⇾ Balrog's Story - Pt. 3 ⚘

Poppy yelped as Aurora ran into her.
“Sorry!” Poppy cried.
That was the only word that could come out of her mouth as she ran off, gasping and panting as she ran toward the thriller cabin. Aurora followed as they approached the Thriller cabin.
“This is awful,” Aurora whispered as they ran.
Poppy couldn't have agreed more.
The thriller academy came into view, a few butterflies and dragonflies flitting around nervously.
Only a few minutes ago, they'd been in great shape. Perfectly intact academy, on top of the leaderboard, completely content.
Things have a way of going wrong quickly.
Poppy barrelled into the cabin. She quickly pulled her brown hair into a ponytail - long hair is an inconvenient thing to have when there's fires everywhere - and looked around the cabin.
Students were sprawled all over the ground, typing and writing madly. Occasionally, one would look up, through the windows, to where Balrog-Gurtle was spraying fire. Smoke rose over the camp.
There goes the critiquitaire house. There's the word war house. That's the Dystopian ruins. The Poetry valley.
All up in smoke.
Poppy handed over some of her motivation-mango rations to the students before eating a mango for herself.
She looked out the door.
Someone was screaming.
Another was weeping.
She only barely heard.
It was hard to hear anything over the sound of the roars.
The roars.
They won't end.
They'll never end.
Poppy pushed the discouraging thought away and shoved the door open.
They have to end.
The stench of burnt wood met Poppy's senses with a dizzying impact, and her knees buckled for only a moment.
Nevertheless, she walked on, through the wasteland the camp had become, until she'd entered the edges of the fray of battle. Campers were fighting madly. Some were typing, trying not to get trampled by the pounding steps of the panicked fighters. Others were slashing and firing their bows.
A scream of rage came from somewhere.
Another camper from a different cabin ran up to her. It was hard to see them through the smoke, but Poppy eventually saw that it was Nova, a friend of hers from the Myth cabin.
She was stumbling.
“Nova!” Poppy cried. “Are you alright?”
“Never better,” Nova said with a wry laugh.
Chloe and Chuey came up beside the two of them. The two of them already had scratches on their faces, signs that the battle had worsened in only the few minutes that Poppy had been gone.
“What can we do?” Chloe panted.
“Well… now might be a great time to pull out some of those detective skills, Chloe. How could this have happened?” Nova says.
"How could it have not happened?“ Chuey says. ”This is just the kind of luck we have. First, Gurtle eats the word wars link, and now this.“
Chloe hefted her sword. ”We can only fight. That's all we have."
Fear touched every action the sad little group made- every hand twitch, every foot shuffle, every weak cough.
Poppy softly touched the gash on her face- a pain borne of her first interaction with Balrog. She pulled her hand away. Blood just barely painted the tips of her fingers.
It was a minor wound. Nothing to cry over.
But it was something to seethe over.
He had been hungry.
She had been scared.
Everyone is scared.
“We do what we always do, right?” Poppy said. She didn't know where the words came from.
Maybe it was from the fear.
That's where they always come from.
“We write. We work together. We stay with one another, regardless of cabin relations or leaderboard. We take up arms. We make stories. We…” Poppy laughed at herself a little.
“We win.”

Off in the distance, someone was preparing to take up their part of the story…

⇾ 638 words ⚘
⇾ thriller cabin ⚘
⇾ 1,543 / 15,000 words total ⚘