|| Shadows || Chapter 26 ♧ Arc 2 ♧ ||

Instructions

AAAHAHAHA FINALLY WE'RE IN THE FINALE SDAFEHBTFD -Luna !!! TW !!! Violence, implied de@th and gore, bl00d Ch. 26 'What the fudge Solar?!' This question, along with multiple obscene insults that she probably shouldn't voice with the trainees around, was the one thought she could muster besides the chaotic panic swirling in her mind. "You know, resisting is just going to exhaust you and prolong this game," the goddess called, sending down another fleet of spikes with a bored yawn. "So this is just a game to you?!" Lloyd shouted, "That's a little immature, not gonna lie!" Solar grinned. "You have no idea, greenie!" She summoned a smaller spike and shot it directly at Luna's chest. Luna shrieked involuntarily, shoving the Dragon Cores over her heart to protect it. Mistake. The spike collided with the top core, causing it to tumble out of her arms and roll onto the street. Solar smiled in satisfaction, preparing to descend and retrieve the core. "One down, two to go." "LLOYD!" Luna yelled, "THE CORE!" His attention snapped to her general direction and immediately registered the runaway artifact. "On it!" Whirling into a spinjitzu tornado, he just barely managed to scoop up the core and get it back to Luna before Glitch's claws, delicately puppeted by Solar, closed on empty air. The goddess rolled her eyes. "I made that too easy for you. Time for a new strategy," she aimed a spike some stories up the building behind the twins and launched it. It buried itself into the wall and disappeared, its golden glow swallowed by the metallic structure. One moment, two, three more passed. Solar didn't make a move, only twitched Glitch's lips into a smile, not quite a smirk, yet still triumphant. Luna struggled to puzzle this new development in the battle out while Lloyd mused, "Well. That was anticlimac-" "GET DOWN!" Luna pulled him tight against her as the wall exploded, stinging debris and crushing rubble raining down. She made a fist and powered it up with magenta and black sparks that rapidly multiplied and spread, forming a force field around them. Multiple huge chunks of the wall hit the top of it and she gasped, not because the shield was faltering, but because the ground began to collapse beneath them. Lloyd held on tighter to her as the street fell away and mutely wrapped his claws around the fabric of her shirt as they tumbled into the darkness, force field and all. For a moment, they were a weightless tangle, cocooning the cores, floating in the center of the protective orb. Then they crash landed and hit the ceiling, and of course immediately went right back to the ground. Hard. "So that's what being in a hamster ball feels like," Lloyd groaned, craning his neck up at the rock crowding their only exit. "I don't think we're gonna be getting out of here anytime soon. You think you can hold up the force field until then?" Luna nodded. "We can strategize in the meantime." "Right. How the heck are we going to fight a goddess who's both OP and possessing our friend?" She snorted. "You tell me. It's really not too different from when the Overlord possessed Dad. In fact, this should be a piece of cake compared to that, considering Solar actually has a moral compass." "'Solar' acts like a teenager doing her very best to torment her favorite characters in her fanfiction. I'm not convinced." "True." Luna set the cores down between them and leaned back, arching her back to comfortably lie against the shield. "But I'm more worried about what we'll do about Glitch when we get Solar out of her body." Lloyd mimicked her, with the addition of pressing his hands to his forehead, pushing his bangs up. "Rrrgh, don't remind me. She'll never forgive me. I can't make up for what happened to Willow, even if I could convince Glitch that I didn't want to leave her behind." "Willow," Luna echoed, pensive. Every time she heard this name, of this presence that somehow had Glitch's whole heart and had taken it with them when they'd gone, she felt a strange tug. More insistent each time, like deja vu. "Who was that?" Lloyd looked back at her under his palms. "Willow?" "Yeah." "She..." He gazed at a crack in the wall, "she was Glitch's girlfriend. They met at a sushi shop some years before the Merge, and that was that. Inseparable till the end of time." He laughed, halfway between deadpan and sobbing. "I guess that's somewhat true still. The Merge certainly was the end of a time. "Anyway. Willow was the sweetest person imaginable- rational, friendly, genuine. She was a friend to all of us. And I-" he gasped- "I k!lled her." "I find that pretty hard to believe," Luna replied, "you k!lled literally, like, one person in my reality, and you felt pretty guilty about it, even though he wasn't a great person." "I what now?" "Never mind," Luna swatted the subject away. "Continue. What did you do?" He lowered his hands to the ground, gripping it with claws that made a SHHZZK sound as they scraped across the shield. (cont)