by Brent Reilly
CHAPTER 14
Billy dueled more while his parents vacationed more. William’s father once told him that life is an adventure, not a vacation, and bad stuff happens on adventures. So William tried to make his wife happy while he could. Who knows what would happen when they started raiding again the following spring?
Given the Summer Slaughter, as it became known, the Mongols held their annual games in mid-winter, when it was too cold to raid, and near the Ural Mountain Range, far from the Bering Strait. It kind of pissed William off that they held it at all, given how many he killed at the last one.
So the family went to the winter games, and took along some English quads for protection. While William fought one at a time, the Boy Wonder took on teams of four. It amazed William that anyone would even challenge the boy. Apparently they assumed a lucky shot would win them the ton of gold that Billy offered.
His identity as the Boy Wonder leaked, but they didn’t know when. What they did know is that they couldn’t sleep at night, which meant they had to leave.
As was his habit, William looked out of his ger through a slit before leaving at dawn for another day of dueling. The Matriarch and two great-granddaughters, Emily and Mary, chatted like gossipy girls so the enemy would not see them as threats. Mary recently won the female dueling championship in England and Emily, a prodigy six years older than Billy, showed so much promise that William gave her his best backup wands. Cousins Tommy and Timmy protected them on the other side.
Despite their loud chattering, the ladies monitored several Mongols arguing over the sale of a horse thirty meters away. One whipped out his wand and angrily fired in the air as soon as William’s head popped out.
Just then a few dozen quads quietly raced over the nearest hill. Timmy shrieked a warning and the six of them flew up while shooting down. Billy and Elizabeth, both waiting inside for his all-clear, quickly followed. The men arguing over the horse rushed them in a skirmish line while more fliers closed in from other directions.
Rotating as they flew up, William estimated nearly one hundred attackers this time. English reinforcements piled out of nearby huts. A detachment broke off to occupy those English while about forty chased after the family.
Billy led them low over the tribes friendliest to them. As he hoped, hundreds of wands shot up the ambushers. Billy turned to another friendly horde, one they lived with the longest, and now thousands of wands greeted their attackers, who broke off amid heavy casualties. The family stopped to finish them off before going after the detachment battling their backup unit. Attacking from above and behind, the eight super-quads decimated them.
A handful escaped and Billy went after them. He took them out one by one until he wounded the fastest, who he presumed was their leader. This one he brought back alive to publicly torture before the horde leaders. Like the others they caught alive over the last two years, he confessed that some nameless rich guy paid them to kill the Boy Wonder. But, unlike previous confessions, this guy had completely erased his wand of all memories. William barked an order to test the wands of the others, all of which had also been erased. Eighty sets of wands, all virgin-clean.
"Continue questioning him while I examine his comrades," William told Billy before flying off. Within the hour William returned. "They all look like seasoned professionals. Every wand they carried radiates power. Any luck with this guy?"
"No," Billy replied, unusually frustrated, gesturing to several nomads who seemed to enjoy the task of seeing just how much pain this guy could endure before dying. "He's a lot tougher than I am. They now want to finish him using four horses to tear off his limbs."
William shuddered, then shrugged. "I should have killed you in Peking."
Billy nodded in agreement. They concluded long ago that the only way to stop the assassination attempts was to stage Billy's death. Or, rather, the Boy Wonder's. But that would seriously limit where they could duel Mongols. There’s no point in staging a death if the Boy Wonder would be discovered dueling again.
Tommy, one of Liz's half-brothers, landed before them so hard that he tumbled. He looked ready to cry. "The bastards got the girls."
Neither William nor Billy understood him. "What do you mean?”
Tommy, still on his knees, pointed east. Before their next heartbeat, father and son flew to the other side of the huge encampment, with Tommy close behind. They found three of their English bodyguards tending their wounded, several enemy corpses near them. They landed next to the Matriarch, still bleeding, and Emily, one side of her upper body badly burned. They killed Mary several times over.
“Where’s Elizabeth?” William asked.
Timothy led them to Elizabeth.
There, in a tree-covered gully, they found Liz's mutilated naked corpse. Father and son broke down immediately. William had not cried since his siblings died, and Billy hadn't cried since he accidentally torched Arslan, his favorite hunting dog, when he was three.
“Noooooo!” William sobbed. “I thought I’d be next.”
The ambushers targeted the Boy Wonder in his moment of greatest distraction. A dozen fireballs flew out of nowhere. Billy popped sideways to avoid the worst of them, but not even he could evade them all. Timothy, the devoted father of six, threw himself in front of a fireball about to hit Billy in the back. He project two large shields and used his body to knock Billy to the ground. Billy suffered only minor burns, but fire swallowed Timothy whole. Billy would remember his screams for the rest of his life.
William and Tommy took to the air, forcing the attackers to show their backs to either them or Billy. With their eyes on his father, Billy used four wands to rocket himself just over the grass and barely had enough time to lift his arms to cut five rapists in the legs before he flew off the mound and into the air. The ambusher split up, with most of them chasing the bigger threat, the Boy Wonder.
William and Tommy spread out so that the attackers had to show their backs to one or the other. William shot at those attacking Tommy and Tommy shot at those attacking William, while both evaded fireballs. This took out several opponents until the enemy got within blade distance.
William’s years of dueling paid off. Instead of trying for fatal blows, he nicked the bicep of one and slashed a calf muscle of another, their yells as they plummeted to Earth elating him. He popped down as they swarmed him, then popped towards Tommy, blasting into their backs. Tommy dropped down while shooting up so they engulfed his opponents in a hellish crossfire. Unfortunately, his low, slow position made him an easy target for those pursuing William. Lacking the momentum to evade, he tried to hide behind shields when several fireballs swatted him from the sky.
Diving after Tommy, however, exposed them to William, who fired in freefall. His fireballs engulfed two and he stabbed two more. The fifth one, however, reversed course to escape.
The two veterans now circled each other in the air like a merry-go-round. They traded fireballs first, but both were too fast to hit, so they drew swords.
“I’m gonna torture you for raping my wife,” William vowed.
The other guy shrugged. “Someone needed to give her an orgasm before she died.”
Furious, William attacked, his swords a blur against the blue sky. His opponent not only matched his blade length, which was unnerving, but was even better at sword fighting, which William previously thought he excelled at. His need for revenge gave him enough extra speed to hold off the superior opponent, until a blade he never saw took off his helmet and sliced his face. Blood blinded his left eye, so he flew up at a 45 degree angle while blindly firing until he had a moment to wipe the blood away. And just in time. He blew off his enemy's right foot off.
William dumped his bleeding opponent between a wounded rapist whose genitals Billy was electrocuting, and Tommy, whose wounds Billy was healing.
"These guys won't talk either," a very frustrated Billy growled angrily.
"I think I recognize my guy."
William closed his eyes to search his wand for a recording. A moment later a three dimensional image showed Genghis Khan seated with his royal guard at the Peking stadium, laughing at Billy's jokes.
"The guard standing right next to Genghis!" Billy pointed out. "That's him."
"Which means these rapists belong to the Kashik -- Genghis Khan's own imperial guards. That’s why they’re so good. Well, we finally have something to spend our wealth on besides American highways." He addressed the wounded. "Did you know that American Jack has your roster? Or that it lists every member of your family? You targeted our family. Now we’ll target yours. I hope you have lots of descendents."
Billy had always wanted to meet American Jack. The Mongols enriched themselves by enslaving natives to extract resources in Africa, so the English made their own fortune doing the same in the New World, flying patrols in Iceland to protect the only route to America. They had a monopoly over an entire continent, until the Spanish started sailing there.
Then American Jack armed, trained, and united the American Indians to repulse the Mongols, English, and Spanish. Most English and their mixed children allied with Jack's Indians in exchange for outlawing slavery and setting up representative democracies. Together they kicked the Mongols out of Alaska, the English out of North America, and the Spanish out of South America.
American Jack now had quads to fight the Mongols, the natural resources of an entire continent to fund a rebellion, and a new form of government to contest the old forms of tyranny. He was the oldest and strongest voice for people fighting world conquest.
William started taking his body armor off. "I’m gonna switch armor with Tim. While I torture the rapists to death, I want you to carry Tommy to the camp and tell everyone that bandits killed your mother and father. You're now an orphan.
“For the next several weeks, I want you to take our English security and duel at the largest arenas, never spending the night afterwards, though. Not this full moon, but the dawn after the next one, return to the Peking Arena to exhaust their best champions. It’s been two years, so Peking should have new duelers.
“Let everyone know that you’ve lost the will to live. Act crazy in Peking. Break down emotionally during interviews. Throw tantrums in restaurants. Threaten suicide. Set up their expectations. And make sure you change your appearance as much as possible.
"When you run out of opponents, I’ll appear as that arrogant German duke that I killed a few months ago. You remember the Kaiser’s grandson, who became famous as Prussia’s best dueler? Well, he also had his face slashed like mine. Remember to carry several bags of blood and wear several layers of fire-resistant clothing so I can burn you.
"Listen. You have several thousand relatives eager to avenge their family. I’ll have them spread the news that anyone can make money killing direct descendents of the khan. We’ll have organized gangs, petty criminals, and professional bounty hunters working free lance for us."
Billy's eyes lost much of their glaze. William knew he’d go crazy for revenge, so he needed to propose something big to satisfy the boy's thirst.
“I don’t expect you to think clearly right now, but I need to know that you’ll follow my plan. Are you with me?”
Billy felt himself float around in his body. He couldn’t believe he lost his mother.
“Dad, what are you gonna do?”
William smiled grimly. “They say the Khan has a million descendents. I’m gonna kill them all.”
Billy wasn’t sure how serious he was.
William hugged his son until they both broke into uncontrollable tears. They may have continued crying until nightfall, but Tommy moaned in pain.
“Billy, one last thing. Your mother died because we got predictable. We stayed here too long. Predictability is fatal.”
“You wanted to leave a week ago. Mama would still be alive if I listened to you.”
“Promise me you’ll never let the enemy predict your next move ever again.”
“I promise, daddy.”
“Then I’ll see you in Peking.”