Chapter 18. The Dragon Deity Formation
Jack was all done with Hollywood. There remained essentially nothing but smoking buildings and wreckage. He had moved on to a place called Ojai, California, where he had a number of rockets aimed at an office building.
"On behalf of the entire Heylin side, this if for all the crap-tastic lines you've given us over the seasons!"
Jack annihilated the L.A. Promotion Development Inc. building, along with all the writers who should have taken up stamp-collecting and called it a day.
"Ahh, revenge is sweet and spicy," Jack sighed, turning his fleet of SMARTs away. He glanced around and took a quick head-count of his robots.
"Hmm. All ten regulars and fifteen Mini's. Cool- I didn't lose any." Jack cracked his knuckles and drew up a map on the display board. "Let's see…which perpetual Yuppie party can I crash next? The Mall of the World might be fun," he pondered as he and his other SMARTs took to the air and headed east. "America really is a lot of prairie, isn't it…?" Jack snapped his fingers suddenly and looked up. "Oh! Chicago! An industrial city would be so much fun! All the fires I could start!"
Jack headed northeast and took the travel-time to give his partner in crime, Meg, a call. The Mother SMART, however, indicated that Meg had left the ship on a regular and flown to China.
"Huh. I guess she got bored." Jack paused to think for a few seconds. "Why do I leave my bodyguard behind?" he wondered out loud. "Oh, yeah, I remember; she's crazy and only attracts more attention to me."
After a few more minutes of flying and downloading songs to his I-Poo, Jack received a message from the SMART's tracking computer.
"Incoming enemy attack," it told him. Jack had long ago changed to voice to that of his Jack-bots: he was just used to that particular voice.
"Blow it up," Jack ordered casually, his feet up on the control board. He listened for a moment as rockets hissed in launch and reported a few seconds afterwards.
"Targets taking evasive action. Sir, maybe you should take a look?"
"Don't tell me what to do, you soulless chunk of advanced A.I!"
"No, really," the computer insisted.
Jack stared blankly for a moment.
"I'm taking that personality chip out first thing tomorrow afternoon," he muttered. Jack slid down in his chair, to the brink of dropping out, to bash his heel on the button that turned on the rear monitor screen. He pushed himself up again with ease: any almost-twenty-year-old who has been building robots and other machines since before he could spell has some respectable upper-body strength. Leaning forward, Jack took a bored look at the monitor.
"Ugh. Them again," he growled. "When will they learn their lesson? They can't beat me!"
The Xiaolin Dragons split apart to get out of the SMART's hot jet stream. They looped around and came in on the SMART bot from all four sides, trying to get Jack's attention.
"What do you want now, you gnats? Where's the giant can of Off when I need it?"
"Jack Spicer! We know your secret!" Omi told him, racing alongside the SMART as the Dragon of Water. "We know how to defeat you, so surrender now or prepare to suffer a most…"
Before Omi could finish, Jack swung the bot to the side in a barrel roll that knocked Omi down about two hundred feet.
"Surrender. Right. LIKELY!" Jack swung the bot back to swipe at Raimundo. "And, what the hell are you talking about? Secret? There're no secrets here! You can't beat me and that's that!"
"Wrong, Spicer!" Kimiko shouted to him. "We figured it out! We know who you are!"
Jack smacked the side of his face in mock shock.
"Gasp!" he called out. "You figured out that I'm the ruler of planet earth all by yourselves! You're so smart! You get a golden star!"
On that last word, Jack pushed a button to unleash a swarm of missiles and flying mines. Clay swooped around and detonated them relatively quickly, his rock Dragon form totally undamaged by the explosives.
"Cease to pretend like you do not know!" Omi continued.
"We know you just…" Raimundo began.
"You guys sound like a cheap paperback romance novel!" Jack just about screamed. "WHAT are you talking about?"
"You're the Dragon of Metal!" they all shouted at once.
Jack arched his eyebrow.
"Um. What?"
"We know that there should be six Dragons, and that the only one we don't know about is Metal!" Kimiko told him. Jack had the SMART on a decent course, nearing Chicago. "You're the only one who fits the profile! You're about our age, and somehow you could build the most advanced robots by the time you were a teenager!"
Jack still stared, wondering if they were just trying to distract him from something.
"I think I would cry if I turned out to be one of you losers," he guffawed. "Believe me: Jack Spicer, Master of Evil and, soon, the Earth, is no Dragon of anything! Don't you think that if I had your silly little magic powers, I would have noticed by now?"
Omi looked beat, his shoulders drooping a bit.
"So…you're sure you're not the Dragon of Metal?" he asked quietly.
"Positive!" Jack snapped, ramming the SMART into him again. "Now, out of my way, Freaktastic Four, while I level Chicago!"
Jack fired up the booster and shot off, his faithful SMARTS close behind.
"Great!" Clay sighed. "Now we gotta go save Chicago!"
"Even if Jack isn't the Dragon of Metal, he is still using metal," Omi said. "I believe we should use the Dragon Deity Formation anyway!"
"I'm with Omi," said Kimiko. "It's worth a shot."
The four Dragons overtook Jack, now nearing the outskirts of the city, and lined up in front of him.
"Now what? Leave me alone! I'm just trying to conquer the world here!"
"The world ain't yours for the takin'," Clay snapped, hovering at the end of the line.
"Dragon Deity Formation!" they all called out together.
The force of the magic actually slowed the SMARTs down, and Jack had to linger for a moment before he could get the controls back.
"Dragon of Wind! Dragon's Wings!"
"Dragon of Water! Dragon's Blood!"
"Dragon of Fire! Dragon's Breath!"
"Dragon of Earth! Dragon's Talons!"
The Water Dragon doubled in size, easily the 30-story height of the regular SMARTs. The Wind Dragon seemed to latch on to Water's back, giving the creature whirling wings, while Fire became the head and flowing mane, and Earth turned into the lethal claws that wrapped stone armor around the dragon's claws, arms, and torso. With all merging done, Jack was faced now with a giant, elemental dragon. It had teeth made of flames, and a tail tipped by ice.
"That's nice," Jack sighed, slouching in his chair. "Reminds me of the Power Rangers. You can tell when you're truly evil and all-powerful, because things like this just don't impress you." He sat up and sent out commands. "Jack-SMARTs! Attack!"
Jack leaned back in his chair to watch the robots attack, absentmindedly scratching his five-o-clock shadow.
Jack shot up like his Namesake-in-a-box when he saw what happened next. The Element Dragon smashed one giant, mountainside of a fist into a SMART; and smashed it to pieces.
"What is going on?" Jack screamed, gripping the control board. "Why are they breaking so easily? It's like they've turned into my old Jack-bots!" Jack gave an angry grunt and racked his brains, wondering what to do next.
"It seems your precious SMARTs are not as mighty as they once were!" the voice of Omi shouted to him. It was different, though, distorted as though underwater.
"Not so fast, little man! I never run out of back up plans!" He signaled all the SMARTs to pull back and form up behind him. "Patience doesn't know it, but I hacked into her laptop at her house and got into all her plans and designs. I don't know how she builds these things, but it's nothing a genius like myself can't handle! So, because I figured you freaks would be bothering me again, I built…"
Jack had pushed a button on his watch to call his creation the moment the monks first arrived. Conveniently, he had hidden his creation in nearby Lake Michigan, and it was waiting high above for Jack's signal.
It dropped down from the sky and hovered between Jack and the Element Dragon.
"A brand new Element SMART! And, this one is even better than the first one! Patience was in something of a rush to build the first one, so I went through and worked out all the kinks! This bad boy is unstoppable!"
"Element bot!" he ordered. "Entertain the little babies while I go to work!"
Jack freefell for a few seconds to break away from the scene. The Element SMART literally charged at the Element Dragon, and the two went at each other with intense aggression. Fire spewed through the air, spilling from the Dragon's mane, while the machine matched brawn with the power of the Earth. The screams and thunder roll of machinery swelled in the air, rising to a deafening volume when combined with the roar of waterfalls, tornadoes, landslides, and forest fires.
All the while, Jack blasted the Blue Brothers' rendition of "Sweet Home, Chicago" over the city while he stomped around on it. He even made a pair of regular SMARTs tromp up and down a line of flattened wreckage side by side.
The dancing reminded Jack of Meg and her wild rave fits.
"I wonder where she is," he muttered to himself. "Somehow, this just isn't the same without her manic giggling in the background." He just shrugged and plucked up a post-card worthy structure. "Oh well. I'm sure she's having fun at some kind of ridiculous, neon, pokadotted-with-stripes rave thing."
Just then, Jack's cell phone rang.
"Spicer here. Oh, hi, Meg! I was just wondering where you got to…What? What are you doing there?"
Outside the city, the Element SMART and Dragon were cutting it close. Kimiko's fire was hot enough to begin melting one of the bot's arms, but it only plunged that arm into the body of the Water Dragon. A giant cloud of steam burst up around them, obscuring the battle from sight for some time. Raimundo beat the wings to disperse the steam, but in doing so distracted himself from dodging a powerful blow.
In the end, seeing as the outcome of the fight isn't all that important to the plot, the Element SMART and Dragon came to a stalemate, bringing one another to the ground. They blasted a massive crater into the ground, turning an interstate elevated highway to dust in the process. The SMART was too damaged to function, pummeled by Clay's intense Earth powers, but the monks themselves were wiped out, too. The moment the red eyes of the E.SMART dimmed out and its limbs dropped, they fell out of the Dragon Deity formation.
"Holy shit!" Raimundo cried out, kneeling on the ground. "That was…too much!"
"I feel like I just wrestled a…a tractor…" Clay muttered, sitting on the ground.
"Let's go home and try again tomorrow," Kimiko muttered.
"You feel like flying yourself back to China?" Raimundo asked sarcastically.
"No…" Kim sighed.
"Contact Dojo, Kimiko," said Omi, "and ask him if he will retrieve us from…this most humiliating defeat…"
"Yeah, I'll use that tracking device," Kim said, reaching into her backpack for her GPS.
"It feels wrong to just leave the city while Jack Spicer is in the middle of destroying it," Omi said, watching the fires jump up in the distance.
"Aw, Chicago never had very much luck, anyway," Clay said.
"There's nothing we can do, dude," said Rai. "We can't even fly, much less fight more SMART bots." He rolled his head back and stared at the sky. "Stupid Patience."
"Um, guys," Kimiko interrupted them. "We have a big problem."
"What's that?"
"Dojo's tracking device," Kim began slowly. "It says that he's at Chase Young's Palace!"