Episode 4, Chapter 5 – Ewan

The Yellow Ranger tore across the rooftops of Cedar Grove with unbelievable speed. Zordon had teleported him to the edge of downtown, but apparently any closer to his fellow Rangers would have risked alerting Rita to their presence. Ewan figured Zordon was just punishing him for not choosing Rangerhood from the start.

As Ewan bounced from one rooftop to another, he felt an overwhelming urge to open his arms wide like a pair of wings, silly as it sounded. He fought against it for the first few miles, but a poorly-calculated jump from one building to another that was now just a pile of rubble sent him into a panic, and he opened his arms wide.

An extra webbing of cloth unfolded from the bottom of his arms and connected to his thighs, turning his armor into a wingsuit. He glided to the streets without making a sound, celebrated his good fortune and good looks with a silent fist pump, and leapt back to the rooftops.

Zordon had given him the other Rangers' location on his heads-up display and even provided him with some picture-in-picture action. In the top-right of his vision he could see some of what Jess saw. From the looks of it, she was fighting a huge dog on fire… with a sword.

"Where the fuck did she get a sword?" he had to wonder.

He leapt from a building and saw a much taller one a short distance away. It had a huge flag pole sticking out sideways from its roof. Letting the suit take over – since he had no idea what the hell he was doing – he reached for his belt, grabbed a thin wire, slung it at the flagpole, hooked its other end to his belt, held his arms open, and braced himself for dear life as the wire retracted and pulled him with incredible speed towards the flag pole. Just before he would have slammed chest-first into metal, the wire unslung itself and retreated to his belt. He flew over the flagpole and high into the sky, using his wingsuit to steer himself towards his friends. When he dipped too low, he repeated the process with the wire on whatever high building he could find.

It may not have been faster than running and jumping, but damn it felt cool to glide over the city. The one benefit to the fires below Ewan were the thermals he could catch. The hot air that arose from each fire propelled him even higher. He didn't even come close to touching the ground for miles.

Something broke the transmission of Jess' view. Ewan hadn't been watching it, but he had to hope that the worst hadn't happened.

"Yellow Ranger," said Zordon. "You must hurry. The others need your help."

"Almost there, Z-man."

"Oh for the love of all things robotic and good," Alpha's voice said inside Ewan's hood. "If the Spirit Power hadn't chosen you I'd kill you myself."

"Suck it up, Terminator," Ewan grinned. "You're stuck with me."

"Not if you die."

Ewan touched down on the edge of a tall building overlooking the Rangers' location. An entire apartment block had collapsed on itself. Jess' marker put her location right in the middle of the rubble, which, even as Ewan watched, began to smolder. From his left, coming towards the building, was a massive contingent of mudmen, and behind them, some sort of hovering tank with several cargo cars linked behind it like a train. Ewan's vision zoomed in and scanned the cars. There were humans inside.

"Slavers," he realized. His mother might be in there.

"Hurry!" someone shouted. He looked down to his right and found the rest of his friends. Though he had never seen the others in their Ranger uniforms, somehow he knew which one was which. April somehow still looking sexy in blue, Jack and Will looking as intimidating as Ewan did in their green and white, respectively. The three of them were leading a large group of battered and burned civilians away from the slavers, but they were slow. Too many people were injured. The slavers would catch up to them soon, and with so many civilians around, Ewan wasn't so sure that he and his friends would prevail.

So he thought of the only thing that seemed logical. He decided to attack the slavers by himself.

He turned left and ran along the rooftops overlooking the street where the slavers were coming, and as he did he noticed for the first time that his footfalls made no sound at all. "Light as the wind," he thought. Then it hit him that, instead of attacking them head-on as he'd so recklessly planned, perhaps some stealthy harassment might be more effective. He ran until he was behind the column of mudmen, and then he dropped into the street.

Not a single mudman looked behind them. It was only a matter of walking right up to the nearest one and giving his head a quick twist on its neck. The mudman dropped to the ground and disintegrated into ash. Ewan repeated the process on the next, and the next, until he came across two who stood side-by-side. He grabbed either side of each one's head and rammed the two together, but this caused more noise than he had intended. The nearest mudmen spun to face him, their arms morphing into blades and clubs as they inched closer.

Ewan waved merrily. "Bye guys!" he said. He reached into his belt, withdrew a small pellet, and threw it to the ground. A yellow cloud of smoke enveloped him and the mudmen, and he took the opportunity to leap high into the air and glide to safety to the nearest rooftop.

The entire line of slavers stopped. He heard orders being called out in a strange tongue that he didn't understand. He peeked over the edge of the building and saw the mudmen fanning out from the tank-train in a wide circle. He'd stopped the caravan, but now it'd be next to impossible for him to get to the vehicles and set the humans inside free. He wasn't sure what he'd planned on happening, but this wasn't it. Ewan ducked back down behind the edge of the roof and cursed his carelessness.

A massive boom jolted Ewan to his feet. The tank was firing its gun at the buildings around it to try to lure him out. It fired again, and a building on the other side of the street came down in a cloud of dust. It'd tear down the whole block in no time if Ewan didn't do something.

He leaned over the edge and yelled, "Hey!" The tank's gun whirled faster than Ewan could have imagined and fired a shot straight at him. Ewan arched backward and felt the projectile miss him by mere inches. He stood back up and leapt away from the building before the tank brought it down. He opened his wings and sailed straight over the mudmen and their tank, which fired a wild shot up at him that missed by a wide margin. Ewan landed on a building on the other side of the road, no closer to figuring out what in the hell to do but at least wasting more time to let his friends escape.

Then something down the street let out a sound unlike anything Ewan had heard before, as if some demon made of pure metal had just screamed at the top of its lungs. The commotion from the mudmen stopped. Even the tank stopped firing. Everyone looked down the street, towards the apartment block where Jess was supposedly buried.

A jet of flame exploded out of the apartment rubble, arched through the air, and landed in the street before taking off towards the slavers at an impressive rate. As it got closer, Ewan saw that it was the flaming dog he had seen through Jess' eyes, and Jess sat on top of him, her sword buried to its hilt in the hound's back. It screamed and tried to buck her off, but she held fast. As it ran up the road, it leapt back-first into the side of a building to crush Jess between itself and the building's side, but she would not let go. She twisted the sword, and the hellhound turned in the same direction and ran straight towards the tank, which began to fire. Jess twisted the hellhound clear of the first shot, and then the second and third, until the hound smashed headlong into the tank's gun and sent Jess flying. As she spun in midair and began firing pistol blasts at the mudmen around her, Ewan leapt from his perch and did the same. Beams of red and yellow crossed in the air and the air grew thick with mudmen-dust. When Jess landed atop one of the cargo cars, Ewan landed right in front of her.

"Fuck!" she cried.

"Miss me?" Ewan grinned.

"Hmph. 'Bout time you got your pussy-ass out here. Nice outfit."

"Likewise. The skirt almost makes you look like a woman."

Jess grabbed Ewan by the shoulders and threw him headlong off the car. He twisted like the expert diver he was and smashed both feet into the chest of the mudman Jess was aiming for. Ewan backflipped off the mudman and stuck a perfect landing.

"Next time warn me!" Ewan shouted. Jess just laughed and jumped into a crowd of mudmen on the other side of the caravan. Ewan hardly had time to think before he was mobbed himself.

He was hardly aware of the fight. A mix of Will's tae kwon do lessons and the innate knowledge in the Ranger armor drove Ewan's actions. He dropped into the splits just as five mudmen attacked from all sides. He punched hard and broke the knees of two mudmen on either side of him, then he grabbed two ankles and yanked both counter-clockwise so that he spun like a helicopter. The bodies of the two mudmen he had grabbed crashed into the two mudmen whose knees were broken. The momentum from the spin let Ewan roll onto his back and up into a handstand. While upsidedown, he kicked the fifth mudman hard in the face and then shoved off the ground to land feet-first on the shoulders of another nearby. He twisted, and the mudman's head twisted with him. He fell through the mudman's disappearing body and sighed. Seven more mudmen sprinted towards him.

Ewan saw the tank slowly turn its gun towards him. The hellhound's ass was still just visible poking out from the end of the gun. Ewan was afraid he knew what the tank was about to try. Sure enough, the tank aimed. Fired.

Just as it shot, Ewan leapt straight into the air. The hellhound-missile rocketed right through where he'd stood a moment earlier and bounced along the pavement before crashing through the glass of a coffee shop some ways behind the caravan.

Ewan glided down and landed atop the gun. "Fuck you!" he shouted. He fired his pistol straight down and through the tank's hull. Sparks flew from the tank, and the gun began to spin wildly on its axis. Ewan could hear shouting from inside the tank, so he shot again and again, each time destroying more wiring located within. The tank's gun bucked under him; it had fired a shot of its own. The surprise gave one of the tank's pilots time to reach up and knock Ewan clear of the tank. He hit the ground, and the tank – along with the cars attached to it – tore down the street.

"Shit!" Ewan shouted. "Jess, we gotta move!"

He ran down the street after the hovering train, but it was clearly faster than he was. Flustered, he leapt to the buildingtops and tracked the train with his HUD. It snaked through the streets ahead. It looked like the turns were slowing it down enough for him to possibly catch up. He raced along the buildings, leaping over streets, past buildings aflame, totally unaware of another, smaller something that also chased the train through the road. Finally, the train's wild ride brought it under Ewan's path. He dove from the building, but just before he landed atop the caravan, the train took a new sudden turn, and Ewan smashed into its side.

He barely held on to a thin rail along the train's wall. The train had turned down an alleyway, and the pilot must have seen Ewan, for it steered the vehicle to the right to scrape its sides – and thus, Ewan – along the buildings. Ewan pulled with all his might and sent himself flying onto the top of the train just as the metal screeched along the building. Ewan stayed low on the roof to avoid being seen. It must have worked, since the train steered back into the middle of the alleyway and slowed down a little bit.

As Ewan crept along the top of the line of linked slave cars, the caravan left the alleyway and turned left, straight towards where Ewan knew Will and the others were just a few blocks down. If he didn't do something soon, the other Rangers would have to try to fight a tank away from a group of unarmed civilians.

The tank's gun swiveled and fired a shot to Ewan's left. To his surprise, Jess was back atop the hellhound, still steering the beast with her sword in its back. The pilot had seen her, but the damage from Ewan's pistol had made the gun unstable. For every shot that fired, it looked like two or three others failed.

"I got this," Ewan thought to Jess.

"Doesn't look like it to me," Jess shot back. The tank fired again, and again Jess and the hellhound dodged. "Hurry it up; I can't distract the bastard forever."

Ewan hadn't even realized that that was what she was doing. Feeling some gratitude – but certainly not willing to tell her that – Ewan ran along the cars until, at last, he stood atop the final one. He looked down. There was some kind of hitch that connected this car to the back of the tank. If he could somehow cut it…

He pulled out his pistol and fired at the link. The shot bounced off. "I need your sword!" he thought frantically. They were almost on top of Will and the others.

"It's on fire, you idiot! You can't touch it!"

"Then get your ass over here and cut it!"

Jess climbed to her feet on top of the hellhound, still clinging to the sword lodged in its back. "Jump to the tank as soon as it fires," she thought.

"Why?"

"Just do it, god dammit!"

The tank fired. Ewan and Jess leapt into the air at the same time. Jess had slid her sword out the hellhound's back as she leapt. The tank's shot blasted the hound into a million fiery pieces. Ewan could see through the holes in the tank's top as he fell. The pilot had no idea he was coming. Jess landed on the first car and sliced the link clean off. She and the cars slowly began to fall away behind the tank.

Ewan landed inside the cockpit. There were two pilots. He punched through the chest of one, but the other grabbed him and threw him against the panels. He arm twisted – it was still inside the other's chest, after all – and his vision burst with light and pain. His muscles convulsed from the electricity coursing from the tank through his body. The mudman pulled him away from the console and slammed his head into it again. He felt like his skull was about to burst. Dimly, he kicked at the mudman, whose grip loosened.

Ewan pulled himself away from the tank's controls and wrestled with the mudman until he had the bastard pressed up against the panel. Ewan noticed the tank's monitor showing that the civilians were hardly a block ahead of them.

"Hold on!" Ewan told the mudman. He threw the mudman as hard as he could against the side of the tank. The control panel exploded around him. Ewan felt the tank spin sideways and begin to roll. He and the mudman bounced from one side of the tank like they were in a washing machine. Round and round they and the tank went, sparks and metal and dust and limbs flying in all directions. The lights inside the tank went out. Then the rolling stopped. There was a screeching of metal scrapping along concrete, and then silence.