A piercing bullet soared straight through Raphael's heart as Rennet made an announcement. All went black.
All right, it was a mental bullet, depicting how much he would rather die, than follow Renet as she pointed to the maze of identical trees- pointing basically nowhere- and apprised: "We have to go that way because I don't know how to read a cursed map because I'm an idiot and we're pretty much walking in a big circle with no clean food, no clean water, and no resources."
Okay. Maybe she didn't say that. The only thing she said was 'let's go that way.' But he could tell she had no idea what she was doing. "I don't think Renet's trustworthy," he spat out under his breath.
Leonardo, hero boy, plodding on the dampened grass beside him, let out a forced confident tone of voice."We have no choice. She's the only one who knows how to find the Hamato Clan-"
"I think she's lying."
"Raph, you think anyone you only just met is lying." A newfound bitterness crisped Leo's voice, broadcasting his brother to think how strange it was that 'Nardo sounded like a newborn kitten one moment and an adult the next. "Be patient, will you? We can find out whether we can trust her later, when she brings us to the emperor."
The ninja with red cloth lining smouldered. Ever since what happened nine years ago, he learnt to never trust anybody new. "Well she might never-"
"Raph, get over it," Leo snapped. Flames of anger that were waiting to be signalled surged up immediately, but of course, Lame-O-Nardo had already disappeared to talk with Mikey and Donnie. In the very front, Renet and April were sharing friendly and flowing conversation.
While Raph was in the back. All alone, under the vast indigo sky teasing him about it.
That only left him and his own thoughts to talk in a questionable peace.
God damn my entire existence.
'Raph, get over it.' Raph, do this, do that. Raph, control your temper. Raph, you're such a big baby. Raph, it was your fault we screwed up. Raph, you have red hair. Raph this, Raph that, Raph everything wrong in the entire galaxy and beyond. Raph, you're not holding a sodding fork properly.
These guys don't get it. They. Don't. Get. It. I never asked to be a part of this stupid team. I didn't ask to be randomly thrown into a gigantic portal to this slaughterhouse either, because of some STUPID GODDAMN GIRL with a weird silver headpiece and shark teeth. I also never asked to be a HUGE MONKEY where branches keep tugging on my hair and clothes that torture this super sensitive human skin. Oh, no, I didn't ask for any of this.
I don't want to criticise April, since she's Donnie's girlfriend, but she's the reason we got into this mess. If that high school drop-out didn't have psychic powers and hadn't sensed Renet snooping in an alleyway, the far-out portal girl could've destroyed this Savanti guy herself without finding us, and I would've been feeding Spike.
Staring at each of his boots stretching and receding back out one by one against the muddy soil, he felt the furrow of his eyebrows alleviate at the mention of his small buddy.
God, I miss Spike. I miss his beautifully-patterned shell, his ginormous yellow eyes, and how you know how he's feeling by every single thing he does. You can tell how sad he is by the way he plods out of my room, you can tell how happy he is taking a bite out of his kale, you can tell how much he loves you when he gazes at you after a long, relieving rant.
"Does anyone think Splinter's taking care of Spike well?" Raph sighed aloud, a spiralling flock of memories flooded with his little friend flashed in his slowly brightening head. Was Spike fed well enough? Was he happy?
All of a sudden, Raph realised everything around him was silent; a huge chunk of air taken out of the atmosphere into nothing. Only a slight, lonely breeze sang past Raph's ear with the crunch of his footsteps that seemed to be the only two sounds in this cursed green maze. No Leo, no Donnie, no Mikey, no anyone.
By now, the land was shadowed and had fallen into deep sleep for almost all of eternity, but one wrong motion and it could blaze and scream. Terror daring to possess Raphael, his mind begged to determine which direction he was supposed to go after he was left behind. "So they said something about going east... which is where...?" Even muttering under his breath seemed as deafening as a sperm whale, trapped inside the strangling pocket of air between dense, staring trees.
Raph stopped- he could feel something that might've been just nerves, but at the back of his mind, a candle of his sixth sense flickered.
Raph held his breath with horror as he knew something, someone, with an almost sinister intent, knew he was here. Alone. Undefended.
He channeled the surge of uncontrollable fear to rage. "Come out!" Surprise struck him at how loud and confident his voice sounded amidst the impenetrable abyss of black. "I know you're there, shank."
Unease slithered into Raph's stomach. Was that... a person? The figure blended in so much with the pitch-black around it, the redhead immediately squinted his thin triangle-shaped eyes. The darkness of the forest unified with the darkness of the figure, yet slowly bid each other farewell as new outlines traced its body.
It was... a man?
First appeared short legs, stubby arms, a short body, a small head.
Basically, Raph thought with a winning smirk, everything about them is tiny. His satisfaction inflated wider like a balloon as moonlight eased weakly onto the man's old, tattered Japanese robes.
"I actually feel kinda sorry for ya." Raph spun out his sai from his front pockets, still unsure where to place his two new, gnarly pale fingers after his transformation. "It's either fight, or flight. And I'm telling ya, you don't wanna choose fight..."
His cocky words sank into a stupefied silence.
It was then that Raph realised that was one of the dumbest things he'd said in his life.
It wasn't just one man. Two more flanked him. Then another two. Then another two.
The leader at the front surprisingly spoke in a low, vicious manner, yet Raphael couldn't understand because the guy was speaking a mixture of gibberish- no, Japanese. All the knowledge from Splinter's language lessons Raph had found boring at the time fizzled into the ginger's memory, and realised the scrawny leader was saying: What an ugly, pale man.
With a jolt Raph identified their faces as brown-eyed and asian, so they might've never even seen a western turtle- he meant man, before. Nevertheless, the light switch of the ignited oven in his stomach was already hot and ready as he retorted, "Who are you callin' ugly?"
Raph's legs worked on its own, blasting off the ground like a rocket and targeting the feeble, fragile, pitiful excuse of a man right in the face with the glisten of his sai.
But he swung at only air.
Sharp pain nipped Raphael's side just as he flung his body around to face the man who had just miraculously teleported. How could anyone, especially a foul-clothed, stout, nobody like him move so fast? Raging sparks zipped into Raph's glaring orbs as both of their weapons clashed together with an ear-raking clang.
"Sai too, huh?" Raph raised his arched eyebrows as he distinguished what Tiny, the nickname for the man, was clutching in his two bruised hands- what a copycat. "There's only one master of the sai." The world seemed to brighten with glee as strength pulsed through his arms and he won the clash, making Tiny double back with a searing kick to his hollow-feeling stomach.
The frail man fell onto the messy forest underfoot, leaves flying up and all that around him. What an ugly sight. Raph almost felt pity for him.
"I'm sorry." The ginger shrugged with an apathetic attitude. "But really not."
Everything blurred past him as the red-masked ninja charged, only the fallen man clear and concise in the centre of his raging vision. With such perfect timing that his brothers and Splinter would've been proud of, his slim human feet (which he still couldn't get used to) abandoned the ground with avidity, and just as his sai met Tiny's face-
Hang on.
Hands whose flesh were made out of gloom lashed out and grasped Raph everywhere- arms, legs, torso, tempted to set his heart aflame. There was a countless myriad of them, chaining the black-and-red ninja back just before he was about to win. Wow. What a way to ruin his night even more.
Raph struggled, demanding all his knives of inner strength to break himself from their strangling, resisting chains, but it was no use.
Then something inside him flared up. There was use. Tenacious beams of electricity glitched up his arms and legs, through his mind and soul, regenerating the heated powerhouse of his desire to fight. "Come on, you lowlife dimwit! Is that all you've got? Need all your wittle friends to help you?" Raph was so very aware that his voice was maybe the loudest it had ever been- but couldn't be sure because the mute forest made it seem that way. All of a sudden, he felt mad at himself, even abashed, as he realised just then he was about to give up. "Once I destroy all these random hands holding me, I'll tear your little ugly face right offa your body, you got that? Just like I did with Mikey's Chris Bradford action figure! YEAH? Ya got that, little dweeb?"
Once Raph finished his randomly made up sequence of insults thought on the spot (hey, he might've been about to die), the boy was ready to break free and chop all those resisting hands from their bodies- slice.
Instead, Raphael only sliced a low branch that caterwauled onto the ground with a crunch. Crap. There were too many of them. Too many of the hands. Fiercely writhing, undying energy leaked out of him like the drainage from the sewer they once lived- drip drip drip, until Raph couldn't struggle no more.
Nonsense.
The boy filled from head to toe with rage relentlessly jerked and jerked and jerked- surely the hands would break out some time, right? They had to. So Raph could leave that wretched Tiny a scar that wouldn't be forgotten. However, still not a single grasp on him flinched.
All of a sudden, Tiny, scrawled on the leaf-invaded ground below second before, picked his flimsy body upwards and stared at the struggling boy. Something so cold and brittle like Mikey's freezer eerily penetrated from the bottomless black soles of Tiny's shadowed eyes, causing Raph to steam air out of his straight nose testily.
Freak.
The gaunt silhouette of Tiny took one step forward at a time, steadily, bit by bit, all the while Raph was still attempting to escape the hands' grip in a crazed rampage.
Little skank. Sissy. Coward.
The almost hesitant moon shed its barely-visible glimmer of white light and only stroked on side- half- of Tiny's face. Half dead eyes. Half bruised lip. Half a beard that was on the edge of exisiting. Half the clothes that bullied white so badly it melted into a filthy yellow. The other half was black. Hidden.
Peasant. Bonehead. Dingbat.
Ever so slowly and agonisingly, Tiny's scrawny little face beard and stared down at Raph, who was forced down on his dirt-covered knees now. One of his dark brown orbs, the other encapsulated by the black of the hateful night, was filled with mockery. Perhaps to gloat?
Finally, it was not that tedious, but far more sinister.
His foe's deadly, piercing edges of his raised sai revelled in the moonlight in a hand, barely a few inches of Raph's bemused face. No. Tiny wouldn't. He couldn't. Raph couldn't die. Not now. Not here.
The glint in Tiny's half gaze only held on emotion: malice, told him otherwise.
No. Not now. Not here.
Spike. Splinter. Leo. Mikey-Donnie-April-Spike, Spike, Spike-
"YOU MONSTER!" Even Raph's voice box shattered like a wrecking ball of anger through glass as he screamed, rocketing birds out of the trees above. "You didn't fight me like a real warrior! You're going to kill me without honour! You already lost, skunk-face!"
The unflinching, crazy man just kept boring his gaze down at the furious ninja as if he didn't hear anything, his face crafted from stone. Tiny's sai lacked speed, hovering and stopping just above Raph's eyebrow.
Not now. Not now. Not now-
"I'll kill you," Raph whispered under his strenuous huffs of itinerant air. It didn't even matter if what he said made no sense. I'll kill you as a damn corpse if I have to.
The psychopath tensed his hands which were wielding the clean sai, but would soon be covered in conceited, bubbling, minacious red. Red that would shower in front of Raph's own eyes before he drowned into an empty void. Red that would pool on the ground, poisoning the earth with a velvety taste. Red that would indicate that he had died between an eerie cavity of trees, in the middle of nowhere, not in his sewer home. Red that said that he had lost.
Raphael lifted his gaze. Slowly. And met the man's. Above the sudden sqauwking among the trees, coloured with so much hope, such lust for him to live if birds could even have such feelings, the ninja couldn't think of anything else to say so a low growl rumbled in his strained throat.
Damn you, Tiny.
The half silhouette standing in front of the ginger smiled. Laughed. His ever so sickly cackle polluted the cold, merciless dark world and echoed beyond. "You are so caught up in rage," he whispered in Japanese, "that you lose sight of everything."
And then the world flashed white as his single sai came down-
It met Raph's forehead with exploding pain-
It seared down his eyebrows-
And it was about to slice his eyes open-
There was suddenly a deafening clash-
And all of a sudden a silhouette stood in front of Raph-
The blur of the ninja's vision hesitantly, dubiously oozed away. A couple inches in front, was not the flaring, menacing sai, but a person- black hair, a lean frame, two extended brown pockets snaking through his back where dual katanas must've rested.
"Get away from my brother," Leo breathed.
Leo?
His brother had come to save him. Just less than a single second later Raph's eyes would've been ripped out, but his brother saved him. His goody gumdrop brother, his close comrade, his partner in crime, his sweaty Pong opponent, his ninjitsu competitor, his remote control stealer, his cheesy sci-fi fan, his emo-girl lover (Karai, which he oogles at), and his brother.
And will forever and always be.
Prior to Raph making sense of everything surrounding him, the greedy chains eating on his body were abruptly obliterated. The freedom caused his stressed, taught muscles to scream with relief. As the redhead swivelled around him with his boots already planted on the firm ground, he realised it was her, Renet, who had unleashed him with a swing of her sceptre. Raphael latched his mouth back aggrievedly at the exact moment the girl yelped, "there's more soldiers!"
Oh, give me a break. Indeed there was; if soldiers were five foot tall, skinner than Donnie, and looked like walking rotten fish.
Down on Raph's luck, there were about thirty of them. He clenched his human fists to bunch the fire boiling up inside- they, the soldiers, were the ones who were holding him back, more than ready to watch him die.
Flash.
The world- orange. The colour pulsed into life without warning, conspicuous without an ounce of effort, born from a golden ball, igniting the night and outshining the stars. The luminosity brutally invaded Raph's eyesight. "Argh," he spat when April's round face was unravelled behind the light of flame, the girl cautiously holding the torch out with two hands. "Are you trying to blind me?"
His spirits, mimicking the tongues of heat, flared skywards as Donnie and Mikey shone vivid on both sides of the psychic girl.
They came.
All his brothers came.
Raph was so happy he could've literally ran over and hugged them just then, if not for two rugged soldiers thrusting themselves against him with an eager hostility he withstood. Blade after blade, thrash after thrash, the weak mice of men stumbled away. Aw. How adorable and sad- sadorable.
"Um, I think you're already blind, since you lagged yourself behind," Donnatello retorted while thunking his oversized stick on his foe's head. The blinding, mystical emotions of beautiful, brilliant euphoria drowned what negative things Raph would usually say. Just hearing his brother's voice again crept his lips into a smile. What a funny, loveable, dorky, tall genius.
"And I knew it was you!" Mikey yowled, his cute voice like a keen puppy. Maybe not. The blonde kid pointed his numbchucks at Raph with accuracy, as if a death threat. "You plucked Bradford's head straight out and threw the body away!"
"All in good memory," Raph laughed, then- wait. Stop. Dang it. Why in the lord was he sounding like an old man? The redhead tensed his facial features. Come on. Get your head in the game.
The shock in a brown-haired enemy's eyes flashed as soon as Raphael granted him a swift kick to the groin. The red-hot sensation coursed through the brawny ninja with delight. "Aw yeah, that's what you get!" Another man leapt at from the side, slumping to the ground with a newfound scar in in his leg. "Take that!"
April's voice chimed behind him, gasping for air between words as she oscillated her blazing torch. "Raph, you know they can't even understand what you're saying, right?"
"Baka," Raph cawed, directed at a taller man who was flailing his arms in dramatic agony. Alas, multiple bodies rocketed against him at once- the force was mesmerising, like being hit by a car, being crushed by a wave, and almost like being ruthlessly squashed against the brick walls by the claws of Shredder. Under all the brittle anger, Raph still struggled to fight all the soldiers surrounding him at once.
There was a katana blade there- a flash of a tessen to the left- a dashing tanto from below- a shuriken flying to-
At one point in your life, your eyes react to something, sending a message to your mind and lastly, your muscles. But the stupid, stupid message might not even be fast enough. At that unfortunate moment, the only thing you can do then is just stand there, paralysed in horror as it hits you in less than a single blink-
Agony exploded on his forehead from the surface of Raph's skin, and before he could think, the deep, red monstrous liquid unlocked its key and spilled out, surging and eating through Raph's lapsing eyesight. He struggled to keep his sharp movements intact, and he knew with sinking faith that his team was finding it hard to defend themselves too. A loud shout coloured with strain whizzed out of Leo beside him. Mikey was wailing with panic from behind. Donnie and April were huddled together, features clouded with stress in the front. Renet was-
"Renet!" Donnie's staff was moving like a hurricane- faster than it had ever been before. "Can't you levitate and trap all these people in your time sceptre or something?"
The sorry excuse for a time traveller was instead playing a game of tug-o-war, multiple enemy hands tearing at the stick on one end and the navy gloves of Renet on the other. Slowly and surely, this was just like being on death row.
That's it. We're doomed. We're doomed. We're-
The soldiers all fell to the ground with blood-licked arrows protruding out their backs. A figure with a bow loomed in the trees above and pointed.
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