Teenage Sorcerers: Prophecy Foretold

Chapter 4: Armed and Ready

Halfway out of the woods was a large thin woman-like creature, wearing a tattered dress and black hair that was thinning from her scalp. Her neck was stretched and swirled around the trees, her head hanging from the branches to peer at the teens. Her face was smooth as silk, but her facial features were horrifically morphed. Her eyes were hollow and completely black, only tiny white dots in the middle of them as her pupils. The smile spread across her face was wide open, showing nothing but darkness inside. She had no tongue or teeth, just emptiness. She stretched out her claw-like arms over the branches she hid in, wanting to go towards the group. She managed to leave the woods and slowly approached the back of the buildings. The teens finally split up to go home, not seeing the woman-like creature quietly stalking them. She moved to the building of Chaz, Bryan, and Sabbi first, but didn't plan on doing anything, at least not yet. She wanted to look around and see where they resided. She grabbed the edge of the building, having her head stretch down to the bedroom windows of the teens. She did the same thing with Andre, but wasn't able to go after Kennethn since he lived farther away. Once she got what she wanted, she rushed back into the woods, hiding herself within the trees as if she never even left. The next morning, the group met up once again, Kennethn not being with them just yet since he had to go to work. As the group made their way up the hill to go see Lucius with their chosen items, they felt the same feeling from last night. They looked around the woods surrounding them, but couldn't see anything once again. Andre knocked on the huts door, but nobody answered. The group got confused and decided to check if the door was unlocked, pushing the door open. They were confused as to why Lucius left the door unlocked, but figured he was expecting them to come over around this time. As they entered the hut, they noticed a lot of stuff in Lucius's hut had been left open. The floor door was left open, all of the books from the bookshelf were scattered on the floor and left open, even the box tv was left on, only showing static. "What's going on?" Chaz mumbled as the others began looking around and calling out to Lucius. It didn't take long for them to realize where he went once they heard a loud crash coming from outside. The group rushed out of the hut, only to see Lucius up in the sky with the woman-like creature trying to swat him down, letting out deep inhuman screeches from her forever gaping smile. "Lucius! What the hell is going on?!" Andre yelled up to him. "Children, get back in the hut!" Lucius called down to them. This caused him to get distracted, quickly getting swatted down by the creature. "Lucius!" the group shouted as they rushed over to help him. As they helped him stand up, the creature continued to let out screech after screech, only having blood on her mind. "Kids, please go back inside, I can take care of this.." Lucius tried to usher the group towards the hut, but they refused to move. "No! You need help!" Chaz exclaimed as the creature began storming towards them. Before the creature could reach them, Bryan used his wind ability to push her away. The creature toppled over, but it wasn't enough to stir her away. As Bryan continued to push the creature away with wind, Andre and Chaz helped bring Lucius into the hut. Sabbi had no idea what to do, mentally panicking as Bryan's wind powers began to grow weak after every push. Just as things couldn't get any worse, Kennethn could be seen coming through the woods. "Hey guys! Sorry I'm-" Kennethn froze mid sentence as he stared up at the freakish creature. "Kennethn, get outta the way!" Sabbi called out to him, but Kennethn was too struck with fear to move. As Chaz and Andre came back out from the hut, they began yelling at Kennethn to move as well. The creature screeched at him and brought her arm up to swing at him. Andre's mind was going through many thoughts as all of this was happening, but it quickly cleared up when he saw Kennethn was about to get hit. He shut his eyes for a split second and could feel energy surrounding his body. It was a quick burst of energy, but it was enough for Andre to feel it. He quickly opened his eyes and saw he was now standing right next to Kennethn. Without a second thought, Andre quickly grabbed Kennethn by the collar of his shirt and shut his eyes again, clearing his mind and feeling the same energy surrounding him before opening his eyes. He was now back at the entrance of the hut where he was before. The creature swung her arm down, but now there was nothing there for her to hit. She froze there, looking down at the empty spot where Kennethn once stood. Andre and Chaz quickly brought Kennethn into the hut with Lucius, leaving Bryan and Sabbi with the creature. "Bryan, you need to get into the hut with the others, you're using too much energy with your wind powers!" Sabbi yelled as she grabbed his arm and tried to pull him towards the hut. "We can't! This shithead is gonna crush us all if we go inside!" Bryan yelled back at her as he could feel his powers wearing off. He's been trying to hold the creature back with his wind control for nearly ten minutes, so his powers were slowly fading away. Sabbi quickly noticed this and rushed back inside the hut, but she wasn't going to hide away with the others anymore. She went down the ladder to the arena and went to the pile of plastic weapons that Lucius had the teens keep with him the previous night. She picked up the pile and brought them upstairs, struggling a bit with climbing the ladder with one hand. "Guys! Grab your weapons!" Sabbi called out as she tossed the pile onto the floor. "But what about Lucius?!" Kennethn asked, pointing over to him. Lucius was resting on the small couch with bruises and wounds. "He'll be fine, as long as we take care of this for him!" Sabbi said as she grabbed her sword and ran out of the hut. Chaz and Andre did the same, grabbing their weapons and following behind Sabbi. Kennethn took longer to come out with his chainsaw, still afraid of going into combat, but wanted to prove to himself that he could fight alongside everyone else. By the time the four teens left the hut and entered the scene, Bryan was on the ground, his wind powers now completely drained and leaving him in a weakened state. "Kennethn, you stay back and protect Bryan! Chaz, get this creature from the back, Andre and I will go for the front!" Sabbi ordered after they all did their transformations. The group nodded and quickly went into position, Kennethn rushing to Bryan's side and kept his guard up the whole time. Chaz went behind the creature and used her skull scythe to slash at her back, causing her to screech in pain and move forward to dodge the attacks. As the creature approached Sabbi and Andre, they got their weapons up. Andre moved first, swinging his large headed sword the same time as the creature swung her arm. The impact between the two caused Andre to slash off the creature's arm, causing blood to spew out. Her arm collapsed onto the ground, slowly deteriorating into dust. As the creature moved back and flailed her body around in pain, Sabbi and Andre glanced at each other, almost reading each other's minds for what to do next. Andre set the head of his sword onto the ground as Sabbi moved backwards. When she determined the right time to move, she ran towards Andre and jumped onto the head of his sword before Andre quickly picked his sword back up and launched her into the air. Once Sabbi was now eye-level with the creature, she quickly swung her sword at her, cutting through the creature's neck clean. The creature's head fell onto the ground, the hollow smile quickly turning to a frown. To guarantee that the creature would be dead, Sabbi swung her sword down at the creature's headless body, splitting it in two. Blood began pouring out of the open corpse before eventually turning to dust, along with the creature's head. Sabbi landed on her feet before quickly rushing to her team. "We did it guys! We won our first fight!" She cheered as Andre and Chaz quickly joined her in celebrating. Kennethn let his guard down and helped bring Bryan up to the others to join in on their victory. As the teens continued to rejoice, Lucius was watching them the whole time through the opened door. Impressed wasn't even the word he could use to express how proud he was of his students winning their first battle. He slowly stood up and made his way to the doorway, leaning against the doorframe. Once the teens were done celebrating, they all finally went back into the hut to relax and check on Bryan and Lucius. Bryan was still exhausted from using his wind ability, too tired to even talk to anyone. Lucius assured the group that he was fine and that he was used to much worse injuries after combat. "Lucius? Do you know what kind of creature that was?" Andre asked Lucius as he brought him some lemon water. "That creature doesn't have a name, a lot of the monsters out there don't have names." Lucius sighed as he took a sip of his drink. "Regardless, it seems that you've gained your ability too, Andre." Lucius stood up and picked up his large book that was brought from downstairs. He sat back down on the couch while flipping through some pages before stopping at a section. "It seems you've gained teleportation, another ultra rare ability. I'm surprised you were able to control it so well for your first time using it, especially in the dire situation we were just in." Lucius smiled as he closed his book and set it on the coffee table. The teens continued to talk about their victory, still in disbelief of what they've just accomplished. "Actually, now that I think about it," Kennethn looks over at Sabbi and Andre, "how did you guys think of a sword launch plan so quickly?" "It was an instinct plan when you really think about it." Sabbi shrugged, Andre agreeing with her. "What the hell is an instinct plan?" Chaz furrowed her eyebrows. "I guess the easiest way to explain it is when you and another person get the same instinct as each other and you can somehow feel it. In this case, Andre and I just had that instinct, which technically just saved all of our asses." Sabbi smiled as she went over to the book Lucius set down. She picked it up and began looking through it before noticing a section for monsters. There were sketches of the monsters displayed on all of the pages, but they had little to no information on them. As she looked through the pages, Sabbi found a sketch that resembled the creature that her and her group just killed. "Lucius?" Sabbi turned to him and showed him the sketch. "How come you barely have any information on these monsters?" Lucius looked at the sketch before rubbing the bridge of his nose. "Unfortunately, these monsters aren't easy to gather information on, so the best thing that others and I could do was just get glimpses of these creatures. The bits of information I've written in this book was mostly from other people who've risked their lives to gather them. Some people have died trying to gather anything more personal on these monsters, even the weakest known monster has immense amounts of strength to easily kill someone. The woman-like monster you had your first battle with is considered one of the weaker ones of the bunch. She mostly relies on her claws to attack, sometimes using her stretched out neck to distract or catch her prey." Lucius responded calmly. He stood up and gently took the book from Sabbi before setting it on the bookshelf and moving towards the floor door. "I'll be downstairs resting for a bit...you all can stay here if you'd like, but we'll postpone today's training for tomorrow." Lucius slowly made his way down the ladder and closed the floor door above him. "So now what do we do?" Chaz asked as she tried to fix the static on the box tv. "Should we just go home?" Andre asked as he plopped himself onto the couch. "Not yet, I want to look through this thing first." Sabbi said as she took the book back off the shelf and began looking through it. "I don't think we should be going through that..." Kennethn spoke up nervously as Sabbi went to the small table in the corner and sitting down in one of the chairs, setting the book in front of her. "Hang on, I want to see it too!" Andre called out as he jumped off of the couch and rushed over to Sabbi's side just as she opened the book. "Wait for me!" Chaz quickly went over as she took the last chair across the table. "I don't believe this shit..." Bryan mumbled as he and Kennethn watched their group going through the book.