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A redux of that old Legend of Dragoon/Final Fantasy VIII crossover that I never finished, because I didn't like the way it was turning out. This time it's a bit more fluid I think, and hopefully I won't b***h out and leave this one unfinished, like I have so many others. Hopefully...



Squall Leonhart, an elite SeeD mercenary, has suddenly found himself looking at a thick forest from above. "How did I get here?" He thought to himself. The forest seems to get closer to him. "What's going on? Am I... falling?" Squall looked around and realized he was plummeting to his death. "No, I can't die. Not like this!" He thought hard to try to think of a way out of this. Of course! "Float!" he shouted through the wind, casting a spell to slow his descent. He crashed through the trees and landed. It was painful, but thankfully he survived the fall. All around him was dense green woodland. He turned around to see a man in red armor watching him. The man looked concerned and surprised. "Are you all ri-" the man started before getting impaled by Squall's falling gunblade. Squall raised his arm to shield himself from the blood splatter, but to his surprise, there was none. He looked back only to see his gunblade wedged into the tree that the man had been sitting on, the man no where in sight.

Squall went over and sheathed his blade, and looked around for a bit. After seeing no sign of the man in red, he continued on his way. He heard the rushing of hoove-steps, and followed the sound. There were soldiers leaving. Squall was about to approach one of them, but then a giant green insect-like creature ambushed from behind. The monster was easily ten times the size of a house, and when it appeared the soldiers immediately ran off in the other direction. Squall drew his gunblade, having experience fighting creatures of similar size. The monster, however, was faster than he had anticipated. It swiped him with its claw, knocking him back a fair ways, against a tree. The blow had knocked the wind out of him, but he slowly rose back to his feet, and took his stance. He readied himself to cast a spell, when all of a sudden, a woman dressed in black had jumped in and grabbed him. She was incredibly agile, and managed to escape from the beasts sight, and hide behind a boulder, all whilst carrying the fully grown adult male with a heavy bladed weapon in hands. "What are you-" Squall started, before the woman quickly clasped her hands over his mouth. "Sshhh," she whispered, "Stay quiet if you don't want to die." The two could hear the aggrivated stomping of the creature as it searched for its escaped prey, before it quickly tired of the search. Its stomping growing quieter and quieter as in departed in the other direction.

Finally safe, Squall slapped the woman's hands away from his mouth. "I'm sorry, I just didn't want to see you needlessly give up your life." Squall ignored her, getting up to brush the dirt off of his clothes, and resheath his blade. "That was the Green Tusked Dragon, Feyrbrand," she said. Squall, completely indifferent, just said "Whatever," and walked off in the other direction. "There won't be anything left," she said, after seeing which way he was walking. He stopped to see what she was going on about. "Left of what?" he replied, half looking over his shoulder. "The village," she said, "that's where you're going, right?" Squall thought about it for a moment. "The dragon destroyed Seles?" he asked. She nodded, "Have you been there before?" She seemed genuinely curious. "Never," he said, before continuing to walk down the path to the destroyed village, leaving the odd woman behind. The fact that he knew the village's name bothered him the entire time.

Squall arrived at the hilltop overlooking the village. Though the fires had died down, the smell of smoke still polluted the air. He scouted the area. A few soldiers remained in the area. A couple of them were toying with the half-dead survivors of the town. Some of the houses were still standing, as well, and Squall assumed there were probably a few survivors hiding away in them. He decided to head down to the village, to investigate further. He approached the two soldiers, tormenting a dying old man, prodding at him with their swords. "Haven't you killed enough people already?!" the old man cried at his tormenters. "As a matter of fact," the soldier responded, "my kill count is currently only nine people, and I'd hate to leave it at an odd number," the soldier said as he pressed his blade against the man's neck. His partner laughed hysterically, and as he laughed, he saw Squall approaching from behind, but more importantly, he saw Squall's gunblade, sheathed at his side. The soldier drew his sword, and nudged his comrade into action. "And just who the hell are you?" Squall adjusted his pose, placing his hand on his hip nonchalantly, "A SeeD." The two kept at their stances, "Is that some kind of code-word?!" one asked, whilst the other one got a bit more panicky, "Are you a mercenary from Basil?!" Squall just sighed, "Whatever," they were clearly too on-edge to talk to, and he'd feel no guilt killing bastards such as them, so he drew his gunblade and prepared to fight. They attacked one at a time, consecutively, and their pattern was painfully predictable for the trained mercenary, and he had no difficulty at all cutting down the first one with a diagonal slash through the chest. He didn't even have to pull the trigger to kill him. "You b*****d!!" the second one shouted as he charged forth in a rage. Squall simply hopped to the right, and dealt a decapitating slash as the soldier stumbled forward, disoriented. "You alright, old man?" Squall asked the older fellow after quickly dispatching his tormentors. "Dart, is that you?" the old man asked his savior. Squall remained silent. "Dart, please, don't worry about me... they've taken Shana. You have to rescue her," he struggled to say, coughing up blood. "Shana?" Squall asked, but it was too late, the man's wounds were too fatal, and he died after getting out that last sentence. The name "Shana" rang through his mind. Such a familiar, nostalgic name, like something from his childhood, but he couldn't quite place it.

Squall continued to search the town, and eventually, he found the commander of the remaining soldiers. "Hey!" Squall yelled out, grabbing the commander's attention. The commander turned, and immediately saw Squall's gunblade still in his hand, with blood on it. He drew his sword "Who are you?" Squall shrugged, "It doesn't matter. I need to know where you took Shana." The commander cocked his head at an angle, "Shana," he said curiously, "You mean the girl we ripped this village apart just to find? She's in Hellena Prison," he informed Squall. "And where would that be?" Squall continued to inquire. The commander pointed his sword towards the woodlands nearby "Past the woods, and to the south. Pretty hard to miss, honestly."

"Thanks," Squall said in monotone, before the commander raised his sword, "but I'm afraid I can't just let you go. A suspicious person like you coming around with a bloody sword, asking information about our prime target? No, I'm afraid you won't be leaving this village alive." Squall decided he was tired of people trying to kill him for the day, and he cast a fire spell to quickly end the confrontation. "Fira," he said, igniting the man to a crisp in an instant, and departing to the woodlands, ignoring everyone else in the village.

As the young mercenary trekked through the woods, he pondered on his situation. How did he get here? "The last thing I remember, Ultimecia created a time-compression," he thought. "What happened after that? Did we lose? Is this still the time-compression?" he struggled to remember, "And where is everybody? Zell, Quistis, Irvine, and..." He stopped walking a moment. "Zell, Quistis, Irvine, and... there were more, right?" He rubbed his palm against his forehead, as he so often does when he is frustrated. Eventually, he tired of trying to remember. "It'll come back to me. Right now, I need to focus on my goal. I need to save Shana." he thought. "Wait, who?"

He was then attacked by a wild dog. The dog sparked a vision in Squall's memory. In the memory, a young girl was being attacked by a similar dog in these very woods. A boy jumped in to protect her. "Leave Shana alone!" the boy said, swinging around a stick like it were a sword. Squall came back to his senses, and eliminated the feral animal with a quick slash of his gunblade. "Have I been here before...?"

When Squall reached the edge of the woodlands, he decided it would be a good time to set up camp. He checked his bags to make sure he still had all of his equipment. Gunblade, an assortment of healing items, a few tents, a full deck of Triple Triad cards, and all of the gil he earned from those annoying Exams, though he doubted it would do him much good in this world. Predictably, he didn't have any of the Guardian Forces that he had left with his other teammates, only a few were attached to him, and he still had his necklace, Griever. He also found a wierd red stone that he didn't remember picking up before. "It seems familiar though. Ugh, what's wrong with my memory lately?" He set up a tent and rested a few hours. He'd need all the strength he could muster for a prison break, yet he had precious little time to waste to get there.