HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE?” JIA shouted. “How can they teleport? We destroyed the book of Summoning, and Damian’s under William’s spell!”
“Please don’t tell me you messed with my mind when I burned it the second time, Fort,” Rachel said, but he shook his head.
“It’s gone, I promise. The only other person who could be doing this would be Damian, obviously, or …” He trailed off, but Rachel completed his thought.
“Or Gabriel,” she said, clenching her hands into fists. “If Colonel Charles let him come back to the school, the colonel and I are going to have a long talk.”
“Looks like you’re going to get your chance,” Jia said, and pointed to the streets below. Fort and Rachel both looked over again, and even from a distance, they could still make out the colonel’s uniform at the front of one of the squads of soldiers.
“Fort,” Rachel said quietly, “get us down there. Now.”
Already ahead of her, Fort opened a portal to a point on the street just in front of William’s monster. As one, he, Jia, and Rachel stepped through and found themselves facing the first squad of soldiers, who immediately raised their Lightning rods.
“Turn back!” Rachel yelled at the TDA forces, waving her sword in the air. “We will take care of this!”
“She’s got a weapon!” someone shouted, and a lightning bolt came sizzling toward them.
Rachel batted it away with her sword and growled loudly. “Did you not hear me? I said, go away! You can’t handle this, not like—”
“Behind you!” another of the soldiers shouted, and Fort whirled around to find William’s giant Spirit foot crashing down toward them from above. He quickly opened a portal, and the three of them fell right through it a moment before the foot landed, cracking the street in half and knocking the TDA forces to the ground.
They emerged on a roof just above where they’d been but quickly teleported again as William crashed his giant hand through the roof of the building they’d landed on.
“There might still be people inside there!” Rachel said from the next roof, pointing at the building, where more orange rivers of light were rising out. “Fort, get them out! Jia, use your magic to help whoever needs it. I’m taking that thing down!”
Fort nodded and opened two more portals, one back to the building they’d just been standing on, and the other to a building closer to William’s height on the monster for Rachel. Fort ran through the first and found a mostly empty office building, thankfully. But the remaining people who hadn’t yet had their spirits stolen by William were now trapped beneath the collapsed roof.
The first two he found, he was able to teleport back to Jia on the last roof for healing, but the rest were going to take more work: If he shifted the rubble too much, it might collapse in other spots, causing more injuries.
As Fort looked around for a way to save them, again, he couldn’t understand why William would do this. He’d wanted to help fix the world, not hurt his own people! How much of this was the Spirit magic taking him over, and how much was it just magnifying something within himself?
Part of Fort didn’t want to know that answer, since it’d mean he’d have to think long and hard about what he’d seen himself do in Cyrus’s future vision.
“Help!” someone screamed, and Fort ran over to find a woman with an enormous concrete beam pinning her lower half to the floor. “Please, I can’t feel my legs!”
“Don’t worry,” he told her, readying his spell as carefully as he could, hoping to avoid any further collapse. “I’ve got you.”
“You?” she said as he carefully opened a teleportation portal just below her. “But you’re a kid—”
And then she teleported to the roof, and he moved on to the next.
Outside, he heard lightning sizzling almost constantly as more TDA forces reached William, but they didn’t seem to do much good. He had to get back out there to help, but the farther he advanced into the building, the more people he found, and he couldn’t just leave them there.
When he finally teleported what he hoped was the last person to Jia, she stuck her head back through the portal. “Fort, get back here! Rachel needs help!”
He leaped through the portal and quickly saw that things had gotten much worse: Easily half the buildings around William had been destroyed now, including the building where Fort had sent Rachel.
“You need to get me over there!” Jia shouted, grabbing Fort’s arm and whirling him around to point at a different building, where Rachel was swinging her sword at William’s giant hand. She barely missed, and William took advantage of that by punching right through the building beneath her. She managed to catch herself on solid air, but another blow was heading toward her, and she wouldn’t have time to get her sword up.
“Now!” Jia shouted, and Fort opened a portal again, but instead of sending Jia through it, he instead made it big enough to fit William’s entire hand.
The giant fist passed through the portal and out the other side, which Fort had placed directly in front of the Spirit monster’s head, hoping to at least send the creature reeling. But the fist passed right through the Spirit creature’s head, and William pulled it back out of the portal, laughing.
“You think that’s where its brain is?” he shouted, and his voice echoed throughout the city. “I control it, just like I do this country. And I refuse to let you foreign invaders hurt us!”
Someone grabbed Fort’s leg and yanked him down, hard. He groaned as he hit the roof and quickly looked up to find one of the people he’d saved reaching out to strangle him, the woman’s eyes glowing orange with Spirit magic. “Invaders!” she shouted. “You dare fight against our leader?”
“Oh come on,” Jia shouted, sending Healing magic through her former patients, including the one attacking Fort, putting them all to sleep.
But as they fell asleep, each of their bodies began to dissolve into orange magic, and a moment later, the roof was empty. Everything they’d just done had been for nothing. Fort gritted his teeth, looking up at William in disgust. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, and teleported them back down to the ground, where Rachel had just landed.
“Oh, hey,” Rachel said when she saw them appear, leaning over her sword to catch her breath. “How are we doing?”
“Not exactly great,” Jia told her. “You’re okay?”
“Never been better!” she said with a smile, then stood up straight, grimacing at some pain in her back. “Okay, new plan. Fort, you teleport me straight at William, and I’ll sword him. That way—”
“That way what, Cadet Carter?” said a voice, and they all turned around to find a full squad of TDA soldiers aiming their Lightning rods at them.
And Colonel Charles was in the lead.
“That way we will end this, because no one else can,” Rachel finished. “What are you even doing here, Colonel? He can take over your soldiers if he wants!”
“Not my squad,” the colonel said, pulling a necklace out from under his body armor. “Sierra made these, so they should work against this new kind of magic as well.”
Rachel screamed in frustration. “You don’t even know if that’s true! This is what’s wrong with you! You insist on holding us back when you have no idea what’s even going on. But we do! Let us fix this, while you rescue whoever you can.”
Colonel Charles slowly smiled. “I’m sorry, but students aren’t allowed to take field trips without permission.” He raised his hand and pointed at Rachel. “Squad, take them!”
Rachel laughed. “You think your Lightning rods are going to work on us? I’ve got a sword that deflects spells, big man! Just try it!”
“If you insist,” the colonel said as the man next to him aimed something right at Jia and fired.
Rachel swept her sword through where the magic would have been, but instead of lightning or fire, a small dart hit Jia in the stomach. She glanced down at it in confusion before her eyes rolled back into her head and she collapsed to the ground, where she began to snore, completely knocked out.
“Oh I forgot: Tranquilizer darts aren’t magic,” Colonel Charles told Rachel as she ran to Jia’s side. “Isn’t that funny?”
“You monster !” Rachel shouted, throwing up a shield of fire as the soldier readied another shot. His dart passed straight through her fire to hit her in the shoulder, and she too passed out, right on top of Jia, Excalibur falling to the ground next to her.
“And now it’s just you, Fitzgerald,” the colonel said, turning to Fort and raising his hand. “I can’t say I won’t enjoy this. You’ve disobeyed my orders for the last time!”