All the years of boredom, math tests, gym classes, working at the library, and imagining exciting worlds that he’d never be able to visit—all those years had been worth it.
First of all, Owen was Kiel Gnomenfoot. That still made him tingle all over with awesomeness.
Second, Charm, Charm, was here, right next to him. Well, pushing a cabinet into the spot where the door had been previously with her superstrong robot arm, but still, close enough!
And third, he was about to fight robot soldiers. With magic.
“Ready?” Charm said, clicking her ray guns on in a tough, awesome way. “I’d prefer not to have to do all the work this time. Try to hold up your end of the fight, will you?”
“You take the ones on the left. I got the ones on the right,” Owen told her, grinning. He took out his wands and aimed them at the door. Now what spell should he use?
Spells? . . . Uh-oh. He didn’t know any spells. Yet.
“Actually, give me one minute,” he said, and turned around to where the Magister’s spell book sat halfway across the room.
“What?” Charm shouted, just as the cabinet exploded inward, covering them both in wood fragments. Laser beams blasted through the doorway, exploding all over the room and incinerating whatever they touched. None had hit the spell book yet, but it was only a matter of time.
That just confirmed exactly what Owen needed to do. Something heroic.
“Cover me!” he yelled, since that’s the kind of thing that one yelled in this type of situation. “I’m going to grab the spell book and hit them with something huge!”
“WHAT?” Charm shouted again. She fired her ray guns frantically through the door. “Don’t be stupid! You’re not even using a shield spell!”
“Who needs one?” Owen told her, then ran in a crouch toward the middle of the room.
Lasers hit the floor all around him, some just inches away, but Owen barely even noticed them. All he could think about were the readers, the thousands of readers who were on the edge of their seats, watching him do something incredibly stupid and dangerous and not even get touched.
This must be making Bethany crazy!
“They’re coming in!” Charm shouted. “I have to fall back!”
Owen glanced behind him at the door, where red eyes glowed from the smoke-filled hallway. Science Soldiers! He almost stopped moving, he wanted so badly to see what they actually looked like. But Charm shoved him forward, firing behind her as she ran.
“You useless magic-spewing pile of winged-cat droppings!” she yelled, smacking him with the back of her human hand. “This is what I meant by me doing all the work!”
If anything, she actually looked even cuter when she screamed like that. Owen flashed her a grin, then pushed himself the last few feet to the spell book, which miraculously had remained untouched, despite its pedestal being riddled with burn marks from the lasers. He yanked the book down and held a hand out over it, just as Kiel had always done. Give me a powerful and impressively cool spell to use on the robots! he thought.
A golden glow flooded through his body, like chicken noodle soup when you were sick in the middle of winter. Owen almost gasped. It just felt so right. All his life, he’d been waiting for something like this, and finally, finally it was here.
“Stand back,” he told Charm, then stood up in the middle of the laser fire. “SCIENCE SOLDIERS! I will return thee to the metal pits from whence you came!”
“Are you insane?” Charm hissed, yanking at his cloak to pull him down.
“Insanely awesome,” he told her, then winked.
Kiel always winked.
Five Science Soldiers entered the room, their lasers firing everywhere. For just a second Owen stopped to marvel at how cool the robots were. They’d evolved throughout the series, starting as just plain metal humanlike robots, but by book two, Dr. Verity began inventing new types. There’d been the Science Spies, who looked exactly like humans, and the Science Police, metallic robots in uniforms who stood on every corner of every Magisteria town in book five, watching for any hint of magic or rebellion.
But these . . . these were Science Soldiers, the most dangerous of them all. Their entire bodies were weapons, bombs ready to explode as a last resort, taking out anything nearby. Their arms were basically laser rifles with hands, those hands each holding more laser rifles. And their eyes could see through anything but metal, scanning constantly for magical energy.
Honestly, they’d have actually been pretty scary if Owen hadn’t known they’d never managed to hit either Kiel or Charm in any of the six books so far.
“I’ve got just the thing for you, my friends,” he told them, raising his hands. “A little spell called Explosion of Fiery Greatness!”
“You said that was too powerful !” Charm hissed from right beside him. “You’ll kill us both!”
“I’ve got this,” Owen told her, then ran through the spell in his mind. “Hope you like your explosions ENORMOUS!” he shouted at the robots, the spell’s energy coursing through him. He raised his hands, then released the power straight at the robots.
And then everything exploded into fire and chaos and awesome.