Deadly Wands

by Brent Reilly

CHAPTER 73

  Despite their defeat in southern India, the Mongols in northern India clearly did not expect 20,000 enemy quads to show up at the provincial capital. The Khan and the assault on Ceylon had bled their units of those identifying as Mongolian, so when the Baron identified himself with his scream, backed by a sky full of quads, the Indian troops mostly cheered. The twins didn’t get the battle they expected, but they got some therapy killing the governor and his family. The twins’ extended family had plenty of Mongol blood, so they offered an amnesty to anyone who accepted the new democratic government.

  Billy didn’t want to kill Indians, so he waited for enemy units to offer battle. Instead, those who didn’t support the new regime either remained silent or left.

  As they toured the cities, most people welcomed the twins, hoping they’d resuscitate the dead economy. To that end, Billy let every quad who recorded a video swearing loyalty to the new democratic government to get free food from the pass. In one swoop, the cousins learned the identities of every quad they could count on. More importantly, they knew they couldn’t trust any quad not on their list. Billy barely had enough wagons to haul the gold, so much of that food would rot unless eaten soon. Every militia soon returned to distribute food to the cities they served, then went back for more.

  Distributing gold, food, and supplies ended the war before it began. It’s hard to rebel against overlords giving away fortunes. The Red Baron gave it the credibility it needed. And it helped that they scheduled elections, rather than rule by fiat. Just like that, several million people left the Empire. This was the first time things went as well as Billy hoped.

  Billy sent for enough employees to convert every Bank of Mongolia branch into Global Bank centers. All the deposits were now his. He had to wait for the first team to arrive, so he sent his super-quads to Grandma.

  In his last speech, Billy set up a competition: “The Republic of India in Ceylon is expanding north. The faster the Republic of Northern India expands south, the stronger, safer, and richer it will be.”

  Forming a competition in the minds of all Indians would speed up the liberation of the subcontinent and give a sense of inevitability to Indian rule. Millions of mixed descent would chose the side they thought would win. Whereas before no one doubted the Mongols would prevail, now no one doubted that the Indians would win. Doubters had only to look at what the Baron did in Europe.

  Once the wagon train arrived, the cousins would have twenty-six long distance battalions, a sense of urgency that the Republic of India didn’t, and a hell of a lot of coin.

  Billy left confident that the new kingdom would thrive. Now he had to destroy the remains of a mighty armada with just four thousand super-quads.

  For the first week, the Mongols posted layers of sentries because they couldn’t believe the Red Baron would not hunt them down. By the second week, they relaxed because no one had attacked them. So Billy’s super-quads surprised them completely.

  Still, the twenty thousand would have fought much better if they knew they faced only four thousand.

  With strong winds, heavy rain, and dark clouds, they posted sentries on the ground rather than get blown away in the storm. The Mongols spread out over several small hills to make bombardment less effective.

  So Billy formed his super-quads in a skirmish line on the ground. They walked quickly into the Mongol camp, stabbing and slashing the sleeping quads as they went. The wind and rain drowned out their shouts, while terrible visibility and rolling hills masked their presence among the trees. As they progressed, more Mongols lived long enough to blast, but the sound did not carry far and Team Red stuck with steel to avoid noisy firefights.

  For several minutes, things went so smoothly that Billy hoped they could cross the entire camp. But all good things end too soon.

  Out of Billy’s hearing, the enemy spotted his troops walking down a hill, killing as they went. A Mongol woke his teammates by blasting Team Red, and soon a few hundred Mongols were shooting from behind trees, stopping the advance. Not dumb enough to charge out in the open, Team Red flew up and over these Mongols to use their maneuverability in the air to pick off the easy targets on the surface.

  It was the right tactic. Unfortunately, aerial blasts carried much farther, waking up more Mongols.

  Billy’s skirmish line broke down. Some companies advanced far, while their neighboring company fought duels above the treetops. As Mongols tried to flank the aerial duelers, they came upon the super-quads on the ground, triggering desperate fights in the dark. The two sides became mixed up, which cost Team Red some of its advantages.

  In contrast, Billy had a great night. He had plenty of practice, so his team advanced the farthest. Whenever Mongols looked too closely, Billy sang the latest Mongolian hit song or yelled something reassuring to buy enough time to get within twenty meters. He heard some firefights, but had no reason to retreat until he reached the peak of a hill and saw the extent of the battlefield. Some of his companies advanced a kilometer into the Mongol camp, where they could be attacked from behind. Hell, Billy realized, his own company could be ambushed from the rear.

  Billy gathered his team together, flew behind a thousand or so Mongols pushing back his neighboring team, and surprised the enemy from behind -- what Mongol tacticians call The Sodomy Maneuver. Billy now flew over the battlefield to signal retreat as the entire Mongol force would soon be upon them. They had a great victory. Now all they had to do was break off and enjoy it.

  They rallied in dense woodlands across from a stream, behind a large outcropping just a five minute flight away. Billy’s company hovered in a line between the rally point and the camp to drive back enemies pursuing too closely. He noted which team members flew by and which had wounds.

  Then something prompted him to fly higher.

  Billy noticed a fierce firefight in the enemy’s camp. It now dawned on him that he had not seen Princess. Instead of fading away, the firefight grew in intensity. Stomach churning, Billy tapped his throat and shouted down to his unit:

  “Do my scream when you engage.”

  Billy knew this was bad. Superior quads maximize their advantage by keeping a distance because they could fly and fire better. It’s so much easier to avoid small, slow fireballs than big, fast ones.

  Knots tied up his stomach as he raced full out and saw his worst nightmare -- an aerial rumble where numbers mattered more than skill. The remains of a company battled a thousand Mongols and some of the dead bodies on the ground were mothers of his children. He glimpsed Tiny picking up Prince, who looked dead, while Princess held off several Mongols in a blur of sword fighting.

  Time to distract the enemy.

  Billy risked blowing out his vocal chords by tapping his throat with both hand wands. His primal scream erupted all on its own, voiced with greater fear, rage, and intensity than Billy had ever known. Later, watching the video, he didn’t recognize himself. It was like a parent shouting down a child, if that parent was Thor and he used thunder to yell. Billy’s throat would remain raw for weeks, but he accomplished his goal: letting the enemy know that the Red Baron was coming.

  The verbal assault froze the battlefield as hardened warriors felt chills run down their spines. It was like crawling into a cave, then having a mother bear roar in your face. Hearing the Baron’s scream on video did not compare to the terror of hearing it in person; it was like virgins comparing sex with watching porno. Few would have been surprised if a giant troll crashed through the trees. The enemy backed up, seeking the protection of comrades, squinting in the dark to see the new threat through the rain. They looked more at each other than the vulnerable enemies virtually at their feet.

  Billy rose in an arc to fire at the densest mass of Mongols below him. He descended like a meteor farting streaks of fire. All enemy eyes could not help but focus on him. Billy knew his quads on the ground would use this opportunity to break contact. Since he had so many targ
ets, he continued his controlled fall, firing as fast as he could. His powerful wands barely needed to breathe, so his fireballs flew in a virtually continuous stream.

  No one had ever seen that before, and many were not sure what to make of it.

  Having captured their attention, he needed to keep it. He extended his full forty-four meter wingspan -- he no longer hid his recent gains -- and twirled among the Mongols as fast as his body could rotate. The Baron struck them like a tornado.

  While the tip of a sharp blade can pierce body armor if given enough force, a sword’s edge just scratches the surface. So, instead of blades, Billy used fire. Falling among them, he positioned his boot wands at an angle to keep spinning. When he fell too far, he reversed thrust to spin back up, like a cyclone with two fiery arms. They were so numerous that Billy didn’t have to see them to burn them.

  His boot wands blasted at those below him, which threw him in the air, like a dancing drunk. It looked like he bounced off of invisible walls in the sky, but it worked since this made it harder to predict where he’d be the next second. Every heartbeat he changed his elevation, speed, and trajectory, like kids learning to fly.

  Billy’s flames obscured the battlefield. The rain turned his fire into mist, the hissing sound surprisingly loud against the falling rain. The aerial dance now had music. The Mongols projected shields, even though a thin stream of fire would not injure them. It was like the Baron held a water cannon in each hand, except it blew fire instead of liquid. In a very crowded quarter-kilometer of cubic space -- not unlike an open-air stadium arena -- Billy used dual twenty-two-meter long flames to burn a dozen enemies a heartbeat, and horrify the rest.

  Billy glimpsed a few thousand Mongols staring up in confusion, not sure what they were seeing. If they joined the fight, then not even his one hundred quads could save his troops on the ground. But first they had to understand what faced them. It looked like a giant fire serpent dancing in front of a mirror, the way the lines of flame flowed, curled, and snapped. Forty-four meters of air hissed like an angry snake. With every heartbeat more steam rose to cloud their night vision.

  Although someone had to later point it out to him, what Billy did was not unlike the fire dance that Diva taught him, but delivered with a desperate fury that confounded expectations. The video montage would soon stun viewers worldwide.

  A Mongol above him recorded the “fire” fight and used the sale to fund his early retirement. Although the Sun was far beyond the horizon, it nevertheless did not look like nighttime. It was easier to imagine a two-headed fire-breathing dragon with one hell of a cough than one guy taking on a thousand quads with just flames.

  As Billy staggered vertically and horizontally, he crashed into enemies unpredictably. Billy felt something whack or cut or burn him every other heartbeat. He passed through pockets of super-heated air as if campfires filled the sky. He thanked Princess for bringing him more of George’s armor. Something almost knocked his head off and his left boot wand kept coughing. Because of the rain, Billy had no idea that tears of fear for Princess flowed down his face like rivers. He prided himself on his tactical sense, his self-control, and foreseeing the immediate future, but now he became a fiery tornado hell bent on destruction.

  With all his twirling, he could not keep an eye on his wife, so he tracked her grunting and groaning as she sliced off limbs, lanced chests, and whacked helmets. It sounded like his wife was having great sex. Without him. But as long as he knew she lived, he was free to fight like a fire demon. She didn’t know it, but just one moment of silence would have undone him. Him -- the mighty quad who spooked history’s greatest empire. He heard her yelp in pain, and would have turned to make sure she was okay, but she screamed in outrage and Billy clearly heard a terrified Mongol loudly curse her -- and that anger made him love her all the more. When he next saw her, she still hovered above her twin, daring the big bad men to come any closer. Not only did the sight make his heart leap, but it gave him an untimely erection that pressed uncomfortably against his body armor. In a weird irony, Princess hurt the one part of him the Mongols left uninjured.

  Smoke, steam, and mist now obscured the battle zone. Billy didn’t defeat the enemy so much as blind them. The Baron didn’t even kill many of them. Instead, he worked his fire dance like a flute player controlling a cobra.

  Every second felt like eternity, although it couldn’t have been more than a minute before reinforcements arrived. His company repeated his arc and one hundred super-quads -- each touching a wand to their throats -- screamed like a million stadium fans outraged at a referee for an impossibly bad call. The sound wave hit Billy like a gust of wind and covered his exposed flesh in goose bumps.

  But Billy, at least, expected them, and popped down to get out of the way. No sooner did his feet touch solid earth than he fell, his head still dizzy from spinning. Tiny kicked him to get up, but instead he flopped like a fish on a beach, mostly defenseless and completely terrified. He could almost taste the fishing hook in his lip.

  The closest Mongols could only see a dark shadow falling menacingly towards them. As if fighting the Red Baron was not enough. And who knew what to make of the piercing scream that sounded like a dragon belching? They sure as hell did not venture closer to find out.

  Because no one knew what the Baron looked like, the superstitious speculated that he was super-human. The videos this fight produced would give their worst fears better imagery.

  Then a few hundred large fireballs swept the sky like a volcano exploding sideways. A cloud of mist drifted up in their wake, creating an impermeable wall between Team Red and the Mongols. Their simultaneous screams and the sudden stench of burnt flesh cost even the bravest of Mongols their nerve. Those who fled slowest were next.

  Later, his friends would praise Billy for his brilliance, but he couldn’t remember ordering them to scream as one. Billy agreed it was clever, but couldn’t claim credit, despite one hundred witnesses. It became really popular with parents who’d project the clip to cower their kids. Even Mongol veterans could praise the tactic over lonely campfires. All that mattered to Billy was that even more enemies feared the Red Baron. When Billy closed his eyes, he could hear his mother laughing with savage glee.

  “That’s my boy!” she’d say proudly.

  Diva, pregnant with their third child, had her guts split open and Billy saw his unborn son on the bloody grass. That baby would have been his first redhead. The Russian known as Crotch, because he fondled his penis like a wand, had several fatal wounds. That elderly Swiss lady who kissed his feet literally lost her head. Zulu, a fierce African great-grandson of American Jack, bled too much to fly. Billy’s flopping on the ground kicked Dreamy, who certainly looked dead from a nasty head wound, but who shocked him by yelling, "I'm awake, I'm awake." Billy didn't know how many they lost in the entire battle, but he could see a few dozen dead friends just in this firefight. With the enemy blind and bewildered, they carried back their wounded.

  Although the Mongols didn’t press their momentary advantage, their victory no longer felt victorious.