Ten, Combusken, and Muler did not hesitate for a single second. This was their ultimate moment. In a total, all consuming visual escalation, the three scouts went directly all out, determined to reduce the two drunk fighters to ashes in one merciless combo.
“Finish them off! No mercy for these drunk dogs!” Combusken roared, lifting his massive sword above his head with two hands. The blade glowed so intensely white hot that the air around it began to warp with a loud hissing sound, and the sheer heatwave caused the surrounding rocks to crack and transform into liquid lava. “I will burn you to the ground!”
Ten flashed forward like an insane, purple blue bolt of lightning. His speed was so absurd that he broke the laws of physics; dozens of pulsating afterimages simultaneously filled the space, making it seem as if a whole army of purple blue phantoms surrounded the crater. “You are too slow, trash!” yelled Ten, whose voice echoed from all afterimages at the same time. From every angle, crackling storm blasts and sonic shockwaves exploded straight toward Beat’s head.
At the same time, Muler leaped high into the air with a thundering roar, his shadow covering the entire width of the battlefield. His massive armor, studded with heavy spikes, charged during flight with a pitch black, pulsating kinetic impact. “Crushed under the law of gravity!” he bellowed, crashing straight down like an all destroying meteorite, aimed right at Apollo’s position.
But the cosmos seemed to bend for the stone drunk state of the two heroes in the most absurd, impossible ways.
At the exact moment that Ten’s razor sharp, lethal fist was about to cleave Beat’s face sideways, Beat swung backward with a wooden, slow movement because he stumbled over a simple loose stone. Ten struck with full power through empty air, lost his balance completely due to the missed blow, and shot meters past due to his own immense momentum, driving his own kinetic shockwave into the distant crater wall.
“What the… how did that miss?! This is impossible! He did not even move logically!” screamed Ten, sliding over the sharp stones and desperately trying to brake.
At the same time, Apollo swung his arms wildly and clumsily to keep his balance. Through that slow, drunk movement, his head ducked precise to the millimeter under Combusken’s glowing, horizontal sword slash. The white hot blade missed him so narrowly that a few loose hairs burnt with a hiss, filling the air with the smell of singed hair. Muler crashed to the ground right after with a deafening thud, splitting the earth completely and slamming a deep crater, but Apollo had already slouched a meter to the side at that exact moment because his blurry gaze fell on a shiny piece of debris on the ground.
“Look at that… a very pretty, shiny stone… hic… that one is mine…” Apollo slurred with a heavy tongue, clawing at the shiny pebble on his knees, completely oblivious to the apocalyptic impact right behind him.
The three scouts did not know what they were witnessing. Their perfect, lethal coordination and years of training were made completely ridiculous by pure, uncontrolled luck.
Beat remained standing wobblily on his legs, looked at the smoking craters around him with bloodshot, loopy eyes, and suddenly burst into loud laughter. “Hahaha! Guys… we are missing… we are really missing some heavy music here, hahaha! Where is the beat?!”
His Rajin Volt Anting responded immediately to his unhinged, drunk mood. The electricity no longer pulsated tightly or concentrated, but transformed into thick, bright blue, chaotic arms of pure energy that shot wildly and uncontrollably from his back. Beat began hammering on the surrounding rock walls like a madman with his kinetic lightning arms. He beat an insanely funky, loopy bass rhythm, like an alien drummer in a crazy club. Because he was directly linked to the deepest stone layers of the crater through the brute current, the complete battlefield began to wave rhythmically and wobble like a giant, liquid bounce house. The rocks moved up and down to the beat of his insane improvisation.
“What kind of hellish madness is this?! The whole ground is alive! The stones are melting and dancing!” roared Combusken, whose heavy boots lost all grip on the surging floor. He tried to ram his glowing sword deep into the trembling stones for grip, but the floor simply tossed him back up.
“I cannot target him! He has no fighting stance! He moves too illogically!” shrieked Ten, whose afterimages blurred through each other due to the heavily vibrating floor and exploded into useless sparks.
Apollo meanwhile grabbed Beat tightly by his shoulder to avoid falling backward from the surging ground, and Beat in turn grabbed Apollo tightly by his waist. Together they formed a human carousel. Powered by the unpredictable kinetic discharges of Beat’s funky lightning arms and the heavy inertia of Apollo’s staggering mass, the two men began spinning in circles at a furious speed. They twirled across the surging, purple blue glowing battlefield like a crazy, unguided wrecking ball.
“Everyone out of the w-way… here we comeee! The Apollo Express stops for no one! Woohoo!” Apollo slurred out loud, his legs hanging horizontally in the air due to the centrifugal force.
It became a total visual chaos of flashing electricity and flying debris. Apollo’s swinging, heavy leg hit Muler full against his helmeted jaw. The impact was so bizarrely powerful that the massive metal of the armor tore, and the brawler flew backward through the air with a triple backflip, coming to lie motionless with a loud metallic crash. In the exact same rotation, Beat’s electric bass arm hit the chest of the charging Ten clean. The purple lightning was overwhelmed by Beat’s blue current, and Ten was brought straight to the ground with a bright electrical crackle, his afterimages evaporating into smoke. Combusken tried to dive away with a desperate leap and use his burning blade as a shield, but the loopy carousel mowed him down mercilessly, sending his sword flying away in a wide arc.
Within a few seconds, the storm had passed. The funky beat stopped abruptly, the ground became quiet and rigid again, and Ten, Combusken, and Muler lay completely knocked out, gently smoking and groaning in the deep folds of the smashed crater floor. Completely K.O.
At that exact moment, loud murmurs echoed from the darkness of the caves. The crowd of soldiers and residents strolled over calmly, drawn by the strange, rhythmic noise that had echoed through the corridors.
“OHH, there you are! Come eat, the tables are already full of warm meat and…” began one of the front soldiers enthusiastically, but his voice died right in his throat when his gaze fell on the three knocked out, smoking scouts lying scattered here and there.
Nyx and Silarias walked at the very front of the group, their eyes wide open in pure astonishment at the sight of the total wreckage and deformed rock walls.
“Wait a second… who on earth are they? Those are army uniforms!” Nyx asked directly with a sharp, commanding voice, while her hand instinctively moved to the hilt of her sword and scanned the area.
Silarias looked completely confused from the three trembling, unconscious bodies on the ground to his two staggering friends. “Did those two just have a full fight? All by themselves? And in this state?”
Beat and Apollo stood staggering heavily a few meters away. They had clearly spun around far too many times and drunk far too much; their field of vision was completely distorted, the horizon twirled before their eyes, and they could barely remain standing upright.
“Three… three of those peepers, those scouts,” Beat babbled with a proud, thick tongue, pointing with a trembling finger somewhere toward a random, completely empty rock wall. “The two of us… totally, totally fixed them while drunk! No problem for the boys!”
Apollo latched onto him immediately, throwing his heavy arm around Beat’s neck with a loud slap, making them almost fall over together, and roared toward the dark sky: “HAZZAH!! FEAR US, MONSTERS!!”
With a grand, theatrical gesture, they both raised their fists straight into the air at the same time, with extended arms, as if they had just defeated an epic army in front of thousands of spectators like the greatest, most heroic legends of the world. There was only one giant, painful problem: due to their total drunkenness, their backs were turned completely toward the arrived group. They stood prattling with full pride, fire, and passion toward a bare, cold rock wall, without realizing in the slightest that they were looking in the completely wrong direction.
“Uh… guys? We are over here. Behind you,” Jane said with a dry, flat voice, slapping her hand against her forehead.
Beat and Apollo startled from the sound right behind them and wanted to turn around immediately in a coordinated, tough movement to claim the glory. But that turn went so clumsily, so crookedly, so completely out of sync and with so much lost balance, that their heads slammed full, and really full, against each other with a dull, terrifyingly hard CLUNK.
Their eyes rolled away synchronously into their sockets, lighting up white in the dark. Without straining a single muscle or making a sound, the two men collapsed straight forward, their faces flat in the dusty sand of the crater. Completely K.O. next to their own prisoners.
The crater remained dead silent for a fraction of a second, in which everyone tried to process what had just happened, after which the complete crowd of soldiers and citizens erupted into deafening, loud laughter. The roaring, wheezing, and pure humor echoed loudly against the stone walls of the deep crater.
Even the hypeman could not contain his enthusiasm at this comical display, immediately jumping back onto a raised boulder and waving his arms wildly to hype up the crowd. “People! What a show! Take these two absolute legends to the feast tables, they have earned their rest! And tie those three scouts up tightly with magical chains… maybe they can tell us something very valuable before morning comes!”
Nicola took a serious, measured step forward and examined the knocked out scouts with a sharp, analyzing glare. He bent forward, checked the insignia on their broken armor, and suddenly a bright spark of recognition struck through his eyes. He stood tall and hit his fist hard into his own palm.
“Eureka! Yes, yes… these are without a doubt top scouts of the prince himself,” Nicola spoke with a compelling, loud voice, looking at the rest of the leaders. “Their presence here is no coincidence. That means they have probably already passed on the exact location of our hidden camp to the main troops before they were taken down.”
His face tightened, the joy disappeared instantly, and the atmosphere became serious. “It does mean that we have no time to lose. We must immediately send someone back to their lines to scout the area, or even better, completely mislead them and lay down false trails. Someone who is just as fast, or ideally even faster than their own communication lines, to escape safely from there and gain crucial information before the actual war breaks out in full force.”
Silarias, Aurelius, and Nyx looked at each other, deep in thought due to the sudden strategic pressure placed on their shoulders. Nicola’s words hung heavy and ominous between them.
“Hmmm… Wait a second,” Silarias muttered slowly, while a faint, telling grin began to appear on his face and his gaze slowly shifted.
Synchronously, as if driven by the exact same thought, the heads of the leaders turned. They all looked at the ground a few meters away, where the drunk Beat was still snoring with his face deep in the sand, while an occasional small, lost blue spark of electricity crackled from his Rajin-anting.
At that exact moment, Miki and Ren came strolling calmly between the legs of the excited soldiers. They were both holding a giant, juicy, and dripping piece of roasted meat in their hands, completely undisturbed by the tension. Miki looked down briefly in surprise at the motionless duo on the ground, then took a huge, noisy bite of his meat and chewed calmly while staying upright.
“Oh,” Miki said with a full mouth, then gently nudging Beat’s motionless, dusty shoulder with the tip of his boot to check if there was any life left in him. “It seems they went to sleep earlier than us, Ren. They already got the loot.”
The massive wooden benches almost buckled under the insane abundance. Mountains of steaming, golden brown roasted meat, meters long freshly baked breads, and heavy cauldrons full of fragrant, bubbling stews were brought in at a furious pace. The complete crater floor was transformed into a pulsating sea of eating, talking, and toasting soldiers.
At the meters long main table, however, the division was painfully visible. On the left side sat Silarias, Beat, Aurelius, and the legendary Faustus, who was practically glued to Silarias. On the complete right side sat the rest of the group, side by side with the leaders of the beasthumans and soldiers.
Well, there was barely any ‘sitting’ on the left side. The three young fighters were truly devouring food like starved demons. Silarias had buried his teeth deep into a massive wild boar leg, fat dripping down his chin, while Beat tore the ribs of a roasted beast apart with a wild tug. Aurelius sat chewing away big chunks of meat with thick, purple smudges of a berry sauce on his cheeks. The pace was lethal.
But after a few minutes of intense wolfing down, the silence on the right side of the table began to weigh heavily.
Silarias stopped halfway through a giant bite. His gaze shifted over the edge of his meat bone. Dozens of pairs of eyes were staring at them continuously. Not a single fork on the other side had been touched yet. The soldiers sat stiff as boards, Nicola held his cup still halfway to his mouth, and the tension could be cut with a knife.
With a full mouth and puffed up cheeks, Silarias looked around confused. “Uhh… Wha’ i’ wrong?” he swallowed with a loud gulp, then threw his arms wide. “Enjoy the food, everyone? Why is everyone looking like we are eating poison?”
At first it remained quiet, followed by a swelling murmur on the opposite side. Soldiers nudged each other with their elbows, Lila whispered wildly into Jane’s ear, until Nyx was pushed forward with a firm, unmistakable shove from behind. She regained her balance with an angry glance back and then looked at the three eaters with fiercely burning eyes. She crossed her arms tightly.
“Uh… well, well!” Nyx began, her voice cracking from pent up curiosity. “All of us here would really like to know what on earth happened when we left! How did you actually survive that damned tournament? How did you do it? We leave you behind on a burning battlefield, and the next time we see you, you fall out of the sky!”
Silarias, Beat, and Aurelius stopped chewing synchronously. They looked at each other with wide open eyes, their jaws pressed tight together to prevent food from falling out of their mouths.
“Really?” Silarias babbled with a thick tongue, driving a chunk of meat to the side of his cheek.
They let their gaze sweep across the massive table. The soldiers were practically trembling on their benches, the beasthumans leaned forward so far that their noses almost touched the food, and everyone was literally jumping with pure curiosity. Even when they looked to the side, they saw that the great Faustus was sitting on the absolute edge of his wooden chair with a broad, challenging look, his fingers folded together.
The three fighters looked at each other once more and burst into a boisterous laugh at the same time. “Hahaha! So… where do we even begin?”
Faustus made a fluid, elegant hand gesture. With a soft hissing sound, he wove a miniature of pure, deep purple Void energy that began floating over the table like a living, three dimensional hologram, complete with the mini cloud streams of their earlier flight.
Silarias was just taking a deep breath and opened his mouth to speak, but Beat swallowed his food in one giant gulp and interrupted him completely in the most radical, chaotic way possible.
“I tell you, it was pure escalation!” Beat shouted with wild hand gestures, while bright blue electric sparks practically shot from his hair and made the cups on the table vibrate. “We truly gave everything, and I mean everything! Nicola’s plan was spot on, insane! We brought that giant, exploding beast high enough into the stratosphere right before the fatal bang. The blast that followed was so bizarrely huge, that shockwave was so intense, that the three of us used that explosion as a kind of cosmic launchpad! We were launched, man! We shot straight down like a glowing comet at Mach 10, right through the burning clouds! And while we were speeding down like an arrow, we suddenly saw a heavily fortified outpost of the Inquisitors in the corner of our eye!”
Beat paused abruptly, his breathing heavy, and grabbed a giant jug to pour a huge gulp down, after which he quickly stuffed a new chunk of meat into his mouth.
Miki sat on the bench with giant, shining eyes. She held her roasted meat bone trembling in the air and practically jumped onto Ren’s lap from sheer excitement. “AND THEN?! AND THEN?! What did you do then?!”
Faustus latched onto her immediately with a deep, challenging grin. He leaned forward so far that his pitch black horns almost touched the hologram, fixing his gaze on Silarias. “You did not do what I thought you were going to do down there, did you… You guys did not…”
Silarias burst out laughing loudly, slamming his fist on the table so the dishes rattled, taking over the story in the exact same legendary and epic way. “Oh yes we did! We slammed right through the roof into the inside at full speed, with the absolute force of a falling star! But the weird thing was: inside it was at first as if nothing was wrong. There turned out to be a complete, hidden society of Inquisitors in there with truly everything their corrupt hearts desired! They had a giant armory full of rare weapons, a huge training hall where the walls were still vibrating, an overly luxurious feast room, a giant garden room… and then we came to a gigantic, hermetically sealed laboratory.”
Silarias’ face darkened briefly, the laugh disappearing very briefly from his eyes, but that pure storytelling adrenaline soon took over again. “But in that laboratory… there were no experiments. There were only locked up, terrified children.”
“So what did we do, hahaha!” Beat yelled right through it again, his voice cracking from pure excitement as he poked his fork in the air. “We thought for zero seconds! We smashed right through all the rooms like a crazy pinball! In a bizarre, insane ricochet we shot straight through that whole stream of Inquisitors. Electricity everywhere, walls collapsing, and we blasted a cool path to freedom in one straight line for all those children in there! But yeah, then the red alarm went off of course. The whole hideout went into total magical lockdown, the laboratory was about to turn into a nuclear fireball, and that was the absolute best part of that entire fortress!”
Suddenly Aurelius slammed his heavy cup onto the table, sending the sauce flying around, and took over with a broad grin. “Their huge fridge! Hahaha! That thing was no normal cabinet, it was a kind of massive, meters thick, reinforced vault of magical metal! The three of us jumped inside like a bunch of idiots, kicked the door shut, held onto each other, and… KABOOM! The whole outpost exploded into a gigantic sea of fire. And us? We simply used that all destroying blast as a catapult! It left a huge flash and a thick mushroom cloud of smoke in the mountains, and we flew in that metal fridge way past you guys, straight into this city! Upon landing, we smashed right into some hothead from the inquisition, we flattened him completely… mmm, and then we were forced to go undercover of course.”
Beat let his shoulders slump, blew a strand of hair out of his face, and let out a deep, dramatic sigh. “Yeah, those damn restrictions of that undercover mission… Terrible! We were not allowed to do anything from Silarias and the leadership. We could not make loud music, we could not summon flying lions, and we were absolutely forbidden from using Aethergard! We had to behave like normal citizens!” He brightened up again in a single second, pointing his finger with a broad grin toward the furthest corner of the feast tent. “But there in those slums we did meet Malaka, along with his awesome wife Kali!”
In the furthest, dim corner of the huge tent, a sturdy, broad shouldered man and a very friendly woman indeed immediately began waving their large wooden drinking cups merrily toward the main table as soon as their names echoed through the tent.
Nyx listened with an open mouth, her gaze darting between the three chaotic storytellers. The absurdity of the story was almost impossible to fathom. She slammed both hands hard onto the wooden table, making the glasses rattle, and interrupted the visual chaos with a loud voice. “Okay! Fun, wonderful, fantastic, you are a gang of idiots! This is truly a bizarre story… but where on earth is the point where Faustus here is your cousin?!”
Faustus looked at the heating up Nyx, smiled mysteriously, and wove a small, softly glowing sign of soothing Void energy toward Silarias with his fingers, as if to say: It will be alright, little man, I will take it from here.
The legendary gunslinger leaned far back into his chair with a fluid movement, casually placing his heavy leather boots on the edge of the table with a dull thud, letting the dark runes across his agile armor pulsate softly.
“Look, my dear upcoming family, here is the deal,” Faustus began, his voice suddenly heavy and steeped in a deep, mystical undertone that silenced the entire tent in one go. “I have actually been a double agent for a very long time. I work in the shadows for Abysia, the almighty goddess of the moon. And Silarias and I… we do not just come from anywhere. We come from a very special, ancient, and pure blooded lineage.”
The entire table held their breath synchronously. The playful, noisy atmosphere gave way instantly to pure, breathless fascination. Even Nicola set down his pen and parchment. Miki almost choked on her bite of meat when she heard the heavy revelation. She swallowed it quickly and looked from Faustus to Silarias with big, shining eyes, still trembling with pure excitement.
“My uncle,” Faustus continued, his gaze now firm and fixed with deep respect on the young face of Silarias, “went through a tear in reality, a portal, back then to protect Silarias from the forces that wanted to destroy him. He was the man who truly gave everything back then, sacrificing his complete being and his own life, so that my little cousin here could keep breathing and grow up in the shadows. And if I remember the old chronicles and timelines correctly… that portal is also the exact place where I met Juro back then.”