#malladus

…………………………………………………………………………………

 Link, the Hero of Trains, was being fired at by laser cannons.

Well, technically his Train was being fired at by laser cannons. Link, unfortunately, happened to be on the Train.

Behind him, a spirit was clinging to the train wall for dear life and trying not to be sick. Link wondered how Zelda could feel sick without a stomach, then wondered how she could have motion sickness now of all times after spending months traveling by Train with him.

Then again, none of the rides before this one had been quite this violent.

After dealing with Malladus for months on end, things had finally come to a head with the duel Link was currently in; racing his Train against Malladus'. It was a distinctly unfair fight, in Link's opinion, mostly due to the previously mentioned laser cannons on the Demon Train that Malladus was driving. Link, on the other hand, had regular cannons that shot regular cannonballs.

Totally fair and even odds, those were.

But that wasn't even the only problem Link was dealing with. Malladus had a completely warped sense of proper steering, and would randomly switch tracks at the most awkward and inconvenient times, usually right in front of Link's Spirit Train making the Hero pull some jarring and often straight-up illegal maneuvers to avoid a collision.

Abruptly, Malladus decided to do exactly that and the Demon Train jumped rails, making Link slam the brake lever to avoid a head-on crash with the back of the demonic locomotive which was now mere feet in front of him. The sudden movement threw Link onto the dashboard and Zelda to the floor, and Link threw a hurriedly worried glance at her.

“I'm fine!” she yelled over the noise in response, though she looked a bit paler than usual – and that was saying something, considering that she was transparent. “Keep going, we can't lose him now!”

Link nodded and returned his attention to the race – and just in time, because the Malladus had fired up the Demon Train's lasers again and was about to shoot him with them. Link yelped and switched rails as fast as he could manage, and the lasers carved a furrow in the rapidly passing ground instead.

“Just once,” Link growled, “I would like to drive my Train without another Train trying to kill me. Why is that too much to ask?”

Probably because you're the Hero, his subconscious answered. Link scowled and jerked the accelerator to move his Train up alongside the Demon Train again. He wouldn't mind being the Hero as much if the title didn't get him into so much trouble. Then again, the fact that he did tend to get into some questionable situations made for an excellent excuse to use the Spirit Train's cannons.

In fact, Link decided, that sounded like a fantastic idea.

“Zelda, watch the accelerator!” he yelled, sprinting to the cannon controls. Zelda shouted something about intangibility in reply, but Malladus had chosen that exact moment to fire more lasers and thus Link didn't hear her. He did, however, hear the screech of damaged metal as the lasers raked over the body of the Spirit Train and snarled incoherently.

Nobody messed with his Train. This had just gotten personal. And Link capitalized on that fact by slamming cannonballs into every inch of the Demon Train he could reach.

“Link!” Zelda yelled, materializing next to him. “Aim for the laser ports!”

...Yeah, that was probably a much better idea, Link admitted to himself, and reoriented his cannon. His next shot smashed one of the turrets into splinters, and Link grinned in fierce vengeance for his Train. Zelda let out a relieved sigh in tandem, then glanced ahead at the rails because she was smart like that.

“Link, there's a rail switch coming!” she said, pointing at the rapidly approaching mechanism. “We should probably use it!”

“Right, thanks!”

He really didn't know what he'd do without Zelda's second pair of eyes watching everything he couldn't. She'd saved his life at least four times on this adventure so far, and if he was being honest with himself basically every idea the two of them had was actually Zelda's that she gracefully let Link take half the credit for, exactly like the rail switch just now.

Link sprinted back to the Train controls and threw the rail switch just in the nick of time. The Spirit Train abruptly swerved onto a different track, a good twenty feet further away from the Demon Train. This, in Link's opinion, was a very good thing, because the farther he was from that monstrosity the better.

But then a different laser turret swiveled, locked, and shot the Spirit Train's siding right where the engine would be. Link yelled in surprise and slammed the brake lever to get out of range, which threw Link onto the dashboard and Zelda, despite being incorporeal, sliding across the floor and straight through Link and the dashboard.

“Sorry!” Link yelled as she pulled herself back out of the machinery, looking slightly annoyed.

“A little warning next time would be nice,” she chided. Neither of them mentioned the part where she'd slid through Link, because that part was considerably awkward and they were far too busy to bother with something as trivial as awkwardness anyways, not to mention that the noise of the lasers, cannonballs, brakes, Train engines, and just about everything else was incredibly loud and made it hard to even think about bothering with feeling awkward.

Put simply, neither of them cared.

Link stuck his head out the window to make sure they were out of firing range of the lasers, and seeing that they were, ran back to the cannon to fire some shots of his own. Unfortunately, he'd left the brakes on and thus spent the next few seconds with absolutely terrible aim before he figured out what was going on and sheepishly ran back to the controls.

That problem fixed, he ran back to the cannon and started firing again, this time hitting the laser he was aiming for with relative ease and demolishing it too. Then he scrambled back to the controls, because the Demon Train had just switched lanes to close the distance between the two of them and was using the proximity to cause some significant damage with its two remaining laser guns.

Why the heck did a Train even have laser guns in the first place!?

Lost in his annoyance, Link missed the Demon Train switching rails again until Zelda pointed and shrieked, “LOOK OUT!”

Link obediently looked, and promptly freaked.

“HOLY DIN!” he yelled in a panic, and once again sprinted for the Train controls, because the Demon Train was right in front of them and they were about to collide with it. He jerked the brake lever just in time to prevent a nasty crash and quickly threw the upcoming rail switch to get as far from the Demon Train as he could.

“Oh, that was way too close,” he gasped. “Thanks, Zel.”

“Well, we wouldn't want you turning into a ghost too, now would we?” Zelda replied. Link tilted his head, confused.

“...I thought you were a temporarily disembodied spirit.”

“Link, drive the Train.”

“Oh! Right.”

With his attention back on the steering, Link had a clear view of what was in front of him. Thus, he essentially had front row seats when the Demon Train missed a rail switch and plowed headlong into a rock wall.

Lin's mouth dropped. So did Zelda's.

“...Did the Demon Train just crash?” Link asked slowly.

“Looks like it....”

“Even though Malladus has never made a driving mistake before this, ever?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You're coming with me when I investigate, aren't you.”

“Pretty much.”

Link sighed. “Just give me a minute to stop.” As a general rule, he did not approve of the Princess following him into possibly dangerous situations, regardless of the fact that whatever the danger was probably couldn't touch her. Call him protective, or whatever, but it freaked him out when the life of the future ruler of his country was solely in his thirteen-year-old hands.

Unfortunately, Zelda was stubborn enough that she would follow him anyway, and he couldn't exactly order her back to safety because, one, she outranked him by a lot, and two, he couldn't move her even if he tried. He'd just go straight through.

The Spirit Train, which he'd been steadily braking the whole time, slowly chugged to a halt in a cloud of white smoke a few hundred feet away from the Demon Train, which suited Link just fine. The face on that thing creeped him out. He threw a few more levers to lock the Train in place, then hopped out of the engine car and began slowly approaching the Demon Train, with Zelda floating close behind.

As a result of smashing straight into a mountain, the entire front of the Demon Train was a complete chaotic mess. Metal was twisted, paint was scraped, wheels were bent, and that face which had been creeping Link out for months was so mangled that it was unrecognizable. Link made a little fist-pump when he noticed that.

Luckily, the door wasn't nearly as damaged as the rest of the locomotive, and Link was able to climb in with relatively little difficulty. Zelda, on the other hand, just floated through the wall and feigned impatience with a little smile on her face as she watched Link come in.

“That's not nearly as funny as you think it is,” Link informed her once he was through. Zelda just shrugged, smile still firmly visible, and Link rolled his eyes good-naturedly before starting off down the hallway.

After a few steps, the hall opened up into the engine room, which was much larger than the one Link had in the Spirit Train. But this was hardly worth noting, because there were three other things in the room that most definitely were worth noting.

One was Zelda's body, laying 'lifeless' and unoccupied on the floor. The second was 'Chancellor' Cole, who was also on the floor but seemed to be regaining consciousness.

The third was a middling-sized utterly black hole over by the Train's controls, which was slowly growing as Link watched and making the machinery rattle as the void pulled on it.

“Link...” Zelda said, with a little catch in her voice as she stared at her body.

“Just hang on a sec,” Link replied, narrowing his eyes at the scene. Months of narrowly escaping getting killed had taught him to never, ever, take a seemingly harmless room at face value unless you wanted to die a very painful death. With this thought in mind, he slowly advanced into the middle of the floor with his sword drawn and his shield ready to be used at a moment's notice.

Thirty seconds crawled by. Nothing attempted to kill him.

“...Okay,” Link decided. “We're good.”

Zelda rocketed past him the instant the words left his mouth, so fast that she actually created a wind in her wake that buffeted Link's hair. Link decided to give her and her body a few moments to get reacquainted and used the fact that Cole was groggily blinking at him as his excuse. He grabbed Cole by his collar and hoisted him to his feet – which wasn't very hard considering that Cole was actually slightly shorter than Link himself, which was a real novelty to the Hero because he was a naturally short and stocky boy.

“You've put me through a whole lot of garbage, you know that?” Link growled into Cole's face.

“Cheese unicorns,” Cole wheezed, excellently demonstrating the concussion he had from the crash. Link blinked, then dropped the little demon man unceremoniously to the ground again. Clearly, he wasn't going to be much use.

A little gasp to his left caught his attention, and he turned to see Zelda back in her body and taking her first real breath of oxygen in months. She inhaled, slowly, then exhaled just as slowly. A beaming grin spread across her face.

“We did it,” she said, euphoric. “I've got my body back!”

“Awesome,” Link told her. She beamed again and caught him in a quick hug.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

Link had absolutely no idea what to do in this situation, and it showed in the fact that he couldn't figure out where to put his hands. He settled for flailing them awkwardly. “Anybody else would have done the same thing,” he managed.

“Shut up and accept the gratitude,” Zelda said, releasing him and rolling her eyes.

“Sure thing, Your Highness.”

“Avocado chutney,” Cole warbled from the floor, completely breaking the mood. Zelda's face darkened like a thunderstorm, and she veritably stalked over to the man who had posed in her court for months.

“Link,” she said coldly, “could you stand him up, please?”

Normally, Link would have said something about how violence was unbecoming for the future Queen, how revenge was almost never the answer, and a lot of other cliched but true stuff about taking out your feelings on people. However, the look on Zelda's face scared the living daylights out of him.

So he did the smart thing and stood Cole up instead.

“You,” Zelda hissed, “have betrayed me, plotted against me, tried to destroy Hyrule, ripped me from my body, gave my body to someone else, tried to kill me and Link more times than I can count, and broken almost every single traffic law we have. I can think of only one punishment good enough for the likes of you.”

So saying, she wound up and SLAPPED Chancellor Cole across the face so hard that he impacted the far wall.

“That,” Zelda said in tones of supreme satisfaction, “felt amazing.”

Link was too busy watching Cole burst into smoke and blow away in the fashion of all defeated monsters to respond. He suddenly felt both very proud, and very terrified, of the girl standing next to him.

“...Did you just vaporize Cole by slapping him?” he asked, just to be sure of what was happening.

“And I'd do it again in a heartbeat,” Zelda nodded firmly. “Now, let's finish the job. Where's Malladus?”

That, Link realized, was an excellent question. Malladus was supposed to be driving the Train, although if he was gone and Cole had been driving, that explained why he'd crashed. Still, demonic overlords generally didn't just vanish into thin air.

“...He ought to be here somewhere,” Link said. “I mean, Cole was here, and your body was here, and we know Malladus wouldn't have left your body lying around like that.”

“Except that he apparently did,” Zelda frowned. “I wonder... Link, what do you make of that hole?”

Link turned and gave said hole an appraising glance. “It freaks me out a little, not gonna lie. I've never seen anything like it.”

Zelda frowned more and took a few steps closer to the void, examining it closely. It had grown a little bigger since Link had looked at it last, and was now in the process of eating through the accelerator.

“...Ah,” Zelda said. “That's bad. That's very, very bad.”

“Why?”

“That's a hole,” she replied. Link nodded slowly.

“...I knew that,” he said. “I can see it's a hole. Now why is it bad?”

“Because that's a hole in the world.”

Link took that in for a moment.

“Okay, yeah, that's bad,” he decided. “But I'm still not seeing how this tells us where Malladus went.”

“Well...” Zelda started hesitantly. “I think... that he might have been... absorbed.”

Link blinked and gave the hole a more thorough once-over. Still black, still growing, still eating the accelerator... wait.

The accelerator... which the engineer would have been standing in front of. The engineer, who would have been Malladus.

“...So, do we panic, or celebrate, or what?”

“Bit of both,” Zelda decided. “We can't leave this here. We need to take care of it.”

Link's eyes narrowed as his instinct to protect kicked in again. “Oh no. I can take care of it. You can head back to the castle where it's safe and reassure your probably sick with worry father that you're alright.”

Zelda's eyer narrowed to match Link's, and she crossed her arms authoritatively. “And what makes you think that I'm going to leave you alone with a world-threatening crisis to deal with? We only made it this far because we worked together, and I am not going anywhere while Hyrule is still in danger.”

“Oh yes you are,” Link retorted, “because I am not going to let anything happen to you now that we've finally got your body back. I understand you're worried about Hyrule, which is perfectly understandable, but you are the freaking Princess! What happens if you get absorbed just like Malladus? What am I supposed to do then? Heck, what's Hyrule supposed to do then?”

To her horror, Zelda found that she couldn't actually argue with that logic. So she settled for scowling in Link's general direction instead. Link himself breathed a silent sigh of relief. Zelda could be monumentally stubborn if she wanted to be, and the argument could have easily gone on for hours. Luckily, her country came before almost anything else, otherwise Link probably would've never found a way to make her go.

“Now,” Link said, “how are we gonna get you back?”

“...Maybe they'll be willing to escort me,” Zelda offered, pointing behind him. Link turned to see Anjean and Byrne materializing out of thin air, the instrument at Anjean's mouth showing how they were doing it.

“Yeah, that'll work,” Link agreed.

…………………………………………………………………………………

 Link waved as the Spirit Train chugged away without him, although it felt really strange to not be driving the machine himself. In fact, he was having a hard time reminding himself that nobody was stealing it, that he'd agreed to this, and he'd get his Train back as soon as Zelda was safe.

...He missed it already.

Link shook his head rapidly and flicked himself in the temples in an effort to get his mind back on track. He needed to do something about the hole, which by now had grown large enough that it was starting to be visible from the outside of the Train.

“...What am I going to do with you?” he asked the hole rhetorically. The hole didn't answer, which was a good thing. In Link's opinion, talking to inanimate objects was perfectly normal, but if they talked back, that was when you needed to be worried.

But since the hole hadn't said anything, it was all good.

Link pursed his mouth thoughtfully, then upturned his Adventure Bag on the ground and began sifting through the contents. Bombs, boomerang, arrows, Sand Wand, Whirlwind, whip, Spirit Flute... none of this seemed like it would do much. Still, Link decided, wouldn't hurt to try.

The bombs exploded, but did absolutely nothing as the hole then ate the explosion while it was happening. Arrows just vanished upon contact, the sandstorm summoned by the Sand Wand did squat, the Whirlwind was equally useless – and somewhat puzzling, because Link couldn't tell if the hole had eaten the wind or not. The boomerang just seemed like a bad idea, the whip seemed like an even worse idea, and the only thing he achieved playing the Spirit Flute was a snappy dance tune once he determined that every other song he knew did exactly what his other items had done – nothing.

Now he kinda wished Zelda was still around. He was out of ideas.

…………………………………………………………………………………

 “Unbelievable,” Farore said, throwing up her hands. “I even went to all the effort of keeping the hole moving with the Train so he'd run into it! What does it take with these boys!?”

“Shame we can't actually close them ourselves,” Nayru mourned.

“I know, I honestly thought we had a chance when Farore managed to move that one, but I guess moving them around is all we can do,” Din agreed ruefully. “Better than nothing, I guess, but still...”

“Right, that's it,” Farore decided, having ignored the conversation her sisters were having. “It's time to get serious with this. If they won't investigate themselves, then I'll make them investigate!”

“Or we could try tact?” Nayru suggested. “So Courage doesn't freak out at feeling his body moving on it's own and we don't break the Interference Laws?”

“Okay, I'll make them investigate subtly.”

“Have we considered just sending them a message? You know, have the local Great Fairy turn up and say, 'Hero, thou must goeth into yonder hole'?” Din said.

Farore gave her a flat look. “Nobody talks like that.”

“It was more subtle than your suggestions, though,” Nayru pointed out.

Farore opened her mouth to retort – then paused, as something occurred to her.

“...that could work...” she said softly.

“...What could work?” Din asked.

“You'll see, if it works,” Farore replied, suddenly in a better mood than she'd been all week. “Nayru, where's the Four Sword aspect right now?”

“...On their way back to the mountain, actually,” Nayru replied after a moment of concentration. “Looks like they're done with the Library, for now.”

“Excellent,” Farore grinned. “Now, let's see how this works.”

…………………………………………………………………………………