Valkyrie:
There is silence inside the circle of the cloaking sphere as the army lead by Flame slowly comes towards us. Each one of us knows that as soon as they breach the invisible barrier and find us standing here, ready, all hell will break loose.

They're close enough for me to be able to identify a few when, there is a shout from within the crowd of people. Genius emerges from the group and says something I can't hear from this distance. There is some negotiating, then a man with skin a shade of sickly greenish yellow and wide eyes steps forward and starts to slowly inch forward, looking for something. Of course, they know that there must be some form of protection from the Sanctuary and that we wouldn't give up that easy.

The greenish man steps forward one more time and there is a few gasps as he disappears into the cloaking sphere. One of the agents grabs his squealing form and gives him an ejection that puts him in a sleeping state. The agent then shoves his limp form back outside the cloaking sphere and he collapses to the ground.

There are mumbles from the crowd, then one of the yells a war cry and they come charging forward towards us.

I hold out both my hands and click my fingers, igniting flames as big as my torso with the help of the power enhancing chips in my gloves. I use a new trick I learnt from one of the agents, I pour necromancy shadows from my ring into the flame. The fire turns a darker shade off orange, a duller colour and not nearly as bright. Now there are shadows whipping out from the fire like flames but even more deadly.

All around me the battle starts as Genius's army emerges through the cloaking sphere. I start to throw multiple fireballs at the attacking army around me. I take down lots of people through the cloaking sphere before they can even get close to me and the people around me. To them my fireballs are coming out of thin air, they have no way to dodge them. One of them tries to block the fire with a wall of water, the fire extinguishes on impact but the shadows are carried through and the
sorcerer is stabbed by a dagger of shadows.

Despite my powerful fireballs, the wave of attackers are getting through and more and more. Many of them are now inside the cloaking sphere. I duck under a punch from bald man and return with a kick to the legs. He loses his balance and crashes to the ground. I press a metal disk onto his back and in a second he is unconscious.

I activate the bag on my back and black and white wings sprout out of the pack and I fly up above the battle. I fly above Skulduggery and a few others I know so that no one can attack me from my blind spot (right below). I notice an agent who's surrounded by attackers ahead of me. I form my hands into an O shape facing upwards. Time to tryout a little idea I had, the power enhancing chips will make it easier. I start to swirl my hands around each other dragging the wind along with them. The wind forms into a small tornado and I continue the swirling motion to make it bigger. When the tornado is almost my size I drop it to the ground and pour lots of magic into it. It grows to the hight of a double decker bus and I let it loose on the attackers. They're sucked up into the tornado and spat out the top high in the air. They all fall hard into the ground and don't get up.

My hands fall from the swirling movements my sides and I take a minute to get my energy back a bit, I feel drained. Making tornados is hard work. Cool though. Every now and then I shoot a dart at someone who's getting too close to where the portal is and avoid getting hit myself. I dodge a red energy blast and shoot a dart towards the one who conjured it. Something hard collides with my back and I tumble forward through the air. I turn and steady myself to face my attacker, a tall strong woman with flaming red hair and a smirk on her face. I notice that I'm not the only one with wings. The woman is wearing baggy white pants and a gold tank top, in her hand is a massive war hammer and she has a pair of grey wings. I smirked back, my energy having now returned. I stretch out a hand beckoning her forward, while lighting fire intertwined with necromancy in the other hand.

"Bring it on bird brain" I say.

The woman smirk widens and lifts her hammer over one shoulder ready to swig it down on top of someone (pretty sure that someone is me). With one massive beat of her wings she flys forward with surprising speed. I twist to one side and push behind the elbow of the arm stretched in front of her pushing her off course. I push the ball of dark fire into the place where her backpack would be - except there is no back pack - bird brain actually has wings. I give myself a second to wonder how she did it, bird brain turns around in mid fall and throws the hammer at me. I fold my wings close to my body to drop a few feet and the hammer flies over me. Bird brain smirks just before hitting the ground in a messy heap obviously dead because of the lethal fall. There's an explosion above me and a rock hits me in the back of the head.

The world goes black as the ground rushes up to meet me. Through the hazy ness I manage to spread out my wings and slow the fall. My legs buckle as I land hard inside the circle of fighters with Skulduggery in front of me. One of the agents, a woman with a white band around her upper arm, spots me and rushes over, her dark, purplish hair flying behind her.

"Where are you hit?" She asks as she drops down beside me. In a away her voice is soothing, it makes you calmer, lets you know your safe. Or about as safe as you can get on a battle field. My arms lazily gesture to my head.

"This might hurt a bit" the agent says and her hand starts to glow white as it hovers over my fore head.

I get a feeling similar to being cut on my forehead, a shallow cut but it stings, a lot. I grit my teeth for a few seconds and then it's over. The pain in my head is reduced to something I can easily ignore.

"Thanks" I say. The woman just nods then hurries off to another person.

I look back at my now tattered wings and take the bag off, knowing the wings will be no use to me anymore.

I run up to rejoin the fight. When I get level with Skulduggery and Ghastly in the line, I see a small object flying my way. As I step to the side to dodge it I identify it as a hand grenade. Crap.

"Grenade!" I yell out to warn the others.

Skulduggery, Ghastly, one of the agents and I form a tight case with the air around the grenade. The grenade stops in mid air. Then it explodes, it's stronger then we thought it would be and the bast knocks everyone around us to the ground.

The air is knocked out of me as I crash to the ground. There is a ringing in my head as all other noises of the fighting dull. I see the blurry outline of Ghastly getting up slowly. Skulduggery is out of my range of sight but was also knocked over by the blast. As Ghastly is about to get up though, a short blonde woman kicks him in the gut and he falls back to the ground choking up a bit of blood.

I force my shaking body onto my hands and knees. As I get up my vision starts to clear and I stop shaking as I recover from the blast. The woman pulls out a gun from her jacket and says something I can't hear. She pulls the hammer back and it's like everything is in slow motion as I run as fast as my legs will allow. Then..

BANG

BANG

I collide with the woman just as she pulls the trigger and the bullet hits the ground next to Ghastly. We both stumble and I press a disk into her side. She yells out then falls to the ground, the gun falling from her hand. I stomp on the gun, crushing it into the ground. I rush over to Ghastly to help him sit up.

"Medic!" I shout and I see the purple haired girl rush over to us.

"Cover us" she says.

Authors Note:

I was going to finnish the chapter at BANG but then decided it would be too cruel to leave you on a cliff-hanger like that. Your welcome :)

While rewriting the summary I really wanted to add this last part but it didn't fit with the rest of the summary.

I decided there needed to be more Skullduggery Pleasant books and this is what I did. Valkyrie and Skullduggery get assigned to inspect a prison. But everything goes wrong and the prisoners escape with a little help from Sanguine. Along with all the other escaped prisoners, there is one very powerful one named Flame, master over fire, the second sun, destroyer of all and excellent toast maker.

If that isn't funny to you then try reading it in a really deep and serious voice, kinda like they have on some movie trailers.

Reveiws are like fuel, they make me write faster.

Valkryie Everdeen out _