Minutes before the blast…
Gresh was the first to see the band of Skrall approaching from the west. Like the carrion eaters of Bara Magna, they had come to finish off the fallen. He felt a fury grow inside him that he had never known before.
He turned and headed for the Skrall. The last time he had faced this many warriors on his own, he had been beaten and badly wounded. But that was before Mata Nui had gifted him with the elemental power of air. Now he was ready to blow the Skrall back to the Black Spikes…and it would be a pleasure.
He was about to launch his first attack when he spotted something in the hand of one of the Skrall. The warrior was carrying a piece of golden armor, some kind of sword hilt. So, Gresh thought, this armor belongs to them. Some kind of weapon? Then they are the last ones who should be allowed to have it.
Concentrating, he summoned hurricane-force winds that whipped sand at the oncoming Skrall with his new blades. One gust tore the piece of armor from the Skrall warrior's hand and sent it flying toward Gresh. "Not as satisfying as bashing you with my old shield…" The Glatorian snatched it out of the air, stashing it away with his other piece. "But I'll take it."
Three Skrall had battled their way through the windstorm and were coming for him. Gresh smiled.
This was going to be fun.
X X X
Not far away, Takanuva was dodging the heat vision of a yellow Rahkshi. In the past, his light powers had been enough to stagger these creatures, but not this time. Makuta had evidently created improved Rahkshi models.
Right, he said to himself, as another Rahkshi blast sliced a nearby rock in half. Like they needed improving.
Takanuva fired a laser at the Rahkshi using his new weapons. He had greatly appreciated the power lance for the battle in Karda Nui and his journey through the alternate dimensions, but it had been destroyed in the fight for survival in the Makuta's body. This was a blessing in disguise, as he found it hard to control his power and found the weapon to be too cumbersome now that he was smaller again. He had obtained two twin staffs from a weapons cache in favor of his original Staff of Light. Now, he used both to create streams of light energy toward the Rahkshi.
The creature countered it in mid-air with its heat vision. It was a stalemate at first, then slowly Takanuva started to gain the advantage. The Rahkshi hissed in anger.
Okay, maybe this won't be so hard after all, thought the Toa of Light.
He caught a glimpse of yellow out of the corner of his eye. Another Rahkshi was charging at him from the left. Before he could react, it hit him broadside with a blast of searing heat. Takanuva cried out and fell.
The two Rahkshi closed in on the fallen Toa. Takanuva pushed himself from laying on his back to a sitting position. These two will use their heat vision to flash-fry me…unless I can pull off something I've never tried before… Takanuva knew he had to take a chance. There was a new trick he had been working on for some time, but he had no idea if it would work in combat. He was going to have to find out.
Concentrating, Takanuva brought his light powers to bear in a way he hadn't before: he used his power over light to create a hologram in front of him and between the two oncoming Rahkshi. He didn't have the skill yet to make it perfect or very imaginative—all he could manage was a motionless duplicate of himself.
A hologram—a fake Takanuva made of light. If I'm very lucky, it might fool them. If the Rahkshi looked closely, they would see it was transparent in too many places. But in the midst of battle, they weren't going to take time to examine the sudden appearance of a new enemy.
Immediately, the creatures whirled as one and shot out beams of heat vision at the light image of Takanuva. But since the image was only made from waves of light bending at Takanuva's will, the heat passed right through the light image to strike the other Rahkshi. Before they could recover from the sizzling shock, Takanuva used his lasers to slice through the creatures' armor. Both crumbled to the ground, dropping their staffs.
Takanuva got to his feet. One of the Rahkshi was reaching out for its weapon. The Toa stepped on the Rahkshi's armored hand, shattering the metal into fragments. The two Kraata slugs that had controlled the Rahkshi crawled out of the helmets, only to meet their ends by the power of light.
The Toa of Light grabbed the piece of golden armor, apparently some kind of small shield. Yes! Let's hope the others are doing as well…but I sure wish I knew what this armor was supposed to do. He headed back toward the battle, never looking back at the shattered remains of the Rahkshi. But in his heart, he made a vow that this would be the last fight with Makuta. The time had come to crush this evil once and for all.
X X X
Sahmad's Tale:
I like to sleep. I like to sleep because I like to dream. Dreaming reminds me that I'm still alive.
Last night, I dreamt I was back in the village of Iron, working in the cold and damp of the mines. The air was filled with the rhythmic ching-ching of pick striking stone. Spherus Magna was generous that day and we emerged from the dark with loads of iron. I stood upon a peak and saw the Rock Agori in the distance scrambling to and fro like spider beetles. Then they stopped and turned as one to stare at our village. I turned to see what they might be looking at, and that was when I saw the first Iron Agori vanish. One moment he was unloading the ore cart, the next he was gone. In the next few moments, more disappeared, and then more. I knew that something terrible was happening. I had to stop it.
I ran through the village in search of the woman I loved. When I found her, I took her in my arms and held her tight, and an instant later, my arms held only empty air.
Help. We needed help. I rushed down the mountain toward the Rock Agori, I shouted for them to aid us, but no one paid any attention. I screamed, I pleaded, to no avail. I moved to strike one of the villagers down just to get their attention. And then I looked down and saw nothing. I had disappeared….
I woke up in a sweat. I had camped not far from the Skrall River. I took off my armor and knelt on the bank, trying to wash away my nightmare. In the moonlight, I could see something massive in the distance. When I took a better look, I saw it was the Skopio-XV1 vehicle Telluris had built, now sprawled out on the sand like the carcass of a dead animal. The owner himself was crouched beside it. I hitched up the Spikit to my wagon and rode to Telluris. He seemed to be in mourning.
"What happened?" I asked.
"They ruined it," my tribesman answered. "The Glatorian, they sabotaged it. It won't work anymore."
I always thought the Skopio was a gaudy waste of time and materials. No matter how big your weapon, someone else can always build a bigger one. You don't conquer your enemies with something they can see coming ten miles away. You do it by working your way inside like the larva of a spiked worm, making yourself a part of their society, and then blotting them out from the inside. The Skopio was Telluris' crutch, his way of throwing an armed and armored tantrum at the world.
"You can't fix it?" I asked.
He shook his head. "I don't have the parts."
I looked at him. In a couple days, maybe, he would think to stop missing his machine and get out of the sun. By then he would be in no condition to be of use to anyone. But unstable as he was, he was still Iron Tribe, one of the few left, so I owed him.
"Maybe we can find what you need," I offered. "I'm headed north. Come with me."
Telluris glanced up at me, then gestured to the dead Skopio. "I can't just leave it."
"It's not going anywhere," I answered. "And when we come back, we'll rebuild it, bigger and better than before."
Telluris got up and climbed in the wagon. I yanked on the reins, and the Spikit started plodding north. I wasn't sure exactly where we were going, but I had an idea. If the death of my tribesmen wasn't an accident, then it was murder. And if it was murder, someone had to benefit from it. Whoever that someone was, I was going to make them pay for every dead Iron Agori. I couldn't return to the scene of the crime because Bota Magna had split off a hundred thousand years ago, and wasn't coming back. All I could do was go north and hope I learned something, preferably before the two robots slugging it out overhead wrecked what was left of Bara Magna.
We had been traveling for a few hours when the Spikit suddenly reared up, both of its heads arching in panic. Telluris jumped off the wagon. He pointed to something, shouted, but I had already seen it myself. A long, gray serpent was coiled in the sand up ahead, a serpent with blue eyes, and there was madness in those eyes.
"Kill it!" I said to Telluris.
My tribesman grabbed a blade from the wagon and advanced on the snake cautiously. It was some kind of a viper, poisonous to the extreme, and it was of no use alive. Dead, it would at least be dinner. Telluris raised the weapon and was about to bring it down when the snake reared up, as if it were going to strike, but instead of attacking, it spoke.
"Go ahead," it said. "Kill me. I can't take this anymore."
Telluris looked to me to see if he had gone crazy. I nodded to let him know I heard it too. I was reminded of some wild tale I had heard from a few Rock Agori. They were fleeing Roxtus after losing a battle to the other villages, and claimed an Ice Agori named Metus had been turned into a snake. Sounded to me like they had been eating too many rotten Thornax, but now…well, there were plenty of weird things in the Bara Magna desert, but talking snakes wasn't one of them.
"You're…Metus?" I asked the serpent.
It hissed in response.
"They said you were vowing revenge for what happened to you," I said. "Give up on that, did you?"
"I still want revenge," Metus replied. "Being turned into this monster wouldn't stop me, being turned into an insect wouldn't stop me, I would still find a way somehow if it weren't for…" He stopped.
I waited. When he didn't continue, I said, "Except for what?"
The serpent slithered through the sand and looked up at me with pleading in his ice blue eyes. "I've stopped dreaming," he whispered.
Suddenly, the desert seemed to grow very quiet and still, and all I could hear was my own voice saying, "It's starting again."
Sahmad, of the Iron Tribe
X X X
"I'll crush you!" bellowed Nektann.
Tahu barely blocked the Skakdi's blow with his sword. He had spotted Nektann in the midst of the battle, hanging onto a piece of golden armor. At least three Toa and a dozen Matoran and Agori lay dead around him. A wave of heat had driven the other Skakdi and Rahkshi away from his side, but Nektann hadn't fallen. Instead, he seemed to actually welcome Tahu's attack.
"Go ahead, Toa!" the Skakdi taunted, towering over the Toa of Fire in size and strength. He fired a burst of water from his powered tool, giving him the advantage of accessing his element independent of another Skakdi. "Use your flame power. Use your mask. We all know you 'heroes' can't win a battle with just your strength, your skill, and your wits, right?"
Tahu gave a grim smile as he bored in on the Skakdi. Enemies had done this to him before—try to strike at his pride, make him sloppy, try to get him to make mistakes. But it hadn't been so long ago that Tahu had fought others of Nektann's kind, the Piraka, and suffered a bitter defeat. This conflict brought back painful memories of his duel with Zaktan along the cliffs of Voya Nui. If it hadn't been for a brave group of Matoran villagers, he would have died. Guess I need to get a new hobby besides fencing Piraka, he thought. The experience made him take a hard look at himself.
Nektann was about to regret that.
"This is the part where I'm supposed to say, 'I don't need my power to deal with you,' right?" said Tahu. "I take it as a challenge and try to beat you one on one. Can I outfight you?"
"You can't, and you know it," growled Nektann. "That's why you have to cheat."
"Sorry, that worked on the 'old' Tahu…" Tahu triggered his elemental power, heating up his sword to several thousand degrees. His next blow melted right through the Skakdi's weapon, cutting it in half.
"What—?" the warlord exclaimed, staggering backward.
"Meet the new, improved version!" Tahu yelled, kicking Nektann.
The Skakdi was so armored it didn't move him much, but it was a solid blow. Meanwhile Tahu suppressed mixed emotions at the irony of calling this reverted form new. Then he pursued the Skakdi with his familiar fire sword held in front of him.
"Look around, barbarian," Tahu said. "All around you, warriors are fighting and dying. This isn't a game. There are no rules. It's not about honor, or pride, or who's better—it's about winning."
Disarmed, Nektann still smiled that ruthless Skakdi smile. "So…you did learn something from your enemies and my kind after all, Toa. Maybe we won in the end, then—we made you just like us."
"Not like you. Never like you!" Tahu returned, his own temper rising. He couldn't accept that he had become any more similar to those he fought. He felt his anger increasing, though, and forced it back in control. "You fight to take lives. I fight to save them."
Nektann charged, slamming into Tahu and carrying him into the midst of the fight between Glatorian and Rahkshi. "Go ahead, burn me. But your Toa power will burn your friends, too."
"You still don't understand. You still don't get it," said Tahu, as he flipped the Skakdi over his hip and slammed him to the sand. "You and your kind were what I was created to stop. You've terrorized villagers, murdered Toa, and now you serve a monster that would enslave worlds. I'm going to do whatever I have to in order to win."
Nektann shot up faster than Tahu could have imagined, grabbing the Toa by the throat and lifting him off his feet. "You don't have the guts, anymore than those Toa I killed, or the villagers who had more courage than sense. Some of them didn't even have time to scream before they died." The Skakdi squeezed harder, starting to choke Tahu. With his other hand he threw Tahu's sword from his grasp. "Talk, talk, talk. That's all you Toa are good for. Try talking when I'm crushing your—"
Nektann stopped. Something was very wrong. Tahu's eyes were gleaming and blistering heat was running down Nektann's arm. Before the Skakdi's eyes, his armor began to melt. It fell in molten drops to the sand, first his gauntlet, then the plate on his arm, then his chest armor. Tahu never moved, never spoke, as he fed his power into Nektann's armor. Nektann lowered Tahu to the ground and tried letting go, but Tahu wasn't having it. He actually began to hold Nektann's hand to his body.
"What—what are you doing?" shouted the Skakdi in horror. "My armor—melting!"
"Be glad you were wrong—be glad I'm not like you," Tahu said, as Nektann fell to the ground in a mass of liquid metal. "Be grateful I never learned from my enemies how to kill. You'll live, Skakdi, but you won't forget."
Tahu let go and walked away. He picked up the Skakdi's satchel and removed the piece of golden armor, a chest plate. "And, Mata Nui help me, neither will I."