Deadly Wands

by Brent Reilly

CHAPTER 17

  For several weeks, Billy would arrive in a big city, get a good night’s sleep, dominate the arena, deposit his winnings, then fly a thousand clicks to another city to avoid getting ambushed in his sleep.

  The night before he dominated Peking again, the entire city shook with hundreds of explosions. People filled the streets to find out what happened.

  Except Billy. He knew what happened, but not how. He couldn’t imagine how his father pulled it off. That man amazed him once again. That old dog kept showing him new tricks. Still, he argued with management in the hotel lobby and blasted a hole in the wall to leave a memorable alibi.

  That night, kids played soccer with the heads of dead Mongols -- which infuriated the nobility when they saw the news videos. The next evening, after beating several hundred duelers, Billy couldn’t get enough news. The more he read, the better he felt. Later he heard that thousands of homes had been bombed, some thousands of kilometers apart, which left Billy as slack-jawed as everyone else. Every night Billy had tossed and turned, inventing revenge fantasies, while his dad pulled off something bigger than he could ever dream of. Billy never lost his awe of his father.

  Then came a video that showed Genghis Khan screaming threats from a metal box while Americans dumped headless corpses on top. It showed Americans literally shitting on the Great Khan. They buried the Great Immortal under a giant pile of crap! Pundits called it Karma Mountain.

  Like millions across the world, Billy could not stop laughing. Every night, he had to take the news wands to his room so he wouldn’t be seen in public chuckling at Mongols getting what they had been dishing out for centuries. Reports said a deeply traumatized Khan went stark raving mad for months, pulling out his beard and blowing craters in the grass. The oppressive weight of his mother’s death finally lifted, although he’d forever miss her. All over the planet, millions of victims of Mongol cruelty felt the same. It was not quite a cure for depression, but it worked better than anything else.

  The government ordered massive retaliation against the Triads, but found it hard to identify them, much less punish them. To pre-empt that punishment, the Triads attacked more Guard units as if their lives depended on it. Either out of solidarity, or just for revenge, thousands of Chinese quads targeted Imperial Guards on their own. Since it became government policy to exterminate all Triads, and since Triads ran organized crime in every big city, open fighting broke out across China. Billy had accumulated more bronze coins than Global Bank could possibly utilize, so he spent several hundred tons of it hiring Chinese mercenaries to help the Triads. A surge of righteous nationalism swept the country as patriotic songs, plays, and art enjoyed a resurgence.

  Mongols killed the triad leaders before William could return the artifacts, so he gave them to the University of Taiwan, which displayed them in an enormous structure called The Baron’s Chinese Museum. William paid the government to send thousands of quads, who could pass for Chinese, to help the Triads kill Imperial Guards. William found American Jack’s trainers, helping to upgrade their air force, and hired them to recruit contract killers.

  The museum multiplied tourism and renewed Chinese antipathy towards their overlords. Because Mongols started targeting Chinese quads indiscriminately, a flood of Chinese moved to Taiwan. Their horror stories motivated Taiwanese quads to join the fight in China.

  William flew from Taiwan to Japan and offered to fund as many marathon divisions as they could form, on the condition that he could borrow them on demand. How they smuggled the money from Peking was their problem. On the way back, he met with the descendents of the last Korean kings, now living in poverty, and arranged to fund the training of a rebel air force.

  Billy won a fortune daily as he defeated a few hundred teams of four, day after day. It took weeks before word leaked that he was really the legendary Boy Wonder. He woke up every day, eager to avenge his mother, and slept like a baby, knowing he’d get to repeat it. When he couldn’t sleep, he’d fireball rich Mongol neighborhoods.

  So it was almost a shame when Billy saw his father eating at his favorite restaurant. The boy almost didn’t recognize his dad with a beard that resembled the Prussian dueler’s. Their scars looked very similar. They shared a knowing look and Billy nodded his head, to indicate he’d be prepared to die the next day.

  William actually arrived the week before with a few hundred American sailors who moved tons of gold to the ship he bought. William would never have dreamed of transporting to much wealth from Peking without local officials battling gangs.

  Every day William bet Billy’s money on their duel. Until then, nobody still bet against the boy, so William met all that pent up demand himself. Once word got out that some rich fool was acting as a counter-party, everyone placed their life savings on the Peking champion. It seemed like such a sure thing.

  The Boy Wonder’s last duel would become world famous. They swapped wands so William could extend longer flame to make him look almost equal. After several exciting minutes of exchanging giant fireballs, they drew swords. Since his father was the better swordsman, Billy didn’t have to fake much. William wanted everyone to see the Boy Wonder’s last duel, so they drew upon a decade of training together to make it as memorable as possible.

  Finally, the German got a lucky swipe that wounded the Boy Wonder’s leg, who left a trail of blood as he desperately stumbled away. Billy pretended to fight with just three wands, which had the crowd on the edge of their seats. They anticipated each other’s moves like mind readers. After an epic struggle, the duke wore the boy down and managed to stick him in the chest. While flailing about in pain, Billy covertly poured a heat-resistant oil on a mask that he used to cover his face under his helmet.

  Everyone in the stadium booed because they all bet on the boy. William pretended to transfer his own wands, then projected flame twelve meters to show they were now his. This convinced everyone that the transfer was real because there was no other way he could extend so much fire using someone else’s sticks.

  The Prussian duke he was impersonating was famous for being a jerk, so he insulted the audience, called himself the greatest dueler ever, and praised Prussia at the expense of Mongolia. In German. Though few understood him, most got the message and pelted him with food and garbage while stadium security formed a protective circle in case the mob stormed the winner. It would not be the first time.

  William then reached inside his pants for water that he colored yellow and pretended to pee on the Boy Wonder’s face to protect his son from the coming heat. To everyone’s shock, the duke blasted the beloved boy, watched the body flop over, then kicked it while screaming like a lunatic. This made identification more difficult later, when he replaced Billy in the morgue with a Mongol boy that William burned that morning. Billy had drunk so much pain killer that he barely felt anything. All he thought about was his mama.

  That night, after putting a corpse in his bed, William and Billy, dressed like rich nobles, forced their way into the hotel, demanded to know the duke’s room number, then kicked in the door to fireball the room. The hotel naturally called the police who found a dead body, a lot of gold, and wands burnt beyond recognition.

  And it worked. Mongols would grieve for years. The Kaiser then strained relationships between the kingdoms by demanding justice for his grandson.

  The Mongols took every decent quad to fight Americans in Siberia, so William, some English employees, and his American sailors robbed Bank of Mongolia branches.