Archer x Lancer_I DARE YOU

Chapter 8: Second Trial

Author here! Very sorry but college students can get very busy, so the gist of it, is that I've been very busy struggling and dragging my useless self through 3 thesis assignments in Computer Science that I haven't had time to return to writing. :p

And since it's been a long time, my writing style may have changed (for better or worse). If you can, drop comments about my writing if it has improved or degraded.

This time, the moment Lancer opened his eyes, his eye sight wasn't met by darkness, but by a flash of the same shade of blue he adorns...the blue midnight painted around them. From the angle where he stood, it was cornered in four planes that reflected like mirrors, in another cube trap-room that tricks the eyes of open space.

He drops from the ground and Archer having done the same thing echoes beside him. They scan the place immediately in offensive poses, sharp senses trying to get a hold of any other signs of life. However, the place was empty, nothing to hold creatures except for the animation of swirling halos of the night including streams of cloud and dotting stars, like painting coming to life bouncing off reflections on extensive walls.

"What now?" Lancer asks, staring at Archer.

"How do you expect me to answer?" Archer growls at him in an annoyed tone, which is pretty much, all the time with the guy.

"I was just asking," Lancer replies, rolling his eyes and strolling away from the other man and testing out the expanse of the room. He walks over to the wall, tracing the borders and placing his hand on it's cool surface. He could definitely feel it stemming with magic, as quaint as it is powerful. The room however, was relatively smaller room than in the first trial but it's wasn't the type that would change. The way in which it was created was stationary, which was a relief.

Behind him, Archer doesn't utter a word and Lancer continues to focus on the magic within the wall, attempting to figure out it's composition; any information to aid them.

"Hey, you're pretty quiet," Lancer spoke when the silence was finally unbearable and empty of Archer's sarcasm. Might as well, it was past their scheduled bickering.

He slides his fingers across the cool surface of the wall and runes flash into existence under his finger tips. He reads to himself what he could make out from the symbols engraved into the exterior.

Foes...

Allies...

Lovers...

The words entered, as if filtering through his whole system the importance of their meaning. But what could these words mean in a place like this? Unconsciously, Archer clutched the fabric above his heart, as if for a second, even at its meerest passing, the words made his heart flutter.

'Lancer...'

"Archer, you said something?"

He turns himself around, expecting to meet the other man's bitter face and his angry eyes but...Archer was not where he stood before, Archer wasn't anywhere in the room. He simply disappeared, there wasn't a trace of him, nothing, not even his scent. All that was left was Lancer standing in a room of halos, alone with the confusion and building anxiety...and an unprecented fear.

Thoughts raced through the man's head. Where could he be?! When? To think that Archer was captured right under his nose, and undetected in fact, stressed an uneasiness within him.

But his inability wasn't what troubled him most, it was somehow something that worded like this.

Was Archer alright?

Lancer frantically shakes his head. No, no, no, why would he care? Archer was his rival, and an unvarying thorn in his side, an enemy he would face at every chance they met in the battlefield. Most of all, he was an insufferable prick with an attitude weighing down on everybody, especially his own. Archer's current state shouldn't bother him at the very least.

If Lancer trusted him with anything, it would be that he's a fellow hero, someone who could handle himself quite fairly. He hated to admit it, but he's somewhat of an equal, in some cases but damn, it took a long time to figure that out, or downright admit it even in the secure cage of his thoughts.

As if to suffice for Archer's disappearance, a dangerous aura fills the room, Lancer could smell the burdening weight of heavy magic in the air. Lancer takes his spear in both hands, and glances around the room for any signs of his ally, and for any advances of the looming danger in the form of anomalies.

"Show yourself!" He yells and mutters as he was met with silence, "Whatever you are."

As his eyes roll to side to side, the center of the room warps in a darker shade of blue almost black. Lancer thought he was lucky because he knew what to expect from these traps, it was knowledge shared to him by his master, just before he killed her. She was a monster anyways, and her demise was to be expected, even at the hands of her apprentice.

His senses alerts of him of a hotspot amassing a cluster of energy at the center of the room. The warping center grows bigger; leaking a familiar scent.

In his caster form, he might've been able to dispel it, or might've been able to use it to trace the exit and the caster herself from the very inception of this trial. He could have finished all of this quickly. Right now, he was quite conscious of his disadvantage in the case of his current class, but there was no other way and he'd have to deal with it head on, like he had always been with Gael Borg at his side.

However, a sudden presentiment grips his senses, the sound of clink echoes, like a coin that fell from above with addition to the sound of pouring water. He looks down to see that the floor has been filled with an inch of water, its arctic chill seeping through his boots.

His body gyrates to the right where a portal opens at the very moment. A bright red pours out of it like mist, descending from the swirling halo. Slowly, it gracefully dips into the ground and slowly solidifies into a more familiar human form that no sooner turned out to be than the only face he's been begrudgingly stuck with...Archer.

A scent drifts into the air, despite its scarcity, Lancer's nose was strong and he knows something was amiss. The scent smelled like wax and magic.

Archer was it? Or to be more precise, a copy of him.

But just as he realized so, cold chains whip out from the portal behind him which he narrowly dodges. And before he could figure out what was occuring, his spear narrowly meets Archer's blade, the man pressing againts him from the blunt of the clashing steel.