Rated 'T' for violent content. Sequel to 'Pits'.

Edited/Rewritten 12/2008

Final Exam
A Danny Phantom FanFiction by Cordria

Daniel Fenton
Casper High Middle Level English
Final Paper
7th Period

Topic: Write a paper detailing one of the traumatic experiences of your life. Explain how it affects you today, and how it has changed your life. Use concrete details and try to evoke emotions in the reader.

Trauma

As you all know, five months ago I was captured by a group of ghosts and taken to the ghost zone. The head of the ghost police, Walker, decided that I was more trouble than I was worth and I was sentenced to die. He likes being an executioner. However, the ghost zone is a bit behind the times; they don't execute people like we do today with gas chambers or injections. No – Walker's particular section of the ghost zone is stuck in Roman times. Ghosts are executed Coliseum-style.

I'm not going to bore you with the trip to the pits' holding cells, getting shocked with a device known as the "Plasmius Maximus," or that first night that I spent there in the dark listening to the condemned wail and cry around me. This paper is supposed to be about one experience. I chose my first trip to the pits; the fight that changed my life.

It was early in the morning, which was lucky I found out later. The pits' sand is changed at night and by about mid-morning it's so full of spilled ectoplasm and blood that it's more of a muddy mess than anything else. Walker's goons thought it was funny when they came to drag me away: a puny human going up against one of the strongest pit fighters on record. They gave me a sporting chance, though, when I was given these two sword-like weapons. They were strapped onto my arms and the blades extended above my wrists and about two feet beyond my fingertips. The blades were specially created blades for humans to use in the fights: they deflected ecto-bursts from ghosts and could cut into ghosts even if they were intangible.

The guards yanked me out of my dark cell, forcing my hands behind my back and pushed me down the long ramp to the arena. I later learned that I was put into pit three – the largest of the five pits in the complex. I couldn't see anything at first, the light was so bright it made my eyes water, but when my eyes adjusted to the sudden glare my heart dropped.

The pit was huge, nearly the size of a football field, and covered in a thick layer of sand. Ghost sand is a lot like regular sand, by the way. It gets everywhere, hurts when you get it in your shoes, and turns into a sticky mess when wet. Three fights had already happened and large pools of green blood were soaking into the sand. What was most disturbing about the arena was what surrounded the pit... rows and rows of seats, like a stadium, were filled with hundreds of ghosts – all of them screaming and hollering – betting on who would win the fight: me, weakling Danny Fenton, or Crusher, my opponent. The odds were not in my favor.

Crusher was the reigning champion of the pits. He had survived in the pits for four and a half weeks – only two days shy of the record. He was a large ghost, strong and muscular, with a bad temper and no compassion. It made him a wonderful pit fighter.

I was on my first fight. Almost everybody lost their first fight.

When we reached a point about a third of the way across the pit, the guards shoved me to the ground and took off, wanting to stay away from my blades. I couldn't have used them at that point, I was too stunned and confused about what was going on.

Crusher was a different story entirely. It took seven guards to wrestle him to his starting position. As soon as they let go Crusher swung at them, grabbing a guard with his overly-large fists before they could get away. Overhead, a ghost shield snapped on to prevent the fighters from flying away or hurting the patrons who were betting on the fights.

I still didn't know what to expect from the Pits; nobody had bothered to explain it to me. I didn't know that the second I was released I was allowed to start, I didn't know what I was supposed to do, and I didn't realize the consequences of being in a Pit fight. But I learned quickly. The poor guard that hadn't gotten away fast enough was my first lesson in pit fighting.

Crusher ripped the ghost to shreds with his bare hands, ectoplasmic blood raining down on the sand like a small thunderstorm. As I stood there, stunned by the suddenness of the guard's demise, Crusher looked up and grinned at me. There was no sanity left in those green eyes... Crusher was crazy. I knew it down to the tips of my toes. And I knew I was next.

The huge ghost moved incredible fast - part of it was probably because I was in shock and not thinking right. But Crusher had gotten about fifty feet closer to me before I realized it and started to react.

His fist suddenly glowed green and headed straight for my head. If it would have connected, my head would have been gone right then and my story would have been over. I managed to duck at the last second, my arm snaking out in an attempt to punch him, but I had forgotten about the blades. When I tried to punch him in the stomach, the sharp point of the blade went right into his gut.

I yanked it back out, stammering an apology and backing away. I hadn't meant to hurt him like that- I still didn't understand the point of a pit fight. Crusher looked up at me, his green eyes burning with crazy hatred, one hand holding onto the gash in his stomach. "You," Crusher hissed, his voice deep and echoing.

He came at me again, an ectoblast forming in his hands. I raised my arms in self defense, crossing the blades in front of me. I was lucky, I suppose. Crusher's ectoblast smashed into the blades and was deflected away, slamming into the ground. Pushed backwards a few feet, my arms tingled painfully from the force of the blast.

Crusher followed the blast in, fingers grasping for my neck. Since humans find themselves in the pits nearly as often as ghosts do, Crusher had fought enough humans to know our weak spots. A simple twist of the neck and I would have been finished.

However, I was finally coming out of the shock of the first few attacks and I wasn't quite ready to die at the hands of some crazy ghost. Sidestepping Crusher's attacks. I slammed a blade into his arm as he passed. The blade was a lot sharper than I had thought it would be; it went straight through his arm with little resistance. I suppose it helped that Crusher didn't have any bones for blades to get snagged on. Crusher and his left arm were forever separated.

He staggered to a stop, holding his severed stump of an arm close to his body, ectoplasm dripping down his front. He snarled at me and launched himself again, this time taking to the air. Ghosts can't fly high in the Pits because of the ghost shield, but they can get about twenty-five feet off the ground. Once Crusher was up to his highest point, he dove straight towards me.

There is nothing quite as scary as a six-foot tall, glowing, powerful, and insane ghost hurtling towards you at about a hundred miles an hour - trust me on that. He had his remaining fist out in front of him, fatal amounts of ectoenergy pulsating between his fingers. I thought my reaction was wonderful considering the circumstances: I screamed and panicked.

This happened to be quite helpful in this situation since I dropped into a crouch, my hands coming up to cover my head, the blades attached to my arms sticking up into the air. Crusher, already in a steep dive, was going way too fast for the distance he was traversing and couldn't stop or correct his dive in time. He had been aiming for my stomach. Now that I was crouched, he was aimed for my two blades.

He ran into them, not being able to pull up enough, the two blades carving out long strips of his chest and abdomen. Crusher collapsed to the sand, screaming in pain. Scrambling to my feet, I warily got as far away from the enraged Crusher as possible. I figured he had more tricks up his sleeve – being the reigning champion and all.

I was right. Crusher pushed himself to his feet, seemingly gallons of ectoplasm running down his front, and vanished. It would have been a much bigger deal if Crusher hadn't been bleeding all over the place. His ectoplasm didn't stay invisible once it wasn't connected to him anymore; I could easily trace his path across the pit floor by the thick trail of green blood he was leaving behind.

When Crusher reached me, I was ready. Since I knew where he was, I was able to thrust my two blades forwards in a double-punch and I felt them sink into the flesh of his stomach. What happened next reviles me even to this day. I know that ghosts fix themselves much quicker than humans, and what I did was far from fatal for Crusher, but it still weighs on my mind at times. I had two blades in his abdomen about four inches apart. When I felt his cold skin hit my fists, I ripped my arms apart, tearing the blades through Crusher's sides and, basically, cutting Crusher in half.

Crusher screamed, losing his invisibility instantly. I was showered in a spray of cool ectoplasm as teetered on his feet for a moment, and then collapsed onto the ground, his good arm clutching at his destroyed stomach, unable to breath because of the pain.

I stood there, dripping in my opponent's ectoplasm, staring at him. He wasn't going to get up – not for a very long time. I had won. Looking up, gazing around, I wondered, stupidly, when the medic was going to come help Crusher and let me off the field.

I had never paid attention in history class. I should have. Then what happened wouldn't have surprised me nearly as much.

The crowd was chanting. "Destroy! Destroy! Destroy!" They were screaming and cheering, the ghosts that had placed bets on me shrieking to get on with it so they could go collect their winnings.

I wasn't able to comprehend what they meant. I had won, hadn't I? What more did they want from me?

Walker answered my unspoken question. He had been sitting in his special box for the entire match, but now he was floating over the pit, just on the other side of the ghost shield. "Destroy him, Punk."

"What?" I wasn't being dense; I knew what he meant. I just couldn't understand why.

"Only one of you may survive, Punk: you or him. Choose."

I looked down at Crusher, who was staring up at me with those crazy glowing eyes. "Kill me," Crusher whispered. "I'll just die tomorrow when they throw me back in here. I'm too injured to fight anymore. Kill me so you can live."

There were tears on my cheeks. Crusher wasn't fighting anymore; I wasn't going to hurt him. "Kill him, Punk!" Walker ordered.

"I can't," I whispered, staring down into his eyes. "I can't kill you." I stared at him, sinking down onto my knees by his side, not noticing the cool ectoplasmic mud that I was kneeling in.

Crusher's crazy eyes locked onto mine. "The first kill is always the hardest, kid." I felt his muscular hand grab my limp arm and he maneuvered my arm so the blade was hovering over his throat. "One swift cut and it'll all be over."

"No…"

It's hard to think back on what happened next... I don't think I'll ever be entirely sure what happened. What I do know is that Crusher started my arm moving down and through and that I completed the movement. I'm not sure when it went from Crusher killing himself to me killing him. I will never know if Crusher committed suicide or was murdered.

I do remember the cool gush of ectoplasm as it left Crusher's throat and cascaded over me. He disintegrated in my arms soon after that, leaving nothing behind by a muddy pool of green ectoplasmic blood. The next thing I remember well was being back in my dark cell, crying.

I wish that I could say that the story was over there... that nothing else happened to me. Then there wouldn't be an aftermath - I wouldn't have to think about how I tried to commit suicide or how I had taken the life of something sentient. I wish that those three months of my life could just be erased like words on paper. I wish that the burning memories of being forced to repeat the same scene over and over again wouldn't exist.

I was locked in the pits for two months before I escaped. I fought and killed so many ghosts and humans; every one of them screams in my dreams at night. Most of the time the opponents at least tried to fight. But too many of them, especially the ones that had never been in the Pits before, didn't put up much of a fight. They just dropped to their knees and gave up. In the end, it never mattered what they did since the outcome was always the same: only one can survive. I'm still here – you can figure out what happened to my opponents. By the end my second week trapped in the Pits, I could kill without a second thought. Ghost… human… fighting or on their knees… all died at my hands. By the time I managed to get out, I didn't even care when I killed someone. My mind had just shut down and had given up on being me anymore.

When I look back, it's not the beatings or the small cell or the dark or the lack of food or the fights... none of that makes me wake up at night. It's never the memories of crying in the dark or the thoughts of just finally letting myself die there and then or the screams of the dying that give me nightmares. It's not the haunting and persistent thoughts about what I could have done differently that wake me up.

It's the eyes. The eyes of the condemned, staring up at me, pleading for their lives. For I was their executioner. Not Walker – for all he boasts of loving to be the executioner – me.

And those eyes will be with me for the rest of my life.