “There are no exceptions or
excuses in my class, Roger. I thought I made that clear to everyone
the first day of school.”

“
Bu-but, you, you don’t
understand!” Roger explains to her in hushed tones, trying in vain
not to make a scene as the other freshmen gather to watch.
“The-there’s something not right about him, I, I can’t fight him! I
won’t stand a chance, he’ll slaughter me!”

“
If he won’t slaughter
you, then
I
will,” Serpanz remarks, making the other freshmen cringe.
“You can go ahead and simply spar with him, or I’m going to make
you so miserable you’re going to wish you had sparred instead.
Either way, you’re going to suffer, apparently. But I would really
recommend sparring with Matt.”

“
No, no, please, don’t
make me do it!” Roger whimpers, casting a frightened look at a hurt
Matt. “I’ll do anything, anything but fight his…”

“
One hundred
push-ups.”

“
Huh?”

“
Get your face on the
ground and give me one hundred push-ups, out of your battle morph.
Now!” Jumping a little at her command, he drops to the floor and
begins the gauntlet of push-ups, already struggling to do them
after just five. Serpanz’ glare cuts through the other freshmen as
she asks, “And what are you all looking at? I didn’t hear any of
you fighting. Morph and spar!”

As the other freshmen, including Sean
and Rose, jolt from her sharp tone and scatter across the arena for
their respective match-ups, Serpanz walks past the straining Roger
to address Matt in a more respectful manner. “Sorry about your
partner suddenly having cold feet, but don’t let that make you
think you’re excused from the exercise.”

“
Oh, no, of course not,
Professor! But, who am I going to spar, then?”

“
Me. No guns, no magic.”
Before Matt can respond, she enters a brown flash of light before
appearing as a large Snake, her scales copper-colored, her
serpentine body long and thick, and her head full of knife-sized,
arrowhead-sharp fangs as she hisses at him and curves her neck for
a striking position.

While the other freshmen are supposed
to be fighting each other, they morphed before turning back, spread
around the arena, to watch their professor’s morph in action as she
feints a lightning-fast strike at Matt, making him fall backwards
and gasp with surprise on his face. In the next instant, Matt gets
into his battle mentality and morphs, drawing his black sword from
his left arm and lunging back at Serpanz, who swiftly slides away
on her scales out of the way, slithering over a freaked-out Roger
and making him jump up and run away.

Matt and Serpanz circle the other for
their sparring match with his sword between his hands and her
tongue flicking out between her jaws. Matt makes the next move as
he uses air balance to whip himself into a whirlwind, holding his
blade outward, and sends himself at her, hoping to whack or hack
through her. Serpanz counters him when she slips by under his
rotations and wraps herself around him, binding him up tightly and
crushing him in her constricting coils.

While Matt struggles against her
entangled embrace with wound energy spitting out from between her
scaled length, she raises her head, her jaws wide open and lined
with sharp teeth, and bites down through his neck, the whiplash of
her teeth ripping out of him with a spraying stream of yellow
energy from his wounds. Growling from being outmatched so easily
and gargling on the darkening wound energy escaping his throat,
Matt demorphs as it bleeds red, releasing him from Serpanz’ bind
and having her drop to the floor with her body forming a ring
around him.

As he staggers on his feet, finding
his body sore all over from the crushing constriction beforehand,
Matt is startled when Serpanz demorphs next to him, standing beside
him after the flash of light and brushing some of her hair back
with her hand. Then noticing that the freshmen had all watched
their spar, she sighs before saying, “Alright, since all of you
have yet to spar, I will take a moment to give you a quick and
important lesson. As you undoubtedly observed, I defeated Matt here
in a close-combat sparring. Can anyone tell me how it turned out
that way?”

When the most of the freshmen are
hesitant to dare answer her, Rose raises her hand and says, “If I
may, Professor, you were able to easily outmaneuver Matt’s sword
techniques with your quick agility and then immobilize him in your
coils, where you weakened him in a constriction and then delivered
a vital wound through his neck to drain out the rest of his health
energy.”

“
That is correct, Rose. In
case any of you are unaware of the term, a vital wound is a wound
inflicted upon an Alkalian in battle morph that is so deep in him
or placed within a weak spot of the morph’s form, for example a
humanoid’s neck, that it will lose further energy at a gradual
rate, quickened by further uses of energy from the Alkalian, as
long as he remains in morph. Also, the more severe the vital wound
appears, the greater the rate of health lost. Where one would be
decapitated, split in half, or just blown apart if they weren’t in
morph, the damage is compensated in morph with a rapid loss of
health.