Although Sora managed to fatally wound Clarc during the last game, this was mainly because the latter was only defending himself: in actual combat, even with Imagination, Sora was basically still an inexperienced eight-year-old, he was absolutely not comparable to his father.
So, where the former captain of the royal guard would have been capable of defeating all his men single-handedly without receiving any serious injuries, Sora was struggling even with Mike's help.
Even though the screws he imagined did a lot of damage to the guards hit, but most of them had already gotten used to the screws and managed to sneak up to the boy, who only owed his survival to Mike, who constantly imagined chains to block blows or hinder the guards, while occasionally performing short fencing exchanges with them using a sword he had imagined:
"Fear the power of the orichus"! Mike exclaimed as he disarmed a random guard with his sword.
"Mr. Mike, is the orichus the thing that all the weapons you Imagine are made of?" Sora asked.
"That's right" Mike confirmed, narrowly escaping a decapitation attempt. "This metal is the best thing I managed to create with Imagination, the orichus. It's amazing, isn't it?"
"Yes sir Mike, it looks even better than my screws!" Sora shouted. "But the name is a bit lame..."
"What !? Whatever, you're just jealous" Mike said, narrowly dodging an arrow thrown with enough force to go through all the walls of the castle several times.
This arrow shattered a window and flew out of Mike's field of vision in less than a second.
"Argh, I forgot that all the guards here are stupidly strong for no reason" Mike complained, hitting one of the guards in the head with the flat of his sword.
The guard was wearing a helmet and even without it, comparing his insane strength and the force of Mike's blow, he shouldn't even have been stunned. However, he collapsed with a thud, completely stunned.
"The orichus is really handy" Mike said appreciatingly.
"Mr. Mike, we really need to find a better name" Sora said, making more screws appear.
Vaguely hearing the conversation from afar, Clarc shared his son's opinion but he was too busy fighting Shinki to try to interfere.
"And I say that orichus is perfect as a power name" Mike protested.
"No, Sora is right, it looks like you plagiarized the name of an online role-playing game itself plagiarized from another online role-playing game" Shinki intervened, countering Clarc's attacks.
Shinki didn't even bother to use Imagination and just used his powers as king of the worlds, blocking Clarc's sword strikes using energy barriers similar to the cube where he had him. locked in to fight Sora and sending debris flying towards him to distract him at a speed where even Clarc didn't see them coming.
"Hey, no one asked for your opinion" Mike replied, blocking more blows, but also observing the fight between Shinki and Clarc.
Obviously, Shinki had some sort of very advanced telekinesis, which he probably already possessed even before he was a Traveler. This was also how he destroyed worlds, and not with pure force, something only Clarc could do in this story.
That was already a problem, but the fact that Shinki hadn't even needed to reveal precisely how he used Imagination until then made things even worse. The only time he bothered to use it was to stop Mike from doing it, and that alone proved that he was much better than Sora. It was like warning Mike that a natural disaster was going to strike without telling him what it was or when it was going to happen.
Suddenly, Mike was pulled from his thoughts by a guard who had managed to get around him and was about to skewer Sora. Mike imagined an arrow, which flew towards the guard and pierced his calf, making him miss its target and causing him to fall to the ground screaming in pain:
"Argh! Damn ori-thing arrow with a stupid name!" the guard shouted.
"See, even the guards say it" Sora pointed out to Mike.
"Okay, we'll just call it black iron" Mike conceded, sighing. "Like the metal that appears in the C.Z.N book that I read... The book!"
Suddenly, Mike remembered that he had already heard about Fate once, or rather read in a book: that of C.Z.N.
Argh but who is it in the end! Mike thought out loud, before kicking a guard aside.
He didn't have time to think about it for long because suddenly he felt a small stone flying towards him at high speed. Without thinking, he used what he had learned when he saved Clarc during the last game and imagined a new trajectory, which deflected the stone. This one only grazed a guard, but it was enough to reduce the unlucky guy to pulp.
"Oops, wrong target" Shinki said. "Since when can you imagine movements, Mike? Hats off"
Seeing that his former king had almost killed his best friend, Clarc roared in anger and brought his sword down with all his might towards Shinki. The blade passed through all the energy barriers but, before it reached the king's head, he had disappeared and reappeared a little further behind Clarc. However, the sword blow was so strong that it destroyed almost a third of the castle.
"Whoa, it was a matter of a second for me to go from king to scattered dust" Shinki said without looking the least bit scared after just escaping death.
Mike took note that Shinki could teleport with Imagination and that added even more pressure to him. He feared that he would suddenly decide to drop Clarc and viciously appear behind him or Sora and attack them.
And so he did, using Imagination to teleport without warning behind Mike.
Mike prepared to block further attacks with the black iron sword he held but unexpectedly, the target was not him but Sora, less than two meters away from him, towards whom Shinki flew a knife by lifting a finger slightly.
He wanted to stop him but, like the last game, Shinki blocked his use of Imagination with his own. Mike could only put his black iron sword in the way to deflect the trajectory, sword which broke under the impact.
Mike was shocked. Even Clarc wouldn't be able to do that much damage to a black iron object he had Imagined, and Shinki had done it just by sending an unfortunate knife with his telekinesis, without even using Imagination. As luck would have it, one of the broken fragments of the sword brushed against Sora and left a huge gash on his small hip.
The wound hadn't hit any vital point and Sora knew how to heal himself with Imagination, but that didn't stop Mike from taking on a horrified expression. Shinki also had a horrified expression, but not for the same reasons: while he tried to kill Sora, his "successor", without the slightest hesitation, the latter had returned the favor, and a screw had pierced right through the king's stomach, so that one could see through it.
Mike didn't miss the opportunity and, while Shinki was too distracted by the horrible injury to stop him from Imagining, he conjured another black iron sword and decapitated Shinki with it.
Meanwhile, after Shinki left him alone, Clarc had already subdued all the guards. The few who were not knocked out or in too poor condition to fight had surrendered and remained motionless, on their knees, with their hands and ankles tied, which might have made a rather comical scene if not for the Blood stains everywhere.
"Are you alright?" Clarc asked, running towards Mike and Sora without paying any further attention to the guards.
Panic crossed his eyes when he saw Sora's injury but immediately disappeared when he saw that the latter had already almost made his injury disappear with Imagination.
"I have to say it stings a little to be the only one in the group who can't use Imagination" he sighed.
"We'll talk about it again when I too can fracture a world with my bare hands with a single punch" Mike replied. "Besides… Clarc, we need to talk about something, it's important"
Clarc immediately regained his seriousness when he heard Mike:
"Does this have anything to do with, um… him?" he asked, pointing at the headless body of his former king.
Mike was immediately uncomfortable at the sight of the corpse. It was truly the first time he had killed someone since his adventures began, and even though he hated Shinki and had acted in pure self-defense, he couldn't bring himself to believe that someone someone he had known for almost two years was in this state because of him.
He was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but it was not at all the right time, especially considering what he had to say to Clarc, and so he managed to pull himself together temporarily:
"No, Clarc, it's true that I would probably need to have a discussion about this later, but there is an even more urgent subject that awaits us... it's Fate" Mike declared with a serious tone.
Even if there were two months left before the scheduled date, unforeseen events could very well arise and they therefore had to find a way as quickly as possible to prevent Clarc from being "reset" when Fate took effect. So, Mike explained to Clarc everything he had learned from Shinki and Sora while the latter finished treating the nasty wound on his hip. At the end of the explanation, Clarc's face had paled several degrees:
"So what you are telling me is that if I try to leave this world, well this story rather, I will disappear, and if I stay, I will suffer Fate and return to the me from the beginning of the history ?" he asked Mike.
"That's mostly it. Honestly you explained it better than me" Mike said. "Basically, we have two months to find a way to save you from this, but Sora and I are completely dry. Since you are the main one concerned, do you have an idea to resolve the problem?"
"Mike, if you and Sora, the two Imagination experts, don't have any ideas, then you suspect that I don't either" Clarc sighed. "Well, we have two months, and you and Sora are both already guaranteed to escape it, since you know how to use Imagination, so we can say that the situation is not yet at the critical stage"
"Wow, what Olympian calm! It's worthy of the great and powerful Clarc, hehe" Mike joked to lighten the mood.
Before, his jokes often ended in a blank, but that had changed since he became friends with Clarc, who was quite a good audience in terms of humor.
"Maybe you should have asked me to help you practice that too" Clarc said.
"Um, well actually-" Mike began before being cut off by Sora who rushed past him to give Clarc a hug:
"Dad dad ! Snif, I thought I would never see you again! I'm sorry I hurt you, Dad. Please stay with me" Sora cried.
"Of course I'll stay with you, son" Clarc replied, returning the hug to his son.
Mike smiled as he watched the scene, but unfortunately his happiness was brief:
"Sorry to interrupt the family reunion, but I think you forgot someone"
Hearing this voice, Sora, Clark and Mike turned at the same time towards the same direction, to see that Shinki, who had literally been decapitated a few minutes ago, had gotten up, perfectly intact, without even the slightest scratch on neck. At the shocked expression of the three others, he resumed his usual smile:
"So, did you miss the king of losers during those few minutes? If so, then rest assured, you are not about to get rid of me"