As Khalif fought through the chaos within the lavish kitchens within Aqua, his eyes began to play tricks on him. This wasn’t the first time within recent days that this odd occurrence had overwhelmed and distorted his senses and the young Cultivator was beginning to wonder if it ever would end.
He didn’t know why his mind suddenly started to play tricks on him, but hoped things would return to normal as soon as possible. As his eyes seemed to be flickering between his current reality and situations that made no sense at all.
Before Khalif, was a battle of chefs, guards and unknown assailants. None of this was a part of the oddities however. It was instead a mere few individuals scattered throughout the melee that flickered between normalcy and outright shifts in perspective.
Khalif kicked a guard, and was immediately forced to step back as Micro plowed into a prep table right in front of him. At first his best friend was being savagely beaten by the demon mask-wearing fighter. Though Micro had the slim figure around the waist and slammed her opponent into a table, the punches the fighter sent toward Micro’s mid section were savage and well aimed for maximum pain. Khalif worried over his best friend, knowing that she wasn’t a very skilled fighter, but was forced to duck as another guard tried to tackle him from the side.
The guard flew over Khalif, and the young man stomped down on the guard’s head even before he straightened fully. By the time he looked back toward Micro the scene had changed completely, showing Khalif a completely different spectacle.
Instead of being beaten by the demon masked fighter, Micro was upright and performing a series of flashy combat maneuvers he’d never had believed his best friend could ever achieve. Micro dodged punches and kicks, as she threw her own set of crippling blows with a huge smile on her face; the demon masked fighter now struggling immensely to defend themselves.
“Not in the face, please!” Khalif frowned at the effeminate voice that yelled through the demon mask, wondering what happened to the seemingly well trained invader that had just been beating down the now ripped dressed Micro. His best friend now performing spin kicks in heels, all in rapid succession, one after the other.
The sight was alarming for two reasons. One, Micro couldn’t fight and had never been taught to defend herself. While the second reason was the young woman’s gleaming smile.
What the sparks…
Khalif tried to rub his eyes at the sight, not truly expecting for anything to change, only for the vision before him to distort completely once again. Instead of the fierce combatant Micro had just appeared to have become, Khalif’s eyes once more showed him the girl he’d fallen for, shrieking in absolute panic, her dreadfully rotted teeth once more returned. Before Khalif could even take a step to rush toward Micro, a pan soared through the air, rocking the young man in the side of the head.
Khalif roared in pain, looking toward a blonde haired chef who looked around in dread at the glare Khalif sent in his direction. He couldn’t help but feel the young man was familiar to him, and even more familiar when he blinked and his vision distorted once again.
Instead of a chef in all white, the young man was now dressed in all black chef garments. An aquatic mask bubbling with water adorned the lower half of his face, the young chef smiling as hands conjured themselves from the liquid within the air all around him to fight on his behalf, only adding to the frantic situation within the kitchen.
I don’t even do drugs, why is this happening to me. I don’t get hit in the head that much, do I?
His vision shifted back, and the same chef once more stared at Khalif in terror, all of the hands of water that had once supported the young man, gone in an instant. Khalif wanted to charge in the pan flinging chef’s direction, not rattled enough to forget that he’d just been struck by a rather heavy pan, but decided to follow his target instead.
Now able to see the short figure that dragged the engineer through the kitchen due to the cake batter and thick meat based sauce that covered their upper half, Khalif transitioned through his shadow, crossing the length of the room in an instant. He thought he would be able to sneak up on the abductor with ease, but the moment Khalif appeared beside them, the figure extended a hand toward Khalif, placing a hand in Khalif’s pocket as they spoke to him, Khalif lashing out with a badly aimed punch that caused them to step away.
“You know I’m surprised at how often I run into my brother’s people even though none of you seem to remember him,” said the prince. Khalif’s eyes widening slightly before they creased in confusion at the young man’s words.
As he’d spoken to him, Prince Alexander had become visible, smiling at Khalif while he smashed a fist through the window directly beside them both.
“What in the bloody embers are you talking about, your brother, I don’t know your brother?”
“Of course you don’t, just like you don’t know the others in this very room that work for Arson right…”
With the speaking of Arson’s name, a ripple of power flowed through the room and all connected to the scion froze. Micro, Rob, Lane, and even Alexander couldn’t move momentarily. Hundreds of memories flooding them in an instant, just before they were ripped away the very next breath.
The group looked around at one another, familiarity brushing across their minds as the the sensation of recognition drew them to one another like magnets. Until the sound of crunching glass pulled their sights from various corners of the room back into Alexander’s direction.
“Ahh, don’t look at me like that. I think we all know that when my brother isn’t here to pick up the pieces left behind by our damaged elders, that I would be the one that fate would make responsible until his return…”
Khalif had no time to react to Alexander who now crouched on the ledge of the broken window, holding the engineer by the neck with one hand, and pointing toward Khalif’s pocket with the other. Khalif reached a hand into his pocket, hearing an odd beeping com from the interior of his suit, in the same blink that Alexander decided to jump out of the window, pulling the once more screaming engineer along for the ride.
Khalif cursed as he took in the sight of the bomb with very little time left on its glass front. The small yet advanced demolition tool enough to blow a massive chunk out of the building that drifted through the sky with ease.
Son of the bloody maiden…
Khalif waved the bomb in the air for all to see just before dropping it.
“Everybody run!”
…
Rob thought he was having a good day. It had started with grand news. He’d been elected to cook for a very wealthy Cultivator, and would even get to visit a lavish shopping district within the silver sector of Maelstrom.
Things had been going beautifully, but halfway through the very exciting experience, everything had gone wrong.
A series of screams drew Rob’s attention from the cake batter he’d been mixing. He looked up to see a woman being dragged by the hair through the opposing side of the kitchen. Everyone around him froze, and his own arms went limp at the sight, causing him to set down the batter.
“Hmmm, I can only see him with infrared,” came a muffled voice beside Rob, but when he looked, no-one was there. His eyes shot back toward the woman being dragged, Rob once more shocked as the mixing bowl in front of him lifted into the air just before his very eyes.
“Sorry about this, my guy, but I can’t let them get away with my target,” came the muffled voice again. Rob watched as his batter was thrown across the room, splashing all over an invisible figure, that seemed to chuckle before throwing an entire dish of spaghetti sauce back in his direction.
He raised his arms in defense, but the dish missed him completely. When he lowered his arm, another individual could now be seen directly next to him, soaked from head to toe in red sauce.
“Well, that backfired,” spoke someone wearing a mask just beside Rob. He jerked away from the person as their stealth suit became visible, just as guards and a random couple rushed into the room from opposing sides of the kitchen.
All pandemonium broke loose, and before Rob knew it he was caught up throwing pans and knives all over the room.
“They're invisible, get them,” yelled a chef, and the situation only became that much worse.
The guards fired their mana pistols wildly, not knowing if there were more unseen intruders. While the chefs made everything worse by panicking completely, throwing their work everywhere in an attempt to help, Rob included. All of this in addition to the random couple that seemed to also be chasing after the screaming woman being dragged throughout the room.
Rob at some points felt himself blackout, and when his mind returned to him, he was not only in a completely different location within the room, he also noticed random objects fall from the air, suddenly dropped, splashing against even more oddly placed puddles of water.
He cursed internally, and even tried to flee. Then a name was spoken and Rob froze, feeling forced to look over his shoulder at a now visible young man sitting in the frame of a broken window.
The young man looked at Rob, the odd couple and even the masked intruder, before jumping out of the window, dragging a woman out by her neck, a stretched scream tearing through the air as it faded into the distance. Rob’s eyes were stuck on the spot until the silver haired young man that had fought his way across the kitchen yelled for everyone to run, dropping a bomb before he vanished.
To make matters worse, the young man reappeared directly next to Rob who had just fallen in his attempt to run, now army-crawling while his peers stormed by him, trampling him in his every aim to try and stand to escape.
“Grab him!”
Rob felt a grip wrap around his wrist and in the next moment he was pulled into a shadow. Time slowed as he was teleported. A torturous stretching of space distorted his screams while he was pulled from the kitchen to a nearby rooftop.
He was still screaming when he and the others tumbled free of the shadow they exited from. Tears rolling from his eyes as he looked around in a panic. The masked intruder wearing the stealth suit, ripped off her mask while gasping for air, her eyes wild and darting as she frantically crab-walked away from him and the random couple that had been in the kitchen.
Rob felt his stomach lurch and he vomited. He wiped his mouth and flopped onto his back, the sound of someone else throwing up coming from nearby.
Rob turned his head to see the random couple whispering to one another, and then once more to see the young woman in the stealth suit wiping her mouth. He sat up and was just about to speak when—
Boom
…
Alexander pulled the engineer he held toward himself, knowing that the woman could break her neck if she continued to flail about when they collided with the water below. Because the woman’s invention was necessary for his plans to stop the war between the realms and the invasion of demons that even the Oligarchs seemed unaware of, he couldn’t afford for anything to happen to her.
“Stop moving or you're going to die,” said Alexander, ringing the woman by the neck. The woman looked down as Alexander pressed her against his chest, the engineer still screaming for her life without end.
“Embers woman, take a deep breath or you're going to drown.”
Alexander heard the woman take a deep breath and in the next instant they plunged into the water below. A beautiful coral reef coming into view below them as Alexander kicked, taking them deeper into the aquarium.
A glimmer of bending light could be seen, and Alexander swam toward it. He had to swim as fast as he could because even though he couldn’t drown, the woman he held could.
The moment he closed the distance, he and the woman were sucked toward the opening bay doors of a rather large submarine. The pair pulled inside by the suction caused by the water trying to flood into the underwater ship.
The doors quickly closed behind them both, Alexander rolled onto the floor as the ships anti flood mechanisms sucked the water from the area completely.
The young man slowly rose to his feet, letting go of the engineer completely. The woman expelled water from her nose and mouth as she choked, looking around with a face of despair as Alexander strode away, uncaring where the woman decided to stay in the ship.
“Don’t do anything stupid or I’ll have to chain you up, and trust me, neither one of us will enjoy that.”
“Hey, wait, where are you going?”
The woman chased after him, doing her best to fixe her hair and dress while chasing after Alexander, not wanting to be left alone in the strange vessel she now found herself in.
“I have a lot of work to do, and so do you, so I’m going to go pilot this ship and get us out of here.”
She finally caught up to Alexander, following him down a sequence of hallways before they found themselves at the controls for the ship.
Alexander sat down, and the woman looked around curious. Alexander glanced back at the engineer, finding how calm she was to be rather odd, but pushed the thoughts aside as he began to pilot the ship.
“I’d sit down if I were you, things might get a little bumpy…”
“What makes you say—“
The woman stopped talking, cut off by the ships windshield cover being pulled back to reveal the sight in front of the ship. Dozens of buildings plunging into the waters all around them could be seen, making the woman’s eyes go wide.
“That’s not good…”
“You think?! Now sit down, if you fall over and bump your head or something stupid like that, and I end up wasting my time, I’ll find your family and take out my anger on them…”
The woman scoffed, and strode to the co-captain’s seat, buckling herself in with a press of a button on the side of her seat.
“Have at it, bucko. I don’t have a family.”
Alexander looked over toward the woman with a raised eyebrow, not a blink before a communication abruptly filled the glass of the windshield, with Auto’s face.
“Hey you little punk, did you steal my submarine? I’ll sparking ki—“
Alexander pressed a button and his brother’s face disappeared, the young man pulling back on a throttle, the ship darting off, Alexander weaving through the sinking buildings all around the ship.
“Trust me,” he said with another glance toward the engineer who now wore a raised eyebrow of her own.
“You're better off without one.”