After activating the plate the entity escapes the crucifixion and jumps on Radu. He gasps out loud then grabs it by the neck and slams it down. Radu takes time to dig into the ground then escape outside, the entire cave collapsing as the beam of energy from the plate pierced the mountain. The soul screams out a bunch of incomprehensible sounds and reaches out for Radu, but its efforts were in pure vain as it got buried under stones. In just a minute, Radu finally gets out of the hell that he was just in. He finds himself about 100 meters away from the mountain. Once he reaches the surface he takes a deep breath and tries to calm himself down. He looks at his hands then he hears a loud thud. He looks up and is left in awe when he sees the sky pitch black and falling, but being stopped by The Shining Peak. Just as he looked at the mountain, he saw a familiar figure approach at insane speeds, it was Darius.
“What the-” said Radu, whose words were cut short by Darius who blitzed right past him, pushing him back as a consequence.
Radu braces himself as Darius zooms past him, but it didn’t take long for Radu to chase after Darius throughout digging. They were both heading towards the grand wizard’s altar.
Meanwhile. . .
Both stefan3B and Ares notice the collapse of the sky so they both rush as well to the wizard’s altar. Just a few minutes later, all 4 royal guards are back at the temple, each and every single one of them exhausted to the point of barely moving. The wizards open their door and they appear extremely disappointed.
“Boy of lightning. What was your job?” asked the first wizard.
“But… But I tried my best!” exclaimed Darius, desperate.
“We do not “try” here, we win here. We succeed. You failed us. Not only us, but the entirety of the world.” continued the first wizard, scolding Darius.
Darius’ elementalist coat turns off as he feels greatly emotionally injured. He looks down then turns to the right and starts walking away.
“Fine, then you bitch asses try activate it next time, I’ll fuck off.” said Darius, pissed off.
Ares grows angry from his childish behavior and frowns. He walks quickly at him and puts his left hand on his right shoulder. Darius turns around, confused. Ares pulls back Darius, turning him around. Darius gasps, but the next thing he sees after blinking is Ares preparing a healthy punch for his face. Ares punches Darius in the face with no remorse, knocking him down.
“Get a hold of yourself! You accepted to join this shit, now you’ll be neck deep! Together with us! Do you think that we enjoy being in this… In this… Motherfucking apocalypse? Grow the fuck up! I swear, there’s no backing down now!” said Ares, furiously.
Darius doesn’t get up, he caresses his chin gently and groans weakly. Ares is obviously disgusted by just the sight of Darius’ patheticness, holding back so hard from spitting on his face.
“Ares. Enough.” said stefan3B, in a serious tone.
His mother’s words echo through his head again… “I'm more concerned about your brother.You stand no chance against him. Heh, you should actually look up to him, he is the bigger brother.”... Ares grows even angrier and walks towards stefan3B then grips his hoodie tightly and raises him up, getting his face close to his with his expression of sheer rage and sight of pure anger. stefan3B keeps a calm yet passive aggressive demeanor. Once Ares gets his face close to his, stefan3B pushes him away.
“Get the fuck off me, dickhead. I’m so, so fed up with your bullshit!” said stefan3B, now matching his brother’s anger.
“SILENCE!!!” exclaimed the third wizard.
“Royal Guards, we must plan the next operation. There is no time to waste. You can kill each other after this unfortunate event ends.” continued the third wizard before entering the altar.
“He’s right, come on boys.” said the second wizard, entering as well.
Ares, Radu and stefan3B follow inside the altar. Darius remains down, still sad and looking at the green grass waving around as the wind howled along the gloomy atmosphere. The first wizard sighed, then spoke up before entering the altar as well.
“Come on in, child. We forgive you.”
Darius doesn’t move an inch from the ground, he sheds a small tear from his left eye and speaks in a low and weak tone.
“I just wanted to be appreciated for once…”
Darius wipes it off then slowly gets up. His elementalist coat flashes faintly then activates once more and he goes into the altar as well. All 4 royal guards line up. Darius, Radu, stefan3B and Ares.
“Alright, Guards. Time for a small recap.” said the second wizard.
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He used a long wood wand to tap onto a chalkboard and create visual images.
“As we all know, you failed to activate the 4 plates at once, which resulted in the current event. Now, you might be asking yourself “why did this happen?” The answer to that is, there was a huge imbalance of energy all across the land, as the previous barrier was instantly canceled the moment the new one was supposed to be installed. But by pure coincidence, our current enemy was in the perfect position to strike right at the perfect time, in a way or another gambling on the failure of the one who would activate the fourth plate.” said the second wizard.
“Wait, so you’re saying that the enemy was already prepared before we’d even start?” asked Radu.
“Unfortunately, yes.You see, we found out quickly that the “sky” is not actually the sky, but a cube made out of dark element energy, which has a lot of low rank elementalists push energy into it so it crashes everything in its path. They didn’t calculate their power well enough, so the mountains are currently stopping the cube fully.” explained the first wizard.
Everyone is shocked by the news, but they manage to keep their calm.
“So… What are we supposed to do? Is there any way we can do anything? I don’t really understand what’s going on…” continued Radu with slight fear in his tone.
The first wizard sighs before speaking again.
“Our enemies are the shadow elementalists. They have a dark elementalist as a leader, that’s without a doubt. They really thought about it… But they must show a weak point soon enough, they can’t push the cube forever. However, they’re not the only ones who have an ace in their sleeve…” said the third wizard.
All 4 boys cheer up.
“For real? What trick is it?” asked Ares.
“You must rush over to The Sun Temple, buried underground a long time ago.”
“Oh! Oh! Oh! I can dig a tunnel there!” said Radu, cheerfully.
The first wizard points at Radu, smiles and says “Correct! And…” then he picks up a random normal looking sword from the weapon stack and passes it to stefan3B.
“Inside the temple there is a small shrine of golden light. You must enchant the sword with the power of the sun in order to be able to deal critical damage to the dark elementalist!” said the first wizard.
“Uhm… Alright… I suppose… I’ll take the sword since… I have swordsmanship experience and I have no powers either.” said stefan3B, a bit disoriented.
“Where is the temple?” asked Ares.
“Do you still have your orbs?” asked the second wizard.
Darius, stefan3B and Ares take out their orbs. Radu searches desperately for him but he cannot seem to find it at all.
“Oh, come on. I even threw mine in a geyser and still got it back.” said Ares.
“It does not matter, we only needed 3 anyways.” said the second wizard as he took the orbs from the boys.
He unites the 3 orbs which fuse into a small shiny golden compass.
“The white arrow points towards the altar and the red arrow towards the temple. You should arrive there in no time." continued the second wizard before giving the compass to Ares.
All 4 of them nod affirmatively then head out straight where the red arrow is pointing. As they were going to the destined location, stefan3B decides to talk.
"You won't ever believe what happened to me when I arrived at the canyon."
"Neither will any of you for me…" said Radu.
"I think I'm drugged or something because I could swear I fought an orange clone of Stefan." said Darius.
"Orange?!" exclaimed stefan3B and Ares at the same time.
"So that idiot has something to do with this after all… I will not let him slide so easily this time." said Ares.
"Yeah, I'm not stopping you from doing that this time, heh." said stefan3B.
"I swear I met and defeated a demon or something, because dude, that thing was purely black and it survived getting crushed by a giant slab of stone! But it doesn't matter now, it's buried underground and there's no way it can escape now." said Radu.
"I also fought some kind of sword user robot thing which had a blue flame flow out of its eye." said Darius.
"The soldier slicer… Could the other one be the shovel robot I've fought? Someone must've repaired them… It's impressive that they were able to fix something that was smashed like glass." said stefan3B in his mind.
"But I survived because I had a sudden power up and I was able to fight off the robot, however, that Orange guy snatched the flame out of the robot and then healed! It was crazy, I'm telling you." continued Darius.
Suddenly, the arrow quickly turns around in the opposite direction.
"Huh? Hold up, it's pointing backwards now." said Ares.
"That means we're right beneath it!" said Radu before starting to quickly dig a tunnel downwards.
"He still has that excitement in him…" said Ares, amazed even.
"Hey! Guys! I found it!" exclaimed Radu.
Darius is the first one to jump down, followed by Ares and then stefan3B. Radu managed to dig the dirt around the entrance, revealing a golden temple with a small amount of moss on it.
"Look! The door is blocked! We can't enter." said Radu.
Darius charges up his fist with lightning then punches the temple. Lightning flows within the small spaces between the bricks.
"All temples have an emergency entrance, whether it's a hidden key or a secret brick." said Darius as he kept his fist against the temple.
Just a few seconds later, a brick pops out of the temple's wall.
"Aha!" shouted Radu before instantly kicking the bricks beneath it.
The wall crashes down, creating a hole big enough for them to enter.
"Good job, Darius! Stefan, Ares! Come on!" said Radu, enthusiastic.
Darius feels slightly better that he was praised and all 3 of them follow Radu inside. The temple was way smaller than they expected, there was a ray of light shining upon the middle of the room and in the middle of the room there was some sort of fancy light which looked as if it's burning onto itself, colored brightly in a slightly dark yellow shade. stefan3B steps forward and looks at his sword for a second before slowly dipping its blade within the light. He looks at his comrades, wearing a slightly anxious expression. He looks back at the sword and then slowly pulls out. Blissful holy sounds can be heard as stefan3B glares upon the magnificent enchantment of his sword. Once he takes it out, the blade is covered in a spiky and pulsing warm energy which greatly feels as if he's holding the sun on a stick. The energy spreads onto the sword, evolving it at once into a majestic 135 cm long sword. stefan3B holds the sword close to him and closes his eyes, then his Yellow Blitz form activitates, however, this time, it has a deeper shade of yellow, more powerful than last time. The light of the temple was still there, unaffected even after enchanting his sword. stefan3B turns around to his friends, then frowns and says in a serious tone: "I'm ready.". They all nod and smile except for Radu.
"Hmph, lucky… I wish I had a magic power too…" said Radu in his mind with jealousy.