Chrono Trigger Loops Chapter 6
By Reido Shougeki
Zac awoke with a throbbing skull. He sat up slowly, groaning softly to himself as he held his forehead. His free hand rested on the ground for support, sitting in a puddle of water. Finally, Zac managed to look around at his imprisonment.
The room was dark, save a few torches strategically placed on the walls to provide a crude amount of lighting, barely enough to see. The floor was damp, and the occasional drip could be heard from the ceiling. Zac sat in a cage near the back of the room. He had been stripped of his weapon, not that it would have done him any good. The material the cell was made of was easily stronger than his Steel Saber. Gakuin sat at the center of the room, surrounded on all sides by the others, all in cages like his. Starting from him and going clockwise, Niki was imprisoned, and then Marle, Lucca, and Crono. So far, he was the only one to regain conscious. The First Commander smiled cockily at him.
"Welcome back to reality, Sleeping Beauty," Gakuin remarked sinisterly. Zac just glared at the man. This caused his captor to laugh.
"Shooting needles, are we? It won't do you any good. Fuinaire told me to kill you if I had to...but since I don't, I'm going to do things my way."
He stepped over to Niki's cage slowly, savoring every moment. The girls limp body moved towards him, as if being drawn by an invisible string. He held her head in his hand, smiling insanely.
"She is quite pretty. I can see why you like her. Unfortunately, she'll be the first to die."
"You son of a bitch!" Zac screamed at him, clearly over the edge with Gakuin. "I'll kill you!"
The teenagers hand raised quickly, a jet of water erupting from his palm, streaking towards his foe. As it neared the other, it stopped, inches from his target. Zac was stunned, but quickly regained his composure, willing the stream to go forward. It was all for naught; Gakuin was simply too powerful for him. The insane commander stood to his full height, placing a hand in front of the other magic. A bolt of lightning burst forth from his arm, zapping through the liquid. Zac did not have time to break contact with his own attack, and was hit with the full force of the electricity, it's power only amplified by the fact it was traveling through water.
A God-awful scream tore from Zac's throat as the shocking magic hit him, channeling through every part of his body. Small bolts flew from his fingertips as Gakuin increased the flow of magic through the water into the teenager. Zac was smoking slightly, his hair standing on end. With one final burst of lightning, Gakuin broke his contact with Zac, sending the teen flying back into the bars of his cage. He slid down slowly, half aware of what was going on. His body was racked with pain. The water, remaining suspended for a few moments after Zac had broken his contact with it, fell to the ground, splashing all over the surrounding area.
"T...tch...g...ghh..."
Zac was making some rather strange noises from his throat. One eye shut, and his vision blurry, he managed to make out Gakuin's figure looming towards him slowly, with a kind of cocky swagger.
"Fool...do you honestly think you can stop me? I've changed my mind..."
With that, Zac slid forward towards the insane one with a magical force behind him. Gakuin caught his head, holding it in his deathly white hand. His voice was as cold as ice.
"You will be the first to die..."
Another surge of electricity zapped through Zac's body, causing the teen to scream again. Gakuin stepped away slowly, holding his hands in front of him, lightning bolts shooting from his extremities, flying into the body of the teenager. Zac was suspended in mid air due to the magic. Gakuin was laughing softly as he watched his would-be attacker writhe in pain.
"Hehehehehe... I forgot how fun this could be!"
Zac did not hear him. He was too busy trying to figure out how to escape the electric trap. His brain was barely functioning, but somehow he managed to lower his head slowly. His neck muscles felt ready to burst due to the amount of strain he had to put on them to make his head stay down. Gakuin frowned at this, sending more electricity into his body. Zac's head snapped back again as another scream escaped his lips.
Suddenly, Zac's head lowered again, slowly. However his muscles were not straining. His pupils vanished, leaving his eyes a shade of white. He gritted his teeth a bit, eyes narrowing so much that it was a wonder he could even see out of them. Gakuin did what any sane person would do in this situation; he panicked.
"What are you doing, kid?" he said, his already pale face turning a shade whiter. Zac was fighting the magic with seemingly no effort. Of course, in his state, Zac was not aware of anything that was going on around him. He was seeing Gakuin as a source of danger, and was about to rectify that situation.
Zac brought his hands up, placing them in front of him as if they were being pulled by a puppet master, his thumbs lightly touching one another, waves going off of his body, like the waves you see coming off of the street when it gets too hot. Gakuin saw this and screamed with rage.
"Alright, you little punk, I'll teach you to mess with me!"
The insane commander of the army of Fuinaire put more of his own magic power behind his bolt of lightning, shouting loudly as he did so, but deep down knowing that his end was near.
Zac ignored the increased shocking effect of the electricity, the amount of distortion waves coming off of his body increasing ten-fold. And then, there was a loud noise, like five-hundred thousand Colt .45's going off at the same time, and from Zac's hands came an invisible wave of air distortion that hit Gakuin dead on, sending him flying backwards into the wall of his prison complex, ripping various parts of his skin off of his body, driving him into the plane behind him.
When it was all over, Gakuin was dead, a good foot into the dirt wall, stuck there, still frozen in the same position that he had perished in, blood dripping from more places than one would care to count. Zac was still floating in the air and ripped the bars off of his cage before dropping back down to the ground, first on his feet, and then to his knees, and finally to the ground, his eyes closed as he slept, fully unaware of what he had done.
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Fuinaire frowned. Gakuin had been defeated. He may have been a good soldier, but he was also totally worthless when it came to keeping his head about him. The conqueror of the future sighed slightly, absently killing a human that was begging for mercy with a quick stream of fire through his heart. His plan was already failing before it had gotten into motion. The fourth dimension would have to wait until this 'Zac' could be eliminated. But that feeling that he had gotten from the youth before Gakuin failed him bothered him. He shrugged it off, raising two fingers into the air, a dark violet triangular portal opening up on the ground under his throne of skulls. Out of it came a figure, invisible to the untrained eye due to the fact that it was encased in a diamond of darkness.
"I hope you are ready, Freyer...if you cannot capture the one who killed Gakuin, eradicate him and his friends. I'll have no more hindrances. Jiade will pay with his life. Do NOT fail me..."
He put special emphasis on the last sentence, causing a monstrous laugh to come from the diamond imprisonment as it sank back into it's entrance point, the laughter cutting off abruptly as it fully reentered the portal, zipping backwards through the time stream to the Middle Ages.
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Zac came to in a pool of water, pushing himself up slowly, holding his head, his eyes closed.
"Geez...anyone get the number of the bus that hit me...?"
He looked around quickly, getting his bearings. The others had come to, and were standing around him, concerned.
"Thank God," Niki said, wrapping her arms around him in a hug. Zac blinked a little bit before patting her on the back.
"I'm alright...I think..."
And then he saw Gakuin, his mouth dropping a little bit.
"What happened to him?" he questioned Crono.
"Not sure...something big hit him, it looks like...and he's missing some skin, too."
"Yeah, I kinda feel sorry for the guy," Marle said, looking at the corpse of their previous antagonist. "Whatever he got hit with must have hurt until he died..."
Zac blinked once again, and then got a flood of memories, brief flashes of what had happened to Gakuin, and what he had done. He let go of Niki, leaning over and vomiting.
"God..." he whispered, his face as white as a sheet. "What did I do...?"
"Zac?" everyone questioned. "Are you okay?"
"No, no, I'm not okay!" he shouted at them, pointing to the body. "Do you see that? That's my fault! I killed that guy! I killed him and I didn't even know I did it! But now I remember everything...that power...it..."
He broke down at that point, tears running down his cheeks. He was unable to continue, his voice choked up. Niki hugged him again.
"It's alright...we're alright...you're alright. Gakuin had it coming, and I'm sure that he did for a long time..."
"That's not the point, Niki," Zac managed to get out in between sobs. "I did that...without knowing it...what if I do that to you guys, the people I care about...?"
The others just stood there, not knowing what to say. And, although they did not say anything, they all knew that he had a good point.
"Zac, I don't think we'll have to worry about that," Lucca said. "I have a feeling that whatever happened to Gakuin, whatever you did, whatever power that you got...I have a feeling that it only happens when you're angry, or perhaps in mortal danger..."
"And besides, if you can kill him, think of what you could do to that Fuinaire guy," Crono added. "I think that you'll make a valuable asset to that battle, when it comes. In the meantime, we need to make up for lost time. Glenn's not gonna wait around forever, ya know."
"Yeah...yeah," Zac said, regaining his composure, standing up. Crono handed him his weapon. Everyone else was already armed. Crono had made use of the Luminaire technique a few times to break out of his cage, and then used the Rainbow to free the others.
They walked up the stairs to the exit from the prison together, Zac trailing behind, trying to gather his thoughts. His mind was going nintey miles a minute. He was trying to make sense of the images. He saw his hands come up, he saw the electricity around him, and then he saw the attack, or rather, he did not see it, as it was nothing more than a few visible ripples in the air. He watched Gakuin die in his minds eye and shook his head. That had passed. Now he needed to focus on the present. He started to jog to catch up with the others.