Flame Rider II: Rise of Chaos

Return from the Dead

I couldn’t believe what was going on. One minute, Dragono is flying alongside Ginny and Carlos, the next, time and space had wrapped around us, leaving us just over the Cook Strait.

“How could you have gotten lost like that?!” I demanded, agitated.

‘I don’t know,’ Dragono snapped, ‘why don’t you tell me?’

I lapsed into silence once again; a silence where I was able to mull over things. As I thought over what had happened to me in the past year alone, I noticed a slight shift in Maria’s brainwaves.

Upon further investigation, I discovered that she had just passed through a zone of semi-consciousness that Blaze referred to as Waking Dreams. Although I doubted that Maria was actually asleep or semi-conscious.

‘I think she might have warped space and time,’ Dragono stated out of the blue after some time.

“What does that mean?” I inquired.

‘Like how Blaze is able to warp energy,’ Dragono explained, ‘I think Maria has control over time and space.’

“But that can’t be possible,” I stated bluntly, “Can it?”

*-*-*-*

One minute we had been fighting inside a box alleyway, the next I find myself laying on the ground next to a house after dragging myself into such a place that I wouldn’t be an easy target.

During the firefight, I had earned myself a shard of some kind of crystal in my leg, after hauling on of the rookies out of the firing line. When I had dragged the rookie’s body back to a safer location, I had discovered that she had already earned a face full of the shards.

“Son of a fucking bitch,” I grated, as I tried to pull the shard out of my leg.

I had to do some shifting around before the shard even started to move, but when it did; it was only to go deeper.

“Oh my,” I cussed, “Fucking hell. How can this be so freaking hard?!”

I suddenly felt the shard slide out of my leg. I raised the shard up to my eye line, and examined it for a short time, before placing it in one of my pockets. I went to stand up, but quickly dismissed the idea, as I collapsed back into the ground.

“Shit,” I swore, “Where the hell is everyone?”

When I looked around, staying silent as I observed my surroundings, I realised that it was quiet; really fucking quiet.

I stood up again, this time bracing as I felt a wave of pain sear through my leg, and up into my core. I grunted, before using the wall of the surrounding buildings, and the fence to make my way forward.

“Colonel?” I asked, speaking quietly into my radio, “Staff Sergeant? Shit, Private Clark? Is there anybody out there?”

I stopped suddenly, as I heard metal scrapping against concrete. I looked around the corner, before slamming my back against the building I was using for cover. In the street across from the alleyway that was my safe zone, I had seen some kind of tank.

Or at least I thought it was a tank. It didn’t have any tracks or a defined turret; instead it hovered about a metre or two off the ground, and had a cannon of some kind sticking out of its front.

I turned my radio off, before slipping across the danger area, and continued on my way.

*-*-*-*

“Get moving Shadowflame,” Price’s voice ordered over the coms, “We ain’t got time for this bullshit.”

I started to crawl forwards, but found it difficult to move more than half a metre. I raised my F16 into my shoulder, before firing off a three round burst. We had been making some significant leeway, when the invaders had ambushed us.