Sindel reeled backward, stunned.
“Is this any way to treat your mother?” she said, adjusting her stance.
Kitana felt a hot flash of anger at her mocking tone, and took a deep breath to restore her mental control and focus.
Her lean body coiled for Sindel’s next move.
“My mother is dead!” she said.
“And soon will be her daughter!”
Sindel lunged at Kitana with a brutal high-heeled swing kick, then another, but Kitana bobbed underneath it and then sprang up for a counterstrike. Before she could connect, though, she felt the air vibrate with ambient electricity, saw sparks begin dervishing around Sindel’s body, saw her hair rise off her head in a dark corona, and watched in horror and wonder as Sindel levitated off the ground, just as she had done on the royal highway.
Then her booted foot kicked out from midair and smashed into Kitana’s face.
Kitana swayed on rubbery legs, barely clinging to consciousness.
Sonya, meanwhile, was having serious problems with Ermac. After a blindingly fast contest that had shifted back and forth from the temple stairs to the courtyard, she had rolled into position for a seamless upward bicycle kick that caught him squarely in the abdomen and sent him swerving across uppermost step.
But before she could get too pleased with herself, the impossible happened.
The flesh around his eyes puckering with concentration, the red ninja had magically split into two separate fighters – Ermac and Noob Saibot, an identical warrior, only dressed in black.
Closing in swiftly, they hit her with a blitz of kicks and punches that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Blood spurted from her mouth. She felt something buckle in her ribcage. Then a crisp jab to her stomach knocked the wind out of her and she slumped dizzily against a column, stars wheeling in her vision.
“Jax,” she called out, and then mustered all her strength to force one more word from her throat… a word she had never before used in her life.
“Help!”
Hearing Sonya’s desperate cry, Jax knew he’d have to stop prancing around with Motaro and take the offensive.
“C’mon horse breath,” he shouted, hoping the Centauran would take the bait, “let’s see who’s got the thicker skull.”
Motaro snorted with rage, hooves pawing the ground, the muscles of his short, thick neck humping up, his tail lifting and sweeping back and forth. Then he fixed his eye on Jax and charged, his head lowered, horns outthrust to gore him.
Which was exactly how Jax had wanted him to react.
With a deep breath he went straight in at Motaro, meeting his charge, looking as if he was literally planning to butt heads. But then, an instant before they would have collided, he pivoted and changed direction, grabbed one of Motaro’s horns, and swung up onto his back like a rodeo cowboy.
“Ride ’em!” he hollered, and then scissored his thighs around the Centauran’s neck while pounding him with his fists.
Motaro’s hooves clattered wildly on the ground. He bucked hard, his face registering surprise and confusion. His hands clawed at Jax’s ankles, his calves, his thighs, trying to pry them apart and free his neck.
Jax clamped his legs harder, harder, harder, exerting crushing, viselike pressure on his opponent’s windpipe.
“Let me go! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe…” Motaro’s voice was choked and whistling. Foam flecked the corners of his mouth. His eyes were frenzied. “Le-let-me–”
Jax tightened his leg-lock.
Motaro bucked and reared some more, thrashing his neck to try and get his horns into Jax’s belly, but Jax could tell most of his phenomenal strength had been squeezed out of him. It was all over.
Finally his eyes blinked shut as if some internal circuit breaker had been thrown and he went limp, collapsing underneath Jax with a final snort of pain.
Jax did not waste an instant savoring his victory. Rushing down the steps to aid Sonya, he surprised Noob Saibot with a triple kick, and quickly knocked him out with a bone-jostling shoulder slam.
“C’mon, do it!” he yelled to Sonya. “Finish Ermac!”
Gathering up her strength, she did just that, tagging him with a brutal uppercut that had enough force behind it to make him drop to the flagstones like a heap of wet rags.
“You okay, girl?” Jax asked.
Sonya gave him a crooked smile. “Well, I didn’t really need your help…”
“But you asked,” Jax said. “And that means we’re partners. For real now.”
Sonya’s smile grew.
“So you ready to help Kitana… partner?”
Jax nodded. “Now you’re talkin’.”
“Looks like she doesn’t need our help after all,” Sonya said.
She was right.
As they ran up to the shrine where mother and daughter had been facing off, Kitana caught Sindel with an adroitly executed leg-whip combination that brought Sindel to her knees. Kitana swiftly pushed her face to the floor, holding her in submission with a wrestler’s takedown.
“Whatever you are, you will live to see the end of Kahn,” she said. “To give my mother’s soul peace.”
Jax looked over at Sonya and grinned.
“Right on,” he said.
Liu stared at Kahn, his eyes narrowed with the unparalleled fury that had boiled the grief and sadness out of him.
Behind his dark-brown irises, something glowed red as fire.
“It’s down to just you and me, Kahn,” he said.
Kahn stood in front of his throne and grinned an imperious grin. “Know this. Your death will be slow. For I want you to see the ruination of all you cherish.”
He moved in and launched a spin kick at Liu, knocking him down, but Liu snapped back to his feet and returned the move with even greater force and accuracy.
Kahn’s temper flared. Adjusting his stance, he cocked his leg for a kick to the front of Liu’s body, but Liu not only eluded the attack, but employed Rayden’s acrobatic flip-kick to land another punishing two-footed blow to Kahn’s face.
Venting his fury with an inarticulate bellow, Kahn drove in at Liu, slipping under his guard and unleashing a ferocious torrent of blows that sent him staggering backward.
Kahn’s grin was back on his face.
“Pathetic and weak,” he said. “Rayden has clearly molded you in his image.”
Hurt badly, his body soaked with sweat and blood, his breath coming in rapid gasps, Liu tried to bring up his hands. But Kahn’s experience and feverish rage gave him an advantage that he pressed to the fullest, smashing his fists repeatedly into Liu’s nose and mouth and cheekbones.
Liu sank to his knees, his head drooping.
“Face it, Liu Kang,” Kahn sneered. “You will fail.”
Liu’s heart hammered. There was a rhythmic surging in his head that had nothing to do with the pounding he he’d taken. You will fail. He had heard those words before. Where? When? Then it came to him. The demons. The demons in the vision he’d had near the Hopi Mesa.
But there had been another voice, hadn’t there? One that had given him the confidence to dispel the wraiths.
Nightwolf’s.
What was it he’d said?
Liu closed his eyes and summoned up the words from memory:
“Everybody has the power to change the future. Find that power within.”
Liu’s eyes glowed red.
Fire red.
“I can feel it,” he muttered to himself, raising his head. “I can.”
And with a focused burst of will, he loosed the dragon.
In the space between seconds, sharp armored scales appeared on his arms and then raced inward to cover his entire body. His muscles expanded, increasing in mass even as his flesh and bones flowed and stretched like soft putty. He began to grow then, grow quickly, shooting up to a height of fifteen feet. Teeth the size of steak knives sprang from his gums.
“Impressive,” Kahn said. “You come prepared – but not well enough.”
Laughing demonically, he threw back his head, clenched his hands into fists, and began to tremble all over and change, calling up his own avatar, morphing into a towering six-headed hydra that was nearly twice as tall as the dragon. Each of his fanged, three-eyed heads hovered on a neck that was as long as a tree trunk.
Standing with Sonya nearby, Jax could only goggle in awe.
“Now I’ve seen everything,” he muttered under his breath.
The combat between the two behemoths was brief and savage. They closed with each other, snarling, clawing, biting, lashing their tails. Their tangled forms thrashed back and forth. Finally, the dragon boldly lunged at the hydra, biting hard and severing one of its serpentine necks. In turn, the other five hydra heads bit into the dragon’s torso.
The two beasts staggered apart, bellowing in agony, shifting back to their human forms in an eyeblink.
Deep gashes crisscrossing his chest, Liu stepped over to Kahn and looked down at him.
The Warlord was on his knees, trying to stanch the bleeding from his neck wound with the palm of his hand.
“Your blood flows, Kahn,” Liu said. “Just like the blood of a mortal.”
Kahn rose unsteadily, teetering, blood still pouring from his neck. Slowly, he turned toward his empty throne.
Shinnock stood behind it in his everpresent cloak of shadows, arms crossed over his chest, standing so still he was almost inert.
“Father,” Kahn gasped, staggering a little closer to him. “How can this be?”
Shinnock’s anger was as deceptively calm as quicksand. “I warned you there would be consequences for breaking the sacred rules.”
“But… but how can I win now?” Kahn said, a high, whiny edge in his voice. His face had twisted into an expression that might have been comical under other circumstances. To Sonya, it looked like the face of a spoiled and peevish child.
“Are you so pathetic you can’t even beat a worthless human?”
“Not this one,” Liu said, stepping forward.
“Then I suppose I must do it for him,” Shinnock said.
Pushing out of the shadows, he swept out his arms for an energy blast.
Liu prepared for the attack, assuming a cat stance, carefully watching Shinnock’s hands to see which direction the deadly bolts would come from. But then, suddenly his eyes jerked away from them, looked behind Shinnock to the watery, ethereal visages that had appeared in the air near the throne.
Liu’s heart races as a cubical blue plasma barrier formed around Shinnock, instantly encaging him.
“Tell me if I’m wrong, bro,” Jax muttered to him, “but I think we’re lookin’ at the Elder Gods in action.”
Liu could only nod marvelingly. He was staring at the shimmery blue apparitions with near-total absorption.
One off the Elder Gods said, “For abusing your power, Shinnock, and breaking your sacred oath, you are banished to the Nether realm–”
“–where you shall spend eternity imprisoned with the soulless dregs of existence,” the second Elder God said.
Shinnock released a sharp cry of protest, but it was muffled by the energy barrier, which rapidly folded in on itself, dwindling in size until it winked out of existence with a pop of air rushing in to fill the vacuum.
The two glowing faces turned to Liu.
“Now the fate of the universe will be decided as it should be,” one of them said.
“In Mortal Kombat,” said the other.
Desperate to avoid his father’s fate, Kahn got to his feet and wobbled toward Liu, raising his fists, trying to snag hit him with a combination of blows. But there was nothing behind them, nothing left of his power. Liu slipped most of the feeble punches, blocked the others, and then finished Kahn with a devastating uppercut that sent him high in the air.
Kahn crunched to the ground with a moan of pain and abject defeat, tried to push himself up again, but then slumped back down.
Then, almost at once: the sky itself seemed to creak and groan with the turning of invisible gears as the realms of Earth and Outworld began to separate, and the temple floor underneath Kahn’s body began rippling like liquid instead of stone. Whimpering, Kahn tried to scramble toward solid ground, but he could not move fast enough.
An instant later, he was sucked into the shifting, aqueous vortex with a tortured scream – a scream that went tearing across both rapidly unmerging realms for what seemed a long, long time before finally fading away into space.
Breathing hard, Liu felt a soft hand on his shoulder and realized it was Kitana. Their eyes met, and she smiled, and gave him a tender kiss… one that might have been far more lasting had it not been for the woman’s voice they suddenly heard behind them.
“Kitana?” it said, sounding disoriented and groggy. “Kitana, darling?”
She turned abruptly, her jaw dropping.
Propped on her elbows, Queen Sindel was looking up at her from the ground where she’d lain, the ashen pallor gone from her cheeks, replaced by healthy pink color.
“Kitana?” she repeated. She shook her head dreamily. “Where…?”
Before she could say any more Kitana was running over to embrace her, her eyes bright with tears.
“Finally I am freed of Kahn’s hold,” Queen Sindel said, sitting up in her daughter’s arms. She nodded toward Liu Kang. “Thanks to your brave friend.”
Kitana reached her hand out to Liu. As he approached to take it, both Kitana and her mother draped their arms around him.
“For your heroism, I pledge my kingdom,” Queen Sindel said.
He felt an embarrassed blush creep into his cheeks. But there was also intense pride in his expression.
Pride in himself, and in his friends.
Watching, Jax nudged Sonya with his elbow.
“Guess I know who’s gettin’ some tonight,”
“Yeah, well, I hate to interrupt all this bonding, but check out what’s happening in the courtyard,” she said.
They all turned in the direction she was pointing. Surrounded by their bright blue aura, the two Elder Gods had knelt over Rayden’s body, their heads bent, their lips moving in a muttered chant.
“Anybody wanna tell me what those Day-Glo dudes are up to now?” Jax asked.
“Shhh,” Sonya said, putting a hand on his back. “Watch.”
As she spoke, Rayden’s body began to glow with the same celestial radiance as the two otherworldly visitors. Then, miraculously, his eyes fluttered open and he sat up, blinking like someone who had awakened from a catnap.
He rose to his feet. “Was I… dead?”
“Yes,” one of the Elder Gods said in a voice like the roar of a distant tide.
“But I sacrificed my immortality,” he said. “And mortals cannot be reborn.”
“No,” said the second entity. “But Elder Gods can.”
“Elder Gods…?”
The first Elder God nodded, hypnotic flecks of light dancing around his head. “After all you have done to restore the integrity of the realms, it is only right that Shinnock’s son be allowed to replace him in the Eternal Palace.”
“Now,” said the second Elder God, “you become one of us.”
Rayden turned to his mortal champions and approached them, already surrounded by a blue nimbus that seemed to be saturating his body, becoming part of him.
Jax blinked. After everything that had happened to him recently, he had about gotten to the point where he was ready to drop the word “impossible” from his vocabulary… and this was the clincher. It was almost as if he could see through Rayden. Not only that, the priest’s feet didn’t seem to be touching the ground, but rather gliding above it. He was like some sort of living hologram.
“I gotta tell you, this was the longest – and the weirdest – week of my life,” he said to Sonya.
She nodded, but was only half paying attention to him. Her eyes were fixed on Rayden, who was now standing over by Liu.
“You have done well,” Rayden said to him. “I feel like
a proud father.”
Liu swallowed thickly, overwhelmed with emotion.
“You can’t stay with us, can you?” he asked, his eyes moistening.
“No, I cannot. But I will be watching you. Watching you all,” Rayden said. “Stay out of trouble. And stick together. You’re a family now.”
His eyes were pools of starlight, he regarded them a while longer and then turned to rejoin the two Elder Gods.
Then, the glow around the triumvirate brightening until it dazzled the eye, they streaked skyward like heaven bound comets.
There was silence for a long time afterward.
“You know,” Sonya said finally. “I think we’ve all earned some time off.”
“Where should we go?” Kitana said. “By now things should be getting back to normal on Earth. Will you stay here with me, Liu? Or will you return there?”
He looked at her a moment.
“Hmmm, tough call. I mean, you’d think I could do better than a ten thousand-year-old princess,” he said with a wry wink.
And for the first time in eons, the sound of mirthful laughter soared high into the Outworld sky.
Mortal Kombat: Annihilation Page 11