Alkalians (57 page)

Cain raises his sword, his crystals
feed it power, and he flings a jolt of it at her. However, it
doesn’t get anywhere near her, fizzing out just a few feet before
him. He blinks, not comprehending what happened, and tries throwing
lightning at her again. He fails again, a stream of curses escaping
his mouth as Cynthia continues playing her music. Only when he
feels the air getting hotter around him does he look, and he gawks
dumbly at the two crystals hovering near him, glowing brightly from
the heat of searing sparks dancing upon them.

Some part of him figuring
out what is going on, how a few of Cynthia’s fireballs went for his
crystals instead of him and she was composing the magic to contain
and cut off his own, Cain spitefully looks at Cynthia, calm in her
composure as her fingers fiddled the air, and spits out, “How dare
you defile
them
,
you burning bitch!” before readying his sword to charge at her.
When he thrusts forward, he gets smacked by something from the
side, something hot that streaks a burning yellow wound across his
face and spirals him in place before falling. Once he gets back up,
he appears confused, then panicked, when he sees the object and its
twin rapidly revolving around him, his own crystals turned against
him as blazing blurs.

Changing the tempo of her music to a
crescendo, joined by the pounding rhythm of many in the gym’s
stands clapping or stomping, Cynthia feeds the fire, the crystals
she hijacked whipping up a twister of flames in their speed that
blazes like her hair, beautiful and fierce. The fire rises,
ignorant of a trapped Cain flailing and screaming within it, until
a pillar of it stands tall in the arena for a moment before she
ends her music. The flames die down, revealing Cain staggering with
bright orange wounds upon his cracked armor and crystal growths,
and the orbiting crystals brake to a stop, transformed from heat
and pressure into smooth, red stones with their rounded points
aimed at him, one in front of him and one behind him. She waves her
arms forward with sparks still flying from her fingertips,
condenses them into gathered energy between her hands, and releases
them to activate the metamorphic rocks, firing incinerating lasers
into Cain that rupture his wounds further and paint them burning
red.

***

Only a few seconds after the lasers
drill into him, a red demorph flash consumes Cain, the flames, and
the stones at once and spits him out in his human form, his face
blank from shock and pain before he collapses backwards. There is a
still silence over the arena before the overhead speaker announces,
“The winner is Cynthia Volvaron,” and the audience erupts with
applause. For their sake, Cynthia puts on her glamorous appeal,
standing there and waving in her battle morph, her red suit and
fiery hair adding to her brilliance. Despite her appearance and her
wounds gone from her trick with the ashes, she does not feel well.
In a glance at Cain’s blacked out form being attended by medics, a
subtle frown crosses her.

She knows something is truly wrong
with him after hearing his raving and ranting and his threats
toward her, as well as his reaction to seemingly killing her. Most
Alkalians, including the students and faculty of the college, know
how they die in their battle morphs. Once the health of a morph
becomes red in color, they are vulnerable to true damage beyond the
morph, and if anymore damage that is fatal happens to it before
demorphing, the morph literally falls apart as dust or ashes,
signaling the Alkalian’s death.

There is something terrible in Cain’s
mentality, to have been laughing at the supposed sight of her
dying, and Cynthia wonders if the different form and powers of his
morph were a manifestation of his madness. Despite her bright
response to the cheering crowd, her feelings are dark when she
glances to the medics carrying him out of the arena. She decides,
not just because it’s about time the word gets out but also in
light of his most recent behavior, to inform the college’s
authorities about Cain’s malicious plots, especially what he
planned for Matt and Rose, so that they could deal with him before
anyone else could be harmed by him.

***

The next, and last, match of the
tournament semifinals is about to begin shortly after Cynthia’s
victory. Dante and Irene Goros, brother and sister, soon face each
other from opposite sides of the arena’s middle. They wear similar
suits of bright pants and vests, but Irene’s clothing is more
yellow while Dante’s focused on orange. The audience, instead of
resting from making noise for the first battle, is just as loud for
this one by its whistles and whoops. They are not excited for a
single one of the two about to duel, but rather the mere prospect
of a brother-against-sister contest.

While the spectators continue making
noise, Irene speaks to Dante, mocking concern clear in her voice.
“Well, this is rather tragic, isn’t it? You and I, the heirs to the
Goros nobility, about to fiercely battle each other and leave the
winner to humiliate the other. It’s not too late, if you want to
forfeit and avoid it all.”

Dante does nothing but stare back at
her in response. Before, he had always taken care not to fight
Irene, ever since they stopped sparring back at home when they were
younger. This time, however, he feels compelled to participate in
this battle. There is something he has to confront her over, and he
has the bad feeling it would encourage them both into fighting the
other. He says to her, “Sister, I have a question I need to ask
you. Something has been troubling me for a while, and I was hoping
you could resolve it for me.”

Irene replies, “Oh? You’re asking me
for insights? What could my dear younger brother need
clarified?”

Dante pauses before explaining his
question. “Irene, I’ve heard strange stories about you, but none so
strange as the one most recent. I need to know the truth from you
alone, for no one else can convince me. Did you attend a late-night
party where you harassed the other women, and then slept with one
of them?”

Surprise flutters in Irene’s eyes. She
looks around at the arena’s packed audience, knowing they can’t
hear their conversation. Then she confesses to Dante, smirking as
she says, “Yes, I did.”

Dante’s disciplined behavior cracks
with the pale expression on his face. Irene shakes her head with a
chuckle which only enlarges the fractures. “Why do you look so
surprised, brother? If you had any care for me, you would know
fully about my recent hobbies. And I’m not afraid to admit that
I’ve taking a liking to sleeping around with others, male or
female, I’ve had both several times this semester. I’ve just had an
appetite for sexual pleasure that I’ve come to find hard to
satisfy. I’m sure you couldn’t understand, having never even kissed
someone intimately, you know.”

Grief and denial swirl in Dante’s mind
around the one emotion he is desperate to suppress. Chokingly, he
asks Irene, “Why, why, sister? Why would you do such things, after
all of the morals and disciplines we’ve been taught?”

Irene shakes her head before answering
him. “Those silly ‘morals’ and ‘disciplines’ were for when we were
young and didn’t know any better. But now, I am older, more mature,
and have more privilege. Plus, I’m my own independent person. I
can, and will, do whatever I want that pleases me. I’m in control
of my own life, and you can’t tell me how to live it.”

The suppressed feeling in Dante
expands and swallows all others as he pictures the truth. Irene is
losing control of her life. She has forgotten the examples of her
family and her noble roles, led astray by the corrupted behaviors
of disgraceful individuals. Soon, if it continues, she would fall
from nobility and respect, possibly without any chance of ever
redeeming herself. Dante’s sorrow and hesitation are strangled by
anger and logic. However, he keeps down words of rage and
condemnation, lowering his gaze as his body trembles.

Watching and recognizing her brother’s
body behavior, Irene laughs before saying, “Aw, what’s wrong,
little brother? Are you gonna cry, in front of all our peers? I
won’t judge you if you do, as I’ve always known you to be a softy,
a suck-up to superiors and whatnot.” When he doesn’t reply, and the
countdown begins above them, she berates him, “You are such a fool,
Dante. You’ve always kept yourself low, sulking around with your
smokes, thinking you’d get around without causing trouble. But
you’ve got to get reckless, brother! You’ve got to cut loose, go
out and enjoy yourself, take advantage of others dumb enough to let
you. And you see, that’s what I’m going to do here, by beating you
to a pulp and showing everyone why I am the first heir in our
family.”

Dante still says not a word, keeping
it all locked down in him, not looking back at his ignorant sister.
He channels his emotions, his anger, his sorrow, his guilt at what
his sister has become, pressing and folding them into one essence,
one feeling, sharpening and tempering it for one
purpose.

***

When the siren goes off, they morph,
and Dante charges forward, drawing his suppressed emotion in a
flash of amber that splits the bullet shot at him. The smug look on
Irene turns to shock at her brother’s explosive start, and she
launches herself backwards on air balance to avoid a deep slash of
his katana.

Irene remains hovering in the air, the
appearance of her battle morph on display. Suited in gold and black
leather, with her left arm in the form of a high power sniper
rifle, she focuses on Dante with sniper vision, picking out the
fury burning in his eyes. She has seen those eyes before, but only
rarely, as they have grown up together, and she knows what they
mean. Dante Goros is slow to anger, but once he gets mad enough to
break loose, so does hell.

Scowling, Irene takes aim with her
rifle, but as she shoots her target vanishes from her sights, and
the bullet bites the floor where he once he was. Blinking, she
looks off to her right and spots Dante, having side-thrust on air
balance to dodge her shot. She takes aim and shoots again, but he
dodges again, sliding back to where he was before. Becoming
furious, she zooms out on her vision, aiming at more of an area
around him, and fires a rapid burst of bullets, spreading to hit
multiple points in a small area.

The rain of bullets miss Dante as he
avoids them by dashing forward, then up, on air balance, rolling a
few times to gather momentum as his trajectory carries him to
Irene. Startled and without time to take another shot at him, she
responds instead by drawing an energy dagger from her right hand to
meet Dante’s descending sword.

The two blades clash and lock, the
heavy blow from Dante dragging them down in the air instead of
breaking through his sister’s defense. They struggle in the
dead-lock for a moment, brother and sister boring through each
other with their similar eyes, before Dante pulls a fast one by
kicking at her side with his right foot. With the jab flinching
her, it leaves her open for a spiraling slice of the sword, a green
wound streaking across her chest, and a rising sweep cutting
through her lower leg, nearly severing it while flipping her over,
off air balance, and to the ground.

After hitting the floor on her back,
Irene cringes, irritated at the damage done to her, and when she
looks up to see Dante falling upon her rolls sideways to the left,
just in time to avoid him planting the point of his katana deep
into her. With him having stuck it in the floor instead, he is left
open to Irene spraying another burst of bullets at him, and they
pound into his leg, chest, and shoulder, the wounds blooming bright
green, then yellow. Before she punctuates the opening, Dante thinks
quickly enough to abandon his sword, its energy vanishing from his
hands, and bends back to avoid a single, direct, more powerful shot
from her rifle, sliding and spinning to lay himself low on the
ground.

In a brief moment of respite, the two
siblings, their wound colors and expressions similar, stare from
where they are, about twenty yards between them with Dante lying
flat on the floor and Irene kneeling, her rifle’s aim fixed on him.
Seeing her expression is focused and disciplined, he knows her
mentality is in the fight now, and with that also knows he’s
pinned. If he tries to make a move, in any direction, her rifle
would follow and shoot him.

As Dante tries to think of a way to
get out of his situation and back at her, he finds he has little
time when Irene forms a small object of condensed energy in her
right hand and, smirking, tosses it across the floor to him. In
dread, he recognizes what the object is, and is forced to launch
himself straight up into the air, leaving the grenade to blast the
space he had once been in. In the split second he floats in the
air, Irene’s rifle fires, and only by twisting himself in another
air thrust to the side does he let the bullet hit his knee, busting
it in a gush of yellow that makes him cringe.

Wounded from Irene flushing him out,
Dante pushes himself to propel his air balance in a wide descent
back to the ground, grinding across it on his feet while revolving
around her position. Estimating his movement, Irene stands and
whirls in the opposite direction, her gun spraying bullets to cross
his path and cut through him, but he flips over them, continues his
drift, and closes the distance, making contact with a spinning
slash of his reformed sword through her side before she could turn
to him.