The Marked

Friends and Foes

"GO!" I watched as Ryan suddenly disappeared from my view, and then I caught a glimpse of a quick blur coming straight at me. I thrust my sword out, and I felt a sudden gust of wind blow by me on my right side. Turning to swing my sword in a horizontal cut towards the direction the wind had come from, I quickly pushed a reflection of myself out of my Mark and had it stand in the exact same spot I was standing in. 

Essentially, my reflection was myself at that point. It continued to swing the sword at the same speed and direction as I did, so that it wasn't even visible there were two of me. I turned fully to face my right just in time to see Ryan with his gun held at my forehead.

"Sayanora, J," he said, before squeezing the trigger of his gun. I crouched down then, my head disappearing into my reflection's chest. If Ryan had been paying attention to my lower half, he would have seen a pair of bent legs amidst a pair of standing ones. But, as it was, he was too preoccupied with smirking at my face as he fired a shot through my reflections skull.

He realized a second too late what had happened, looking down just in time to see me thrust forward with my sword from my crouched position. It struck him right in the chest and knocked him off his feet. He fell on his butt in the grass, and I stood up while smiling down at him.

For a moment he sat in the grass, looking up at me in confusion. However, when I reached out my hand to help him up, he smiled and grabbed hold of it, coming to stand on his feet. "Nice trick, J. I thought I had you there. Dang, I have to give it to you, that was really cool."

I smiled and let my weapon flow back into my Mark, Ryan doing the same. Slapping him on the back, I leaned in next to his face and taunted, "Who's the 'good loser' now?" Laughing, he shoved me back a pace or two, and then we raced to the back door.

I reached it first, as I was in better shape than he was. Turning around with a smile and raised eyebrow on my face, Ryan mock scowled and gently tapped the side of my head with the back of his fist. "Let's see how smug you are when I beat you to twenty to three."

My parents came home soon after we had gone upstairs to play video games, but Ryan and I just listened to them come through the front door and continued playing. My parents had actually once been concerned when they came into my bedroom after a school day last year and didn't find Ryan in there. 

"Where's Ryan?" My dad had seemed so concerned that he couldn't find him in the house, that I had felt mildly offended.

"We're not joined at the hip, you know." My dad had been about to respond when a flushing toilet could be heard from my bathroom, and Ryan peeked his head out the door.

"Yeah, it's more like a tether to our soul. We just can't be more than about thirty feet away before we start missing the other's presence." Closing the door to wash his hands, Ryan left my dad speechless for a moment.

He turned to me and barked out a laugh, asking "And you were saying?"

So it wasn't a surprise to my dad when he came upstairs about an hour later, which was now about six thirty in the evening, and found Ryan playing video games and me on my laptop as I watched funny bird videos. The one I was watching at the moment was of the bird's owner using a blanket to cover and uncover their body while the bird watched. 

The owner then threw the blanket in the air, and quickly jumped into another room through a doorway on his left. Even on camera, it looked like the owner had disappeared from view, seemingly into thin air. The bird then began screaming, and I chuckled before pausing the video to turn to my dad, pulling an earbud out of my left ear.

"Yeah?" I asked, tilting my head slightly to look him in the eye. Thinking back to how I had almost died today, I had decided to begin to at least meet my parents' eyes when I spoke with them. Baby steps, I thought.