Despite the fact that the Prince wanted badly to show the upstart Merrick that he was a superior combatant, he reminded himself to stick to his plan. All the Prince had to do was make it appear to the crowds that the Ard Righ was turning a recreational sparring match into a political attempt on the Prince’s life. Once the crowd believed that the Prince was fighting to stave off a potential assassination, they would agree with and support the use of his full might against Merrick to defend himself.
None of the other families would be able to question the Prince’s motives. There would be too many witnesses, including Mona and her two Rune Corp employees, who would have seen the whole thing unfold before their eyes and who watched as the Prince desperately tried to survive the clear attempt on his life by the leader of a rival family.
CHAPTER 58
MERRICK TOOK IN HIS surroundings. The Prince was only one part of the fabric that Merrick’s mind observed and processed while in the almost meditative state of mushin.
As Merrick and the Prince circled each other, Merrick waited for an opening in the Prince’s defenses, but saw none. He could only assume that the Prince could not see any chinks in his defenses either or he would have already attacked.
Unable to take the waiting any longer, the Prince lunged at Merrick with astonishing speed, swinging his pole mace like an axe. Merrick turned his body to one side and felt the breeze as the spiked end of the pole passed in front of his face.
When the Prince followed through with his swing, Merrick brought up his knee into a half roundhouse kick and landed a direct hit into the Prince’s mid section. The Prince spun around to face Merrick, showing no signs of having just been struck. He jabbed this time with the pole mace, and Merrick jumped high into the air and flipped backward with the help of another wind word.
Before his feet landed, the Prince was on him again, pressing his advantage, this time leading with a front kick that Merrick avoided easily, staying just out of range of the Prince’s powerful strikes.
The Prince stumbled slightly from overextending his leg at the end of his kick, and Merrick brought his pole around in an attempt to hit the Prince broad-ways across the chest. The Prince stopped Merrick’s swing with a hard block using his forearm, the impact of which sent a shock up Merrick’s own arm that stung like he had just hit a telephone poll with an aluminum bat.
Rattled for the first time, Merrick heard the shouting and jeering of the crowd, as he doubted, for only a second, his ability to defeat the Prince. Knowing that most fights were won in the mind, Merrick cleared his brain of negative thoughts and sought refuge again in the quiet of his mushin.
Merrick barely raised his spear in time to block another swing of the Prince’s pole mace, as the two men closed to within only a couple feet of one another. At such close range, both opponents swung their weapon at the other with blurring precision and speed. Each pole strike was met with a block and a counter swing, and the makeshift arena in which they fought reverberated with the clanking of their weapons.
At one point, their poles struck each other so hard that a small spark erupted. Seeing an opportunity, Merrick used a Fire Word to fan the spark into a fireball that erupted right in front of the Prince’s face.
The Prince backed away quickly and released a powerful burst of air that snuffed out the flame.
When the opponents were separated by almost six feet, the Prince lowered into his fighting stance once again. Merrick settled into his stance also as both men readied themselves for the next bout of attacks.
In an attempt to surprise the Prince, Merrick tried to flank him by flowing into a one-handed cartwheel, but the Prince immediately released a column of wind, striking Merrick while he was moving in mid-air.
Merrick’s body went flying through the air as his limbs flailed to regain equilibrium.
He landed roughly on the other side of the cleared circle, rolled, and jumped to his feet, ready for the Prince’s next attack. The Prince was still at the other end of the cleared street circle, but already was launching himself through the air to close the distance with Merrick once again.
Merrick looked up and saw the palace in the distance and had a thought. Even as the Prince drew nearer, Merrick craned back his neck and shouted toward the sky a summoning word from Terrada’s tongue combined with a word from the Wind Dragon’s tongue.
The Prince looked confused for a second and landed just short of where Merrick stood. When the Prince saw that nothing had happened as a result of Merrick’s strange utterance, he laughed even as Merrick shook his head in frustration.
With bolstered confidence, the Prince inched his way forward, preparing to unleash another round of attacks.
Before the Prince could make the first move, Merrick jumped into the air with a flurry of front kicks aimed at his opponent’s sternum. The Prince backed up quickly, but found himself slightly off balance as Merrick landed and dove directly into another attack.
Merrick lunged forward, and the Prince raised his mace, grazing Merrick’s lower leg with its divinium spikes and drawing a little blood through his damaged battle suit.
The crowd erupted, cheering at the sight of first blood in the fight.
Merrick switched up his fighting stance so that his wounded leg was in back. He raised his spear and jabbed it at the Prince. His leg was hurt, but what concerned him more was the feel of the energy from the mace when it touched his battle suit. For the second that the two were connected, his suit activated and pulsed with energy in a manner that was all too familiar.
As Merrick tried to make sense of what he had just felt, a strong gust of air pushed him from behind, propelling him directly toward the Prince. The sudden forward motion seemed to take the Prince by surprise as the spear tip of Merrick’s pole pierced the Prince’s side.
Merrick was stunned. He had not meant to deliver such a vicious attack and had certainly not tried to slice into the Prince with his spear. Yet some unseen force had propelled him forward against his will. Merrick supposed that any number of people in the crowd could be responsible, but his intuition told him that perhaps the Prince himself was behind it.
The only question was why.
As the Prince took his hand away from his side and held his bloody palm up for the crowd to see, many of the gathered citizens hissed at Merrick, believing that he had crossed a line and was now trying to injure their Prince.
The Prince held his pole mace with one hand and covered his wound with the other as he closed in on Merrick once again. Even though Merrick was prepared for it this time, another gust of wind came at him from behind. This one was more focused and grabbed hold of Merrick’s spear arm and jabbed the weapon forward, into the Prince’s chest.
When the spear tip went in this time, the crowd turned angry, and several Wind Warriors started to make their way into the makeshift arena to assist their Prince.
The Prince held up his bloody hand again and gave a command in the common tongue of the Wind Family that Merrick recognized as telling everyone to stay back.
Merrick saw that Master Banzo and Jonathan were fighting the urge to enter the street circle, and Merrick held a hand out to them, signaling them to stay where they were as well.
The Prince gritted his teeth and stood to his full height, holding his pole mace in front of him as he advanced on Merrick again—this time with a more malevolent gleam in his eye.
Within a second, Merrick found himself on the defensive as the Prince came at him with blows that would have seriously wounded or killed him if he had missed even one of his blocks.
In addition to the physical strikes, the Prince smiled and launched balls of brutal wind at Merrick that he only narrowly avoided or diffused through well-practiced Fire Magic that ignited and stopped the oxygen-rich projectiles in flight.
As he backed away in an attempt to regroup, Merrick had a clear view of the wound in the Prince’s side. It had either healed considerably in just the last few moments, or the injury had somehow not been as bad as i
t had first looked.
Merrick fended off another of the Prince’s attacks, growing weaker and sloppier with each maneuver. Even through his exhaustion, the sight of the Prince’s wound wouldn’t leave his mind.
Merrick was certain that he had not only seen, but also felt his spear pierce the Prince’s flesh not once, but twice. Everyone had seen it, yet as he looked again, both wounds had stopped bleeding and appeared to be almost fully healed.
Distracted by the Prince’s wounds, Merrick failed to block the Prince’s next lunge with his spiked pole mace. Since Merrick was not wearing the top portion of his battle suit, the divinium spikes sank directly into his left shoulder, causing explosions of pain to shoot up and down his central nervous system.
The pain was engrossing, but even so, Merrick once again felt something familiar in the deadly kiss of the mace.
Merrick shook head, trying to clear his thoughts. He had lost his mushin gaze after he had drawn blood from the Prince, and he couldn’t get it back, no matter how hard he tried to focus.
Just as Merrick saw the Prince ready himself for yet another blow, he saw the mace glow hot red for just a second, like embers in a fire. That image combined with the Prince’s quick-healing wounds and the familiar feeling he had when touched by the mace combined to reveal what Merrick should have realized sooner.
The cube itself was inside the spiked mace head. That was how the Prince was healing himself without a healer, and that was why his weapon was glowing as red as Sigela’s heart.
Now that Merrick knew what he was up against, it was his turn to grin.
The Prince struck again with his mace, and Merrick gathered his fading strength to avoid the swing by flying up into the air.
As the Prince gathered himself to also jump into the air, Merrick reached out with his senses to the hidden, but familiar, cube. When their fight first started, Merrick had sent a calling tone and a word of flying to any follower of Terrada that was close enough to hear, but he had received no responses.
Now he used the cube’s power to shout the same calling tone again, but this time, Merrick’s signal was amplified, and he knew exactly to whom he was calling.
“That didn’t work before, Ard Righ,” the Prince said as he launched into the air and swung his pole mace at Merrick’s feet. As the Prince’s pole passed under Merrick, Merrick shot out with both of his legs and landed both feet directly onto the Prince’s face.
Merrick heard the crunch of cartilage as his opponent’s nose broke, and he fell to the ground.
Before the Prince could recover, Merrick threw his own pole to the side and dove for the Prince’s weapon.
The Prince’s eyes went wide as Merrick ripped the pole mace from his grasp.
“I don’t need that weapon to defeat you,” the Prince said.
Before Merrick could respond, he heard a high-pitched whine that grew louder even as a shadow from above covered the Prince.
Just as the Prince looked up, the large boulder that had been imprisoned in the Earth Room of the palace for so many years came just as Merrick had requested. It landed directly on top of the Prince and continued straight through the floor of the Cloud City, taking the Prince with it.
The crowd was silent, stunned at what they had just seen. Soon, the cloud citizens grew noisy with a mix of anger and fear—anger at having seen their Prince possibly murdered before their eyes, and fear at seeing the defeat of their Prince, an icon of the Wind Family’s military might.
Merrick motioned for Mona and the others to join him as the Wind Warriors started to move in, and the people in the crowd turned into a mob, all looking at Merrick with the threat of death and revenge in their eyes.
As soon as Mona, Master Banzo, and Jonathan joined him, Merrick brought them all together, the Prince’s weapon still in his hand.
“Just stay with me,” he said. “We need to leave before someone thinks clearly enough to strengthen the wards in this part of the city.”
Mona grabbed hold of Merrick as he jumped through the hole in the floor of the Cloud City that was still open where the boulder had just passed through.
Within seconds, Merrick and Mona were free falling from miles above the surface of the Earth. Merrick held onto Mona with one hand and onto the pole mace with the other. He looked up and saw Master Banzo and Jonathan following right behind them, putting all of their trust into him and the belief that he would save them all.
“Get as close as you can to me, and hold on,” he yelled over the sound of the wind and against its suffocating pressure.
Just as they were as close as was going to happen, they broke through one of the upper clouds and saw the highest peaks of Mount Fuji come into view below them. Merrick spoke the words from Sigela that called the lightning. Instantaneously, a beautifully branched bolt of lightning engulfed them and carried them away on Sigela’s tail.
Merrick felt his molecules being ripped apart and set afire as he was shot screaming through the electrical strands of the lightning.
Within less than a quarter of a second, Merrick and his group stood in the grayish, tan depression at the top of the most famous of Japanese natural landmarks. Merrick felt revived after the brief, but intense, journey. His energy had been partly restored by Sigela, but Mona lay down on the ground and put her forearm over her eyes as if to shield them from the sun.
“You can’t rest. If we stay here, we’ll lose any head start we have on the Emperor,” Merrick said. “I’m not sure whether or not the Prince is dead, but we have to get out of here. I only brought us here so we could travel with Terrada back to the Earth Clan.”
Mona nodded, giving Merrick the message that she was not all right to travel, but that she was ready to go because she knew she had to.
While the others regained their senses from traveling with Sigela for the first time, Merrick helped Mona stand up. He looked to his right about twenty yards away and saw a smaller crater inside the one in which they stood. At the center of the mini-crater were the pulverized remains of the boulder that had given its life to save Merrick and his friends.
It was still strange to Merrick, even after all of his experiences, that such nobility could be found in what he used to think of as only a simple rock. Merrick mouthed a silent thank you to what was left of the boulder and then looked around, suddenly on his guard and tense.
If the boulder had landed here, where was the Prince? Had he been killed or was he still alive, somewhere close, watching, ready to strike?
Merrick pulled his group close to him.
“One more part of our journey before we can rest,” Merrick said. “Time to get to the Earth Clan.”
“But our mission...” Mona said, looking more drained by the trip than she should have.
“Trust me,” Merrick said as he took the Prince’s mace pole and hit it as hard as he could on a flat boulder close to his feet. The mace burst into shards of sparkling white divinium, leaving behind the lost divinium cube, glowing almost joyously with greens and reds and whites as Merrick picked it up in the palm of his hand.
“It’s good to have you back,” Merrick said to the cube. “Now it’s time for all of us to get out of here.”
With that, Merrick grabbed Mona’s hand, called on Terrada, and the four of them disappeared along with the cube into the body of Mt. Fuji. Soon they were riding on the back of the Earth Dragon, crossing the globe as a billion separate but related atoms, kept close to one another only by the thoughts each of them held in their mind.
Although it was impossible to keep a sense of time when traveling through Terrada, the trip did not last as long as Merrick thought it would, and soon they were all standing in the valley outside of the Earth City in the Scottish Highlands.
Merrick looked at Mona, who seemed just a little less exhausted than when she had started the trip.
“I’m feeling a little better,” Mona said as Merrick put his arm lightly around her shoulders. “I think Terrada must have done something while we were traveling w
ith her.”
Merrick silently thanked Terrada for her kindness before addressing his three cohorts.
“I know we’re all tired,” Merrick said, “but we need to get to the safety of the Earth City as soon as possible.”
As they made their way up the side of the mountain, Merrick savored how good it felt to smell the wet and rich soil of the Highlands and to be standing on solid ground once again.
Jonathan followed directly behind Merrick.
“Your leg,” Jonathan said. “You need to visit the healers.”
“I will,” Merrick said, wincing and forcing himself up the side of the valley. “As soon as we get inside and return the cube to Cara.”
CHAPTER 59
MONA WAS NO STRANGER to traveling with dragons. She had done so with both Terrada and Sigela many times before. But she had not been pregnant at the time. She knew there was no other practical alternative to escaping the Cloud City, but the short trip down to Mt. Fuji had left her sick to her stomach and anxious.
She couldn’t stop thinking about how dragons gave Drayoom children their names while they were still in the womb. That concept had always fascinated Mona, but the thought of a dragon entering her body to whisper in the ear of her unborn child also frightened her.
Merrick had the blood of not just one, but two dragons in him, and she assumed that meant that their child would also have the blood from both dragons but mixed with her own human blood as well.
She wondered if Terrada and Sigela would each invade her body at some time and whisper a name to her child, or if neither of them would because she was part human. Mona had never heard Cara talk about her own creation name, but she made a mental note to ask her about it when all of this was over.
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