Blood began gushing from the split in his head, and Ethan dropped. The Ax is still embedded deep into his skull. Blood was forming a pool on the floor as his body began to shut down and twist painfully.
"Now, who here thinks they can help our friend out?" Diaz asked, looking over his classroom. Koi blinked at the body lying on the floor, still stunned. This can't be happening. Is he dreaming? Maybe he was so exhausted from the night excursion that he really did fall asleep, and this was a nightmare.
If so, where did it begin? Because less than three hours ago, Ethan was sitting on his own tombstone getting drunk. His legs swung over the open hole that was his burial plot. Was he about to be tossed into that hole so soon? If so, what did that mean for Koi and Adam?
Anyway, Ethan couldn't die now. It's not that Koi cared about the guy, but Koi had QUESTIONS. Ethan had taken them to the far side of campus, the forbidden lands where students were banned. A place that was protected by a magical illusion and real-life security dogs that nearly ripped the three of them to shreds. There was a lot going on here, and Koi couldn't manage it on his own.
Scary as it was to admit that. Koi and his multiple personalities wouldn't be enough to survive this place.
After all, Koi had stared down at his own grave. Unfortunately, the only question he thought to ask Ethan at the time was how he found this place. Ethan explained that he had a bad habit of doing things people told him not to do, so when he found out the students and most staff were banned from going to the far side of campus, he made it his mission to do exactly that. He discovered that this place only existed at night and only during specific phases of the moon. At dawn, the graveyard of students disappeared. The guards and guard station disappeared too. They'd only had about 15 minutes to process what they were seeing this morning before the whole thing vanished. The trio was able to walk back to the main campus as the dogs were still asleep, and the guards and electric fences no longer existed.
But...Ethan was dead now, and Diaz just looked over at the classroom with an expectant gaze.
"I can't believe you just did that!" One of the male students yelled.
"Man, I'll never fall asleep in your class, I swear!" Another one said with a nervous, disbelieving laugh.
"Oh, come on now, none of you?" Diaz asked.
"You're the teacher, man! You just killed a student!" One student says in the back. Diaz shrugged.
Koi did know one spell...the only spell he could think of...that might work. It was a secret spell, though, one he was never supposed to reveal to the public. A necromancer's power was one of the most sought-after in the magic world, but it was very dangerous. If Koi dared to cast it in class—
The next thing Koi knew, he was sitting in class with Ethan standing before Diaz playing the bad ass as usual. It took a few moments, but slowly the memories of what had just happened began to return to Koi's mind. Ethan was on the floor, dead. Diaz pulled out a tiny vial of elixir and drank a sip from it. Then, Ethan's alive again, popping a Mentos into his mouth.
Some of the members of the class begin to applaud. Still nervous and still cautious. Their teacher was a psycho and they'd been the witnesses. Though the memory was already slowly starting to fade from them.
Koi sat there with mixed emotions. He almost got a chance to show off his power, but...
There was a weird desire burning inside of Koi. He didn't understand it. It wasn't him...it was one of them. But damnit! He kind of wanted to show these weak little nobodies what he was capable of...
Ethan stood there, chewing his candy, looking stunned for a moment. Then, apparently, the memory of what happened began to come back, and his eyes narrowed as he looked at Diaz.
"Clever. But I could sue you for that, you know!" Ethan growled.
"Find a lawyer who would dare try to prosecute me," Diaz said, leaning the ax on his shoulder. As soon as it touches, the ax becomes the sqwaking black bird again.
"That's too much work," Ethan said, giving up. He silently returned to his seat just as the bell rang.
The students in the class rush from their chairs out the door, not wanting to risk seeing any more horrors in the classroom today.
But Koi just sat there. Perhaps his brain was shutting down from lack of sleep, but he felt unwilling to move for a moment. Not until he figured out what had just happened. What had robbed him of his great unveiling.
"A time manipulation spell, Mr.Nikumu," Professor Diaz's voice suddenly sounded. Koi looked up and found the professor gathering his things from the desk.
Diaz adjusted the thin, gold-rimmed glasses on his face.
"You were all supposed to study time manipulation for homework last night," The professor continued. Then he looked up at Koi with a slight, deadly smile on his face, and a glint of light shone off the lens of his glasses.
"It appears none of you did the homework..."
Koi instantly didn't like the tone of Diaz's voice. He took those words as Diaz politely telling Koi to "get lost."
So koi did. He quietly left the classroom. The memory of what had just happened to Ethan was fading from his mind like a dream he couldn't remember upon waking up.
Night…
Ethan was back in his dorm room again. He lay in his bed, smoking a cigarette, looking up at the ceiling. It was dark, but he still stared at it. He imagined it was something…something other than a ceiling, but he wasn't quite sure what.
What was left of his vodka lay on the side of his bed. Ethan made a halo with his cigarette smoke. Maybe it was the ceiling of an airplane...weeeeeee! Maybe we were flying.
Ethan watched the smoke from his cigarette swirl up, up, up. He smiled at it and laughed. It was funny, for some reason. Maybe we're in a burning airplane that's going down...down...down...weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Ethan pulled himself out of bed. The truth was, he'd had a headache ever since Diaz pulled that little stunt in his class. He promised that one day he would shove an axe right through Diaz's skull. That sick, old, mother fucker. Ethan didn't care if he was a million years old; he had some nerve pulling a stunt like that! Fucking immortals.
He walked over to the mirror on his dresser and examined himself, smiling. Yep...he was drunk! He heard someone screaming outside, and he ignored it. He was looking too fucking good right now to care. Shit! Who could think about a--hey...Is that a pimple? Great Caesar's Ghost, it was! Must be all the stress. Thanks to Diaz, he'd be scared shitless that teachers were gonna butcher him in class for show and tell. He should sue the school. YES. Sue the bastards over this one pimple!
There was more screaming and lots of running outside his dorm room now. Maybe everyone was drunk and flying. Hell, the plane, after all, was going down…down…down.
It was 4 hours after deconcentration, and most of the students should have been asleep by now. If Ethan wasn't drunk off his ass from trying to dull his pain, he would have realized the strangeness of these things.
Or maybe he wouldn't, maybe he'd just be sleeping. Dreaming up ways to destroy Diaz. It would be a nice vacation from what he usually dreamt about.
On his dresser, there was a photograph inside a beautiful frame. Ethan picks it up and stares at it for a long time before he falls backwards on his bed.
Katherine. Instantly, he imagines their wedding day and how beautiful she had looked. How sweet her giggle was. How her eyes lit up when she saw Ethan in his suit.
All of this only happened in Ethan's sleep as he dreamt. But to Ethan, dreams were another dimension we slipped into as we slept. In fact, Ethan believed the dream world was more real than this reality. It was a strange philosophy he had formed since he was a child. He always felt more alive when he was asleep and dreaming. That could explain why he spent so much of his waking hours drunk or high.
What happens in his dreams matters as much to him as what happens in real life. In this place, the wizardry school, the lines were further blurred. What could have been mattered as much to him as what IS. More so in fact. In his inebriated state, he smiles and laughs, remembering things that never really happened.
There was a hard knock at his door. Ethan can't be sure how long it had been going on, but eventually he tuned into this world long enough to hear it.
"Go fuck yourself, whoever it is!" He shouted. "Especially if it's that demented little Carrot girl! I haven't got any peeling paint for you to munch on." Ethan heard his words a few seconds after they all left his mouth and began to laugh hysterically. Carrot was a virus Adam was infected with, and now, because Ethan had been in contact with him, was infected with it himself. Although Ethan was kind of a man slut, that Carrot chick was too much even for him.
When the door knocked again, he reluctantly walked over to it, cursing the entire way. Having a sudden thought that it was that giant chicken knocking caused Ethan to bend over, howling with laughter. His hand was still on the doorknob, but he was too incapacitated by the silly thoughts in his head to gather the strength to open it.
After another round of patient knocking, Ethan finally managed to pull himself up and pull himself together well enough to open the door.
He only had time to narrow his eyes, trying to see the figure in the darkness within a swarm of dancing white light, before he was whacked across his already aching skull by a baseball bat. He lashed out for anything to keep him from falling out of control, the pain lighting up the entire left side of his head as he crashed to the floor.