Chapter 5

An explosion knocked Jareth away at the last moment, before he collided with me. My eyes scanned the Oval for Nala—I figured she must have blasted him with magic to save me—but I found her lying on the ground. Whatever had knocked back Jareth, it had hit Nala too.

Smoke rolled across the field, thick and impenetrable. I couldn't see the Knights anymore.

"Jareth Mars!"

The voice boomed through every speaker across the Oval.

"Nala, the Crimson Knight!"

The smoke cleared, revealing a Knight in black armor. He was even bigger than the behemoth Jareth.

"Your time is done!"

Chatter rippled across the crowd.

"Another Knight?"

"A new Knight?"

"With black armor? What Tribe is that?"

"The Knights are giving us something new this year!"

Jareth and Nala were on their feet again, closing in on the mysterious black Knight from opposite sides. He lifted his hands and blasted them with energy pulses so powerful, it catapulted them clear out of the Oval.

"This isn't right," I muttered, even as the crowd cheered in appreciation of the black Knight's explosive magic.

Ainsley, Eris, Orion, and Altair rushed into the Oval, hitting the black Knight with magic from every direction. But their spells and potions bounced right off his armor; they didn't even slow him down. He thrust his arms over his head, and the other Knights were all thrown into the air. They swirled around wildly, bouncing off one another like ice cubes in a blender.

And when the black Knight released his hold on them, they slammed into the enormous Scoreboard, sending it plummeting to the ground, crashing toward the human audience. And now people weren't cheering anymore. They were screaming. And fleeing.

The Scoreboard stopped before it hit the crowd, suspended in the air. Kato was standing below it, muttering under his breath. His hands made smooth circles, easing the enormous panel to the ground.

Everyone was panicking. Wild, driven into a frightened frenzy, they rushed to get away from the black Knight, not caring how many people they trampled in the process. Bodies fell under the stampede, crushed by the crowd.

I swung my legs over the fence and dashed across the Oval. I sprinted for a few seconds, toward where I'd spotted my mother. She was helping a few people to their feet, people who'd been trampled by their own neighbors.

"Come on, Mom. We'll do it together," I said as I hopped over the fence and joined her.

Together, we pulled a fallen speaker off a man's leg. Once freed, he limped off in a frantic half-run, without so much as a thank-you.

"Are you all right?"

I turned at the deep, echoing sound of Kato's voice. He was standing over me as I struggled—unsuccessfully—to lift a toppled flag pole off a man.

"I'm fine." I heaved with all the strength I had, but the pole didn't budge. "Which is more than I can say for these people."

Kato squatted down and lifted the pole like it weighed nothing. The guy muttered a quick thanks to him before hobbling away.

I rose to face Kato. "What happened? Who is that black Knight?"

He turned to look across the Oval, where the six mentors were battling it out against the black Knight. "That is no Knight," Kato said darkly.

Knights don't wear black.The memory of the invisible stranger's words echoed inside my head.

"Then what is he?" I asked.

Kato shook his head. "I have no idea."

The six Knights kept coming at the armored fiend, unrelenting, undeterred, even when their magic hardly made a dent in that thick black armor. It was one thing to be confident and brave when you were more powerful than anyone. It was much harder when you suddenly weren't. These Knights were the most valiant people I'd ever met.

"I had to make sure you're all right." Kato's WAND morphed into a sword. "But now I have to help them."

He charged across the Oval, trailing a tail of flames behind him. The fire grew longer, higher every time his boot hit the ground. It was a firestorm now.

Kato thrust his sword forward, and the flames swirled into a fiery lance as large as a flagpole. It slammed into the black Knight so hard that it flung him out of the Oval, past the park, and into the road. There was a metallic ding! when he hit the triangular roundabout sign nailed to a power-line pole—and then a crack! as the pole split in half. The pole remnants hit the road with a crash!, taking a streetlamp and layers of tangled power cables along with them.

The Knights were already running after the fiend.

"We have to hit him with something harder," Orion said as they sprinted past me.

I ran into line beside them.

"Much harder," Ainsley added.

"There are a ton of enchanted objects back in our dressing rooms." Jareth grabbed the split wooden post off the ground and threw it at the armored fiend as he moved to stand up. Jareth frowned when the fiend flicked it away like it was a tiny fruit fly. "Some of those enchanted objects are packed with pretty potent magic."

"I'll go and get them," Altair said.

I caught his arm. "No, I'll go."

Kato stepped in my way. "Absolutely not. It's too dangerous."

"More dangerous than fighting him?" I pointed at the black behemoth, who'd just picked up the power-line pole Jareth had thrown at him.

"You aren't fighting him." Kato's tone left no room for discussion.

I guess he was used to everyone always doing what he said.

"No, I won't be fighting him," I agreed, squaring my shoulders. "Instead, while you guys keep him busy and make sure he doesn't hurt anyone, I'm going to go get something that can stop him."

Orion and Nala had engaged the armored fiend. Orion was constantly teleporting Nala to random points, forcing their adversary to turn to keep her in his sight.

"Savannah is right. Keeping this guy busy will take all of us," Eris told Kato before she flew into the air on a gust of wind and shot toward the enemy.

"And you can't say no to that cute determined little crinkle between her eyes." Ainsley said to Kato, then joined the fight.

"Fine," he finally said. "But don't get yourself killed."

"Right, like that's my plan."

But he probably didn't hear me. He and the other Knights looked pretty busy fighting the armored fiend.

I ran back to the brick house Kato had brought me to just a few hours ago. I waved my hand in front of the magic scanner at the door, and it actually opened. Maybe it remembered me from earlier.

I rushed inside. There were a lot of magical-looking items scattered throughout the various dressing rooms. I grabbed anything that looked like it might put a dent in the fiend's creepy black armor, stuffed them all into my backpack, then ran back outside.

The Knights were still battling the black behemoth at the roundabout, though there were a lot more broken power lines now. Leaves and branches and even an old park bench littered the ground too.

None of the Knights were in great shape. Ainsley was bleeding through her armor, one of Jareth's bull horns was missing, and Nala was moving around the battlefield with a decided limp. Orion and Altair were lying unconscious on the ground. Eris was shielding them with a great whirling wall made out of a tornado, which was busily sucking up every piece of debris that the fiend hurled at them.

When Kato tried to sneak up on the enemy from behind, the armored fiend spun around, lifted Kato by the throat, and plucked the helmet from his head. Then he threw Kato into Eris's tornado.

Eris unraveled the tornado, trying to lower—not drop—Kato to the ground. Which was just what the fiend wanted. Now that her wind shield was down, he lumbered toward the Knights with loud, thundering steps. The ground shook violently, every step setting off a new earthquake.

This had to end now.

I plunged my hand into my backpack and pulled out a mystical-looking handheld mirror: a circle of stained glass, about the size of my hand, set inside an ornate silver frame with an even more ornate handle. I wasn't sure what this enchanted object did, but it sure felt powerful.

Magic rippled across the mirror, and the picture in the stained glass changed from a relaxed pastural scene to something that bore a striking resemblance to the armored fiend.

And when I turned the mirror to face the fiend, lightning flashed across the clear sky.

A piece of his armor fell off.

And then another.

And another.

Lightning flashed every time.

The fiend scurried to recover his fallen pieces of armor, but he was losing them faster than he could collect them. Growling, he grabbed an uprooted speed sign off the ground and threw it at me. It came in so fast, I'd never be able to outrun it.

Kato dashed in front of me, catching the sign out of the air and sending it back at the fiend, who ducked out of the way. But he couldn't evade the long metal chain Kato slashed at him like a whip. A rusty swing was attached to the other end of the chain, and when it connected with a hole in the fiend's armor, that hole grew bigger. Another chunk of armor hit the ground.

An earth-splitting boom! echoed off the sky, like thunder. Then the black behemoth tipped over, hitting the street like a toppled tree.

Nala was the first to reach him. "He's unconscious," she told the others.

"Bind him," Kato told her.

She wrapped layers of chains around the black behemoth, and Ainsley helped her.

Altair was up and moving again. He started gathering all the bits and pieces of black armor that littered the ground. "Looks like we figured out who took your WAND." He held up a brushed-metal disc to Orion. It was sizzling erratically, and even from all the way over here, it smelled like burnt toast.

Orion took the blue metal disc and looked it over. "Yeah, that's my WAND all right. That fiend stole it and tried to use it to escape justice." He tossed the sizzling disc back to Altair. "And now it's broken."

"And there's my WAND!" Eris said, grabbing a warped piece of green metal out of the scrap pile.

Altair lifted Orion's WAND in front of his helmet's visor. "The fiend must have attempted to teleport further than the WAND was designed to handle, and the spell backfired."

"Or Kato smacked it too hard with that swing." Jareth was in human form again. He had his gold helmet tucked under his arm, and he was grinning at Kato. "That was epic!"

"Put your helmet back on, Jareth."

Kato looked around to make sure no one was watching. Of course no one was. A crazy armored giant had just tried to kill everyone in sight. So everyone had fled the scene. We were alone. But Kato snatched his own misshapen helmet off the ground and squeezed it onto his head anyway.

"Always the perfect Knight," Jareth chuckled, then slid his helmet back on too.

Kato pointed at the two damaged WANDs in Altair's hands. "I suspect that Jareth is right, and the swing was what damaged the WANDs. Our adversary stole them, but he cannot use them."

"How do you know?" Altair turned the blue disc over in his hand, like he was searching for whatever Kato already knew.

"Because our adversary cannot use magic."

Altair laughed. "Were you paying any attention at all during the last battle? He smacked us around with more different kinds of magic than even you possess, Kato."

"You should know better than anyone, Altair, that magic doesn't just come from people. It comes from objects too."

"Yeah, but you need to have at least some magic in order to wield things like potions and enchanted objects," Altair countered. "And you claimed the fiend had no magic at all."

"He doesn't have magic." Kato grabbed a piece of black armor off the ground and tossed it at him. "He mimicked magic."

When Altair gasped in surprise, the other Knights all huddled in for a closer look at the armor piece. And so did I.

"Cables. Electronics." I poked the inside of the armor with a stick and some weird neon-green fluid gurgled out. "This isn't magic. It's tech."

"Tech designed to mimic magic." Kato dropped the piece into the bag of armor chunks that Altair had collected. "Which means our adversary isn't supernatural. He's human."