At night, the Ansjaun desert glowed with an inner light of its own. Its blue-tinged ivory sand dunes swirled and danced under the gentle touch of the sirocco that blew in from the south.
Alternating between scanning the distant dunes that framed the endless horizon on his external monitors and checking the lion's onboard computers, Hunk methodically searched the area for the ro-beast.
A whirlwind of sand approached the Yellow Lion.
Hunk regarded it suspiciously and trained a full array of sensors on it. He had seen dust devils before, but there was something different about this one — it moved as though it was on a chartered course.
He glanced down at his console, hoping that the instruments would confirm his initial assessment and grunted with disgust. As far as his instruments were concerned, he was facing ordinary sand.
His instruments were wrong.
The sand transformed, colors and textures seeming to shift and then hold, gathering and growing into a mound, almost like a man materializing.
Hunk stared at the huge arms and the gargantuan body of the ro-beast in awed fascination. Running a few quick computations in his head, he estimated that it was over 170 meters tall. That's almost double Voltron's height, Hunk realized with dawning fear.
The sudden roaring of the wind snapped Hunk from his reverie as a swirling, whirling dervish of desert dust engulfed the lion, lifting and sucking it into a cyclone-like tunnel, which rose hundreds of feet high into
the sky.
"Niflheim," Sven muttered as he piloted the Blue Lion through air thick with white feathers of snow, fighting with all his strength to keep the lion on a steady course.
He was no stranger to snow storms, such as this one, having spent many holidays in his mother's homeland, the Nordic region of Terra, but it had been years since he had last flown through a blinding flurry such as this.
The course he set through the valleys between Kistrani mountains that spanned the Alsaz continent was dangerous in the best of times, but it was also the shortest route to the towns and villages of the Opqam.
Sven studied the mountains, pregnant with snow, with a worried eye, mindful of the danger they posed. He carefully controlled the Blue's airspeed and kept sound of the lion's engines to a muffled roar.
And then he came upon it.
"A frost giant," Sven whispered, almost reverently, remembering the pictures he had seen as a child in one of the ancient books stored in his mother's ancestral home.
Or was it? He focused his external monitor on the beast and zoomed in on the faint markings on its forearm — Zarkon's mark of slavery. He unconsciously rubbed his own forearm, which had once been marked by the same symbol.
He glanced around warily, weighing his options. Had the beast seen him yet? Probably not. After all, visibility was almost nil thanks to the snow storm raging around them.
Keeping the lion pressed close against the side of the mountain, Sven began to retrace his steps, keeping an wary eye on the ro-beast all the while.
The Blue Lion had barely even begun its retreat, when the ro-beast lifted his head and scanned his surroundings, sensing something different in the air.
Sven held his breath as he watched the ro-beast's gargantuan head move slowly from left to right. He tightened his grip on his controls, preparing himself to for either fight or flight.
He sprang into action as soon as he saw recognition in the ro-beast's eyes. Pulling on his yoke, he sent the lion up a steep climb, not bothering to muffle the roar of his engines.
His ploy worked.
The thunder of the lion's engines echoed through the valley and thundered back from another direction. It seemed to grow louder and louder until there was a crack, a rending and tons of snow began to fall.
Baring its teeth, the ro-beast lifted its massive arms to reveal a pair of silver shards on each outstretched palm. It roared in helpless rage and hurled its icy projectiles at the fleeing lion.
Avoided the lethal darts with unconscious ease, Sven watched them whiz past the lion and explode on the snowy side of a mountain. His eyes widened with alarm as realization set in.
He hadn't been the target of those missiles.
The mountain above him seemed to crumble, and with an ear splitting sound, a relentless weight came crashing on the Blue Lion, so fast that Sven had no time to register pain as he spun downward in a spiral toward darkness and nothingness.
The Wahanab forest on Arus' southern continent was not unlike the rain forests back on Terra, Pidge noted idly. There were a billion and one places to hide in the forest's millions of acres of trees and grassland.
The ro-beast was down there somewhere, Pidge told himself as the Green Lion executed a low fly-by over the lush canopy that formed the western boundary of the Wahanab forest. Laying out a flight pattern, he engaged the auto-pilot so that he could concentrate on his instruments and speed up the search.
But even the daunting task of surveying millions of acres did not occupy Pidge's nimble brain for long. Within minutes, he formulated a target profile and uploaded it into the lion's onboard computers.
His thoughts turned to the grisly relief operations that were ongoing in the towns and hamlets attacked by the ro-beasts and a shudder ran up his spine. He had joined enough of them to know what was going on. At this very moment, relief workers were sorting through the rubble of fallen buildings trying to find the living and more often than not, the dead.
Establishing a secure communications link, Pidge logged onto Castle Control and checked the death toll. 2,912 and rising. He removed his round-rimmed glasses and rubbed eyes that burned with unshed tears.
A feeling of helplessness washed over him. It was just like Balto all over again. The Voltron Force hadn't been able to get there in time either...
A tentacle suddenly whipped out of the canopy and wrapped itself around the left hind leg of the Green Lion. Pidge's eyes widened with alarm, but he reacted as his training dictated.
Simultaneously pushing a button on his console and pulling his yoke towards him, Pidge activated the Green Lion's tail laser and sent the lion rocketing skywards on a steep climb.
It didn't work. In spite of Pidge's skillful maneuvering, leafy creepers grabbed the lion's tail forcing the laser to go wild. Trees burst into flames and birds took to flight.
Pidge learned a terrible lesson that moment. Despite all that they taught you at the Academy, there were times when there was nothing you could do.
Creeping steadily up the lion's hind quarters, the leafy tendrils halted the lion's flight and yanked the lion below the lush forest green canopy.
"Hey, watch it! You're not the only one who can breath fire, you know," Lance snapped as he threw the Red Lion into a barrel roll, that faltered just a bit as the g-forces pushed him back into his seat.
"Take that!" he cried out, releasing a set of stingray missiles onto the serpentine body of the ro-beast he faced. The explosions slid off the beast's armored skin without any obvious damage.
But despite his defiant words, Lance knew that he was dangerously close to physical exhaustion. His shortness of breath and his slower reflexes were proof of that. Dogfighting was extremely tiring and he had been fighting the ro-beast for close to an hour already.
It seemed that even the Red Lion was beginning to feel the strain.
Lance felt his lion struggle valiantly to keep up with his demands even as its energy levels of the weapons systems dropped sharply due to the ferocious running firefight.
The elders of the little village he had grown up in believed that spirits surrounded the physical world, breathing life into everything they touched.
It was a belief that he had scoffed at until he forged a strange kinship with the Red Lion, a mechanical beast created by a magic that none of them could really understand.
"Come on, baby, don't let me down," Lance prayed as the engines of his lion stalled for a split second. "There are a lot of people counting on us. We can't let them down."
He sensed the spirit of his Lion respond to his heartfelt plea.
The Lion roared defiantly and charged the ro-beast, attacking the serpent head-on with all the strength, power and precision that were built into it, despite the overwhelming odds.
A frown crossed Keith's brow as he flew the Black Lion through a maze of heavy missile fire. There was something strange about Zarkon's attack. It didn't follow the old tyrant's normal modus operandi. Zarkon had never launched five ro-beasts simultaneously. Ro-beasts were just too expensive.
The Intelligence Section of Galaxy Garrison theorized that throughout the expansion of the Doom Empire, Zarkon kept a tight fist on the expenses involved, conscious of the need to maximize and conserve the limited resources of Planet Doom.
It was a theory that Keith was inclined to believe.
Where the Drule ro-beasts were created by the latest scientific technology, the process of creating Doom ro-beasts was a strange fusion of Haggar's magic and Drule technology.
Zarkon and his inner circle — Haggar and Lotor — would routinely pick out slaves and other political prisoners and sentence them to be transformed into a ro-beast.
Gritting his teeth, Keith launched a few missiles of his own, hoping to damage the ro-beast. The explosion of his proton missiles destroyed some of the hostile ones and caused the guidance system of others to go haywire, turning every which way to explode harmlessly in mid-air.
Forming his Ion Knife, he launched his lion at the ro-beast. The beast fired another volley of missiles at him, but they exploded harmlessly against his missile deflection wings.
Shredding the ro-beast's chest with the Black's powerful claws, he thrust at its thick neck with the Ion Knife, hoping to find a chink in its armor. Cursing under his breath, he found out that the armor was heavier than normal.
Roaring with rage, the ro-beast reached for him with its four-arms, almost grabbing the lion by its tail. Luckily, Keith anticipated its attack and used its thick chest to spring up into the air.
If only they could form Voltron, he thought, studying the ro-beast's enraged movements, all it would take to end this battle would be a few slices with the Blazing Sword.
A niggle of doubt wafted over him as he began to question the wisdom of his actions. He could have, SHOULD have ordered the team to stay together, even if it meant sacrificing thousands of lives.
Yeah right, Blackwell, an inner voice scoffed. Listen to yourself. Do you think that you could actually give that order? You know that you'd never be able to live with yourself if you did. And you know that your team would never stand for it either, even if it was the smart thing to do.
