Battle of the ULTRAs (2 page)

I
didn’t even have
to think whether or not to chase after Saint.

When you wanted to avenge the deaths of the people you loved so badly, you just did it, whether it seemed like a good idea or not. The time for sitting back and moping went away. It had to, or it’d tear you apart.

I wasn’t letting it tear me apart. I wasn’t letting Saint tear
anyone’s
lives apart. Not anymore.

I flew in the direction of the dark cloud. The rain fell down heavier over Manchester now. Beside me, I saw smoking buildings. I saw cars in streets, smashed and abandoned. I’d seen so many scenes like this since Saint launched his attack on the world just three weeks ago. I’d seen so many big cities fall. Places you didn’t think it was possible to fall. Paris. Rome. Washington. Beijing. Places of strength. Places of power.

All of them powerful no more. Not now they had a new leader. One ruling leader to unite them all in misery.

As I flew after Saint, I heard the Resistance and the ULTRAbots still fighting on above me, behind me. I felt guilty for leaving them, sure. But I had my own fight here. I had my own personal battle. And they were strong. They thought they needed me, but in truth, they could handle themselves.

And if I took down Saint, maybe they wouldn’t have to handle themselves at all.

I pushed on even further, my body flying and teleporting through the air so fast that I could feel my stomach twisting. Every time I teleported to where I swore Saint was, I saw his dark cloud get further away. I felt him slipping from my grip…

But no.

That wasn’t happening.

He wasn’t getting away.

I smelled the smoke in the air as the breeze brushed against my bare face. Nycto had destroyed my Glacies mask before he was tossed aside like a fly by Saint. It didn’t matter really. I didn’t need to hide who I really was anymore. The whole world knew my identity, who I was and what I was trying to do.

And for the first time, in a twisted sort of irony, the world didn’t fear me or the ULTRAs of the Resistance. Not anymore. Because they saw the truth now. It’d taken mass imprisonment by Saint’s army of ULTRAbots—and his inner circle of defected ULTRAs—to make them realize, but finally they saw the truth.

Sometimes the grass isn’t always greener on the other side.

But it wasn’t humanity’s fault. Humanity couldn’t be blamed for its fear. They’d been manipulated by a man they thought was in power, Mr. Parsons. They’d been convinced the ULTRAs were the ones to fear, not the ULTRAbots.

Who could blame them?

What a pity they were so, so wrong.

I tasted metal on my tongue and realized I’d bitten my lip so hard that I was bleeding. I swallowed away the taste and kept on pressing. Kept on pushing. Saint couldn’t get much further away. I was on to him. He might be stronger, but I was quicker. More agile. I could—

I smacked right into something when I made a teleportation leap.

I fell back. When I looked up, I saw five ULTRAbots above me. They looked tough. Tougher than any I’d encountered so far. Their weapons were bigger, and they seemed more agile than the usual ULTRAbots. Second models? Hell, who knew.

Didn’t make a difference. I still had to take them down.

I flew into the one on the left, but it knocked me back before I could make contact. I kept my eye on Saint’s dark cloud, gradually getting smaller. I needed to get to him. I needed to—

A fist crunched into my face.

The ULTRAbots above steadied their guns and went to fire.

I lifted my hands to stop the bullets. But the bullets were quick. Powerful. I tried to slow them down, to push them back, but I couldn’t. They were too fast. Too strong.

In the corner of my eye, Saint got further away.

I bit down harder on my tongue, ignoring the taste of blood as best as I could. I stood my ground in the air. Pressed back on the bullets as they continued to fire from the ULTRAbots’ guns. Harder. Harder…

And then I let go and teleported behind the ULTRAbots.

I took them down one by one.

But when I’d taken them down, I saw an explosion in the distance. Their bullets hit the side of a large hotel. Fire blasted from it. The glass all smashed, and the building started to fall.

As I stood there and looked at the chaos, I realized I’d made an error of judgment. I’d let my guard slip. All because of my perusal of Saint. All because I’d needed to catch him.

Saint.

I needed to stop him.

I needed to…

When I looked back, a bitter taste filled my mouth.

Saint was gone.

I was about to go after him in the direction he’d headed when I heard a shout in the distance. When I
felt
something bad inside. Now I don’t know why this had started happening, but since I’d joined the Resistance, trained with them, I got this weird feeling when one of them was in danger. It was like we were all tapped into the same energy source. At first, I just put it down to me usually being anxious about some shit or other.

But I felt it now. I felt it, strong.

I teleported back to where the battle was unfolding above Manchester and saw exactly why I’d had a bad feeling.

Vortex was in the air.

She was surrounded by ULTRAbots.

And they were pulling their triggers.

I
saw
the ULTRAbots surround Vortex and fire their triggers and knew what I had to do.

I flew into their center. Teleported through them. I saw the bullets coming toward me then and knew I was going to be too late to stop all of them.

I focused my attention on a few of the bullets to the left. I slowed them down, then sped the bullets back at the ULTRAbots that’d fired them.

And then I felt the sharp, hot pain puncture the right side of my body and knew I was hit.

“Quick,” I said. “Get—get out of here.”

I saw Vortex looking at me with shock. She was looking at the right side of my body. I knew just from the look on her face that it wasn’t good and that I must’ve taken some damage. I didn’t want to look at it myself. Looking at wounds and blood just made me squeamish.

I turned to the rest of the ULTRAbots—the ones that’d fired at me—and I lifted my hand.

“You’re gonna regret that,” I said.

I fired a mass of ice into their bodies.

They froze right upon contact. One more hit and they’d be down completely. Shattered.

But I didn’t have the strength in me right now to shatter them.

I dropped to the top of a nearby building, crouched down and leaned back against the wall at the side. I caught a glance at the side of my body. It made me feel sickly, made my toes curl. I’d taken a bad hit. I needed to heal myself. Fast.

I focused all my energy on that right side of my body. The healing process was never nice. It always stung. But I had to use it, or I wouldn’t survive. If it weren’t for my ability to heal, I’d die. I couldn’t die. Not when Saint was still alive to kill.

I was in the middle of healing a puncture wound just underneath my ribcage when a group of ULTRAbots raised up at the side of the building right opposite me.

I looked them in the eye. They looked back at me. I kept my focus on that wound. Kept on healing it. I’d have to be quick, but I could still fight. I could…

When I saw who they had in their hands, my focus on healing slipped.

They were holding on to Ember. One of the ULTRAbots had a gun to his head. The ULTRAbot had a total dead look in its eyes, like it didn’t care what it was doing, only that it had to carry it out.

I saw Ember struggling. Saw him trying to spark up the flames in his hands, but it was no use. The ULTRAbots had him. They’d got him right in their trap. There was no fighting back from Ember, not now.

I kept on healing that right side but I knew I didn’t have long. Healing used up a lot of my powers, and when I’d finished healing, it always took a while for them to recharge to the max, too.

But I couldn’t just sit here. I couldn’t just watch something terrible happen to Ember.

“Hold still,” I shouted, standing.

Ember didn’t listen.

I lifted my hands. “Hold—”

The blast deafened me. It made me close my eyes. Hold my breath.

There was an explosion right beside Ember’s head. An explosion from the ULTRAbot’s gun.

Ember’s head wasn’t there anymore.

Neither was Ember.

I’d managed to form a wormhole around him just in time.

Now, Ember by my side, I fired ice at the ULTRAbots. I threw them aside using telekinesis. I re-routed their bullets through wormholes, threw them into one another, and I watched as Ember covered them in flames.

Together, we stood at the side of the building. I put my hands on my knees. The pain in my side was still bad. I’d used my powers way too soon after healing. I’d have to heal myself properly when we’d won this place.

“You okay?” I asked.

Ember shook his head. We didn’t exactly get on like a house in… yeah, embers. Witty me. “No thanks to you.”

“Hey. I just saved your ass.”

“If you’d been here in the first place instead of chasing after shadows, you wouldn’t’ve had to save my ass!”

I watched Ember walk to the side of the rooftop. Focused on healing myself. All around, up above, I saw the ULTRAbot numbers waning. The Resistance still stood strong. Manchester looked a little brighter all of a sudden.

I put my hand on Ember’s back. “Looks like you did a good job.”

When I heard the rumbling, humming sound behind me, I realized I might just’ve spoken too soon.

I looked back. Saw exactly what I’d feared but exactly what I’d expected.

More ULTRAbots. A thick wall of them, moving in a spherical mass. More than we’d fought here. More than we could deal with.

The Resistance floated by my side.

“What do we do?” Ember asked.

I looked at Orion. Although I couldn’t see his eyes underneath his black mask, I knew he wasn’t happy. He had that demeanor he always had when he was pissed with me. “We do the only thing we can do,” he said. “We run.”

I shook my head. Many of the others in the Resistance groaned and cursed. “We don’t have to give up,” I said.

“Yes we do,” Orion said. “There’s more than we can handle. Way more than we can handle. Maybe if we’d dealt with the first wave in time, we could’ve prevented a second wave from following.”

“You don’t know that.”

“We had a chance, Kyle. We could’ve stopped this. We could’ve traced down their production facility. We could’ve prevented this, if we’d all been here to prevent it.”

I heard the disappointment in Orion’s voice. I felt it, too. Felt it from all the ULTRAs around me. I knew what they were disappointed about. I knew what they were hinting at. This was my fault. I’d gone after Saint, so this was my fault.

“So what about Manchester?” Roadrunner asked.

Orion took a few seconds to answer as he stared at the oncoming mass of ULTRAbots.

Then, he finally spoke the words that none of us wanted to hear.

“Manchester is lost.”

“
Y
ou were
irresponsible and you know you were irresponsible. At least be responsible enough to recognize and accept that much.”

I listened to Orion’s voice droning on and I wanted to be anywhere but here right now.

It was night. We were on an island in the middle of the Pacific. The island was so small that it was pretty much nameless, but the Resistance had taken to it since the rest of the world was pretty much a no-go zone. It was a good place to have. A safe place, which got absolutely boiling in the day. Even Vortex had managed to catch herself a bit of a tan.

But when Saint was out there raining chaos on the world, I couldn’t help feeling I was wasting my time here.

“I did what I had to do,” I said.

“You could’ve got Vortex killed.”

“But I didn’t.”

“You could’ve got Ember—”

“But I didn’t.”

Orion sighed. He turned away and looked out to sea. As much as I got frustrated being stuck on this island, the sea calmed me. I saw the ripples in the water, the moon shimmering across its surface. All around, total silence. Peace. I wanted peace for the whole world again. I wished there were more places like this. More places where what was left of the un-prisoned humanity could go. But I knew we were running out of territory, and soon, the Resistance wouldn’t even have this place to call home.

Saint and his ULTRAbots would find us, eventually.

And when they did… I just hoped we’d be ready for them.

Orion lit a fire in the sticks in front of him with the wave of a hand. “You know, you’re strong. You’re powerful.”

“I know that much.”

“And I respect that you’re only trying to fight Saint, just like I did,” Orion continued, ignoring me. “But there are stages to a battle. Stages to every battle, especially one on this scale. You don’t start the battle by taking down the hardest source. You start small. And then you work your way up the scale with smaller victories until eventually, the hardest source isn’t even hard at all. It’s nothing but soft. And then…”

“And then you kill him,” I said.

Orion sighed. “You’re driven by too much hatred.”

“Hatred is what makes us powerful.”

“No. No, that’s where you’re wrong. And you know you’re wrong.
Love
makes us far more powerful than anger ever can. Forgiveness burns a much brighter light than the black void of vengeance.”

I bit my lip. “So that’s why you didn’t kill Saint? That’s why you didn’t save the world? Because forgiveness burns a brighter light?”

Orion hesitated. I could sense the discomfort he felt about the question. “I put Saint somewhere I thought he could never come back from. I made an error of judgment.”

“So you regret not killing him?”

“No.”

“So what happened to my family. What happened to my sister and my mom. What’s happened to the whole damned world. If you could go back and kill him, you’re seriously saying you wouldn’t?”

My anger was at a peak. I could feel my powers on edge. I wanted to hurt something. Someone. I wanted to make the people responsible for my loss go through hell for what they’d done to the people I loved.

“What happened to the world is unfortunate.”

“Too damned right it’s unfortunate.”

“But I stand by my morals. We do not kill our own. It does not matter whether we love them or hate them. We do not kill our own.”

“Pity Saint didn’t share those morals when he killed Slice and Aqua.”

I knew it was a low blow, but I needed one right now. I knew it’d hurt Orion, bringing up Slice and Aqua, who’d died at the hands of Saint when he’d first returned. I was basically blaming Orion for what’d happened to them, and I got that wasn’t so cool.

But Orion didn’t react with anger. He didn’t react with frustration. “I made a decision not to kill Saint. I cannot be held accountable for Saint’s anger. If a prisoner is put in a cell and that prisoner escapes and goes on to kill, can the person who locked him away in hope of reformation be put to blame? Or should the prisoner not have been given a second chance at all? Should he have received the death penalty?”

I shook my head and stood. “I can’t talk about this right now.”

“But when we, together, have an opportunity—a responsibility—to fight for a falling city, we take that opportunity. We live up to our potential. We don’t go chasing phantoms into the clouds.”

I turned around, gobsmacked. “Okay, so what you’re saying is it’s okay when
you
make a pig’s ass of things, but when
I
make a mistake, the entire fall of a city’s on me?”

Orion didn’t nod. He didn’t shake his head. He just gave me that look like there was a difference in the things we’d done.

I waved my hand at him and walked away. I needed to get deep into the rainforest. I needed to be alone. I needed to think.

“Forgiveness is a far, far stronger power than vengeance will ever be, Kyle. Don’t you ever forget that. Don’t you ever forget who you are.”

I tensed my fists and felt them cover with ice.

I disappeared into the forest, Orion’s words fading into the distance, and I plotted my next move against Saint.

Because I was going to make him pay, whether Orion liked it or not.

I hadn’t forgotten myself. I remembered myself well. I remembered my sister who’d died. I remembered my mom who’d died. I remembered all the people who’d fallen at the hands of Saint.

I knew who I was. I knew
exactly
who I was.

And I wasn’t ever giving up until I looked Saint in the eye and took his life.