The Last Wudai Quest, Chapter Two

[lonewolfprincess]

Raimundo and Tori shared a worried look as Mia bit and tore into a round, hazel-colored pear the size of her head like it’d insulted her whole family.

“Uh, Mia…?” Raimundo started warily. “I don’t know if this is a wolf thing or not, but maaaybe you should breathe in between bites?”

“Ishnodda—” Wait. Mia angrily chewed her mouthful of pear flesh before swallowing. “It’s not a wolf thing, it’s a good luck charm!” Tori tilted her head, but Raimundo only took a second to nod in understanding. “‘Pear’ and ‘separate’ use the same ‘lí’ tone! They’re bad luck during most festivals because it’s tempting a split in relationships, like giving someone a knife as a wedding gift. But apparently you eat them whole during the Mid-Autumn Festival to destroy separation!” Mia stood up dramatically from the table, pear crumbs and nectar clinging around her mouth. “I’m sending them good vibes through the power of food puns!”

The Wind and Sun Dragons were not calmed by this declaration.

“O-kay, we are officially switching you to herbal for the rest of the day…” Tori gently nudged Mia’s cup of oolong away from her plate of pear remains.

Raimundo gave Mia a pat on the shoulder as she grumbled in resignation.

“Girl, you seriously need to relax. Your boy’ll be fine.”

Mia sputtered, coughing and pounding hard on her chest as the pear threatened to separate her air from her windpipe.

“That’s—!” Mia coughed some more. “That’s not… He’s not… he’s not! A-and I know he’ll be fine!” Mia took deep breaths to calm the completely-just-from-near-choking redness in her face. “I know he will…” Mia’s face sobered, still anxious as she ran a hand through her ash brown bangs. “It’s Omi I’m worried about most. He’s been through enough lately…”

“Aw, sweetie…” Tori threw her arms around her sister’s shoulders. “He’ll be fine too. And especially Raimundo’s girl~” She grinned with deceptive innocence as Raimundo did an impressive spit-take on his tea. “They all will! We’ve got their backs, and they have each other! There’s nothing they can’t take on together!”



Kimiko groaned as she continued down the tunnel, one hand holding her phone up to light the way. If it weren’t for the acrid fumes in the lukewarm air, singeing her nose like a sauna, she’d light a fire, but no way was she risking an explosion.

“Great… lost in a creepy cave, no guys, fire’s too risky, and I doubt GPS would do anything even if I could get a signal. What next?”

“Hi there~!”

Kimiko stopped mid-step. That voice… High, tinny in an obviously metallic tone, and way, way too perky.

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me…”



“Kimiko? Clay?”

Omi waded through the thick sludge up to his shins, one hand tracing the craggy black mirrors. Thankfully, some sort of lifeform clung to the stalactites above, lending the cave a faint turquoise glow.

“My friends? Are you alright? Please respond if you can hear me!”

Still nothing—

A high, almost manic tenor laugh rang out through the cavern.

“Why do you want to look for them?” the hyper voice called out rapidly. “You should find me instead, I want to fight, fight-fight-FIGHT!”

Omi froze… He knew that voice. Heard it over and over again when his nightmares dredged up memories of serving Chase Young.



Clay took a deep cleaning breath. “Earth…”

A soft tap of his foot against the hard rock. He’d expected to get a sonar picture of the caverns, but much to his delight, tiny spikes of crystal embedded amongst the obsidian answered with a soft white glow, just enough to make out shapes in the deepest shadows.

“Well, I’ll be a day-old calf.” Clay chuckled as he strolled forward. “And that’s a right pretty view too. Now just gotta find the others and—”

A cackle broke through his thoughts, high, malicious, with a buzzy tone like fly wings. And… why did it sound so familiar…?

Clay jumped into a fighting stance. “Who’s there?!”

“Oh, I’m hurt, boy…” The buzzing voice rang out from… right? Left? Everywhere? “Don’t you recognize me? After all, we had such a fun couple days together…”

Clay squinted down each end of the tunnel—wait… no, he squinted at the obsidian… Instead of skeptical, searching, his hunched reflection bore a crooked grin, eyes shining black as beetle shells.



“N-no… This… this is some sort of underhanded trick!” Omi flung his arm out in a shooing motion. “Away with you, evil spirit!”

“I am no evil spirit!” the reflection laughed wildly, eyes and wrongly-balanced dots burning like coals in the dark, red-hemmed black robes swishing as he rapidly punched the “air.” “I am a part of you, the strongest part of you! I am the part of you that loves to fight, fight-fight-fight!”

Omi shook his head, blood rushing in his ears. “You are not the strongest part of me! My friends defeated you most easily—”

The evil Omi threw back his head and laughed. “They did not defeat me! They merely restored the good half to you! I am still here, I will always be here!”



Kimiko really couldn’t help rolling her eyes. “Let me guess. This is some sort of ‘facing my inner darkness’ test so I can break free?” She cracked her knuckles. “If you’re the worst this place can come up with, then I’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“Ooooh, are you super-duper-extra sure about that~?” The Kimiko-bot cooed in the mirror. “Because I know lots and lots about you, girlfriend~! Liiike your temper…~ your impulsiveness…~” Kimiko nodded along, almost bored… But then the robot’s grin grew quiet, malicious… “Your fear of being alone…”

A sharp chill hit Kimiko’s spine like a knife. “What…?”

The robot grinned. “Oopsie, did that one hurt~?”



“Ain’t you… Sibini?”

The possessed reflection laughed again. “Got it in one, kid. Not as slow as you look after all.”

Clay gritted his teeth as the mirror kept laughing. “Ain’t you supposed to be locked up in the Mosaic Scale back at the temple?”

Sibini-Clay scoffed. “Take it back. Still slower than tar in winter. Good thing your little friends never relied on those brains. Oh wait…” The reflection grinned sadistically. “They did… And you let ’em down…”

Oh… Clay’s heart froze in his chest.

“Or no wait… it wasn’t just your brains that failed ’em, was it? It was your heart!”



Raimundo rose a brow at the stack of books, papers, and multiple colors of pen the girls hunched over in the reading nook.

“What’s all this?” He picked up one of the books at the far end of the cluttered mountain. “‘Modern Vault Design for Dumdums?’” And another book. “‘Safecracking for Dumdums?’ You girls planning another heist?”

Tori laughed as she turned in her seat to grin at him. “No, silly! We were thinking, since we have a little bit of free time, we could brainstorm how to give the Shen Gong Wu Vault a makeover!” She crouched a bit higher in her seat to stage-whisper. “Mia’s less stir-crazy when she has a project…!”

“I can hear you, you know…” Mia said dryly… but her chagrin faded quickly as she poured over the notes. “Omi said peach wood is sacred and can repel evil, right? Maybe we can use that in the framing somehow—”

An explosion rocked the temple grounds, followed by an all-too-familiar evil laugh.

The three Dragons sighed heavily before dashing out into the courtyard and—yup, there was the meditation hall over the Shen Gong Wu Vault, a gaping hole freshly blasted in the side, and hovering in the air, Jack Spicer gloated at the head of a sizeable swarm of Jack-Bots.

“That’s right, Xiaolin Losers! I, Jack Spicer, Evil Boy Genius, have come to reclaim my Shen Gong Wu! You probably thought you were safe with the holiday, huh, but I—”

“And this is why we need to upgrade the vault, guys!” Mia gestured frantically at the hole in the towering hall’s side.

Jack growled. “Hey hey hey, don’t cut off my evil taunt, that’s just rude!”

Raimundo shook a fist back. “So’s robbing us on a holiday, you jerk!”

“Oh, come on, it’s not like I’m robbing you on Christmas!”

“No, just messing with Omi’s head during New Year—”

“Boys, boys!” Tori stepped in front of Raimundo, hands clasped beatifically in front of her. “You’re both pretty…ish… But the festival’s supposed to be about community!” She waved up to the evil boy genius. “Hey, Spicy, we’ll give you some mooncakes if you leave the vault alone today! You can try again some other time!”

“WHAT?!” Raimundo, Mia, and Wuya yelled.

“Wait, did you say mooncakes?” Oh. Jack hadn’t had a mooncake in years; his dad would always bring the really fancy boxed ones back from his business trips to Hong Kong, but that stopped when he got old enough for books and antiques.

“Tori, I spent days on those—!”

“Caramia…~!” Tori gave her sister a tight smile, enough that the Moon Dragon blinked in surprise.

A few mulish seconds… and she sighed, stomping towards the kitchen. “Give me a few seconds…” she called over her shoulder.



“I am everything you will never be free of! Your temper, your massive ego—”

“Stop it…!”

“Your impulsiveness, your shame over all of it and how it plunged the world into darkness so many times… shoved your friends away… got them killed!”

“Silence—”

“So many lectures and warnings about your pride… but then again, it was never truly pride, was it?” The reflection grinned deviously, voice slowing. “Just desperation… Desperation to keep your new friends from leaving you alone again… and to prove them wrong…!”



“Yup~! Poor little Kimiko… all that money, all those toys and cool clothes~! Everybody else just wrote you off as a spoiled little brat, didn’t they~?”

“Shut up…” Kimiko growled…

“Keiko’s the only one who stuck around~! She’s the only one who ever saw the real you, right~? You can’t even show it to the other monks after all this time, right~?”

“Shut up…”

“I’m not wrong though~! You always get so touchy when you mess up around them~! Last thing you want is to be weak, useless, like a pampered princess who can’t take care of herself~!”

“Shut up shut up shut up…”



“Nope, ain’t listening to you.” Clay marched down the tunnel, eye glued straight ahead, only faintly registering the hard rock beneath his feet transitioning to soft black sand.

The buzzing laugh rang out again, still hot on his heels.

“Yeah, that’s right, run away… all your talk, but when the going gets tough, you get going with your tail between your legs! Run away from your daddy chafing you all the way to China…”

Clay groaned as he winced… Don’t engage don’t engage don’t engage…

“Run away from your siblings and their pain… or the fact that they might’ve plum disappeared…”

“Shut up…” Just keep moving…

“Or turning tail when Chase had the kid in his clutches… Letting your ‘little lady’ run you off when she needed you to stay…”

Keep going, find the others…

“And when that other world needed you most, what did you do? Ran off to play farmboy and dragged the others with you! As long as y’all stayed safe, who cares if anyone else suffered?!”

Clay growled, boots halting in the sand.

“You’re wrong! I was trying to keep us safe and fed until we could regroup, grow enough to feed the people around us too!”

“Oh, can it, boy!” Sibini’s sick humor faded, even his patience growing thin. “Just admit it: you were too chicken to do what needed to be done! You always are! Why the heck did Chase pick a yellow-bellied mule in the mud like you for a leader?!”

“Grrrr, YOU can it—!”

Clay turned on his heel to face—wait… no, his boots wouldn’t move, and… when did the sand come up to his ankles… the tops of his boots… his knees…

He gasped! “Quicksand!” Not the real kind either, the kind that sucked you under like a riptide.

“Too little too late, cowboy…” And Sibini’s buzzing cackle rang out through the cavern.



“That’s why you’re soooo scared to go beyond cheek kissies with him, right…?” The robot’s grin sharpened to a bloodthirsty edge. “Every time you think it’s safe to be vulnerable with him, he shoves you away…! He sold you out for video games… he cut you out of that itty bitty scheme with Guan to get back the Treasure… he was going to drink that nasty-wasty soup and leave you behind forever…!”

“Shut up…!”

“Not to mention you didn’t keep Omi safe from Chasey-Wasey…! And you’re the one that helped that icky bug take over Clay…! Maybe the others would trust you more if you didn’t SUCK SO MUCH!”

“SHUT UP!!!”

Kimiko’s scream tore from her throat as she launched a mote of fire—

Wait, no—

The flame spread around her, swallowing the air and exploding into an inferno, flames leaping at her like rabid beasts!

“Oopsie~! Now you’ve really messed up…!”



“Perhaps they saw this coming…” The reflection sneered as it hissed, drinking in the way the real Omi gasped. “Is it any wonder they threw you away…?”

Omi’s eyes and teeth, clenched tight- flew open at the last cutting sentence.

“That is ENOUGH!”

Omi leaped out of the clinging mud and launched a flying kick at the twisted reflection. The obsidian cracked like a spiderweb, groaned… leaked—wait, what…

“GAH!” A torrent of water slammed him into the opposite wall, ruining any chance to swallow one last gulp of air before the raging flood filled the tunnel completely. Forget up and down, where was air?

“Tsk tsk tsk… And here I was looking forward to one last fight-fight-fight!”