Chapter 34
When the tidal wave struck midtown, Ashley was, luckily, prepared. She had always been told that tidal waves were more like fast-moving floods. However, this one behaved just as usually portrayed in the movies and cartoons. The mammoth wave crashed over the entire city with the force of a small bomb while Ashley sat atop Oakie, anchored into his branches and guiding his attacks as he swung out at any visible villains. Earthshatter may have inadvertently saved them all, as the previously formed fissures provided relief from the aqua attack and acted as drainage for the newly created rushing rapids.
With Torrendous’ attack on downtown successful and the water villain washing away the entire beach, all of the villains had converged on midtown. All Ashley and Bailey had been able to do so far was hold them off from destroying this one last part of the city. Most of the residents of Cyber City had either fled to the safety of the train station or had been killed in the chaos of the attack.
Oakie attacked with his largest branch and missed Earthshatter, but managed to knick Bailey on the shoulder, accidentally redirecting her flame attack right past Ashley’s face.
“Watch it!” both women simultaneously yelled at each other. “You watch it!” they both followed up in unison. Maybe they were more similar than Ashley cared to admit.
“Ashley, if you can drive that thing remotely, get your ass down here,” Bailey shouted, referring to the giant oak tree. “We are starting to lose the numbers game.”
“Would you kindly shut up? I had this totally under control before you got here.” Despite her words, Ashley activated the vine staff in her hand to make a slide, jumped off Oakie, and descended to the ground. Once at street level, Ashley began to pull various seeds from her bandolier and looked to scatter them around her. Unfortunately, the water was still about half a foot deep and rushing swiftly into the ravine that had formed during the day’s largest earthquakes, so she called an audible and made a run at Earthshatter. Once in throwing distance, and while the quake villain was distracted by Bailey’s flamethrowing attack, Ashley let fly with the seeds, transforming them into poisonous plants as they struck Earthshatter’s face.
“Aarrraaah,” the villain howled when the collection of flora struck her, and the poison leached out into her eyes. “I can’t see. You little- oof!” Bailey wasted no time in taking her opponent down, and Ashley finished Earthshatter off by wrapping her in vines and sleep grass, essentially removing her from the battlefield.
Before either Challenger could celebrate, a torrent of water forced them toward the fissure. Ashley was quick to act and extended her staff outward toward Oakie, wrapping one end around the giant oak’s trunk and the other around her own waist. She reached out to grab Bailey but couldn’t save her from going over the cliff. She watched as her frenemy splashed over the edge and down into the abyss.
“Nooooo!” she screamed. So many times Ashley had watched movies where somebody’s friend was thrown from a plane, or out of a spaceship, or off a mountain, and they always shouted “Nooooo!” and Ashley always thought it was lame and fake. If they had the time to yell, surely they had the time to do something productive. However, faced with that exact scenario, all Ashley could do was scream and hold back tears. She was shaking from the adrenaline rush, thinking about how maybe if they hadn’t fought, she and Bailey could have trained together over the past month, and her death, even if just simulated, could have been avoided.
Just then, over the lip of the chasm, Bailey levitated slowly and reached out to grab Ashley’s hand. With joyful relief, Ash grabbed her hand, mooring them until the pressure from the flood lessened, allowing them to detach from Oakie and stand on their own two feet.
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Her joy was short-lived. The situation had actually worsened. Standing before them were not one but three supervillains. One was Torrendous, although neither of the girls knew his name yet, flanked by an older man who seemed to be controlling the water and some sort of cybernetic monstrosity with a flamethrower in place of his right arm. There was a slight delay in battle as they all sized each other up, but it only lasted a beat before Oakie slammed a leafy fist into the water-wielding villain, shocking everyone back into action.
“I've got Flamey if you can take the really scary dude in the middle,” Bailey said to Ashley as she ran at the cyborg and fired on him with her lightning fist. She was so pleased with her costume design thus far. She glanced down, and she had most of her “Lightning” and “Shield” words left. The right arm, once full of “Fire” text, wasn’t as intact as she only had about a dozen or fewer fires remaining. “Well, maybe that isn’t so bad,” she thought, seeing as how her opponent probably controlled flames. Speaking of flames, she sidestepped a stream of them as she decked the cybernetic man in the face and followed it up with a blast of lightning that launched the villain into a building half a block away. Bailey smiled and silently thanked her mom for making her take those self-defense and martial arts classes as a teenager.
Ashley, meanwhile, tried to maintain a safe distance between herself and the mystery evil-doer until she could see what his power was before committing to a plan of action. She didn’t have to wait long. Torrendous began pulling rubble toward him, using his mastery of wind, before turning himself into a cyclone and absorbing it all. Before she knew it, a whirlwind full of rocks and metal scraps was flying full steam at Ashley, leaving her very little time to react.
Luckily she and Bailey weren’t the only two Challengers left in the trial. Before her eyes, all of the wood pieces that had broken off Oakie and other trees and buildings in the area snapped together forcefully, creating a wooden barrier that the living tornado’s wind couldn’t simply move around or absorb. Cecilia was standing on the other side of the giant ravine, her hands in front of her face, holding the massive wooden wall up from a distance. Torrendous was forced to make a detour and flew at Cecilia instead, disrupting her concentration on Ashley’s protective barrier. Cecilia turned and ran, attempting to pull some nearby scraps of wood together to form some sort of armor. But, Torrendous was too fast, and Cecilia was gobbled up by the hungry tempest. The concrete and metal smashed into her, over and over, until she was spat out onto the sidewalk, battered, bloody, and unconscious. Her reward for saving Ashley was the beating that Ash would have taken had Cecilia not arrived in time to rescue her, and she had just stood by, looking on in horror while it happened.
A scream echoed throughout the midtown block as a young woman, Megan, stared at Cecilia’s barely breathing body. Since The Culling, Megan and Cecilia had been inseparable. They were roommates and friends, Ashley didn’t know whether they had this bond before the competition, but it was undeniable: Aside from June and Jax, who were twins, no one was closer than Cecilia and Megan. Rubble shot out from Torrendous, heading straight for the grief-stricken girl, but passing harmlessly through her. Ashley exhaled in relief, not even realizing she had been holding her breath. She didn’t think she had it in her to watch yet another competitor be bludgeoned to near death. Megan walked slowly, as though in shock, to Cecilia’s body and knelt, crying. Torrendous, however, didn’t let up. Absorbing more of the city's wreckage, he made a beeline for the two best friends. Megan looked up calmly, tears running down her face, and held out a small button, the panic button, and pressed it, blinking out of danger, leaving Ashley and Bailey alone on the battlefield once again.
Her sacrifice moved Ashley, and she looked over in Bailey’s direction, who was smiling broadly as the cybernetic flame controller she was fighting emerged from a dusty hole in a building about 50 yards away. Bailey pulled out her phone and took up a defensive posture, waiting for the cyborg to rush her, which he did. As he ran, he pointed his firearm in Bailey’s direction, and as he started to blast her with flames, she let go an impressive gust of wind from her phone, pushing the flames back into the face of her adversary. With him blinded, Bailey ran at him and pumped so much lightning directly into his cybernetic arm that the arm was completely disabled and was now shooting fire straight down at his feet. She hit him with one more electric blast hitting at the base of his skull, and powering him down completely. Overloaded and outmatched, Bailey’s villainous foe collapsed to the ground. Two down, two to go. We might actually be able to do this, Ashley thought, just as a rock the size of a watermelon pelted her right in the side of her head, and she fell to the ground unconscious.