Author's Note: Okay, folks, I'm back. Sorry about not finishing the Kelbrid Wars yet…I'd just kind of had enough of this next generation of Animorphs I'd accidentally stumbled on with The New Dawn. It's time for a good old-fashioned, middle-of-the-Yeerk-war installation. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: I own nothing and am not turning a profit from this story.

The Champion

My name is Marco. My last name is Nunya, as in none ya business. It's not important, and even if it were, I still wouldn't tell you. I will remain anonymous for as long as possible, because if they find out who I am, it'll be a simple matter for them of using a Dracon beam to separate my body into its individual molecules.

I am not kidding. The Yeerks are here. They're parasites, only a million times worse than a ringworm or whatever. After all, good old Earth parasites can only kill you. Yeerks are space-faring slugs that enter your head, wrap themselves around your brain, and take total control. You become nothing but a broken, shattered puppet as you watch the Yeerk manipulate the ones you love. Jake, my best bud, was one of them. For three days, he was a controller. My mom is host to the most ruthless of the Yeerk generals, Visser One.

I guess you could say the fight is very, very personal for me.

The fight, if you could even call it that. Me, Jake, his beautiful-but-psychotic cousin Rachel, her best friend Cassie, and Tobias. Tobias was just kind of this tagalong of Jake's until that night in the construction site. A damaged Andalite (the good aliens) fighter landed and we all met Elfangor. He warned us about the Yeerk threat, but more importantly, he gave us the power to morph.

Morph. To change into any animal that we can touch. Sounds amazing, right? Well, mostly it is. There are some drawbacks, though. Only two hours in a morph, or you become that animal forever. Tobias is a nothlit – someone stuck in a morph. He managed to get himself stuck in a red-tailed hawk morph a few days after we acquired this incredible power.

So anyway, we use this power and knowledge to fight the Yeerks. We hurt them sometimes. Sometimes we barely come out of our half-brained missions alive. Either way, none of us can complain. We can't give up. Without us, the Yeerks would steamroll Earth into one big concentration camp.

They'll probably end up winning even with us fighting them.

Anyway, it'd been an especially rough few weeks for us. Especially rough, as in instead of three horrible nightmares per night, we were having about ten. Missions gone bad. So Jake, being the leader that he was, decided to do something to raise everybody's morale a little. We were at my house, looking on my computer for something fun for us all to do. It may sound stupid to you. These are the saviors of the human race? They're just a bunch of kids looking for a fun way to spend their weekend. Well, let me tell you something if you've never been involved in a resistance of a secret alien invasion – it's the little things that keep you going, hanging in there. We all needed some fun in the worst way.

"Check this out," Jake said from the computer. I was putting in my new CD my dad had picked up for me. "A video game competition at the mall. First place is ten thousand bucks!"

"No way!" I exclaimed. I hadn't heard a thing about it. "What games? You know I totally own at Doom."

"No Doom. Mostly a bunch of dogfighting games and strategy-type games," he said disappointedly. I almost barked a laugh. The general resisting the invasion was sticking his nose up at strategy games.

I shouldered him out of the way and read the fine print, and my guts went cold. "Jake, check out the main sponsor."

"The Sharing," he said in a subdued tone of voice. The Sharing was a front organization for the Yeerks. "But why would they -"

"Come on, Jake," I cut him off wearily. Jake was plenty smart, but he just didn't get things sometimes. "Fighter and strategy games? The Yeerks are looking for humans well-suited to conquering Earth."

"Why?" he wondered. "The Yeerks are plenty good at that sort of thing. Waiiit," he stopped himself. "What if you put one of those ruthless Yeerk brains in the mind of a master tactician?"

"You'd get a super-controller," I breathed. "This is not good. Jake, you know what this means."

He gave me a depressed look. "Yeah. We won't be getting that vacation. We've got to find a way to stop this competition."