[02] Forest Sector

[Ashe]

Stumbling painfully through the city, Ashe pulled her phone out of her bag, her fingertips brushing the screen to break the screensaver that was turned on. A few quick motions later, she turned off the alarm that was frantically beating, alerting her to a warning timer that she had set as a scheduled event to alert her to collar detonation. "I need... to get into a bunker fast," she spoke, her lungs burning while her lips cracked and bled.

She had no words to describe what had happened other than that she had been completely fucked up. Even her reluctance to use such language couldn't overcome that feeling. She didn't blame Kaden at all, since they were both clearly being controlled at the time. First, whoever was pulling the puppet strings decided to have her conjure up a blast of energy and fire it, weakly and faultily, but they wanted to make a point. They could make her do things that she didn't even know how to do herself.

Then they had forced her to her feet. Punch after punch later, they left her staring in anguish at the blond courier, his eyes horrified as his palms spread out. Everything had been overcome with a bright light at that point, fading quickly into darkness.

She'd awoken hours later in complete and total blackness, unsure if she was even awake or not. Moving around on a soft but horribly smelling pile revealed that, to add further insult, they had teleported her into a trash dumpster. When she'd gotten out, the abandoned fast food place nearby told her that she had no idea where she was. It wasn't on her map, when she pulled it out.

For a while, she didn't even know if she'd been just stumbling in circles or towards the edge of the map. Her only real hope was that she wasn't walking further into one of the corners that didn't connect to another zone. Fortunately for her, a bight blue translucent energy field suddenly came into view as she rounded another corner to circumvent a building.

Through the field she was able to see a strong treeline. Forest Sector. The thought came to her easier than words would, having no swollen and bleeding lips to emerge through. The Mountains were diagonal from here, but I definitely don't have time to make it to that bunker. Gonna have to just head to this one for now.

It was a crappy decision, she felt, but she'd have to find Kaden at a later point in time. Hopefully he didn't blame himself for what happened. If it wasn't for one of her boyfriends having beaten her in the past, she would not have known the difference between intentions. Sadly, she could find fortune in such an event having taken place, and that gave her the strength to know that by the look in Kaden's eyes, he was feeling every blow that she had.

There was no blame to be laid outside of Damon Dukes.

She was actually angry, she realized. Not at Kaden. Not even at Dukes. She was angry at herself for not having any idea how to handle her own power. One would think that after the events of Friend or Foe 3, she would have learned to understand her own potential. Part of her screamed that she was still just a teenager and still trying to make it through the world, but it was apparent that every cruel bastard in the universe was honestly out to get her.

Her hand rose before her, weakly lifting up into the same apple holding grasp that she'd seen Kaden doing before. She was angry, and she would have loved for nothing more than to detonate a massive blast right in Damon's chest. The power was within her, she felt. The Star's Tear was fill with absolute potential that she would probably never be able to channel herself, but this...

Trembling in agony, she remembered the feelings that her body underwent as they controlled her, channeling her deepest energies through her energy streams until it gathered into raw energy directly within her grasp before being flung wildly forward towards Kaden's own small blast. Her shot was weak, striking some random object with nothing more than a pathetic flash, but it was a shot. It was... real.

It was what she wanted to figure out. They knew how to unlock her potential, and they mocked her with it. Just what was it they did, she wondered, to conjure it? Kaden hadn't been able to explain it, and she seemed like without having any true connection to her energy source, she wouldn't be able to See the streams of energy that flowed throughout everything. Touching his energy had helped with that, but she hadn't been able to hold onto it.

She remembered a tingling, rising through her body before it gathered in her palms. It had embraced her from every direction, just for an instant. Everything she wanted screamed out for it as she clutched her fist, imagining herself throwing a ball forward. Her palm shimmered a bit, causing her eyes to widen, but then it faded all too quickly.

Realization crept over her as she looked up to see a structure in the distance. The bunker? she thought internally. She'd been so focused on what she was trying to do, trying to force her power to come to light, that she'd crossed right through the forest itself and had thankfully come across the bunker without even realizing how she'd walked. She felt as if she'd been drawn to it, somehow, as if it contained a large magnetic pull that called out to her, but she wasn't quite sure why.

She stopped a moment, feeling slightly dizzy, as she used her hand to hold herself up against a tree. She was almost there, she decided, adjusting her backpack. Her hand left the tree as she trudged forward, leaving her completely unaware that the handmark on the tree had left a small blue glow for a few seconds before fading from sight.

Ashe leaves the City Sector and enters the Forest Sector, entering the bunker within.