Psychic Schoolkids - Part 22 - The Fight

I had done all that I could do. I walked into the atrium and found Chloe sitting at one of the tables. She was unfortunately lacking a Lisa, but I wasn’t too surprised. Dane telling Lisa she should be more like Chris wasn’t going to encourage her to be helpful.

“Any luck?” She said to me.

“About as much as you. You think people would be more willing to help us stop people dying.”

“Apparently not. Now we need to move, everyone is wandering around and I think they’re going to run into each other in the common room.”

The common room was a ‘quiet study area’. Which meant that when teachers enforced such a concept, the room was perpetually empty, and when teachers didn’t care it was full of students. However since Mr Harding’s office had been moved next to the common room, the silence rule was enforced. It was probably a beneficial place for everything to go down since there wasn’t likely to be a lot of collateral damage. Chloe and I reached the area at the dramatically appropriate moment, Emily and Dane had just walked in from the doorway opposite to us and Chris, Nathan and Matt were standing in the middle of the room.

“This is going to get ugly isn’t it?” I said to Chloe.

“You have no idea. We need to hang back though. I don’t want to die today.”

The common room was full of tables and chairs, and bordered by lockers. So lots of things for Nathan to throw around when he gets in a bad mood, but also lots of obstacles to prevent anyone getting close enough to touch one another.

“How can we help?” I said to Chloe.

“We can’t. Not yet anyway. We just have to hope that Emily and Dane know what they’re doing.”

We were too far away to hear any exchanges of words, but the concept was pretty simple to understand. Within seconds Nathan had flung tables and chairs to either side, clearing the room between himself and my friends.

“Matt’s going to run.” Chloe said to me. “When he does you can get over there. He’s their weakest link.”

Surely enough that’s what happened. As Emily and Dane approached Matt broke away from Chris and Nathan, retreating to a safe distance at the side of the room. I took this opportunity to make a break for them. I barely got halfway across the room when Dane came flying towards me. Nathan had noticed me and thought my best friend made a good weapon.

“Dane...you need to go for Matt.” I said to him.

“And what about the others?” Nathan said.

“They’re about to get taken care of...” I said, looking across to the room, hoping that I wasn’t being overconfident.

Thankfully, I wasn’t. I spotted the increasingly familiar shadow standing next to Chris and Nathan. A split second later the shadow was a very solid, very human looking Neil. Before either of them realised he was there Chris and Nathan had both been taken down by a very impressive punch and an even more impressive spinning kick.

Dane didn’t miss his chance. He headed towards Matt, and Emily followed suit.

“I already killed you!” Chris shouted at the ghost of Neil. “Obviously I’ll need to do it again.” He reached an arm out, which went straight through Neil’s torso. Neil responded by grabbing his arm and with a loud crack smacking it with his other hand. If it weren’t for the fact that I knew Chris could heal it in seconds I’d have almost felt sorry for the guy.

Meanwhile, Matt had noticed people coming for him and tried to raise a barrier to protect himself. Emily simply touched it and it froze over, shattering seconds later. Before Matt knew what was happening Dane had grabbed him.

Although I couldn’t see exactly where they were, there was a faint movement in the air that appeared and disappeared across the room. Dane had made Matt’s power go crazy. Emily reached out and touched one of the walls. The extent of the barriers became immediately apparent as frozen walls appeared across the room, forming a maze of barriers stopping Nathan from throwing anything at Emily and Dane, and Chris from getting even remotely close to them.

The ice melted seconds later, and instead intense heat began to radiate from the room. I saw Neil hip and shoulder Nathan into one of the walls, and could hear the sizzle of his skin getting burnt. He responded by throwing a desk at Neil, which went through the ghost but hit one of the barriers Matt had unintentionally made. It shattered, and Matt screamed in pain.

By this stage I had rejoined Chloe...just in time to hear her say “Oh crap.”

Chris had recovered enough to reach out again towards ghostly Neil. However he didn’t even try to touch him this time. He just extended his palm in Neil’s direction. This time, it appeared to be working. Cuts began to appear on Neil’s face. The ghost vanished.

Chris and Nathan turned to Dane and Emily, who were making their way through the maze of walls towards them. Nathan threw all the assorted furniture that he could at Emily, knocking down wall after wall until they began to get close to her. As he threw a table Emily stood there, knowing she couldn’t move. She closed her eyes and the table froze, then shattered. She covered her face as shards of frozen plastic pelted her face, leaving tiny scratches and drawing blood as they went.

Nathan looked amazed, but quickly recovered, picking up chairs and throwing them at her. This time she at least had the foresight to dodge.

Dane however, was not faring as well. He had reached Chris, and managed to drive his power crazy. The only problem was that Chris was using his power on Dane. Burns and bruises and cuts were all appearing across Dane’s face, and then healing before they were fully formed. Both Dane and Chris were screaming in pain as Dane’s body and Chris’ mind were being torn up. The end result was plain to see though, unless Dane could do something Chris was going to kill him before he could do anything to Chris.

Then Chris flew across the room, slamming into the nearest set of lockers. I turned to see Mr Harding and Ms Ellis walking down the stairs into the common room. Chris looked up at Harding with disbelief on his face.

“Enough of this!” Ellis said. “This game ends now. You’re all going to stop before you hurt yourselves any more than you already have!”

Unfortunately, Nathan had a different idea about this, pens that had fallen out of one of the lockers were hurled across the room at the teachers. Neither of them flinched though, Harding waved a hand at the last minute and the pens changed course and lodged harmlessly in a wall.

“Really Nathan.” He said. “I taught you how to do that. Don’t think you can use it against me. But Ms Ellis and I have agreed. The fighting stops.”

“You told us never to stop until the game had been won.” Nathan said. “And we are winning. We’re going to be the Champions of this school.”

“You can be, but you’re going to stop trying to kill other students first.” Harding replied.

“I don’t think so.” Said Chris, who had manoeuvred himself next to Harding. He tackled his teacher to the ground. I felt sick as I heard my maths teacher scream, before I saw Chris fly across the room. Harding however, didn’t get up.

Nathan turned his attention to Ms Ellis, who was walking towards him.

“Nathan. Stop this.” Ms Ellis said. A chair that had been thrown at her melted into plastic then dispersed into steam. “I don’t want to hurt you.” A table froze, then shattered, then melted into droplets of water before they hit Ms Ellis. Much cooler than how Emily had done it.

Nathan kept throwing things at Ms Ellis, who calmly walked towards him, melting, freezing and generally destroying anything the increasingly panicked Nathan threw at her. As she eventually reached him, she put a hand out and grabbed his wrist.

“No!” Chloe said from next to me.

The next thirty seconds were some of the most intense emotionally that I had felt for quite a while. Chloe had seen enough of the future to know her ex wasn’t going to make it out of the fight, and she felt so strongly about that that I couldn’t help but feel jealous. Emily and Dane were dumbfounded, as was I to an extent, that our teachers had superpowers too, and were damn good at them. They had stood back from the fight, content to watch the events. They were also terribly exhausted, they had used everything their powers had and that took a toll on their bodies, especially in Dane’s case. Blood covered both their faces.

Nathan, he just felt cold.

That was because within seconds of Ms Ellis touching him, he had frozen solid. Ms Ellis didn’t intend to kill Nathan, or if she did she felt absolutely nothing even resembling remorse, but what she didn’t expect was Matt behind her. He dealt her a terrible blow to the back of her head with a chair, sending her falling forward into the frozen Nathan.

You don’t ever want to see a person shatter. It is one of the most frightening experiences. It is not cool, it just looks like there should be lots of blood, but there is none, because it’s all frozen.

Matt realised what he had done. He was gone from the room within seconds. Chris was sitting in a corner curled up in a ball. Obviously between what Frank and Dane had done to his mind, as well as the blows to his head from being thrown at wall by Mr Harding, had broken his mind in a new sort of way. I wished I didn’t have to feel what was going on inside his head at that moment.

Mr Harding just lay on the floor. He was most definitely alive. I could tell by the pain radiating from him. As Chloe and I approached him we saw why he hadn’t bothered to get up. When I thought that Dane and Emily’s faces were bloodied, they didn’t compare to Mr Harding. While my friends had red patches from minor cuts on their face, Mr Harding’s face was covered in blood.

And the bit that scared me the most was that his eyes were gone. I couldn’t be sure, but from the confusion and fear in his head, combined with his hands over his eyes, I could tell enough. It wasn’t something I wanted to see.

“I’m getting Lisa...she *has* to help now.” Emily said to us, as Chloe sat down on the floor where we stood, and Dane came over to survey the situation.

Chloe had shut down. She was so overwhelmed with everything going on, especially from having to experience it twice – both in her head and then watching it in reality – that she didn’t know what to do. I was in a similar situation. Of my old best friends, one was curled up in a corner, insane beyond recognition, and the other was scattered in frozen blocks across the common room floor. I know how I should have felt, and I was feeling something very different to that.

But at that point, it wasn’t about me. I walked over to Dane, and hugged him and helped him to one of the chairs that hadn’t been flung around in the fight. Then I sat down next to my girlfriend, wrapped my arms around her and stared blankly into space, trying to disconnect from all the emotions around me as she cried on my shoulder...