Alkalians (38 page)

As the spectators collect their reward
money from betting for him, no more of them are willing to try his
luck against Matt. They all can see that something is different
about him this evening, the giddy look on his face and the sparkle
in his eyes making him look like he was possessed. They can be
sure, though, that he isn’t drunk as he has defeated four opponents
in a row. If an Alkalian is under the influence of alcohol when in
morph, his coordination and capabilities are severely
flawed.

Some of the students are considering
leaving to do other activities, believing nobody would be crazy
enough to take on Matt in his state, when someone shouts out from
among them, “Ah hah, I’ve finally found you! Matt Calamos,
yes?”

Matt turns around to the source of the
voice and sees Buster emerging from the crowd and strolling into
the pit toward him. What four battles beforehand had failed to
cause, it happens when he looks closely at him as Buster continues,
“Every time I’m in the pit, you’re not around it, but when you are
in the pit, I’m the one absent! Haha, it’s like fate was trying to
keep us apart, or something! But now, we finally get to meet in the
arena.”

Matt asks, “And who would you be, if
you’re so excited to find me here?”

“
Oh, yes, right.
Introductions are needed before we get down to business. I am
Buster Harmada! A pleasure to finally meet you, Matt.”

Memory from Sean’s forewarning of
important people reminds Matt of who Buster is. “You mean you’re
Buster, a boss student, the infamous King of the Pit?”

“
That’s right,” he laughs,
“and I’m pretty good at being it! In fact, that’s the reason why
I’ve been searching for you around here. I have to protect my
title!”

“
Huh?”

“
Oh, you know, I have to
prove that I’m still king around here, and that means I must defeat
all others who are doing exceedingly well in the pit battles. Right
now, that just happens to be you and your little friends. Adding to
that, I figure if I beat the one of you who the rest revolve
around, I’ll be stopping all of you from taking my title. Of
course, I would love the opportunity to fight the others, but I
believe besting you will make the greatest impression around
here!”

Matt isn’t sure if that is the true
reason why Buster wants to fight him. He knows from Sean’s warnings
that he is a boss student, which means he could be an ally of
Cain’s. As he dreads the situation he is caught in, the crowd
becomes thirsty for combat again, already making bets as their
coins roll and flip noisily into the pit. They believe this is
going to be the biggest pit battle ever since Matt had crushed
Cain.

Buster takes notice of Matt’s troubled
expression and the audience around them throwing money down into
the pit. He says, “Hey, don’t take it personally, Matt, I’m just
doing my job. Besides, if you lose, it wouldn’t be the end of the
world!”

At the moment, Matt feels like it
would be the end. The whole success of his conquest and efforts may
now rest upon this fight. If he lost, all the hard work and support
he had gained could be wasted. But instead of panicking at these
thoughts, he faces them head on and steels himself before morphing.
“I warn you, this isn’t going to be as easy as you might think,” he
says in an effort to intimidate.

Buster laughs and replies, “Ah, now
that’s the spirit! Let’s have ourselves a hell of a fight!” And
with those final words, he morphs.

***

Matt’s hardened battle mentality
softens at the sight of Buster’s MechWarrior morph, which he
recognizes as a formidable foe from studies. When the siren goes
off, the battle begins with Matt making the first move, turning his
right arm into a rifle and firing burst shots at Buster. Before the
bullets hit, he springs high into the air from a built-up air
balance, surprising Matt down below. He and the crowd’s eyes follow
Buster upward and see the large guns’ barrels change into the
gatling design. The barrel circles spin at high speed, and as
Buster drops back into the pit they point down at Matt and fire
endless streams of bullets.

Matt dashes away from the raining fire
on air balance, and then sharply turns to run back at Buster down
the pit’s sloped wall. Buster lands near the center of the arena,
sending a small quake through the floor, and aims his left gun
mount at Matt to continue his bullet barrage. Matt accelerates
forward without hesitation past and through the storm, moving with
enough agility to let only a few bullets scrape him. As he nears
Buster, he leaps up high and his left hand forms his large black
blade, raised to split his foe’s steel skull.

Despite Matt having closed the
distance with minimal damage, Buster has a confident look in his
robotic eyes, and before Matt can bring the sword down on him he
turns himself just enough to point his right arm up at him. Matt
immediately hates what he sees. The right arm has become a shotgun,
which shoots and hits him with enough force to stop his descent and
throw him backwards onto the floor.

With wounds radiating green on him, he
looks up to see Buster moving his right gun mount into position,
the gatling design replaced by the gaping cavity of a cannon. Matt
grimaces, his pupils dilating as the cannon stares him down, its
core within the barrel flashing with loaded energy.

Buster fires his cannon mount at the
same time Matt splits into magic clones. The mortar smashes the
clones before they can scatter, and their disintegration goes along
with the cannon’s boom. Matt is left standing close to where his
shadows were, surprised and stunned by the shockwave. Buster lifts
his left arm, now a grenade launcher, and throws out a sphere of
energy. It smacks into Matt, and in the same instant explodes and
sends him tumbling several feet away along the arena wall, leaving
wide orange wounds across the front of his body.

The crowd cheers at something they
have not seen before. For once, Matt is the one getting clobbered
in battle. Buster reflects their enthusiasm with a hearty laugh
before shouting, “Is that all you’ve got, Mr. Dark Warrior? Basic
techniques won’t work against me!”

Matt understands this as he stands up.
He feels stupid for starting out with a beginner’s tactics,
especially since he’s had four battles for warm-up. He has to get
his head in the game and pull off smarter combination attacks if he
was going to defeat a foe like Buster.

Matt splits into his shadows, each
armed with the large black sword. Buster’s eyes twinkle, already
predicting the clones will rush him and take the gunfire while Matt
moves into a position to nail him with a direct hit. His left gun
mount changes the barrel into a missile-launching stump, and his
targeting vision scans the clones and finds the real Matt. Buster
locks-in on him, and the rockets of energy are fired, screaming
into the air above the pit and then diving down, seeking out
Matt.

In response, the clones leap up and
together to become a shield against the missile barrage, which
decimates them as soon as they unite. Buster ignores the mid-air
clash, watching the real Matt zoom towards him with his massive
blade aimed for a stab, and prepares to counter the attack by
pointing the tank cannon at Matt. The cannon’s missile crushes the
charging Matt before he can reach Buster, but, to his and the
audience’s surprise, he only hit another clone, and the real Matt
comes up to his side with a magic spell ready to cast.

He throws out his dark version of the
Voltzon Fury spell that zaps and shocks Buster, immobilizing him
with the stunning electricity and lighting him up, as if his
circuits are overloading and sparking out of him. Branching
fractures of yellow wounds spread across him, scarring his limbs,
chest, and head, before he looks down to see Matt pulsing with
another spell to follow up the first spell at its end. Matt whips
out his Blastion magic, and the explosion sears through Buster’s
open wounds on his chest and blows him over backwards, leaving a
cavity of dark orange energy in him.

The crowd is stupefied from Matt’s
reversal evening the two opponents’ health energies. Buster
himself, laying face-up on the floor, is impressed by Matt’s clever
action of keeping a clone in his outline and using it as a buffer
when he charged. He is also fascinated from what it feels like to
experience a Dark Warrior’s special power, tearing through his
heavy armor to deal immense damage and create a vital wound in his
chest.

Matt, after a few panting breaths,
forms his sword and leaps into the air, holding his sword’s point
toward Buster below. Buster, seeing him coming, isn’t going to let
himself become the sword’s plaque. With an air balance trick, he
hovers while spinning his entire body, making his gun mounts into
swinging battle arms. They deflect Matt’s sword plant and knock him
away, and Matt rolls a few yards before standing upright. He looks
back at Buster, who has four guns, two his mounted cannons and two
his arms shaped into grenade launchers, aimed at him.

Buster releases all four guns
simultaneously, and a huge explosion blooms where Matt was standing
on the pit wall. The whole room shakes from the force of the blast,
and the hungry crowd looks for the demorph flash, but are
disappointed when they notice Matt had escaped the blasts by diving
forward to the center of the pit, letting the projectiles land
behind him. He is back up in an instant and racing off on air
balance, gaining altitude and distance from Buster along the pit’s
slopes.

Matt turns his left arm into a rifle
and fires single shots at his enemy below, who hovers about on air
balance to avoid the shots while his cannon mounts fire volleys at
him. He speeds along away from the bombardment, the only damage he
takes being the vital wounds of his torso bleeding darker, but he
can’t fight back as he is being fired upon. So, instead of waiting
to see if Buster’s cannon cores would overheat, he hurls himself
high into open air off the edge of the pit, forcing Buster to stop
firing or he would have hit the crowd beyond the pit.

Buster cusses, then chuckles, at
Matt’s gamble, knowing he can’t hit his target when he is suspended
in mid-air near the crowd, so he acts to resolve the problem. His
right gun mount changes into the missile launcher, and he prepares
to lock-in on Matt. However, once again, he underestimates the
freshman Dark Warrior.

Instead of remaining in the air, Matt
drops and sprints back down into the pit towards him at high speed.
In the same moment he divides into black magic copies for the third
time, but this time the clones are lined up in a straight line,
perpendicular to Buster. The MechWarrior realizes he can’t stop
this incoming assault with his arm weapons, so he does the next
best thing, finding the real Matt anyway and firing two rockets
into the air while crossing his arms to shield the vital wound on
his chest glowing a dark orange.

The clones crash into him with sword
stabs and slashes. His wounds shift into bright red and he is taken
down, his legs chopped through by two clones, while the three
others impaled his arms when they went for his chest. One of them,
the real Matt, hops off and lands a few yards away, switching in
his rifle for the sword to point at his butchered foe.

The audience has been muted, holding
their breath as they see the battle is about to end. Matt coldly
tells Buster, “Demorph, or I’ll have to do real harm to
you.”

Buster tries to sit up, the red wounds
all over him like magma vents and sheer astonishment in his
mechanical eyes. He says, “That, wasn’t too bad…”

Matt hears a sharp whistle growing
louder above him, and looking up he gasps. The duo of missiles
hammer into him in colliding explosions before a demorph flash
blinks out from between them. Matt as a human is left there, fallen
to his knees and frozen in shock.

Buster’s eyes narrow with
satisfaction. “But it wasn’t good enough.” He demorphs and the
crowd goes wild with cheers.

***

Buster walks over to Matt as the crowd
does their business of collecting the winnings up above. Matt is
lost in his thoughts, a grim expression on him, before he lifts his
gaze up to Buster in front of him.

Buster’s glee disappears when he
notices the look on Matt’s face, and he asks, “How do you
feel?”

Matt’s words are absent until he
replies, “I’ve been beaten by a boss student, the one type of foe I
couldn’t afford losing to. Now, all of my hard work in rallying
people against this system of student leadership will be smudged by
my failure. You turned out to be the force Cain needed to stop
me.”

“…
Have you talked to Rose
yet this evening?”

“
Huh? Uh, no, I haven’t
met her back at our cabin yet. Why?”

Buster doesn’t reply for a moment
before he booms out in laughter, making Matt jolt in surprise.
“Man, no wonder you are so worried! You still think I’m on Cain’s
side? Well, I’ve got breaking news for you. I’m a turncoat. I’m
your ally now!”

“…
Wait, what?”

“
Simple, really. I don’t
agree with, nor can afford risking my own neck, for Cain’s schemes
anymore, and from what I’ve heard about ya, plus what I saw out of
you tonight, it’s clear to me that you’re ten times the man Cain
is. Sure enough, you turned out to be the dark horse of this
contest, and now I’m gonna be putting my bids on you!”