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‘They could be down in the tunnels,’ I reply, starting towards the house Adam rushed into. I scan the empty windows as I go, wary of any Mogs who might be lying in wait. It’s just too damn quiet.
‘And that huge-ass general guy,’ Sam says. ‘He wasn’t with the ones you blew up.’
I’m crossing the lawn towards Adam’s house when the front window shatters and Adam’s body comes flying out. His legs smack hard against the porch railing and he’s turned head over heels, flipped like a rag doll into the front yard. I run to him as he shakily tries to pick himself up.
‘What happened?’ I shout.
‘Father … isn’t happy,’ he groans, looking up at me as I crouch down over him. There’s a huge piece of glass sticking out of his cheek, a trickle of dark blood running down his neck. He yanks it out and tosses it aside.
‘Can you get up?’ I ask, grabbing his shoulder.
Before Adam can answer, a booming voice interrupts. ‘Number Four!’
The General strides confidently through the front door, looking down at me from the porch. He’s huge and muscular. The tattoos splashed across his pale skull are way more intricate than any Mog I’ve seen outside of Setrákus Ra. I sense motion behind him – other Mogadorians, I can’t be sure how many. They don’t come out of the house. It’s almost like the General wants to do this alone.
I stand up and face him, my hands glowing and hot, a fireball floating in my palm.
‘You know who I am, huh?’ I ask him.
‘Indeed. I have long hoped we would meet.’
‘Uh-huh. If you know me, then you know you don’t stand a chance against me.’ I crane my neck to look past him. ‘None of you do.’
The General actually smiles. ‘Very good. Bravado. A welcome change of pace. The last Loric I encountered ran. I had to stab him in the back.’
I decide I’ve had enough talk and whip the fireball at him. The General sees it coming, hunkers low and in one surprisingly fluid motion draws his sword from its sheath. He slices the air in front of him just as the fireball gets close, and the glowing Mogadorian blade absorbs my attack.
Not good.
The General leaps off the porch, sword raised above his head, and brings it down in a vicious arc towards me. He’s fast – way faster than the other Mogs I’ve been fighting – and my shield barely has time to deploy before his sword would cleave me in two. The shield rebuffs the blade with a loud clang, but the force is still enough to knock me backwards and off my feet.
‘John!’ Adam shouts, and the General, having landed right next to him, takes a moment to kick his son hard across the face. Adam screams, rolling away.
‘You are a perpetual disappointment,’ the General seethes at Adam, so low I can barely hear his words. ‘Stay down and I may yet show you mercy.’
I pop on to my knees quickly, channeling another fireball. The General points his sword at me and I feel something like a rush of air, almost like the blade is sucking in the energy around it. My fireball gutters and shrinks, forcing me to focus harder to build it bigger. Meanwhile, the grass around the General goes from green to brown, the blade draining the life from it. I haven’t seen one of the Mogs armed with a weapon like this since that fight in the woods outside Paradise High.
‘Don’t let it hit you!’ Adam warns, spitting blood.
But his warning is too late. A dagger-shaped bolt of energy tears loose from the General’s blade and screams towards me; the energy is black, or more like devoid of any color at all, and changes the very texture of the air that it passes through, sucking up life and oxygen, like a mini black hole.
I don’t have a chance to dodge it. My shield deploys, expanding in the usual umbrella-like way, but immediately turns black and brittle when the General’s blast hits. Frozen like that, my shield slowly begins to crumble, blown away like so much Mogadorian ash. Dark, rustlike veins begin to spread through the bracelet itself, and I hurriedly snap it off before they make contact with my skin. When it hits the ground, my bracelet breaks in half.
The General smiles at me again and asks, ‘Now will you run?’
9
The Mogadorians who were taking cover inside the house start to laugh. One by one, they filter onto the porch, eager to get a closer look as their great general dispatches one of the Garde. There’s a couple dozen of them, the salvage team plus some warriors and scouts, all of them vatborn. Not exactly the high-priority targets we were hoping for, but that doesn’t matter now. There are only two trueborn Mogs in Ashwood Estates – one of them is Adam, and he’s laid out in the grass just a few yards from me, dark blood dripping from his face.
The other is charging right at me.
As the General bears down on me, sword leveled at my throat, there’s a moment where I think we might have bitten off more than we can chew, Adam and me trying to take on an entire Mogadorian town.
But then I remember it isn’t just the two of us.
With a shriek, Dust, still in falcon form, dive-bombs the General. His talons sink deep into the General’s face, the huge Mogadorian grunting in pain before he manages to backhand Dust away.
It’s exactly the distraction I need. Quickly, I form another fireball and pitch it at the General. This time, he doesn’t have a chance to get his sword up, and the fire hits him right in the chest. I expect him to at least be knocked off his feet, but the General merely stumbles back a few steps. The front of his uniform burns away, revealing a carapace of obsidian Mogadorian armor beneath.
Dust, stunned by the blow, flops into the grass at the General’s feet. He brings his sword down hard at the Chimæra, but Dust transforms into a snake at the last second and manages to slither through the grass away from the blade. The General, fresh claw marks across his face, swings his gaze back to me.
‘Hiding behind your pets!’ the General bellows. ‘Disgraceful. Fight me with honor, boy. No more tricks.’
I hold up my hand and smile at the General, noticing the birds fluttering in from all sides. ‘Hold on. Just one more trick.’
And that’s when the rhinoceros drops from the sky.
One moment the Chimæra – I’m not even sure which one – is a robin flying innocently above the heads of the Mogadorians; the next it’s a half-ton African rhino belly-flopping on top of them. A couple of the Mogs on the porch are crushed outright, the wood breaking and splintering, the front of the house even sinking a little at the beast’s weight. Another Mog is gored by the rhino as it starts to rampage around. The other Mogs spill into the yard, blasters firing. They aren’t laughing anymore. This whole noble execution the General had them watching has been ruined by our small army of Chimærae.
It’s chaos. All around us, birds are morphing into more lethal forms – a bear, a couple of jungle cats and a lumbering lizard thing that I think is a Komodo dragon – and running down the Mogadorians. I see some of the Chimærae sustain blaster burns as the Mogs fire madly at them, trying desperately to regroup. They won’t be able to hold out long. For once, we’ve got the element of surprise.
‘Looks like you should be the one running,’ I yell at the General as I square up with him. Truth be told, I’m not sure what to do with him. He is Adam’s father, after all. Adam told me to show no mercy, but it still feels wrong to kill a father in front of his son, even if they are Mogadorians. I glance over to Adam, hoping he’ll at least give me a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, but he’s still crumpled in the grass, struggling to pick himself up. Dust is next to him in wolf form, also looking a little beaten up, gently licking Adam’s face.
‘My name is already written in the histories as a killer of Garde!’ the General roars back at me, not even caring about the decimation of his men going on behind him. ‘If today is the day I die, I will take you with me.’
He charges me, sword stabbing right for my sternum. I hold up my arm, expecting my shield to deploy and deflect the blow. It takes me a split second to remember my wrist is bare, my shield destroyed. The General almost skewers me for
my over-reliance on my bracelet. I have to spin to the side at the last second and can feel how close I came, his blade tearing through the back of my shirt.
The General’s sword might miss, but his elbow doesn’t. Using his momentum to swing around, he catches me right in the temple. He must be wearing that Mogadorian armor all over his body, because the elbow feels more like a hammer. I stumble to the side, seeing stars. The General slashes at me again, and I just barely manage to lash out with my telekinesis, shoving him backwards. His heels dig up tufts in the grass as he refuses to leave his feet.
Instead of charging back at me, the General levels his sword, another minivortex developing at the blade’s tip. I’m caught out – no shield, no cover – and I know I can’t let that life-draining energy hit me. I brace myself, ready to dive aside.
Before the sword can discharge, the General’s right hand explodes. He roars and drops his blade, holding up his hand to look at the nickel-sized hole through the palm that wasn’t there a second ago.
‘Dad says, “You’re welcome,” ’ Sam’s voice chirps in my ear.
I glance over my shoulder to see our van parked on the access road. Malcolm Goode stands next to the driver-side door, using it for cover as he peers through the scope of his rifle.
