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There was a click of a trigger.
It was faint, definitely several feet away from him, concealed by the thick layers of leaves in the canopy of trees. But Remus’s ears picked up on it. Or rather, he felt it. He felt a part of him tingled as if someone was tugging a tendon within the muscles of his heart. He felt the click reverberating in his eardrums, echoing through his cochlea.
Finally, After five fucking days. A move was made on the chessboard, and Remus was so fucking ready.
A bullet shot across his face the moment Remus sprung backwards.
It just barely scratched the tip of his moustache.
Remus expected to have a series of bullets just fly out from the trees by this point, but after that one single shot, there was nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
“Really?” Remus said, completely unimpressed, “I gave all my best material for you to do this. You refused to use any of it for the first five days, and now when you actually tried to shoot me, you missed?”
The trees hissed. Remus chuckled.
“C’mon, Jan, don’t give up on me just yet, you still have five minutes! I’m still waiting for you to bash me in the head with a hatchet~”
Remus could barely see it, but there it was in the distance, the eye of a malicious snake glowing in an amber hue.
“Are you just going to sit there and do nothing? I’m literally right here.”
A cold gust of wind swept through the garden and the leaves rustled.
Remus grinned at the silence. “Honestly, Jan, I’m disappointed~I waited for an entire afternoon for you to shoot me, and you’re backing out after one shot? You could’ve chosen any other method to kill me and I would still be more entertained than whatever this bullshit is.”
Janus simply smiled.
“I wasn’t aiming at you.”
Remus’s grin immediately fell.
30 seconds. It took the bullet to fly 30 seconds across the realm to hit the actual target. That was how far, how well hidden it was, to the point Remus couldn’t even feel it. The moment those words fell out of Janus’s mouth, Remus sensed the clank of a bullet hitting a stick of dynamite, almost like fire burning on bare skin.
Then there was a boom reverberating in the distance, then another, and another, as it slowly crept towards his back.
“Fuck.”
The next thing Remus knew was that there was a flash of blinding white light expanding right behind him.
Oops, too late to run now.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMM!
A colossal mushroom bloomed in the middle of the garden, and from a distance, Remus was sent rolling up in the sky like a rocket with steaming air trailing behind him.
Remus couldn’t breathe; his perception completely warped as he was sent tumbling through the wispy thin clouds of the sky. Somehow, by some goddamn miracle , he managed to summon the protection ball on the millisecond before the explosion.
The game was still on.
The protection ball poofed into a green mist, as Remus continued to fly up in the air. He did an air flip and looked down with wide eyes — the entire garden was in smithereens. His field of garden trees was now bombarded with thick trunks of mushroom-like ash clouds, erupting like a parasitic fungus coursing and sprouting from an ant’s body.
Initially, Remus withdrew the protection ball because it would be dragging his weight down, and he could control his movements more freely so he could enjoy his time flying in the sky, but apparently someone had to make it even harder for him, as another dash of bullets came flying in his way.
Remus swiftly ducked down dodging the bullets, snapping his gaze to where the bullets were coming from. Below him on a watchtower, where it was nothing but a dot from his view, was Janus, aiming at him with a machine gun like a hunter that got his eye locked on a bird in the sky.
“Fucking bastard.” Always ruining the fun.
Remus summoned his protection ball again, and it immediately made him drop faster. He was descending to a piece of somewhat flat land that extended beyond his garden, and the terrain looked at least safe enough to land on at first glance. At least it wasn’t covered with a bunch of ash clouds created from bombs.
Of course, Remus wasn’t stupid. He knew something else was coming. He knew there was something on the ground waiting for him, and Janus was waiting for the exact moment Remus landed on the ground.
Because Janus would never let himself lose to a dare.
As Remus fell closer and closer to the ground, he saw what was lurking in the bushes, covered by the dirt and the grass. Carefully plotted by Janus, it was subtle, almost in a camouflaged state, but Remus recognised it the moment he saw it.
Mines.
Everywhere. Not a single piece of land aside from his garden was not covered with them, all huddled closely together on the ground, each one ready to drag Remus to his demise.
When the fuck did Janus do all this?!
There was no way out of it. A rule they have both established was that both of them couldn’t use magic and their powers against each other aside from summoning protection balls and using actual real-life weapons. And even with protection balls, there was a time limit.
The time limit was one minute.
Remus probably had 10 seconds left.
Well, time to start using his legs!
“Goodbye, my love,” Remus lovingly stroked the walls of his protection ball, saving at least one second left of using it just for good measure, before it poofed into green smoke again, as Remus did another air flip and safely landed on his feet.
From the first millisecond his boots brushed the dust on the ground, Remus started sprinting.
The mines behind his feet set off one by one, erupting into tall pillars of fiery blasts, as Remus continued to let his legs carry his body, jumping and hopping over as many mines as possible so the entire terrain wouldn’t immediately turn into a detonation festival. He could feel the heat, the burning sparks of land mass and the breath of fire just barely stroking behind his back, and with just one second of stopping Remus would be pulled into the explosions, his entire body engulfed by the clouds of toxic gas before it was blasted into shreds.
It was like a race of cat and mouse, with the mines exploding one by one trying to catch up with Remus’s god-like speed, but neither the prey nor the predator was winning.
Despite the violent reverberations from the blasts just behind him, Remus could hear nothing but his blood rushing to his ears, adrenaline coursing through his entire bloodstream and supplying his brain with nothing but bolts of excitement. As he continued to dash across the field of booby traps, the terrain went steeper and Remus was approaching near the edge of a slope, allowing him to slide smoothly down the bomb-littered bevel, setting off a series of explosions at once. Wind fuzz passed Remus’s hair, and he extended his arms upwards like he was on a notorious roller coaster ride at an amusement park.
Oh, Remus felt amazing. It felt like he had only been inhaling cocaine as a full course meal for three straight days.
“FUCK YEAH!!!”
There had to be more of this. Janus would not stop until he actually kills him. And that meant Remus would continue to stay this high until the time is up.
As Remus was approaching the end of the slope, he grinned even harder.
Janus was already standing with something next to him, so far away he was nothing but a golden flicker, expecting Remus to arrive at the end.
BAM!
Within seconds a cannonball, burning hot and red like the orbit in the sky, was charging straight towards him.
Remus, being squished between a trail of mine explosions behind him and a huge ass cannonball heading straight in front, had nowhere else to go other than going up. He extended his legs, lunged himself upwards and bounced as high as he could, jumping over the cannonball and preparing for his eardrums to shatter in an instant.
The cannonball swished through the clouds of ashy smoke formed from the mines, landing on an upper part of the slope.
For a brief moment, Remus could only see the bright light of white and orange beyond his eyes. His ears were ringing for possibly the sixth time, and Remus was surprised he wasn’t deaf at this point.
Nonetheless, Remus was still running, because mines were still everywhere.
“AHHHHHHHAHAHAHGAHAHAHAHAA!!!!!!!!!”
Remus let out a long squeal of excitement. It was a type of thrill he would feel when he had been on multiple killing sprees, but this was even better. This intoxicating feeling of danger, fear, uncertainty, of complete joy.
It definitely worthed five days of waiting.
“WOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO~”
It was coming to a climax, Remus could feel it, as the explosion smoke were almost as close to being next to his feet. He was approaching the end of the roller coaster ride and in front of him was the final deadly drop. With a sudden act of feverish insanity, Remus gathered up all his energy under his footing, paused for just one single second to use up the remaining one second he was allowed to use the protection ball, and bounced high up in the air.
Thanks to the mine exploding right behind him, his entire body shot right up in the sky. Remus did multiple flips, practically rolling up to the air like a tennis ball being sent flying by a racket, so high up to the point he swore he touched the edge of the sky. Remus stretched his arms wide, feeling the wind passing through every gap in his body, imagining himself to be a part of the clouds.
On the ground just below him was yet again Janus, his capelet waving heroically against the raging winds as an army of automatic firearms marshalled right next to him, ready to command for the final attack. The moment Remus felt his body collapsing downwards, he heard the shots of multiple guns below firing, as another flood of bullets flew towards him like flying darts.
It wouldn't be fun to just let the game to end if Remus didn’t land without a large bang.
Remus twisted and bent his body multiple times in the sky to dodge the bullets, without a single one hitting him lethally, yet Remus could faintly see the colour of crimson blood flowing out from his body somewhere. It didn’t matter to him, as he was completely intoxicated by the state of frenzy he was in. Without even realising it, Remus extended both his hands and a ball of neon green light slowly materialised into a morning star with the ball having the size of a fucking meteor, as he aimed his weapon right on the ground.
Janus widened his eyes when he saw Remus plummeting straight towards him with a huge ass morning star in his hands, but he braced himself, holding some random thing in his hand—possibly a gun —as Remus swung both of his arms upwards and lifted his morningstar high up in the air, which covered the army of firearms with a circular dark shadow almost the size of a UFO descending towards Earth.
“JAAAAAAAANUUUUUUUUSSSSSSSSSS—”
BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMMM!
From somewhere in the Mindpalace, a huge boom could be heard for the third time this afternoon.
The moment Remus swung the morning star right on the ground, the entire army of automatic guns shattered like glass on impact and exploded into pieces of metal, along with the smushed matter of land mass being shot out to the air, forming a giant crater on the once flat land. The morning star poofed into surges of green smoke the moment it hit the ground, flowing away along with the strong winds formed from the large impact.
Remus fell backwards and landed on his back, panting. For a few seconds, he was sure he was going to pass out from the high and the amount of ecstasy fuelling his brain to the point of bursting. Remus blinked a few times, the thick wall of smoke slowly revealing the giant crater laid in front of him, emitting breaths of hissing smoke, and Janus was nowhere to be found.
A haunting trill of a crow echoed through the entire Imagination.
It had been five minutes.
The game ends here.
“WOOOOOO!” Remus lifted his arms high and screamed, then lying back on the ground. “THAT WAS AWESOME!”
He heard footsteps approaching, and when he opened his eyes again, Janus was standing right next to Remus, his black capelet slightly splattered with blood and coated with ash, having both arms hidden behind his back.
“You broke a rule.”
Remus frowned, slightly disappointed that this was the first thing Janus mentioned. “Well, what do you expect from me? ‘Rules are meant to be broken.’” Remus grinned, quoting a line Janus had said to him the other day.
Technically, he did break the rule of using magic by summoning his morningstar, but it was too good of an opportunity! Remus couldn’t just let himself plummet down on the ground and let the game end without at least smashing something!
Janus glanced back at the crater behind him, inspecting all the broken firearms Remus had destroyed in one hit, sighing. “...I suppose so.”
Remus sat up again, patting the dirt off his clothes. “Either way, I still won. HA! I told you killing me is hard—”
“Remus, you lost.”
Remus stared at Janus, stunned by Janus's cutting him off with this statement.
“What? No, I didn’t! Sure, those bullets hit me but they didn’t kill me at all!”
At that, Janus laughed out loud, and Remus scowled. “Remus, why don’t you tell me what I’m holding and take a look at yourself?”
Janus unhid his right hand behind his back, revealing his yellow-gloved hand stained with crimson red paint, holding something resembling a failed red clay art piece straight from a primary school art and crafts class.
It took Remus a few seconds to focus on what it really was.
A beating heart.
Remus snapped his eyes to his chest. All his black clothes were showered with crimson blood, there were multiple bullet wounds on his arms and legs, but right on his chest was a gaping mouth vomiting blood right from where his heart should be.
“Oh.”
Janus played with his heart for a while by throwing it in the air and catching it back, admiring it like a trophy. “When you were plummeting the morning star down to the ground, you were so blinded by your excitement you didn’t even realise the grappling hook was literally ripping out your internal organs.” Janus lifted his other hand to show he was not holding a gun, but in fact, a grappling hook with a blade attached at the tip, dripping down blood belonged to Remus. “Since your heart is away from your body, I suppose this counts as you being ‘dead’?”
Remus still stared at the heart being held in Janus’s hand. It wasn’t like he had never seen his heart before, nor this is the first time his heart was out of his body, but Remus had never seen Janus holding it. For some reason, it just felt different.
“Jesus.” Remus muttered, wiping some blood off his chest, “you really went all out for this one, didn’t you?”
“It was part of my plan.” Janus held Remus’s heart, stroking it as if he was feeling its glossy moist texture. “It wouldn’t be fun to just kill you off. I would want a materialistic goal I can strive for.”
Remus chuckled, licking the blood from his fingers, “You’re being awfully romantic, aren’t you? First agreeing to kill me, then arranging the most exciting plan to kill me in the most enjoyable way possible, and now you’ve taken my heart to, what, put it in your love collection?” He stood up and stepped closer to Janus, staring lovingly at his eyes, “What’s up with that? You wanna fuck me or something?”
There was a small smile on Janus’s lips. “No. Not today.” He let out an exhale, “I’m tired of just running around the entire garden.”
Running around, huh? That would explain why Janus was almost everywhere Remus was. Remus turned around, taking a glimpse at the damage done to the entire landscape. There was still smoke emitting out from all the areas he had possibly stood on for the past five minutes, and most of the trees were completely on fire.
“How did you even plan all of this in the first place? I thought I would’ve known if you did something to the Imagination.”
“I know my ways.” Janus replied, then giving a mischievous smirk, “And I very much would like to spoil it for the sake of our next little game.”
Remus smiled back. “Ahhh, this is what I like about you, Jan. Always preparing to bring me new surprises. Now that’s what I call fun.”
Janus glanced back at the mess they had created for the last time, before starting to walk away. “I’m going back to my room. I need some sleep.”
Remus quickly followed behind Janus, blood still dripping out of his wounds which painted a trail of blood behind him, “Can I sleep with you?”
“If you are talking about a sleepover, then yes. Just don’t puke all over my bed with blood.”
“And then we can play another round of truth or dare! Ooooooo, this time you start!”
“Sure.”
And just like that, abandoning all the mess he and Janus had just caused in the Imagination, Remus blissfully hopped alongside Janus, wondering what was installed for their next little game of truth or dare.