“Yeah. You’ll know it when you find it. And if you survive the day and make it back, come and find me in the Mesoshire. We’ll have a lot to talk about. And I probably won’t know you. Just tell me to look at the mirror and count what I see.”
“Er,” Max replied.
“I know, sounds a bit crazy. Just tuck that last bit away. For now, the key is to just relax.”
It seemed that anytime someone told Max to “just relax,” it was because he was about to have something bad happen to him, whether it came from a teacher, a coach, or a nurse holding a big needle. In the end, “just relax” might be the most unrelaxing thing you could ever say to a person.
The Wez started to shimmer.
“A long time ago I met the creatures hunting you . . . ,” the Wez said, his voice trailing off as if he were falling down a well. “Remember, this isn’t just about you; it’s about every human being on the face of the planet. If you die, the world dies with you, Max.”
“Oh yeah, telling him that will get him to relax,” Dirk said, turning to Max. “He doesn’t know you very well, does he?”
And with that the Wez popped out of view.
“You humans are very exciting,” Yah Yah said, looking around at the group.
“So what do we do now . . . besides relax?” Sarah asked.
Yah Yah pointed to the light at the top of the obelisk. “When it turns green we go in. It won’t be long now.”
Max looked at the empty space between the flashing lights—he guessed the space was probably five or six times bigger than a football field. “And what happens when we enter, exactly?”
Yah Yah looked over at the hunting grounds and then spoke with a heavy voice. “Wonderment. Then fear. Then death.”
All things considered, Max thought, Yah Yah could use some help when it came to his pep talks.
Overhead, the flashing light turned green.
Max was completely unprepared for what happened when he stepped past the large obelisk. There was a kind of invisible wall, like a thick strand of spiderweb that stretched around the ground’s perimeter. As Max and his friends entered, they could feel the tension on their hands and bodies, stretching just a bit and then disappearing as they passed through. But on the other side everything had changed. For one, it was no longer night outside, but day. And instead of the forest they were standing in the middle of a desert. A hundred yards ahead, a jagged pyramid rose out of the sand and was the only visible structure. Meanwhile, frobbits and faeries began popping in as their platoons marched forward.
“Wow,” Sarah gasped as she shielded her eyes from the sun. “I wasn’t expecting anything like this.”
“Hey, that’s a ziggurat!” Dirk exclaimed, pointing to the pyramid. “I know because I was the dungeon master for the Sun God of the Ziggurat module.” The priest frobbits, seeing Dirk point, suddenly fell to their knees and began chanting at the ancient-looking structure. “No!” Dirk chastised them. “This is not the temple of the great and powerful Dirkster.” The priest frobbits rose, dusting the sand from their robes and playing the whole thing off.
“I don’t understand,” Max said to Yah Yah, who had joined him. “Where are we?”
“We are still in the hunting grounds,” Yah Yah replied. “This is the way it is here—the land can take many forms, but only inside the great blinking structures.”
“It’s like this is all a game,” Sarah said, looking around. “And basically we’re standing on the game board.”
Max looked at the ziggurat. “Do you think we should go there?”
“In Sun Tzu’s Art of War it says you should never fight going uphill.”
“General Sarah is wise,” Yah Yah confirmed. “Normally we bury ourselves in the sand and wait for the battle to end.”
“Does that ever work?” Max asked.
“Not so much, no.”
Suddenly it occurred to Max that the dwarf was missing. “Where’s Dwight?”
They turned and looked around but there was no sign of him. Meanwhile, frobbits and faeries continued to enter the hunting grounds.
“He was walking right beside me,” Sarah said.
“Maybe we should go back and look for him,” Max suggested. They turned and walked back, but Max and his friends went past the point they had entered without ever appearing at the forest. Max stopped, completely confused. Sand stretched out to the horizon, and it felt as if they could keep walking through it forever.
“How’s this possible?” Sarah exclaimed, stopping next to Max and looking around. “We should be out by now.”
Yah Yah came running up to the group. “He’s not here,” he exclaimed. “I’ve checked everywhere, but there’s no sign of him.”
“I don’t understand,” Max said, already baking under the desert sun. “Has this ever happened before?”
Yah Yah shrugged. “We’ve never brought a dwarf before.”
Finally the group decided there was nothing more to do but rejoin the troops and hope for the best. They marched toward the ziggurat, the sand making it hard to move. By the time they reached the structure’s base, Max was panting and drenched in sweat. The pyramid itself appeared to be constructed out of large blocks of sandstone, each about five feet high.
“What now?” Max gasped, looking at Sarah.
“I think we form a perimeter around the base,” Sarah answered, turning to Yah Yah. “Have the infantry units line up on the bottom level, and tell the faeries to take up a defensive position higher up.” Yah Yah nodded and ran off, issuing the orders. Max watched as two frobbits joined hands by interlocking their fingers, then hoisted two of their companions, one after the other, to the first step. Those two then did the same, until the frobbits had a fairly efficient ladder system going. The faeries simply flew to the top, however, making it look easy.
Dirk and Sarah had joined hands and motioned for Max to step up. He found himself strangely annoyed that Dirk was holding Sarah’s hand. “I’m not sure this is going to work—it looked a lot smaller from a distance,” he said, still catching his breath from all the sand walking.
“Come on, you can do it,” Dirk called out.
“Yeah, we’ll help you,” Sarah added.
Max awkwardly stepped into their cupped hands, but when he put his weight down Dirk and Sarah fell forward, nearly banging heads.
“Wow—you’re heavier than you look,” Dirk exclaimed, shaking his tingling fingers back to life. “And you look pretty heavy.”
“You know what, this was a stupid idea,” Max said, kicking at the sand. “How am I supposed to fight some robot hunter when I can’t even climb a step?” He glanced over at Sarah, who was looking a lot more vulnerable and girl-like than he remembered. He realized she was depending on him—that no matter how smart and capable she was as a general, Max was the only person in the entire universe who could save her. The realization seemed to awaken something in him, and suddenly his mind stretched out to the Codex and touched a spell that seemed big and heavy.
“Gravity,” Max said, his voice as deep as if he were standing at the base of a large canyon. Suddenly he, Dirk, and Sarah began to float into the air.
Max could feel his friends in his mind, and he wrapped the spell around them as if it were a kind of blanket. From there it took no more effort than to think where he wished to go, and they were gently carried in that direction. Below, the frobbits stood in wide-eyed wonderment. The priests were on their knees, bowing frantically.
“Hey, how about a little warning first!” Dirk exclaimed, his arms flailing.
“Max, you’re doing this?” Sarah shouted, looking around uneasily.
But Max didn’t answer—he was completely focused on controlling the immensity of the spell. He carefully guided them to the top of the ziggurat and set them down. When he finally released the spell it blew away from his consciousness, and Max’s limbs felt as if he’d just spent an entire gym class trying to do the rope climb. He plopped down, exhausted.
“Max!” Sa
rah exclaimed, putting her hands on his shoulders.
Max looked up at her, adjusting his glasses and doing his best to smile. “Weird, huh?”
Sarah smiled, taking a seat next to him and letting her feet hang over the top stone. Below, the frobbits had resumed their climbing while the snow faeries looked on with confused expressions. “I don’t know how you did that—but it was impressive. Really.”
The truth was, Max didn’t know how he’d done it either. When he’d thought about Sarah, knowing he was responsible for her, the spell had suddenly come to him.
“Dirk, why don’t you have your guys keep a lookout,” Sarah suggested.
“Yeah, good idea.” Dirk began organizing his priests to scan for trouble.
It didn’t take long.
A snow faerie pointed, and Dirk turned to see something coming at them, floating rather slowly through the air. Dirk was about to shout an alarm when he recognized it as the frobbit Max had accidentally lit on fire. “Uh, Max?” Dirk said, tapping Max on his shoulder.
Max looked up to the see the floating frobbit drift by, close enough that the bandage on his nose was clearly visible. Max and the frobbit made eye contact, and Max hurried to try to find the spell in his mind again, but it wasn’t there. All Max could do was watch the frobbit float past, drifting gently to wherever the wind took him. The frobbit didn’t look especially happy about it.
Suddenly there was a commotion at the base of the pyramid. Max jumped to his feet and looked down. Yah Yah was several steps below, pointing frantically at the base of the ziggurat. “The hunter!”
Robotouille had popped up near a clump of frobbits along the pyramid’s base. The metallic rat’s metal ears twitched and its talons clicked against one another. Many of the frobbits had dived headfirst into the sand, arms and legs flailing in an attempt to bury themselves. Robotouille sprang forward, its metallic tail twisting like a snake as its claws clamped down on the shoulder of a frobbit who was trying to get away.
Sarah ran to the side, yelling at the frobbits to form up as a squad, but thousands of years of panic-based instincts were overriding two weeks of training. The snow faeries managed to nock their arrows, but there was so much chaos below that they didn’t dare fire. The captured frobbit who was struggling against the powerful grip of the machine suddenly reached up and grabbed the arm of the robotic rat and flipped it over his shoulder. It was a near-perfect judo throw, and Sarah felt some measure of satisfaction at seeing the frobbit execute it successfully. The robot rat, lying flat on the sand, froze momentarily. Since it hadn’t been programmed for a frobbit that actually fought back, its processing unit had decided the flipping incident required a system-wide reboot. It was just enough time for the frobbit to slip away and make a run for it.
Sarah yelled for the other frobbits to attack. It was a word she had had to teach them, since there was no frobbit-language equivalent (compared to the seventeen ways to say “surrender”). The frobbits gripped their weapons and advanced, but they were largely unsure what to do. Max looked down at his spell book, the panic of actually being in a fight making it hard for him to find the spell he was looking for. Instead, he opened the page to the first thing he could find: the Level One Spell of Tentative Candle Ignition, and read it.
Robotouille’s tail flipped the robot rat back onto its feet. It stretched its hand out as two butcher knives extended from hiding places along its arms, traveling down until they settled in each of the skeletal fingers with a loud click. Its head scanned the area, ears twitching like tiny radar units looking for the most available victim. It found one: a frobbit rapidly digging a hole just a few feet away. When the frobbit looked back and saw the robot hunter bearing down on him, he gulped and began digging faster. Robotouille’s processor prepared to ring up its first kill. It leapt with lightning speed over to where the hapless frobbit was working and raised its blades for the killing blow.
Max let the spell fly. The flame, designed to light a candle so a novice wizard wouldn’t have to get out from under the sheets on a cold morning, suddenly took life deep within the central core of the robotic rat’s computer brain. The flame was small and short-lived, but it quickly burned through the main logic chip that controlled nearly all of Robotouille’s primary functions. The robot rat froze, blades still hanging in the air, then it tipped slowly forward, falling headfirst into the sand (the two meat cleavers landing on both sides of the wide-eyed frobbit). A whiff of black smoke drifted from the armor-plated head and its eyes went dark.
It was an unprecedented moment for the frobbits. They stopped their running and hiding and tentatively approached Robotouille, poking at it and then jumping away. But the monster showed no signs of life. A great cry went up from the troops, and Yah Yah turned to see Max staring down in astonishment, the open Codex in his hand.
“Max, you did it! What powerful magic!” Yah Yah shouted as another cheer rose up from the ranks.
“Uh . . . yeah,” Max said, closing the book. He must have gotten lucky—that was the only explanation.
Dirk was jumping up and down and pumping his fist in the air. “What, is that all you got? Stupid robots, we owned you!”
CHAPTER THIRTY
NOTHING RUINS YOUR DAY LIKE A KILLER CUBE
(THE TECHRUS—FUTURE)
BACK AT MACHINE CITY, THERE WAS A STUNNED SILENCE. THE ENTIRE stadium had been turned into a 3-D holograph of the hunting grounds, showing a bird’s-eye view of the pyramid and the battle below. They had watched Robotouille meet its end almost as if they were there. And now they watched as two frobbits pried the meat cleavers from the robot’s hands. Never before in the history of the hunt had something actually killed a hunter—at least not on purpose. It was a moment of shock for the machine cubes watching from the stadium. The fact that the humans could do such a thing sent real fear traveling along their networked connections. They started to reconsider their initial assessment of the soft-looking humans. Even Robo-Princess had to admit that seeing the boy defeat the hunter, even though it was part of her larger plan, was unsettling. Max didn’t look like the great sorcerers she had seen over the years. But he’d managed to lift himself and his friends to the top of the pyramid (which was a pretty good bit of magic), as well as kill Robotouille without so much as a giant fireball, upheaval of earth, or even freezing cones of death. The boy had simply pointed at the hunter and it was over. Perhaps she had underestimated him.
Robo-Princess issued a silent command for the big screen to switch to an image of Wall-up. “Our first hunter has died a valiant death,” she said, her voice booming from the amplified speakers around the Machine City stadium. “Normally Robotouille could have hacked through the ranks of such an army single-handedly. But we must move on—it’s what our dear hunter would have wanted. And besides, you all know our next champion. Don’t let his looks fool you—he’s been reinforced against the harshest environments. Tough, determined, and unstoppable, let’s see how the humans fare against Wall-up!” The applause rose again to fill the stadium as the machines anticipated the retribution that Wall-up would surely bring. “And let’s give our players a new world to contend with as well!” The holographic field suddenly shimmered.
Back on the pyramid, Max turned to Yah Yah. “Cenede told us there’d be three rounds, so that must have been the first.” But before Yah Yah could respond, everything blurred and seemed to fall out of place. When the world came back together, they were no longer standing on top of a desert pyramid. Instead, they found themselves inside the gutted hull of some giant spaceship left broken and stripped. In fact, they seemed to be in a huge junkyard of sorts, with old machines and equipment littered everywhere.
“I was right!” Sarah exclaimed as she shook off the strange sensation and caught a frobbit who was about to tumble over. “They’ve changed the game board again. And probably made it harder.”
“Some kind of futuristic graveyard,” Dirk said, his eyes wide. “Maybe there’s some useful stuff lying around.”
“There’s definitely things we can use as better weapons,” Sarah replied, bending down to pick up a pipe. “Spread the word for our infantry to re-arm themselves. Have the faeries post sentries and be on the lookout—we don’t know what could be out here waiting for us.”
Several frobbits acknowledged the order and ran off. One of them, to Sarah’s annoyance, was skipping.
“Yeah, this makes total sense,” Dirk said, looking around. “We have to fight through various levels until we work our way up to the big boss.”
“That would be Robo-Princess,” Yah Yah added. “She’s the one the others follow.”
“Round two, then,” Max said.
Yah Yah found a long piece of jagged metal, tossing his club in favor of the heavier weapon. “You’ve taught us that we can fight and win. Now we just need the strength to do it again.”
“It’s not about strength, it’s about our wizard and his powerful magic,” Dirk said, turning to Max. “You just got to keep doing what you’re doing, buddy. I bet you’re totally like level four by now.”
“I was lucky,” Max admitted, not liking Dirk’s assessment of his magical prowess. He thought he’d feel better by saying it out loud, but it didn’t help.
“There’s no such thing as luck,” Glenn added from his scabbard. “Just ask the footless rabbit. Seriously—they’re easy to catch.”
Sarah decided to ignore Glenn—she had work to do.
“So what’s our plan?” Max asked. “It would be real easy to get lost or separated in all of this.”
“Now that the machines know we can beat them I’m guessing they won’t be caught off guard,” Sarah answered. “Sun Tzu wrote that you should advance only if it’s to your advantage. So I think it’s best not to spend too much time exploring—we should set up a defensive position pretty much where we are. There are places to hide, and maybe we can spring a trap.”
Max nodded, more glad than ever that Sarah was with him. “Okay. I’ll look for another spell.”
“Good,” Sarah replied. “I’ll reconnoiter and see what we have to work with.” Sarah pointed to a hollowed-out structure some thirty yards away and began jogging over to it. “I’ll be over here if you need anything,” she called back over her shoulder.
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