129

 

129.  The Green Manalishi

 

Two irisless eyes with long eyelashes positioned above a high-bridged nose that curved slightly downward. Thin red lips sat above a small, rounded chin. Silky black hair spilled out from above, falling on porcelain skin.

 

Shadow slipped over the face of Victoria Vance obscuring it within Vance's mind. Darkness shrouded her bewitching eyes, and the warm smile on her face now looked mocking and sinister. For the first time in his life, the face of his mother frightened him.

 

Did I really ever know her?

 

The moment Averyl had told Vance the truth, before all the anger, emotional distress, and trauma that followed, one thought had flashed through his sensory neurons.

 

Mom...how could you?

 

Vance's outrage carried his body over a period that defied time, through multiple dimensions and immeasurable pain. The first world he and Averyl had entered had been a barren land of ice and glacial water called Tingenek, where he was once again able to utilize the full potential of his psynergy.

 

There was a rule to this game: every time he was hit by Averyl, the two would be ejected back to Earth, where Vance would have to struggle with the psynergy vacuum once more and try to land some kind of attack on his uncle in order to return. Every time he made a successful hit on Averyl, they would move up a dimension. Three consecutive hits without stopping, and Averyl would allow Vance to open a portal to Bakersfield, California.

 

Of course, Vance fell out of the crystalline dimension over a dozen times, but every bone-crushing blow that the 17-year-old received only fueled his frustration more and more. Vance's technical victory against Saffron Morrigan during the Belmarcian tournament had been long overshadowed by the mountain of losses that had succeeded it: against Grayson, against Bruce, against himself.

 

This time, Averyl's attitude toward his nephew was a far cry from the nurturing one he had possessed back in Sagacia. With every tortured cry Vance released from within, every devastating drop the boy suffered, Averyl mocked him. He prodded Vance's vexation ever further, and there were no breaks. The fighting continued until Vance's body collapsed under the unbearable amount of fatigue and pain. Whenever this happened, Averyl would place their bodies into Regeneration Tanks, rejuvenating them both just enough to resume their sadistic dance.

 

For Vance, life had become nothing but an eternal day, dragging on forever and ever, consisting solely of battle. The tall, long-haired man in the black bodysuit remained in his sights, and Vance focused only on how much of Averyl's blood he could spill. Likewise, Averyl would torment him, whether it was a gap in the fighting or a moment when Vance simply lacked the strength to even pick up his wasted body from the ground.

 

"Do you even realize what Grayson is? As the son of an angel and a demon, Grayson Lee despises everyone in this world, regardless of whose side they're on. He wants to destroy it, and more importantly, the one who created it. You think the puny emotion you claim to be "love" will help you to stop him in any way? That your adherence to mortality will aid you in your quest? You need to be able to destroy more than he can, Vance. You must exceed his existence...that's all there is to it."

 

Drenched head to toe in crimson, feeling a soft numbness creep into his limbs, nothing but rage kept the Albavitrean going. Vance raised his hands through the torrents of blood spilling from his body and shouted.

 

"That's why mom did what she did to me? So I could end up just like him?!"

 

"No," Averyl said coldly. "You'll only end up like him if you stop halfway. She wanted you to surpass him, Vance, with what lives inside you. If you want to make him suffer, you must become something he can never be."

 

Vance exploded up from the hard ice; polar winds cut into the wounds that tattooed his body. If not for the warm psynergy that cloaked his skin, he surely would have froze to death in the icy hell. Even with the added heat from his energy, he still felt his nerves and muscles slowing due to blood vessel constriction. Likewise, Vance's pain receptors had become slightly dulled, although that may have come simply from taking so many hits in repetition.

 

But it didn't matter. At this point, Vance's mind dedicated its energies solely to thinking up new strategies with which to trap his uncle. Grayson, Eden, and Victoria had all left his mind – he just wanted to crush Averyl into the ground and end this once and for all.

 

Vance's monstrous aura disappeared right before he made contact. Wise to this trick, Averyl swerved around in a half-circle, expecting Vance to slide out of a small portal in space, just as he'd tried so many times before. Instead, Vance warped himself to an outcropping on a large glacier to the right of Averyl. Vance quickly leapt out and then back in within a millisecond, allowing the portal to intersect his waist. The teenager's torso finally phased in above Averyl just as he realized what was happening.

 

Averyl's face marveled his nephew's speed. Vance's right arm was already raised, with a cannonblast of metapsynergy formed in his fist.

 

Silver butcher knives exploded from Averyl's chest, and would have skewered Vance's body on the spot had he not opened up a new portal in front of him, just wide enough to shield himself in time. Averyl's weapons went flying through to the glacier, dislodging a crater-sized piece of rock ice from the mountain.

 

Vance stretched the portal in front of his face wider, allowing the titanic clump of ice to sail down through it. Dark purple metapsynergy surged around his uncle as he frantically shielded himself.

 

As the glacier collided with him, Averyl bent his elbow and placed his open left palm in front of his chest, unleashing his psynergy without any hesitation. Simultaneously, he raised the pointer finger of his right hand and tapped the massive glacier, splintering it.

 

Yet the glacier did not crumble, nor did it budge. Behind it, Vance remained frozen in his portal, pumping psynergy into the fragments of ice, holding them together with pure force. Desperately, Averyl used a hand to shield his body from the torrent of rage that soon erupted from the icy conduit. Vance's psynergy barked like a hellhound, and what should have been a simple explosion of power seemed to tear at Averyl's very soul. Eventually, Averyl's body could no longer keep up, and the force from the explosion of ice knocked him off the edge of the cliff.

 

Averyl let his aura wane for only a moment as he fell, then concentrated his psynergy in his arms to soften to the blow. As he stood up, he saw his nephew sailing straight toward at him.

 

No words were shared. Vance lashed out his arm like a wild beast, and a punch lightly slid across Averyl's face as he jerked it back.

 

Without delay, Averyl created a portal into the next dimension: Hidmiven, a dimension composed of hole-ridden plateaus and rivers. Jagged rivers flowed along ruts in the soil, through winding mountain tunnels, and down labyrinthine holes in the crust.

 

Upon phasing in, Averyl immediately took off into one of the holes, and a competition of endurance and espionage began. Vance sped down after Averyl and was pulverized by an assault of dark psynergy that had been waiting around the corner. The rule still applied – and Vance was thrown back into Tingenek.

 

Whenever he managed to return to Hidmiven, he got anxious. He'd already hit Averyl twice in a row, and only needed to land one more solid punch to be free of this hell. Unsurprisingly, the final level was a paradise for his wily uncle, who continually materialized a slew of traps for his nephew to fall into. To make things worse, since time was not of the essence to Averyl, he would always insist on hiding, forcing Vance to become the pursuer, and always putting him at the disadvantage.

 

Then, it hit him, and the synapses in Vance's brain began firing in a different way. In the time he'd spent trying over and over again to thwart Averyl's tactics, he'd developed a knack for analyzing the battlefield.

 

There's an easier way to do this. Up until now, I've wasted all my remaining psynergy in this dimension, then I end up getting hit and falling back into the ice world, where I'm usually too exhausted to do anything else. But if I allow him to hit me on purpose before doing all that, I can keep my remaining energy in reserve and use it to deal with him in a plane I'm more used to.

 

The ideal place would be Earth. It weakens both of us, but most importantly him, and it's the place where I've had the most experience fighting him over all the times he's kicked me back there and forced me to fight my way back up. That's where the battle has to happen. I need to corner him there, and then figure out a way to hit him three times in a row!

 

Vance dove in. Using Averyl's psynergy as a guide, he closed his eyes and simply warped within the man's vicinity, hardening a shell of metapsynergy around his body but doing nothing more. In a split-second he got struck from behind, and soon fell through a portal to Tingenek.

 

Taking a direct blow from Averyl's naked left hand was devastating. Even though Vance had shielded his body, it felt as if his psynergy itself had been burned way by the Albavitrean might.

 

And he still lost to Grayson alone...

 

Averyl continued to approach him nonchalantly now, despite the fact that Vance still reeled on the ground, clutching his head in stunned silence.

 

"You let me hit you on purpose," Averyl said with a smile. "What are you plotting, nephew?"

 

Vance made sure to keep up his pained expression, floundering a bit as if he was preparing to try something. Sure enough, a kick soon came and knocked the wind out of him as he was swallowed up into another Albavitrean void.

 

The fresh, piney scent of West Virginia filled Vance's nostrils as he desperately attempted to keep breathing.

 

I can take this. For what seems like an eternity, I've done nothing but eaten, breathed, and lived pain. How many hours has this battle been going on for? I'm so close...so close to moving on.

 

"Vance..." Averyl called out to the beaten and bruised teenager. "I want you to tell me: what is psynergy?"

 

He was thrown off by the odd question, and didn't answer. Once his breathing aligned, Vance brought himself up to his feet and stared cautiously at his opponent.

 

"This is a serious question," Averyl repeated, furrowing his arched eyebrows. "Answer me."

 

"Psynergy," Vance coughed out, "is the manifestation of combined mental and physical energies."

 

"And..." Averyl continued. "What is metapsynergy?"

 

Vance paused, thinking back to everything he had been told by Edgar Caskett. "The power to manipulate matter itself, in connection with one's own energies."

"Wrong," Averyl answered. "Allow me to explain. Metapsynergy is the combined power of physical, mental, and universal power: the power to manipulate the basic principles of reality: substance, space, and the beyond."

 

Vance rolled his eyes. "So what?"

 

"So." Averyl's eyes glazed over. "If one can manipulate something, is not also possible for one to destroy that something?"

 

The emotion returned to Averyl's eyes, and he casually leaned against a tree as he continued speaking. Vance's uncle stared up into the blue sky, as if recalling an ancient memory.

 

"With an intimate knowledge of the structure and makeup of the universe, one could even cut and rearrange the gateways between dimensions. My ability may seem daunting, Vance, but in truth, it's actually a very limited one. I can materialize matter from my own body, but it's just like shifting files in a database. I can do little to the actual database itself."

 

Averyl's voice sounded melancholic, and for the first time, Vance began to wonder what other emotions lurked beneath his violent exterior.

 

Does he get afraid? Vance wondered. Does he worry... like me?

 

Averyl watched wispy clouds float through the sky and continued. "You can cut through dimensions, Vance, but you are capable of so, so much more."

 

As if to prove this, Vance slashed a hole between the men and sent his fist barreling through it. Averyl caught the punch and cupped his hand around Vance's metapsynergy-charged fist centimeters before it reached his face.

 

A smirk rippled across Averyl's face. "You've learned so much. But you're only halfway there."

 

Averyl yanked Vance through his own portal, leaving him wide open, caught in an irresistible undertow of power. His uncle's elbow crushed into his spine like an ice pick, carving the earth below into a crater before Vance's body even hit it.

 

Blood erupted from his throat. His plan had backfired, he had taken three consecutive hits from Averyl, and he was a mess. Every sector of Vance's body screamed out in pain, but he no longer had the strength to make a sound.

 

Vance struggled to raise himself onto his elbows and knees, feeling as if his body would come unwound at any second – the culmination of all the agony he had experienced thus far. Against the full power of both of Averyl's arms, Vance was determined to come out on top.

 

Frantically dashing out to the side, Vance spun himself into the air around Averyl. Bathed in metapsynergy, the speed and inertia that shrouded Vance soon grew monstrous. As soon as Vance felt Averyl's aura grow close, he threw his hand out and slashed.

 

This attack was not aimed at his uncle, but rather, the space between them. Vance opened up a portal, warped above the man's head, then cut open another portal and leapt somewhere else.

 

Averyl watched with furious interest as Vance teleport-pinballed his way around, never losing any of the inertia produced from his burning psynergy. As soon as Averyl caught Vance's position, he had already slid through another void.

 

Averyl coated his body in psynergy and prepared to catch the boy simply by blasting the area. It was during that split-second when Averyl took a breath that Vance violently changed his trajectory and went slamming into Averyl's back, seizing his chance without a moment's delay.

 

Averyl wheezed, and soon the two flew through a sea of glaciers. Vance continued his revolutions, digging deeper and deeper into his uncle's back, refusing to let this release of stress end. Finally, before Averyl hit the ground, he outstretched his arms and legs and produced four vehicular shock absorbers that shot through the dirt. They managed to sponge some of the kinetic energy that was pressuring Averyl's body, but even that was not enough to stop all of the force behind him.

 

The joints on Averyl's knees creaked under the pressure while his arms continued to support him. The power Vance released from his body began to cut through the atmosphere and flatten the landscape, discombobulating mountains of ice that soon transformed into swiss cheese soil and ribboned rivers. Every time Averyl tried to escape, Vance only dug deeper into his aura.

 

For the first time in years, Averyl gritted his teeth, flexed the blue veins on his face, and summoned up all he could find within. Images of deserted houses and caves out in the wilderness filled the man's mind as he recounted his own training.

 

"Had my father not abandoned me, Vance, I may have ended up differently. But I was left to my own devices. Demons, both inside and outside of my own heart..."

 

Averyl let out a primal scream as their auras clashed one final time. His uncle's dark fury shot out toward Vance in a desperate blast, but the son of Victoria stopped it – not with his fist, but with his mind, negating the very notion of Averyl's final assault with a new, neon green will.

 

Averyl smiled as he saw the neon green join the purple that covered Vance's body. A final crushing blow hammered Averyl's body, and the middle-aged man collapsed onto the ground. He shivered, sputtering and wheezing, and Vance stood before him, struggling to stay on his legs.

 

"What was that..." Vance murmured. "That last blast from you should have hit me...what happened?!"

 

But Averyl merely looked up to his nephew, mad eyes wide in wonder. A small, dark chuckle bubbled up from his throat, which soon grew into a mad, triumphant cackle.

 

"You weren't lying, were you?" Vance stammered. "Mom really put part of him inside of me... What am I?"

 

"Victoria..." Averyl whispered, as his laughter finally died down. "Your monster...nears its completion..."

Next: Sealed Evil