[BREAK]

My alarm clock rang into my ear. That ring is my least favorite sound in the world. But, I sighed and stood up, and got into the shower. Once I was done in there, I put on a Pink Floyd T-shirt and heard a knock at my door. I opened it to find Cade, who was standing there wearing jeans and a T-shirt.
"Hi" She says. She has a slight English accent, so anything she says sounds nice.
"It's actually a bit warm out today, so I thought we could take Mel for a walk."
"Sure" I say back.
Mel is my pet that I got back at boot camp. He's a monster called a Deriug, which when full grown is fifteen feet tall and can dig a tunnel through solid concrete, and has an impenetrable shell. I saw these abilities in action at boot camp. My camp was in Lurgeress Fortress, which is in a world that's basically a ball of ice. Mel's mom was roaming the countryside for food when my group, which had to find our way back to the fort as a test, ran into her. She grabbed me, dragged me underground under fire from my shotgun, and tried to eat me, but I used my fire ability to basically cook her from her open mouth. Mel was the baby, and I decided to keep it as a pet.
Mel was at this point only half grown, and was about the size of a german shepherd. He looks kind of like a mole in general shape, except he's white with gray splotches, has rows of shark-like teeth, has thick arms and claws shaped like shovels, and has a thick shell on the majority of his body. His shell was still a bit soft, and was about as hard as a turtle shell.
Cade, Mel, and I walked down the twisting halls of Fire castle. Yes, I live in a castle. It's the main base of the students of fire, and has hundreds of us living here. Lately, since the war started, Ice, an evil spirit that's really in charge of the students of ice has been making things really cold around here,like winter, so any nice day we savor. A normal day here is like summer, and today was a normal day. Today, people were outside playing frisbee, or football, or having a picnic.
Cade and I just walked in silence, watching Mel try to catch bugs. Then, I hear a voice behind me, saying the one thing I don't want to hear.
"Jack, you've got an assignment."
I turn around, and find Phil Connors, an old friend from boot camp, standing behind me.
Phil smiles apologetically.
"Sorry dude. You can bring with another person if you like. Nothing seems to be coming up today."
I look over at Cade, who nods at me with a smile.
"I'll come" She says
Phil hands me the envelope containing the details of my mission. I tear it open. My mission is to destroy a group of students of ice and shadow soldiers that are hanging around in Chicago.
Shadow soldiers are pretty much the same thing as students of ice, except they decided to follow Jason, one of my enemies, once he got the power of shadow. To be honest, Jason scares me a bit. The shadow eye itself is the color of blood, with a scar over that eye, and once he put it in, it slowly turned his body into shadow. Now, his skin is the color of tar, and he has a gray haze kind of emanating from him all the time, and he can morph that into weapons or a force field. He carries a scythe for fighting up close, and can make your shadow pop out of the ground and tell him stuff about you. He gets really angry if you call him Jason though, because he changed it to Granshad. And to top it all off, he's in charge of an army of former students of ice and shadow monsters.
Jason might scare me, but his soldiers don't, so we head for the portal room. The portal room is a big circular room who's walls have a bunch of portals leading anywhere you can think of. We find the unmarked one leading to Chicago, and disappear from the room.