Chapter 20. Battle to the Death

"I don't know what Patience did that she's not doing now," Jack said aloud, "but I don't care. I've got her laptop, and I've got all her designs!" He laughed as he scrolled through Patience's files. "I don't even need her anymore! But, as long as I have to pick up Meg, I might as well stop in and give Patience a piece of my amazing mind."

The Spicer fleet of SMARTs rushed towards China, ready to land outside Chase's palace in about five minutes. They passed over mainland China, but the view was a little different from the usual.

In the distance, Jack saw the dark smudge that was the Land of Nowhere. It had a strange reddish glow to it, and dark clouds had formed overhead.

"Chase must be in an extra bad mood," Jack commented, leaning on the armrest. He slowed the fleet down once he came to the edge of the Land of Nowhere. He watched as a long, writhing dragon spiraled up from Chase's palace, whipping about as though in pain. Suddenly, it gave a particularly sharp flick of its tail and Jack was startled to see none other than Meg Kake come flying through the air towards him. He was so surprised that he didn't even open the blast shield right away.

Meg smacked against the industrial glass and stuck for a moment, laughing manically. Jack opened the shield and she dropped in gently, landing in the seat beside him.

"Oh, wow, Jack! That was so much fun! I'm so glad you're here! Chase and Miss Seek are absolutely trying to kill each other, and I don't know what it's about! Actually, I think they're fighting over the Master Pen, but they don't realize that I have it! Are you going to watch the fight with me? They've been at it for a long time now, so it's bound to end soon. I was getting kind of lonely, actually. Want some popcorn?"

Jack just stared for a moment, his mouth open a slit.

"Patience is fighting Chase?" he repeated. "Where is she?"

Meg just pointed, stuffing away some more popcorn.

"That?" Jack shouted. "That metal dragon thing is…Patience? Metal Dragon?" Jack just about jumped out of his chair. "No way! Is that how she built all the robots…?"

"And that's why they're breaking down," Meg added. "Chase kidnapped Miss Seek and must've been really mean to her or something."

"Great," Jack rolled his eyes. "So, if Patience loses, all my SMARTs will fall apart." He paused and glanced at her laptop. "Well, whatever. I can just rebuild them, and make them even better than before."

Meg started suddenly, spilling some popcorn.

"Oh! Look! Look! He is so mean!"

Jack flew the SMARTs a little closer, but ordered them to give the fight a constant, wide berth.

As Meg had pointed out, dragon-Chase was latched on to the Dragon of Metal, pummeling it with black magic fire.

Seek managed to flip Chase from her back, and turned fast enough to grab him in midair. The Dragon of Metal had massive, deadly talons like gauntlets, and a sectioned, armored body of strong silver metals.

"You're not the only one who will bite a dragon in two," Patience laughed, squeezing the trapped dragon-Chase.

"I dare you," he snickered back.

The jaws of the Dragon of Metal, filled with teeth like ten-foot daggers, lunged forward and went to bite Chase. But, at the last instant, Chase turned back to his human form and dropped easily from the Dragon's grip. Now able to fly, Chase flew for the Dragon's body, slamming into it with a heavy series of pedaling kicks.

Patience was knocked back a good distance, but wasn't hurt in the least.

"All the martial arts skill in the world won't be enough to win," she told him darkly.

"Then it's a good thing I have more than just my martial arts!" Chase said as he spiraled around the long body of the Dragon, making it chase him in corkscrews. Then, he lifted his hands over his head and fired a familiar blast of black and deep purple magic straight up, nailing the Dragon in the underside of its jaw. The spot where the metal was hit formed a kind of ugly, melting sore that dripped liquid metal for a few moments.

Seizing the chance, Chase flew up and got under the Dragon's armor to attack from within.

Jack and Meg watched in horror as the Dragon of Metal screamed and spiraled through the air.

"It looks like it just inhaled a bottle of mustard gas," Jack muttered.

The Dragon nearly tied itself in a knot, twisting around and coiling in a random, erratic manner.

"What is he doing?" Meg wondered as the Dragon seemed to be kicked from within.

Suddenly, it started to seemingly bleed. It began with its eyes, where red and white hot metal started to gush out. Its mane began to drip metal, which hardened while it fell and buried itself in the ground far below like frozen lighting bolts. Then, the flaming metal started to seep from between the gaps in its many sections and whip from the end of its tail. All the while, the Dragon of Metal still made sounds like screaming machinery and breaking gears, still struggling and thrashing in the air.

Then, finally, Jack and Meg caught sight of something disturbing. The Dragon stopped in mid-air, its arms spread and its chest pressed forward by some invisible force. A red-hot glow appeared in the center of its chest, no larger than six feet tall and a few feet across. The spot sparked a little and began melting. Then, suddenly, as though its heart was exploding, Patience was forced from the body of the Dragon of Metal. She came out back-first, Chase with one hand around her neck and the other fending off her continual attacks. Hot metal spewed from the rupture, and, as Seek and Chase plummeted towards the ground, the Dragon slowly died. Its metallic skull fell in on itself and its arms ripped away from its body, long stands of sticky looking metal stretching out in the socket.

Some sections of the Dragon dropped away while others melted, but in the end it was reduced to a smoking heap of wrecked metal in the middle of a Nowhere forest.

Seek and Chase plummeted down, still tearing into each other with uncontrolled rage. But, all too soon, they hit the ground together. A column of dust and earth shot into the air on contact, spraying debris like branches and rock. Jack and Meg both winced when it happened, though they had just about shrieked when the Dragon's heart seemed to be ripped out.

There was silence for a few moments. All Jack and Meg could hear was the humming of the SMART's engines, but they were too used to that by now to really notice. They did notice, however, when it suddenly stopped.

All the SMARTs turned off, died, and went into a free fall.

Jack swore loudly and profusely, opening the blast shield. He grabbed Meg by the arm and leapt from the cockpit with all his might.

Meg hung there for a moment and watched as a dozen thirty-story robots smashed to the ground and erupted in a blaze. Jack, she noticed, had at some point traded his Heli-pack for a sleek looking Jetpack, which was actually very similar to the Heli-pack in color and design, only vertically elongated.

"Let's see what happened," Meg called up to him.

"Take a wild and outrageous guess as to who won," Jack said sarcastically. He reached down and plucked the clinging Meg from his leg and held her like a football under one arm.

Jack descended to the forest, which had been cleared as if by Daisy Cutter from the force of the impact. He landed on the shredded dirt and sat Meg on the ground to look for Seek and Chase.

"If the SMART bots died, I wonder if Seek…" he began. But, he saw Meg's eyes turn pathetic and watery, so he didn't continue. "Hey, don't worry Meg. I'm sure she's just a cougar or a…a pancake."

Jack wandered forward carefully. Smoke was curling through the air, and steam from the bolts of cooling metal protruding from the earth hid his feet from sight. Trees were alight in the distance, showing the massive ring of destruction caused by the fight.

Eventually, Jack found the crater. It wasn't more than eight feet deep at its center, but it was at least fifty feet in radius. Jack stepped down the gradual decline, well aware that he might find something he didn't want to see at the center.

He looked down when he noticed the ground was coated in a thin skin of metal. It was slippery underfoot, looked like silver, and shimmered strangely in the light of all the fires.

Then, Jack saw movement ahead of him. He heard someone groan in pain and the sound of brushing clothes. A figure was walking from the crater, perpendicular to Jack. He could tell by his shape that it was Chase.

"C.Y!" Jack called out, running towards him. Chase looked at him sharply and let out a low, deadly hiss. His upper-body armor was gone, including his armguards, presumably melted away by Patience. His black shirt underneath was torn up the sleeves and his forearms were bleeding all over his hands. He had an envelope clenched in one fist, and, Jack saw as he walked away, a nasty burn snaking along the back of his neck and jaw.

"Where's Seek Patience?" Jack tried again.

"Hell, presumably," Chase said with an evil grin.

"She's dead?" Jack exclaimed, forgetting that Meg could probably hear him in the dense air.

"Don't know. But, if she is alive, let me know and I'll finish her off."

And Chase vanished into the shadows and fires.

"Aw, hell," Jack muttered, sliding on the metal towards where Chase had walked from.

He found her, lying face up, in the center of the depression. She looked dead, that was for sure. Her battle armor was shattered, leaving her in her black shirt and dark kilt. There was blood on her face, arms, hands, and seeping through the cloth of her pants.

(Author's note: Just as only Chase can pull off the Sock and Sandal combination, only Seek can pull off the Skirt and Pants look.)

Jack was sickened to see one place where a shattered bone had ripped a small hole in her shin. Her eyes were shut, but her face had lost all expression.

"Holy shit," Jack muttered, inching closer to feel for her pulse.

"What is it?" Meg called down from the rim of the basin, innocently unaware of the scene.

"Don't come down, Meg," Jack warned her. "It's not good."

"Is she okay?" she asked.

"Meg," Jack said slowly, "she is the opposite of okay."

Meg let out an angry, exasperated gasp.

"Ooh, Chase Young! You're in for it now!"

"Wait, Meg!" Jack called to her before she took off into bullet-time. "Slide me the Master Pen! Maybe there's someway I can help her with it."

Meg took out the Pen and set it down where the metal met the ground. On the smooth silver, the Pen easily slid down and straight to Jack.

"Got it."

Without waiting another moment, Meg took off after Chase.

"Let's see," Jack muttered, holding up the Pen. "What can I use…? The Hodoku Mouse? No, this wasn't a mistake. The RioReverso? No, that would turn her into genetic code. The Moby Morpher? No, that would just change her appearance, not heal her…Hmm…"

In the mean time, Meg appeared in front of Chase like a little bolt of lightning and let him know what she thought of him.

"How could you do that? You can't even get the Master Pen from her because she doesn't have it anymore! What is your problem? How could you hate someone so much? Can't you come up with any other solution other than violen…"

Chase smacked Meg across the head and knocked her to the side, continuing into the forest.

"Little freak," he muttered. "I wasn't fighting for the Master Pen."

"Hey! Get back here!" Meg screamed. She appeared in front of him again. "What do you mean you weren't fighting for the Master Pen? What were you fighting for? That?" Meg pointed to the envelope clenched in his hand, gradually absorbing blood. "Because that's just stupid. You can kill someone over a piece of paper!"

Chase went to send Meg soaring, but this time Meg dodged. In bullet-time, she tried to pry his hand open to get the letter, but she wouldn't have had the strength in real time to do so.

"Mind your own business, you impetuous, obnoxious little brat," he snapped at her viciously.

"This IS my business!" Meg screamed. "Miss Seek is my dentist and my buddy, and you can't just…"

Chase grabbed her by the collar mid-sentence and lifted her off her feet. He could tell by the way she shook violently that she was struggling in bullet-time, but there was no way to escape.

"If it will shut you up and make you go away, then we both wagered information. I won, so I won this information. Patience was trying to win something similar. But, we were fighting over past incidents, all of which are too numerous and complicated for your tiny, underdeveloped, Jell-O cup of a brain to understand!"

With that, Chase literally tossed her over his shoulder, through a burning tree, and all the way back to the edge of the crater.

Meg patted a fire out of one of her dreads before checking in with Jack.

"How is she?" Meg asked.

"Well, at the very least she's alive," called up to her. "Though, I don't know how that's even possible. The only problem is, I don't know how to wake her up. She'll probably die pretty soon, actually, since…"

"No!" Meg screamed. "You can't let her die! C'mon, Jack, you're the Evil Genius here! Use the Master Pen! There must be something you can do!"

"Emphasis on the 'evil' part," Jack said over his shoulder, though he couldn't see Meg through the still-dense smoke and steam.

Meg sat back and went into bullet-time to think. She, too, thought of all the Shen Gong Wu that might fix Patience, but she came to the same conclusions as Jack had. She tried to think of all the practical methods, too, but nothing seemed useful.

"Who saves the doctor when the doctor's dying?" Meg muttered.

Just then, a thought occurred to her.

"Chase stays immortally young with that soup…Wuya stays immortal by her Heylin magic…Dojo is almost immortal by Xiaolin Magic…"

She came out of bullet-time and called down to Jack.

"I have an idea! Make a sketchbook, and draw some kind of magic thingy that will keep Miss Seek alive! Just be creative!"

"I can't draw freehand," Jack said flatly.

"Then, search for something on the pen!" Meg exclaimed.

Jack, sitting beside the just barely breathing Patience, held up the Master Pen and scrolled through the list of every single object in existence.

"Cool, this thing can make tanks," he noticed idly. "I bet it can make SMARTs, too," he added with a devious and evil grin.

After a moment, he came upon something that he knew would work. The problem was: he wasn't sure if Patience would ever forgive him.

"Well, the dying can't be choosers," he sighed. "Master's Pen!"

Meg saw the flash of green light well up. Its power cleared the smoke and steam from the area. The stream of ink poured out and took on the shape of the thing that would so ironically save Seek.