Michael’s mind felt hazy as he sat up. The wooden floor under him felt cool to his touch. That’s when Michael realized that something was up.

  Michael’s eyes shot open and started to dart around, looking at his surroundings. The room that they were in was dark. There were pillars that were holding up the room, which cast long shadows against the ground.

  Harmony started to groan, also starting to stir. Michael started to kneel beside her, to make sure that she was okay. From what he could tell, she was doing fine.

  The room around them was damp, and light wasn’t filling the room like it should have. In fact, they shouldn’t even be in a room, they should be in a forest full of trees.

  Something was extremely wrong about this situation. Michael was confident that Maya had typed in the correct information, so something else must have happened. Maybe Caleb had the Eclipse hijack their teleport. He must have known that they were going to use the teleporter.

  To try and glean information from his surroundings, Michael walked up to the barred door that was at the front of the room. He tried to peer out of it to see if there were any symbols or objects that would tell him if this was a holding cell that the Eclipse had.

  All that was outside of the door was stone brick walls, and torch holders with no fire in them. Even though there was no fire, they still produced light. Michael had never seen that before, but right now, he didn’t really care.

  More groaning sounds started to come from behind Michael. Harmony should have woken up already, so she was probably just laying on the floor. Michael looked over his shoulder and saw Steven rubbing his eyes and starting to stand up.

  “I feel worse than that time I got zapped by a lightning bolt,” Steven said, most likely to himself, “and that hurt way too much.”

  “Look who’s finally waking up,” Michael commented.

  Steven looked at Michael, then around at the room.

  “This isn’t where we’re supposed to be, is it,” Steven said, ignoring Michael’s comment.

  “You think?” Michael gave Steven a serious look.

  There were a lot of things going on at the moment. There was no time to keep talking to Steven. They needed to do something now in order to escape their imprisonment.

  “Steven, could you wake up the others?” Michael asked moving back over to the bars.

  If these bars were made out of Cryo-steel, his aura wouldn’t be able to do anything to them. Just to play it safe though, Michael decided that he was going to try to cut through the bars with his sword.

  Michael reached for his sword that hung at his side. All that he managed to grab was air. He looked down and realized that he didn’t have his sword with him. He must have been disarmed when they arrived.

  Without his sword, there was only one option. Michael called upon his ability and started to create a concentrated flame around the lock on the door.

  Michael was practically praying that the bars weren’t made out of Cryo-steel. If it was, it would just absorb the energy that was made by the flame he was generating and turn it back into aura.

  After about a minute of engulfing the lock in flames, Michael relented. He closed his hand and quenched the flames.

  The lock was still in pristine condition. Michael reached out and touched the lock to see if it was even warm to the touch. However, when his hand touched the metal, there was no warmth. In fact, it felt cool.

  “Steven, do you have any clue how we can get through this door? I can’t do anything to it,” Michael asked.

  Michael turned around and saw that Steven had managed to wake the others up. Maya was already on her feet. Harmony, on the other hand, was still laying down on the floor.

  “There might be something that I can do, but I haven’t practiced it enough. It might not work at all,” Steven replied.

  “I’m afraid it will have to be enough to get out of here,” Michael explained in a grave tone, “if we don’t get out of here, I don’t know what will happen.”

  Steven walked over to the door. He took a moment to examine the lock. Finally, Steven reached into his coat and pulled out something that looked akin to a hair clip, and started to work on the door.

  Now that the door was being handled, Michael could go focus on different things, like trying to find out where they actually were. That was going to be key to their escape.

  “Maya, go see if you can help Steven with what he’s doing, whatever it is,” Michael suggested, “I think he’ll need the help.”

  Maya nodded and moved towards her brother.

  “Harmony, you need to get up, you can’t lay there all day,” Michael told her.

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  She stared up at the ceiling, only giving a comment after she took a deep breath in.

  “Fine, but you owe me something later,” Harmony replied.

  Michael reached out his hand and Harmony took it, pulling herself up. She nearly fell back down onto the ground.

  “Are you okay?” Michael tried to hide the concern in his voice.

  “I’ve told you this before, I really hate teleporting, or traveling in general,” Harmony complained.

  That fact had completely been forgotten by Michael. So many things had gone on in the past hour that it was hard for him to gather his own thoughts into something tangible.

  “You can give me an earful about it later,” Michael promised, “For now, we just need to focus on getting out of here.”

  Harmony nodded. She was probably going to give him a piece of her mind the moment they left. Michael was fine with that though. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t heard whatever Harmony had said before. He had just gotten used to everything that Harmony said.

  Michael started to move towards Maya and Steven. They were still working on trying to get through the locked door. Something halted his movement however. In the distance, Michael thought that he heard footsteps coming towards them, and it sounded like more than one person.

  The hair pin like device that Maya was using to unlock the door stopped moving as Maya looked up. She had clearly heard the sound as well. They were in trouble.

  “Maya, Steven, get back here right now!” Michael ordered.

  Maya got the memo right away. She ran right to where Michael was and quickly hid behind one of the pillars. Steven, on the other hand, edged toward Michael.

  Michael ducked behind the pillar that was in front of the one that Maya was hiding behind. Steven hid across from him. Michael had now clue where Harmony hid, but he hoped it was a good hiding spot. If not, they were all caught.

  The footsteps stopped in front of the cell door. Michael wanted to peak out from behind the pillar to see who their captors were, but that could give away their position, and by extent, their advantage of surprise.

  “Do you see anyone in there?” an adult male voice echoed through the room from the door.

  “It’s too dark, I can’t see anything,” a female voice commented.

  The sound of Michael’s breath was barely audible, but he still tried to regulate it. He feared that it would give the position.

  “I think we should go inside,” the male said, “they’ve been disarmed, so they shouldn’t be too dangerous if they are in there.”

  The female started whispering, and it was too quiet for Michael to hear.

  Michael started to come up with a plan for them coming into the room. The flurry of thoughts started to flow back into his head. They couldn’t seem to get away from the danger.

  A clanking sound came from the cell door as it swung open. The sound of footfalls started to enter the room.

  Energy started to well up inside Michael as he started to use his aura. He channeled the energy to make electricity and stored it inside his body to amass its power. He was glad that his aura gave him a resistance to his own ability, otherwise he would have been fried alive.

  Maya looked ready to spring into action at any moment. Michael looked over at Steven to see if he was doing anything.

  Steven was staring intensely at a torch that was mounted on the wall. Steven was doing something, but Michael wasn’t sure what it was. The torch was too far away for them to do anything, and it would take too much time to actually pull it off the wall. Whatever Steven was planning, he hoped it was good.

  The footfalls were heading towards the center of the room. Michael was getting ready to release the electricity he had stored onto the duo. He needed to make sure that the lightning that streaked out when he released it hit, otherwise they would most definitely be caught.

  As the duo entered the center of the room, Michael went to launch a streak of lightning at them, but the torch on the wall that Steven was staring at flew out of its holder and smacked the male guard in the head, knocking him on the floor.

  The female guard immediately reached for a cruciform sword that was sheathed at her side. The sword sang as it exited the sheath.

  Micheal immediately raised his hand and channeled the energy toward the female. She raised the buckler she had, but that wouldn’t help her.

  The lightning streamed out of Michael’s hand and it struck the female’s shield. It looked like she tried to scream, but nothing escaped her throat. She collapsed onto the ground.

  Michael ran out from behind the pillar and picked up her sword and buckler.

  “I hope that wasn’t lethal,” Harmony said, emerging from behind her pillar.

  “Don’t worry, I toned down the strength, she’ll be fine,” Michael responded nonchalantly, “it acted more like a high voltage taser.”

  Maya walked up to the female and checked her pulse, “she’s alive, but I don’t think she’s going to remember what happened for the last five minutes.”

  This conversation was starting to annoy Michael. They needed to escape first. They could talk about what they did later.

  “Let’s just go,” Michael instructed, “I don’t want to be found next to these two.”

  Steven picked up the sword that the male had at his side. He handed it to Maya who took it. Then, Steven grabbed the torch that he had used to hit the male on the head.

  “We’re all ready to go!” Steven exclaimed.

  Silence permeated the room as Steven stopped talking. There was no sign that anyone was outside the room, which meant the coast was clear.

  “Let’s get moving,” Michael instructed.

  Michael moved towards the door. This was their chance to actually escape where they were, wherever it was.

  Maya held the sword in her hand and jumped out into the hallway. She let out a small yelp of surprise.

  Michael raced out behind her with his sword, and then he realized why she was so surprised.

  Outside the door stood around fifteen guards. They had been caught.