For Their Greater Glory

For their greater glory
It is important to note that there is three narrators

in this book. Eric's journal is the events as seen by
Eric, while Rodriguez's diary is the events as seen by
Rodriguez. The same goes for Helena's notes.
Prologue Feel no pain

Eric's Journal
It was right in front of me. This thing that I

had worked so hard for. It had taken me a year to
get on this team. Yet another year to train for the
tournament. And then another to do so well in the
tournament. I suppose you're wondering what the hell
I'm talking about. The game is called conquest and it
is a brutalised version of capture the flag. Each team
has ten players. Each player is given a different
assortment of weapons which determines their
position. The decoration on the weapons reflects how
good the team is. The weapons are harmless lasers,
but sometimes they overload. I'd gotten hit by that a
couple of times. A few scars on my chest and suchlike,
but nothing too bad. Anyway, back to the “present”.
1 The adventures of Eric the Invincible

Naoise Mchugh
That is 2099 A.D. And still doing just fine thank you
very much. So there it was. The Uruguayan team's
flag was right in front of me. I could smell it. Feel it. I
walked forward with a sword in one hand and a flip-top
grenade in the other. I severed the ropes tying it to
the ground and slotted it into my backpack. That was
it. If I made it to our flag, then Clognose had won the
world school's conquest tournament. So I hared off,
radioing my position to my teammates. Soon enough,
Dave and Brian, the Clognose helicopterers would pick
me up and carry me safely home to a hero's welcome.
Ten minutes later, and they still hadn't
appeared. Unsurprising. The McGilligans were not
exactly known for their timing. On my map I could see
the Clognose line and our sentries. Behind me, I could
see my equal, the enemy assualtist close behind me.
No flag on him, so things were looking good. A quick
check on the scanner showed me he had used all his
grenades and his boomerang had broken. He had
nothing to take me out from a distance with. I
dropped back a little and cut him with my sword. His
cheek started bleeding. Overload. I ran a little
faster. Just to play it safe, I lobbed a grenade at him,
sending him sprawling back a few metres. I turned
around and started running backwards, to make sure

he didn't try anything. I noticed he was throwing his

sword. Pathetic. I stopped smirking when my right arm
fell off. I swear, smirk at one foreigner and they bite
your head off. Or in this case, your arm. A loud
repetitive noise above my head told me the
McGilligans had arrived. And so had the Uruguayan
team's entire air force. There was a few denting
noises and Mark, the Clognose sniper, popped out of
his hiding place and ran. The assualtist bowled over
and their three planes floored it, meaning that Rob
and Neill, our sentries had taken out the rocket
launchers. Still left two helicopters engaged with
Dave and Brian and my arm flooding blood all over the
place. I was feeling dizzy now and that was when
Adam, Billy and Sam flew over the trees in their
planes. On the ground, they were followed by Aran,
the last of our team in the tank. Realising they were
outnumbered, the helicopters opened fire on the tank,
knowing which way home I was most likely to take. A
sniper round shot out from a bush behind me and
clipped Adam's wing. While the sniper was celebrating
that he actually hit something he went sprawling over,
immobilised by me. Then their tank came out into the
forest clearing and their planes worked up the
courage to face the rocket launchers. I was damn near

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unconscious at this point so I pegged it for our tank,

climbing in. I ripped up my shirt and bandaged my
shoulder. Out the window I could see their tank being
ripped to pieces and its driver getting out and opening
fire with a laser rifle. Aran had slammed the pedal
down and the massive battle slowly disappeared out
the window. Only drive kept me from unconsciousness
as the tank skidded round in front of the hill on which
our flag was located. I staggered out and lifted the
two flags high in one hand. Purple and white fireworks
sang me to sleep as I fell unconscious on the hill.
What a finale that must have made for the
spectators. Wondered what all ladies were
thinking.....stars going out.....I thought of the
Uruguayan assualtist who cut off my arm....and fell
right unconscious. The words of our coach floated into
my head. Feel no pain......

Chapter 1 Hospitalised
Eric's journal
I woke up in a box. Not a small confined box but

a box nonetheless. There was two metal bars
supporting the roof and the walls were white. The
room was quite airy, despite being a box. There was a
cabinet with a lamp on top of it to the right of me. I
was lying on a hospital bed, which led me to believe
that I was either in hell, or worse, just a hospital.
Where my arm should be, there was a thing of science
fiction. A robot arm. Probably a lot of eight year
olds' dreams, but after thirteen years I had grown
kind of attached to my arm, pardon the pun. There
was something on my back and I wasn't wearing a
shirt. I tried to roll over but something was stopping
me. The new arm did all the normal arm stuff, but I
had a feeling that it was absolutely bulging with lethal
weapons.
“Eric! You're up!” A doctor walked into the
room. One who I knew very well.
“Dr. McGilligan?” I asked, astounded. “What are
you doing here?”
“I came along to watch my sons win the
tournament.”

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“I wish my father would do that for me.” My

father was a scientist, working on some big project
which he wasn't allowed tell anyone anything about.
The doctor looked edgy. Never a good sign.
“If you see Dave and Brian, tell them to work on
the timing.” I said, to break the silence.
“Tell us yourself!” came the reply from the back
of the room as the stars of the moment walked in.
“What can this thing do anyway?” I said,
indicating my arm.
“Well, more importantly, take a look at your
back.” Dave and Brian held up mirrors so I could see
the metal bar on my back. It split at my shoulders and
ran down my two arms and did the same with my legs.
I looked at my feet and saw that the bars turned into
strips with what looked like cooking rings on them.
“Thanks to a recent discovery in superhuman
making, you are able to lift up to thirty tonnes and as
for the rings, they allow you to hover.” The doctor
explained.
“And what about the arm?” I asked impatiently.
Brian pulled out a remote and the doctor took a deep
breath.
“Flamethrower, hammer, rocket launcher,
machine gun, sword, electro-magnet, drill, crossbow,

talons, shotgun and a sniper rifle.” My arm changed to

each of the different weapons at a touch from Brian
on the remote.
“Sniper rifle?” I inquired, hoping against hope
that I was wrong about what was coming next.
“Now you can be just like me!” Came a happy
response from somewhere or other as Mark Shivan
walked in. We all groaned. Mark wasn't exactly
everyone's favorite sniper. In fact, that Uruguayan
probably despised him. And me. Good times.
“Just to tell you, I've probably missed out a lot
of things. Another thing is that you have had glands
transplanted in you that will turn excess food into
bullets and other necessities.”
“Am I able to walk yet?” I inquired.
“See for yourself!” grinned Brian. The doctor
said nothing but looked suspiciously at Brian. I swung
around on the hospital bed so that my feet were over
the floor and put them down. They got to about three
inches away before bouncing up above my head. I was
now hanging upside down in the air and unable to trust
my own feet. Wonderful. Brian pushed a button and I
fell in a mess on the floor. We all burst out laughing,
except for the doctor who just scowled. I pointed the
sniper rifle arm at Brian, somehow and painstakingly

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untangled myself, just in case I tripped up because my

hand was holding my legs together. I managed to get
up without incident and walked around the room. I got
back onto the bed and fell asleep. As I sank into sleep,
my arm changed back to normal.
***
Several seconds later, a huge explosion woke me

up. Mark keeled over like a domino and a flying lamp
hit Dave, sending him sprawling to the floor. Brian
cried out in Dave's pain and a metal bar fell on top of
the doctor. The other one started to fall on top of me
but I caught it and shoved it through the roof,
reveling in my new strength. The quake stopped and I
looked around.
The room had been refurbished by an interior
designer who had a fixation with disaster zones.
There was holes everywhere. The cabinet had
smashed against the wall beside it and collapsed. The
lamp on top of it had smacked into Dave's arm and
Mark had fallen on the moderately cushioned
lampshade. Brian knelt beside Dave wearing a pained
expression. The twins had been known for sharing
each other's pain so I wasn't worried about the two

of them. I just hoped that Brian wouldn't try to take

to much of Dave's pain and kill himself. Mark was
getting up now and I could see that he was only
slightly bruised.
They say that somewhere there's a bullet with
your name on it. In the doctor's case, said bullet was a
large metal bar from which his legs protruded. Ugh. I
walked over to Mark and helped him up.
“Mark, I'm gonna lift that bar, and I want you
to drag the doctor out as quick as you can, alright?”
Mark nodded, steeling himself. I took a grip and
lifted. It occurred to me that the room might need
support so I wedged the bar upright in the middle of
the room like a pillar.
The doctor was hopeless. From waist up, he was
as flat as a pancake. His waist was torn to the point of
complete separation from his legs. I never want see
something like that again. Ever..............

Naoise Mchugh
Chapter Two Bitter Defeat

Rodriguez's diary
Oh my God. As soon as I got home after the

match, I kicked my cat. I swear, when I cut that guy's
arm off I thought he would be out and I would be able
to take the flag back to our hill and everything would
be all so happy. I hadn't counted on him being so
tough, or all the rest of the team appearing from
nowhere. After the match, the coach told me hard
luck, nice try and that I was going to have to pay for a
replacement.
Ever notice that about life? Three years of
work down the drain. And we lost in our own country.
Oh, the humiliation. And then there was the explosion.
Some randomers in Iceland made a big mistake and
the whole world was a wasteland. Some project that
no one was allowed know anything about. Not only had
half of my house just collapsed, but to add insult to
injury, it had not destroyed the school . My twin
sister Helena had broken her left hand, and I wasn't
able to call the hospital because half of that had
crumbled. The Irish guy had probably been crushed
with it. I hoped so.
It was a good thing we were so well off, or else

I would have cared about having to pay for the guy's

new arm. The victory celebrations were in three days
and we were all invited. I was still considering whether
I should go or not. Helena seemed to insist we were
going. I didn't really see why we should. I stopped to
consider it for a moment. Maybe I should get to know
the guy, considering I was paying for his arm. Then
again, maybe I shouldn't considering I cut it off. Oh,
the difficult choices of life.
“It's a party! Why shouldn't we go?” Helena cut
in on my thoughts, knowing exactly where they were
going, even though she was on a different floor to me.
To be honest, part of me wanted to go. Free food is
always a good thing.
***
A few minutes later, I was exploring the

wasteland that was our cul-de-sac. It was tragic. The
land that had once been a paradise of houses grown
from trees and flowers was now a rocky wasteland.
Our house that had been so marvelously woven from
oak and yew trees now was split in half. On one half
there was the old and beautiful house and on the
other, there was a mess of timber. The flowers had
held, surprisingly. I would guess that there was more

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flowers in the Air City of Punta Del Este than in the

whole land-based world.
There was probably going to be a large increase
in Air-Cities because of the infertility of the land-
based soil. Probably in sea-cities as well. Maybe the
Atlantean Guardians would decide to finally resurface
Atlantis. Or the Licean Guard would open the doors of
Licea, the airborne spy centre, to people who weren't
part of their own private Secret Service. Or maybe
even Terranea would finally come out of the ground.
Okay, maybe that was being overly fanciful.
My thoughts were cut short by another large
booming noise. The side of my house had swelled like a
bubble before popping in a shower of bark and
flowers. Quaint.
A thing like a mythological hippogriff walked out
of the wreckage. It was saddled and tied to one of
the saddlebags was a cloth sack which was writhing
indignantly. On the saddle of the hippogriff was a
woman wearing odd greeny pink armour. She looked
around and saw an area of ground that slanted
upwards like a ramp. She directed the hippogriff
towards it, which began to run.
It was followed by Helena, firing at it with a
machine gun. It must have been protected by a force

field because every shot bounced to the ground. I

took out my own plasma bolt, which Helena had made
me take with me when I went exploring. It was good
for taking apart force fields. I fired one burst at it
and the field flickered into view before
disintegrating. Helena emptied the last of the machine
gun at the hippogriff which had now taken off,
dislodging something, which fell to the ground. I
walked over to it.
Helena noticed me and ran over. I looked down at
the thing. It was like a plastic baseball with only half
the seam. Underneath part of the seam there was a
hollow. I slid a thumb into it and lifted. On the
underside was a screen. Below it was a fold-out
keyboard and a touch pad.
“Any ideas?” Helena asked, inquiring about the
computer.
“None whatsoever. What did they take?” I replied.
“Are you sure you want to know?” She asked,
looking worried. She continued when I nodded, “The
explosion killed father. And the thing in the sack was
mother,”

Naoise Mchugh
Chapter three A helping hand

Eric's journal
The first paper I read told me about a

kidnapping. Or rather, mothernapping. It was two days
to the banquet. There was a family picture above the
article. The father, a green eyed, copper haired giant
of a man had been killed by the kidnapper. The mother
was blue eyed, with long black hair and medium sized.
She was the one who had been kidnapped.
The son was copper haired, but a slightly darker
shade than his father, with blue eyes. There was a
scar on his cheek. And guess who put it there. Oh
great. I thought I should apologise to him at the
feast. Amusingly, as captain of the losing team, he was
going to have to present the cup to me.
His sister was black haired with blue eyes and
tall. From the look of their faces, they were twins.
Identical as well.
In other news, my father had died because of
the explosion. My mother had disappeared many years
ago. A sword had come in the post, along with my
enormous inheritance. With it I had bought a cave
which I had extensively furnished. So now I had a
base in a country I liked.

Along with the sword had come a note, saying

how when mother ran away she took the scabbard and
that was how I was to recognise her.
The Clognose team were unable to go home as a
result of the explosion bringing air force one down on
the college. Santa Claus, the head of boarding, was not
pleased. Apparently, he had marched out of the school
and started screaming his head off at the americans.
It was amusing, because apparently, Santa Claus had
been head of boarding when the president went to
school in Clognose. It was funny, but annoyingly, it
didn't make any difference to the fact that I had to
house Mark Shivan indefinitely. And the rest of the
team.
Rodriguez's diary
A party was a big relief after losing my father

and mother. We had hacked the computer and it
contained a lot of data about the owner and what she
was doing. All the files were encrypted but I could
guess what they were from the titles. There was one
which read mass-destruction plan. Big Uh-oh. Then

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there was another which read Mass-destruction plan –

stage one: kidnapping. Hint, hint.
My adopted cousin Tom had been staying with
us when we were attacked and the poor six year old
had been horribly mutilated. For a start, in the
original explosion, his legs had been ripped off by a
falling piece of wood. The radiation of the second
explosion had messed his six year old mind up
irreparably. He now seemed to be psychic as well. A
side effect of the radiation apparently.
Anyway, at that moment in time I was at the
feast, having a great time. I was about to take a bite
of a cake which looked suspicious. My suspicions were
confirmed when I bit it. It was great.
I looked around. Helena was in a corner
surrounded by boys, both Uruguayan and Irish. Tom
was trying to impress the younger sister of the Irish
sniper. It wasn't going well. Presumably he could think
straight, because he knew exactly what she wanted,
but he wasn't able to speak properly, so I don't think
the girl was really flipping. It was funny to watch. The
fact that he had no legs probably didn't help.
Don't get me wrong, I hadn't stopped thinking
about my mother. I guessed that Tom would be
helpful, so long as he could still distinguish right from

wrong, which I guessed he could.

I looked back at Helena and noticed that she
was no longer surrounded by boys. Instead she was
sitting next to the captain of the Irish team. The
same one whose arm I cut off. He noticed me and
excused himself. He walked over to me.
“I suppose I should apologise for the scar,” he
smiled. He was small with red and orange eyes that
looked like they might burst into flames.
“No need. I got my revenge,” I returned the
smile. He seemed an easy guy to be around.
“Eric the invincible, at your service,” He
introduced himself.
“Rodriguez the downright idiotic,” I replied,
dryly, “Did they start calling you the invincible
because of the arm?”
“Yeah. Before, I was Eric, son of Paddy the
invincible. How about you?” Eric continued the
conversation.
“I managed to get in a fight which there was
absolutely no way I could win. And then I lost. The
next day, I got in another fight with the exact same
guy. I lost. And I kept at it for a week until I broke
my arm. Does invincibility run in your family?”
“No. My dad got in a fight with a gorilla bear.”

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Eric seemed to have been through a lot.

“Better get ready. The main event is in a
minute.” I said. Eric nodded. We both ran off to the
different ends of the stage where the presentation
was. I could see Eric winking at Helena from my end of
the stage. Oh joy.
The trumpets sounded and the lights turned on,
showing me the world schools under 14's cup which I
came so close to winning.
Eric's journal
Tension was all I could feel. I had won the cup,

but I just couldn't help feeling something would ruin
this perfect moment. I had found love and success. I
was about to receive my dream prize. Rodriguez might
be jealous of Helena for some reason. I sure hoped
not.
The trumpets blared and the lights flashed on,
showing me the cup. It was a beautiful sight. It was
the first time an Irish team had ever won it and I was
captain. Rodriguez walked on to the stage and lifted
the cup off its podium. I walked on to the stage and

Rodriguez handed me the cup. It was smooth to touch.

I raised the cup high and the crowd erupted into
cheers. The rest of the two teams walked on and
Rodriguez and I handed out the prizes for everyone.
Mine was two golden swords which moulded to my
preference. I had never used a sword so perfect for
me. And now I had two.
I looked at the crowd and saw how the Irish
supporters had blended in with the Uruguayan. It was
a nice sight. Of course, many of the Irish had lost
homes in the explosion. Like me.
Rodriguez and Helena invited me over to their

place for dinner the next day. I was quite surprised at
how well my little moment of glory had gone.
About halfway through the dinner, the ceiling
collapsed. That's what happens when you make a
house out of trees. Anyway, I was there holding the
roof up, while they toed and froed. When they had got
everything safe, we all went off to my cave. The rest
of the team had all gone off shopping, or so they told
me. I guessed they were all looking for presents for
special people.

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When we got there, I somehow managed to

make a traditional Irish dinner of roast steak and
potatoes. The Uruguayans were a bit suspicious of the
potatoes but they tried them. After a while, they told
me about their little problem. They showed me a
device the kidnapper had dropped. There was a little
Irish flag imprinted on it. I was immediately
suspicious of it. There was some basic hacking
equipment among all the crazy stuff my father had
sent me as part of the inheritance.
We managed to open a file called mass
destruction plan stage one: kidnapping. It described
exactly what had happened to Rodriguez and Helena,
with the exception of them being still alive. I didn't
envy them.
The next part was more interesting. It
explained how the kidnapper would return to one of
five bases across the Atlantic.
The nearest of these bases was on the island of
Barbados. Yaaaaaaay!! A sun holiday! Except that the
explosion had caused every single volcano on Barbados
to erupt. It was now a barren, lava covered desert.
So it was decided. We would go to barbados.

Chapter four Leaving

Rodriguez's diary
The next day, we left. I had never left Uruguay.

Eric was talking to his team, telling them to take care
of his cave and suchlike. Helena was nowhere to be
seen. She was probably in a dark corner with some
randomer. Typical.
Tom was beside me. The two of us had got
implants which let us communicate without him having
to talk. An interested crowd had converged to watch
our departure. My hover bike was waiting beside
Eric's. I was going to carry Helena and he would carry
Tom. Between the two bikes, we would have to tow a
baggage hovercraft. Helena and Tom were to blast
anything that tried to stop us into a million pieces.
We hadn't actually seen the base so we had no
idea what we were going to do when we got there.
Unsurprising.
Helena appeared beside us, shortly followed by
Eric, who apologised for the delay and bitched about
how difficult it was to organise his team, then about
how his pathetic excuse for a school was soon being
rebuilt and blahdy blahdy blah.
We mounted up and got moving. The hovercraft

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actually had it's own motor, so it was just making us

go faster.
About an hour later, we saw an actual living bird.

It was a griffin eagle. It's feathers were all gold.
It's beak was silver and it's eyes were crystal. It flew
close to Helena, who stroked its head. From then on,
it was by her side.
A few minutes after, a thing shaped like a bomb
appeared out of the clouds. It was blue, with green
and brown fins. We were just talking about a cloud
shaped liked a falling bus when the eagle swooped
down and picked it up. She brought it over to Eric who
looked at it.
His little finger started changing shape. Eric
was looking for a screwdriver. He wasn't doing too
well. Seeing that Eric couldn't do anything, the eagle
brought it over to Helena. I guessed that Eric might
have got it if he had two hands free.
Helena jumped from our hover bike onto the
hovercraft and pulled a screwdriver out of the
uppermost bag. Holding on for dear life, she took out
one screw, and then the other. She showed it to us. It

looked like the inside of a computer.

Eric finally got the arm to do what he wanted
and his fingers all turned into different cables.
Helena threw it over to Eric who just managed to
catch it.
One of the cables, I think it was his middle
finger, connected to one that looked exactly like it.
Eric frowned, and through the insert, Tom told me
that the bomb was a nuclabioniray. Tom didn't know
what that was and I didn't either.
Eric's face told me that the bomb was either
really powerful, or really hard to hack. Tom told me it
was the former. Eric was having no trouble getting it
to do what he wanted. A smile slowly began to form on
his face. Tom told me that he had changed the bomb
from a remote controlled one to one that would
explode on impact. I wondered what Eric was going to
do with it.
The speakers in my hover bike burst into action.
“Rodriguez?” Eric's voice came through.
“Yeah?” I responded.
“Did you pay for this thing?” He was talking
about the arm.
“Yeah. Why?” I was intrigued.
“Why on earth did you get me a rocket

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launcher?”
“I didn't choose anything. If I could have, I
wouldn't have given you anything.”
“Oh.” Radio silence. Eric put the cover back on
to the bomb and screwed it into place. He put it into a
pocket somewhere in his cloak. I looked over at
Helena, who was still on the hovercraft. She was
playing with the eagle.
We were just a little way past Brazil when the
attack began. The first thing I knew of it, was when I
heard Eric's arm changing shape. I looked at him and
saw the worried expression and pale face he was
wearing. Helena had pulled out a sniper rifle from the
bags. I checked the radar on my hover bike's display.
There was blue dots everywhere. I couldn't see
anything though. Eric's arm settled on a machine gun.
I saw him leaning over the side of the hover bike and
looking down.
It seemed pretty pointless. I mean, why look
down, if the guys were coming at our level. I checked
the radar again. The twenty or so small dots had been
joined by a bigger one. Much bigger.
Suddenly, Helena popped a round from the
sniper rifle. One of the dots on my radar turned into
an exclamation mark, indicating it was crippled.

The big dot was now half the size of the radar
screen. And counting. Eric suddenly looked even paler.
I looked over the side of my bike and saw an enormous
silhouette in the clouds. It was the same shape as the
bomb.
Eric opened fire. Nine of the nineteen remaining
dots, which I could now see were attack hovercraft,
crippled and dropped. Eric stopped firing on the small
weapon loaded circle and started attacking the big
thing.
I could now see exactly what it was. It was
about the size of a terawhale and the same bomb
shape as well. Actually, even scarier, it was a
terawhale. Instead of the usual large island on it's
back, there was a massive gun platform.
Eric was visibly trying not to hurt it and so was
Helena. They were both focusing on the platform.
There was a harness on the back of the whale, holding
the platform in place.
Eric suddenly cursed. His machine gun had
jammed. With his last bullet. He continued to try to
fire, until the obstinate bullet popped out. Instantly
he turned his arm back to normal. He signaled to
Helena, who jumped onto his bike and took over. Next,
he jumped over the bike.

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He was diving, assisted by his rocket propelled

feet, towards the ten remaining hovercraft. He picked
out one and dived towards it. He punched right
through it, but as soon as he was at their level, he was
trapped in a field extending from the nine others. His
arm was changing shape constantly, but the field had
trapped him in a bubble and even if he did get the
right shape, he couldn't do anything.
Helena loaded her rifle with a plasma bolt and
fired on the field. Too late, I realised her mistake.
The hovercraft came up, minus Eric. There was
no resisting them, now they had got to our level. We
were well and truly hosed.
Eric plummeted down, down and down.

Chapter five Through prison bars

Eric's journal
Damnation. My defense had ended in me falling

at extreme speed, and Rodriguez and Helena caught
by our unknown enemy.
Worse, I was still falling. And my foot rockets
weren't working.
Even worse, I could see the ground. And it was
rushing towards me,very, very, very fast. I wondered
if the arm had a parachute. For once the arm did what
I wanted and deployed a parachute.
The ground was still rushing towards me, very
fast. Which was odd. I could see it clearly now and it
was green. Dark green. It looked like a sky island.
Worse. Around the edge of it, I could see a
wing. I suddenly realized what it was.
A sky turtle. My father had told me many
stories about these amazing creatures. They had come
from mars when it dried up. They had hidden beneath
the crust. And then one day, in an attempt to discover
more about our planet, we punctured the crust. The
sky turtles all just flew out. One stayed to tell us
what they were and apologize for scaring us before
flying off. They had roamed the skies for forty nine

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years.
This one was still rushing towards me. And
getting faster. My foot rockets suddenly kicked in and
the turtle began to approach at a much slower rate. I
descended slowly and made an elegant landing on the
massive shell. An ivy string grew out of the turtle's
back. On the top of it, there was some sort of design
that looked like a microphone. The turtle wanted to
speak with me. Which was really good.
“Who are you and what do you want?” boomed a
deep voice through the ivy string. The turtle could
speak Esperanza.
“My name is Eric the invincible and I would like
a ride up.” I answered.
“Good. That's on my way. I am Gigantos. Why
are you going up?”
“I was separated from my friends, who have
been taken prisoner on board a terawhale. We are
looking for a prison on Barbados.”
“Why?”
“My friend's mother was kidnapped and we
think she may have been brought there.”
“I just destroyed said prison and released the
prisoners. There was no women among them. The only
thing that escaped me was a terawhale carrying a gun

platform.”
“That's our whale.”
“Excellent. It appears you may help me.”
“Destroy the platform or loot it?” Sky turtles
were known for being helpful to captives.
“Both!”
Rodriguez's diary
Once they caught us, we were trapped in
another force field. They dragged us over to the
terawhale and put us down on the gun platform. A
group of guards approached us, keeping their rifles
fixed on us.
The guards reached us and the force field was
lowered. If it had dropped a few seconds earlier, we
could have escaped, but the guards were too close.
The guards told us to get off our bikes. We did so.
I told Tom to try to blast them away.
Instantly, Toms hands flew up and all four
guards went flying away. As soon as he did so, he fell
on his arm. He had been shot by a tranquilizer.
I rushed over to him. That second, one of the
recovered guards picked me up. Helena and Tom were

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both grabbed. We were carried out.
*
After a few minutes that seemed like hours, we
were brought into a hall. We were thrown in front of a
throne. On it sat the green armoured woman who took
my mother. She had a hawkish face with sinister
reddish eyes.
“So, these are our brave little invaders, huh?”
She boomed in a sinister voice. “Is this all of them?”
She snapped to one of the guards.
“Nnno, ma'am. One fell to his death.” A guard
stammered.
“Are you sure he is dead?” She asked.
“No, ma'am.” The guard replied. He seemed to
be in charge.
“You! Lance-commander!” She pointed at
another guard. He saluted, as fast as he could. “You
are now full commander. Take him away!” I was full of
pity for both commanders. She pointed to another
soldier. The lance commander gave him his old
chevrons.
“Now, then. As for you, my dearies. Who are
you? What are you doing here?”
“I am Rodriguez and this is my sister Helena.” I

replied, doing my best to keep the rage, spite and

hatred very tangibly in my voice.
“Oh? My little problems. Your mother is not
here. Well I am Eriana and you will carry that name to
the grave! Take them to their cell!”
Our cell was a box. A small confined box. As

soon as our guards left, Tom tried to take the walls
apart.
It was no good. He couldn't concentrate with
his broken arm. I just went to sleep on the floor.
*
The wall of the prison exploded and Eric walked

in. I can tell you, I have never been more annoyed with
him. Seeing my glare he laughed.
“What? I took one out, didn't I?”
“Are you insane-
“Yes,” he said sheepishly. “Now let’s skedaddle,
shall we?”
Eric turned his arm into a drill and took the
enormous iron door off its hinges. He picked up the
injured Tom, and put him on his back.

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We burst out the door and ran. We made it

twenty meters, before one of the guards shouted out
behind us.
“Aw, look! The little babies don't like their
room!”
Eric gently lowered Tom to the ground and
turned to face the guard. He was standing on a
platform hovering three feet high.
“Ooh! A hero!” He giggled. “Get 'em!”
A ring of guards ran out around us. They knelt down
and trained their rifles on us. I pulled out a jar of
Greek Fire and Helena moved her finger to the ring of
a Roman Hubris grenade. I sniffed. The air smelt bad.
Very bad.
“Deal with them!” He shouted.
“Fight us yourself!” Eric's murky voice had a
threatening tone to it. The guard turned his back on
us and floated away.
The other guards opened fire.
I could see the bullets moving towards us. My
life flashed before me. The bullets were closer now.
They were about a metre away now. Suddenly
every single one went back to its firer. Tom fell over.
Eric smiled. Helena hugged me.
Our happiness was interrupted by an

earthquake. A hole appeared in the ground.
Eric's journal
Greek mythology is full of scary gribblies. Of all
these, one of the nastiest is the chimera. It was
something like this that shot out of the hole.
It was very like the chimera. However, it was
minus the fire breathing goat part and plus the bat
wings part.
It shot up to the roof and then back down
again, to land in front of us. The snake tail snapped
out and nearly ripped my head off. Thankfully I
ducked.
The lion turned on me and Tom, while the snake
started to attack Helena and Rodriguez. I decided to
do things the Eric-the-invincible style.
My arm turned into a sword from elbow down
and I charged the thing.
Its breath reeked. I tried not to breath in too
much as I got closer to the thing.
It attempted to bat me away with one paw. I
grabbed it and sliced the leg off. With my free hand,
I picked up the leg and poked it in the eye. It roared.

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Helena's eagle had grabbed the snake by the

head and Rodriguez was bashing it with a pistol, while
Helena was trying, unsuccessfully to remove its fangs.
The lion was trying to hit me with its other paw.
I did the same thing again.
Unfortunately, that was what it wanted me to
do. The paw smashed into my arm and batted it out of
the way. The lion hit me with its paw and threw me
across the room.
I was thrown against the wall. I decided close
combat time was over and blowing up time was
starting. My arm turned into a rocket launcher and I
loaded it with a grenade.
Helena realised what I was going to do and took
out a knife. She cut the snake-tail off the thing and it
howled. I fired.
The grenade streaked through the air in a
beautiful tight spiral, before landing in the closing
mouth and exploding. Its head turned into a cloud of
brilliant red.
The thing fell over, minus its head. I picked up
the disembodied paw and shoved it down the lion's
exposed windpipe. Lovely.
I remembered Gigantos's plan.
“How did you survive, Eric?” asked Helena.

“Tell you later. What did they do with the

bikes?”
“We don't know. When they caught us, we were
brought to the floor above.” Rodriguez interjected.
“Has the whale done anything?”
“That hole might be it's blow hole.”
“It's a sky creature, it doesn't need one. Also,
why would that thing be living inside the whale?”
“Oh yeah. That”
“ Where's the stairs?”
“Dunno.”
“So we're gonna have to search the whole
bottom floor of the prison for a stairs?”
“There's only one cell on the floor.”
“And we could just use the elevator behind you.”
Helena pointed out. Most annoyingly.
We all piled into the elevator. Helena pressed
the button saying hangar.
There was a little window in the cell. Rodriguez
and I stood looking out it. Two men looked out through
prison bars. One saw mud, the other saw stars...

Naoise Mchugh
Chapter six Escape!

Eric's Journal
The elevator pinged and we looked out into a big

dark room. In one corner I could see a force field. In
that, I guessed, was our bikes.
It was the rest of the hangar that interested
me. The entire left side of the hangar was dominated
by the rectangular bulk of a hover carrier.
Then, there was thirty nine hovercraft. Nine
were the upside down helicopter, attack variety, ten
were the lightwing variety, which looked like apache
attack choppers with wings and rotors on the
underside of each wing. Then there was twenty of the
triangular, anti grav, gun platform, defender variety.
There was a school of dolphin submarines, which
did exactly what they said on the tin, annihilator
tanks, which were shaped like the ancient tanks of the
early twenty first century with a bit more curve in
them, there was destroyer tanks, which looked like
annihilators with heavier guns. There was a tank
carrier for them to fit in as well.
There was fifty scout bikes, which were like
early twenty first century motor bikes with a front
wheel that could switch between skis, one on each

wheel holder, a normal wheel and floats and tank

tracks/propellers for a back one, even the armoured
might of a superspeeder.
Superspeeders were like an old Ferrari enzo,
minus the wheels, with jet boosters and tracks, skis,
wheels, propellers, wings, whatever the situation
needed. We had had one, my dad and I, and I had once
used it for water skiing. It absolutely wrecked when I
fell off.
There was one thing I knew, though, and that
was that I was going nowhere with that kind of army
chasing me. Our bikes were fast, but there was no way
they could outrun lightwings. That meant hijacking, or
good old fashioned kaboom. I just didn't have the
heart for the latter.
“What do we do now?” Helena broke the silence.
“You two guard, I'll hijack.” I said, turning my
hand into cable fingers, to show what I meant.
“There's going to be guards, Eric.” Rodriguez
warned me.
“I'll deal with my problems as they come,” I
told him, before picking up Tom and walking towards
the hover carrier. I studied the hover carrier from
my position. It was absolutely massive. It ran the
length of the hangar and half the width (I'd say a

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kilometre long, half one wide). It was rectangular.

First of all there was the back which was basically a
box, but with a lot of weapons sticking out, and then
the cargo hangar door at the back. This was joined to
the cockpit by two cylindrical passages. In one of
these was embedded the crew door. The cockpit was
similar to that of a helicopter.
A thing like a sniper rifle scope popped out of
my shoulder and moved in front of my mouth. I
breathed into it. Instantly a picture formed in my
mind of the hangar. I could see Rodriguez and Helena
at the back, covering the three doors. I could see all
the vehicles around the hangar. So that was sonar.
And it wasn't going to help much.
The sonar ring popped back into my shoulder
and was replaced by a satellite type thing. This began
to spin and another image formed in my mind. This one
was a heat sensor. I could see that there was a guard
by the crew door of the hover carrier and one in its
cargo bay.
I turned my arm into a sword as I neared the
crew door. The guard suddenly saw me and ripped out
a shotgun. Time for a food fight. My arm turned into a
machine gun and I pointed at the guard. Guard stew
for dinner. I hoped there was a cleaning robot

somewhere.
The satellite told me the other guard had heard
the noise. Knifing time again. Tiny blades popped up all
along the sword and began whirring like a chainsaw. I
entered through the crew door.
Just as I entered, the guard walked in. Buzz
buzz buzz scream. I walked into the cockpit, looking
for something for Tom's arm. There was nothing
there.
I checked the two passages. A bit of
maintenance stuff, including a cleaning robot, which I
turned on, but nothing more. Beyond the two passages
was a little chamber, which I supposed was for a
cockpit guard.
Beyond that was the armoury. I grabbed a
plasma bolt from the weapon rack. As I was holding it
in my right hand, two vertical bars popped out of my
palm. A laser ran between them and then moved up
and down the plasma bolt. Immediately my middle
finger turned into a compact version of it.
Next through that was the infirmary. A medic
bot was waiting there. I put Tom down on a bed and
the robot moved over to him. I blinked and Tom's arm
was in a sling.
Satisfied, I proceeded through the next

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doorway. In there, was the crew sleeping area. It

looked quite comfortable. There was bunk beds set in
the two walls, going five layers.
Beyond this was the cargo hangar. It was a
large room, with a raised gallery on the side. Guard
robots were standing, powered off, in neat little rows
along the gallery.
I walked towards the massive cargo door.
Beside it was a control panel. Cable fingers time again.
The massive door opened slowly. I could see the
pistons at the top working like crazy. The door hit the
floor with an enormous bang. I strode out of the
carrier. The front of the carrier had been facing the
internal entrance to the hangar, so I was facing the
vehicle entrance.
Rodriguez and Helena had opened up the force
field guarding our bikes and hovercraft and pulled out
two machine guns. They knelt, covering the two
entrances. I walked over to my bike and detached the
tow laser. I attached the laser to Rodriguez's bike
and mounted up.
My bike had been given to me by my dad for my
thirteenth birthday. As I moved up the cargo hangar
door, a pang of homesickness overcame me. It was
uncomfortable, to say the least.

I parked the vehicles in the corner of the cargo

bay. Tom was sitting on top of the gallery, his arm
slung up. I was glad to see he was well.
Next to go in were the attack hovercraft. I can
tell you, it is not easy trying to tow nine of those
things. They kept slipping and sliding.
The attack hovercraft may have been hard but
then I took the defender and lightwings together.
Super easy, you can bet your life on it.
The dolphin submarines were a bit of a problem,
until I figured out that they could swim in air as well.
They all slotted neatly into the hover carrier like
everything else.
The tanks did exactly what I wanted to do and
slotted into the tank carrier neatly. The tank carrier
also had twenty iron horse tanks to defend the four
behemoth tanks.
The tank carrier went quite nicely into the
hover carrier. Everything seemed to have a place in
the massive construction.
The scout bikes all lined up in nice little rows
along the massive cargo hangar. That just left the
superspeeder.
The superspeeder slotted in at the back. After
it went in, I strode up to the cockpit. A little bit of

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hacking and the adamantite monster was mine. The

engine roared and Rodriguez and Helena came running
over to us. They climbed the crew door.
“Well done, Eric. Any problems?” Rodriguez
asked.
“Nope. I'm going to sabotage this place. I'll be
diving off the landing pad when we next meet. I would
encourage you to be there, because I'm running low on
fuel.” I informed them.
“Be careful out there. This place is going to be
crawling with guards when they realise we escaped.”
“Alright. Tom's in the cargo hangar, I think.” I
got out, and turned my arm into a chainsword. I
turned to face the oncoming horde.
It was blasted apart as the hover carrier lifted
off the ground and reversed out the hangar door.

Chapter seven Lone ranger

Eric's journal
A buzz here, give the next guy an untrained

shave, buzz. As I ran, I tore apart anything that got
in my way. There was a new scanner on my shoulder,
which seemed to be making a map of the place as I
ran. I was looking for the control room, so I could
release the whale. The problem with that logic was
that, a terawhale's island is its source of pride. The
gun platform would be the closest thing the whale had
to an island and if I took it away, it would not be a
happy camper. No siree.
Of course, Eriana was treating the whale
horribly, and Gigantos had told me to get rid of the
platform.
The mapping scanner had found the control
room. The problem was, there was a large wall robot in
between me and it. As the blockade came into view, I
saw that each segment of the wall robot was guarded
by a force field.
My finger went plasma bolt again. One shot
dissolved the central force field and began eating
away at the rest. Rocket launcher time again.
Suddenly, I was dragged towards the writhing wall. I

Naoise Mchugh
realised that with all the metal in me, at least some of

it would be magnetic. They wanted to play rough then?
Chainsword time.
I aided my speed towards the wall with a little
rocket booster. As I neared the spiky, spinning wall of
segments, the chainsword began whirring like crazy.
Buzz, slash, buzz, boom.
A spike from the wall robot had fallen to the
floor. I picked it up and the arm analysed it. As I had
expected, it didn't know what it was for. I started
thinking what I wanted the arm to do with it and,
unsurprisingly, it worked. The spike was absorbed into
my arm and my arm turned into a sword, minus the
chain. The spike had been superheated and was now a
white rod that ran the length of the sword along the
curved edge. It was suspended a little away from the
blade.
I had intended to use it for cutting through
rocks and the like, but it might prove a very lethal
weapon. Very lethal indeed.
The control room was just around the corner. I
entered it and was amazed. There was a small room,
with a computer inset in the one curved wall. There
were a few ports in the bottom of the computer. I
picked one that looked fairly promising.

Unsurprisingly, the computer asked for a password.

One of my new glands saved me, with a large energy
reserve which smashed through the computer's
defenses like a nuke.
I reminded myself to try and hack the
computer Rodriguez had found. A bit of information
could have saved that reserve for a much bigger fight.
I began searching the computer for anything to
do with the whale. Instantly I found several
documents. There was also a program which appeared
to control the whale. I remembered seeing a lot of
equipment and wires connected to the whale from
Gigantos's back. I looked for commands until I found
the emergency release command. I exited, turned the
computer off and hared for the landing pad which the
mapper had found.
A few minutes and a couple of buzzes later I

burst out on to the landing pad.
Exactly what I had been dreading was waiting
for me. It was another of Eriana's crazy creatures.
She seemed to have a fad for Greek mythology, like
me. She also was big into putting wings on her pets.

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This time it was the hydra. Overgrown komodo dragon

with nine heads. And wings.
Instantly, I was holding the chainsword as the
Hydra jumped into the air and glided down in front of
me. Off with three heads.
What I had forgotten was what made the hydra
truly terrifying. As the three heads fell to the floor,
six more grew back in their place.
I rocketed out of its range and tried to think.
Then I realised that Eriana was not about to let me
get off easy. Great gouts of water spewed from the
Hydra's mouths. I ducked as the torrent flew over my
head. Immediately I was up in the air.
How had the hydra been defeated before? I
couldn't remember. I was just going to have to fend it
off until the carrier arrived.
It drew back its central head. Instinctively, I
knew it was going to give me a tirade again. Inspiration
struck me. I took out the superheated blade and
prepared to weather the storm. As the torrent
rushed toward me, it began to heat. Slowly, the
torrent began to dissipate.
The hydra jumped off the ground, up to my
level. One long leg attempted to strike me. I parried. I
could smell the hydra's breath from this distance. It

reeked of fish. I remembered that the hydra's fangs

carried an incredibly deadly poison. And I would have
to evade twelve snake heads trying to bite me. Add to
that, four strong legs and a pair of wings and you
could see my situation. A wave of hopelessness
overcame me. I could see the hydra's red eyes.
Twenty four pairs of eyes stared back at me. It was a
scary sight. So scary, in fact, that I rammed my
sword into the closest eye.
The hydra recoiled, instantly. A claw punched
me as the monster flew backwards. I pressed my
advantage, jabbing and blocking, leaping over the
hydra to attack it from behind. Instantly, it had
turned around and was hitting me again. The
superheated part of the sword was beginning to cool.
I decided enough was enough. The sword switched to a
machine gun and I lanced across the sky away from
the hydra.
I opened fire on the beast and pumped holes in
it. Scales began peeling off and green blood flowed
freely from the wounds.
The problem, of course was that the wounds
healed instantly. I switched to the shotgun.
“Ya kids'd best be getting da hell offa ma lawn
or brandine'll be having yar noggins for candle

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holders!” I just couldn't resist the Cletus the slack

jawed yokel impression. It was that kind of shotgun.
Chugga-boom popped a shell at the hydra. It healed
that as well.
In a flash, I remembered how the hydra had
been defeated. I needed heat. And I had the perfect
weapon. I had longed to use the flamethrower from
the moment I had heard I had it. It was beautiful.
A billowing cloud of fire stretched from the
nozzle of the flamethrower. It extended down to the
hydra and engulfed it in a cloud of smoke and fire. As
the inferno cleared, I could see the hydra. It was
absolutely wrecked. All its scales had fallen off and
its skin had burnt. I could see all the muscles and
tendons, all the veins and arteries, even its organs and
bones. The worst part was it was still alive.
As I approached it with the re-heated sword,
one head snapped out at me. Slice. I rammed the
sword down the gaping windpipe and pulled it back out.
The hydra tried one last all out attack on me
with its eleven remaining heads. Slicey-dicey. I landed
gently back on the platform. Unlike the hydra, which
fell down with a crash.
I walked over to its corpse and found one of the
severed heads. Being very careful only to use my

robot arm, I pulled out one of the fangs. Analysis told

me the arm didn't what to do with it. I made it into
another attachement for my sword. A poisonous one
as well.
“Ah-hah! We've found our little sabotager!
Show him his room.” The guards had appeared behind
me. Eriana was nowhere to be seen. Unimportant. I
was well and truly screwed.
Of course, that was when the hover carrier
arrived. Finally. I ran for the edge of the pad and
catapulted onto the top of the carrier. From the roof
of the carrier, I popped a sniper round into the
closest guard, before the incredible variety of guns on
the carrier shattered them.
I looked down and saw Gigantos talking to the
whale. Seeing me, he said something to the whale and
it nose-dived, and tail flipped and barrel rolled and
many other things, until the platform fell off its back.
An elevator pinged up behind me. I got in and as
I sank down, the last thing I saw was Gigantos waving.
The lone ranger returned home.

Naoise Mchugh
Chapter eight The next stop?

Eric's journal
I nearly fell asleep as the elevator as it sank

down into the cockpit guard chamber. The door slid
open and I walked out of the wall embedded portal. I
waved away all the questions Rodriguez and Helena
had for me. Tom fell in step with me and we walked
off to the dormitory. I was asleep before I even hit
my bed.
After about twenty four hours of sleep and

eight ten course meals, I got up and began work. The
first thing I had to do was hack that computer. The
reserve gland got me into something very interesting.
The owner's email records.
Eriana was an interesting character. From the
emails, I was able to piece together information, and
information was what we all needed.
The early emails were very interesting. There
was a lot of juicy personal details in them. I found out
that she had three families, which she had left. She
had a husband named Patrick and one son in one family

, a second husband and another son and finally a third

husband and one daughter.
There was also constant mention of a fourth,
more shadowy man in her life. I could find no clear
information about him, but I figured that he had not
been ditched. She never actually named this fourth
character, nor did she ever describe her relationship
with him. She made eight referrals to him, one before
and one after each marriage, birth and escape. From
this, I guessed that she was in fact being bossed
around by him. That was all I could find out about her
family.
She was from Ireland, which explained the flag
on the back of the computer. Her maiden name was
McIron, a name which I recognised. The McIrons were
a family run criminal empire of nastiness. To attack a
McIron was like signing your own death warrant. She
had lived in the floating village of Dunliath, which was
owned by the McIrons.
There was a folder called “work”. This was so
heavily encrypted, I doubted an energy reserve would
do anything to it. I left it for a later date.
Next, I drew up the stage one plan again and
discovered that our next stop was in the florida
everglades. Time for a picnic.

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***
A few minutes later, after telling Rodriguez our

destination, as well as the remaining few and having a
few bagels to replenish my reserve, I was in the
armoury, looking for a few half decent weapons. I had
found a morning star and a mace, which I absorbed. I
was looking for some good plasma weapons and a bit of
armour.
As I searched, I found some very interesting
weapons. There was an atom sphere, which was
capable of reducing an opponent to their genetic
material. That was absorbed. Then, there was a
psycho-focus shoulder turret, which could take all
your anger and then dish it into a target of your
choice in the form of quicksilver streams. This, I
would build into my armour. There was a fusion shield.
It could protect my entire body, and since it was just
an arm strap, it didn't weigh a thing. I decided I
would build that into my armour.
I finally found what I was looking, for in the
form of a plasma rifle. After taking this, I noticed
another spike lying in the corner. I picked it up. The
arm didn't know what to do with it, yet again. This

became another attachment for my sword, this time

made of plasma.
Next I found some adamantite-carbon-cotton
alloy armour. It was flexible and light, but hard as a
diamond. It was also capable of deploying weapons on
my forearms and shoulders, and able to turn invisible.
It had a spiked back and arms and a crash helmet type
thing. The shoulder turret attached to it, along with
the fusion shield.
I decided I needed to train a little with my new
gear. There was a training room on the bottom floor,
which I had discovered, went round in a U back to the
hangar.
After getting to the training room, I found that
there was snowmen put up as training dummies. I
realised that it was for atom spears, because snowmen
would just turn back into snow whereas anything else
would make a mess. Donning the new armour, I felt
very in control. I noticed one of the snowmen had
been made to look like it was sticking its tongue out at
me. The psycho turret smashed it apart and I felt as
if a massive weight had been lifted off me. The atom
spear proved its worth by snowising the next snowman
in line. The morning star on its fusion chain smashed
the furthest one away from me. Next, I boosted

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towards the next in line and maced him. The next one
melted when I got within a couple of metres, courtesy
of the superheated sword. I switched to the plasma
rifle and a stream of the purple stuff blasted the last
one apart.
Satisfied, I turned on the arena cleaning robot
and went up to the sweet dispenser in the crew
dormitory for a bite to eat.

Chapter nine Second attempt

Rodriguez's diary
Eric walked into the bridge. Instantly I knew he

had found something. I could hear him hovering behind
me. He only really hovered when he was excited or
agitated. I shifted into auto pilot and turned round.
“Alright, what's this amazing piece of news that
you want me to know?” I inquired.
“Well, I managed to open her email records.”
“Excellent. Anything?”
“She has a three families, all of whom she has
left. She has three husbands, possibly a fourth, two
sons and one daughter. The fourth is a sort of
shadowy overlord. That was all I found out about her
family.”
“What else?”
“She is one of the McIrons. They are a family
criminal empire. She has lived in Dunliath, the family
village, which is so called because it is a floating
fortress of steel.”
“Alright, well, what's the deal with the
McIrons?”
“To attack a McIron is to sign your own death
warrant. They're international as well, so dropping a

Naoise Mchugh
few plasma rounds on Dunliath won't save us. When I

was growing up in Dublin, we were always hearing
reports of their activities coming in from the east
side. Knifing certain people, stealing stuff from
others, but mostly just drug dealing. The southeast
side went crazy for a bit because of them, in about
2096. The problem was, that although everyone knew
it was them, they couldn't find a scrap of evidence,
and then, suddenly, last year, they all turned into
smoke. This is the first time I've heard of them since.
I'd say they went underground,”
“So she's Irish?”
“Yes,”
“Anything else?”
“No. Our next stop is the Florida everglades.
They were a dangerous place before the explosion and
everything, and the trees there were proven to be
able survive a nuclear apocalypse in 2050. The things
Eriana could have done with all the animals there
would scare anyone. It's going to be one hell of a
fight,”
“Excellent. Prepare for a party,” I said. Eric
nodded and walked out.
I looked up the everglades in the carrier's
atlas. They were about two megametres north north

west away from our position. About turn, and off we

went.
About a hundred kilometres from the

everglades, we were attacked by harpies. It wasn't
anything big, just a bit of a fry up and some wasted
ammo.
It happened more and more, the closer we got
to the everglades. I began to realise they were
uncoordinated attacks, just random attacks from the
wild creatures of the forest. The harpies were
probably discarded experiments of Eriana's. I
wondered why she was making all these creatures. It
had to be difficult to make one new species so why
make so many?
When we neared the everglades, I pulled the
carrier below the clouds. For the first time since the
explosion, I saw the Atlantic. It was no longer water.
It was molten rock. You read right. The entire
Atlantic ocean had turned to lava. I saw a bubble
attempt to rise to the surface. The lava was too thick
and it exploded.
I finally managed to take my eyes off the new

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red sea and saw something much scarier. The

everglades were a forest of steely wood. Standing at
the front of the forest was a grizzly wolf in all its
radiational glory. The massive four legged behemoth
was chewing a salmon. I didn't envy the salmon.

Chapter Ten Glades of Doom

Eric's Journal
I was lying on a couch in the living room on the

bottom floor, watching TV with Tom, when Rodriguez
told us we were beginning the attack, through the
intercom. Tom went off to the hangar, and I jumped
up and ran over to the window, where I saw the molten
Atlantic, and the jutting cliff that was the edge of
the everglades. I saw the grizzly wolf that Rodriguez
mentioned. It was massive. Its eyes were yellow and
red, and its fur looked like steel.
Grizzly wolves and gorilla bears were two of the
Montreal incident species. They had each and all
descended from one mutated animal and one healthy
one. What had happened was that an experimental
facility had exposed the animals to insane amounts of
radiation. In each case, if the animals were about a
metre or more away from each other, nothing
happened to them. If they were closer, they somehow
merged. The animals then proved that they all had a
bit of rabbit in them and began spreading all over the
world. There was one incident of a janitor wandering
into the wrong place at the wrong time and being
merged with a small scorpion and a rhino. He called

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himself the rhinopion. Animal rights parties had torn

the facility down and there was murder over it.
The glades themselves looked like a wall of iron
trunks with leaves hung on them in strategic places.
They were huge. I'd say that so close to Iceland, the
forest must have been affected by radiation, which
would have messed up the trees. I walked out of the U
shaped bottom floor, out into the hangar, where I met
Helena and Tom.
“What are we going to do about the grizzly wolf
out there?” Rodriguez asked, joining us.
“I'm a little better with animals than my father.
I'll see what I can do.” I told him.
“Alright. We'll get something from our fleet for
the forest while you're out there,” Rodriguez
answered me.
“Scout bikes and an attack hovercraft, nothing
too bulky,” I reminded him.
“Good luck,” Helena said. Her eagle perched on
my shoulder and rubbed my cheek, then returned to
her. I nodded and walked over to the cargo door. I
pushed the button and the door fell out and hovered
over the lava. Running down the ramp, I leapt off the
bottom, slowly gliding up, rather than doing it quickly
and scaring the wolf. If I botched things up here, I

would either have some real life practice with my new

gear or I would be stew for Mrs. Outrageously large
wolf.
I landed on the cliff and approached the wolf
with my hands up and a smile on my mouth, being very
careful to keep my teeth to myself. I walked towards
it slowly, making no sudden movements. The wolf
seemed to get the picture and padded towards me,
where it proceeded to rub my leg. The unnerving
effect of having a ten foot wolf rub my leg was
lessened by the pleasure I got from knowing that the
unnatural arm had done nothing to my animalistic
charisma.
Rodriguez, Helena and Tom arrived. Rodriguez
was on a scout bike and towing another one for me.
Helena was piloting an attack hovercraft, with Tom
sitting beside her. The eagle was flying beside them.
They flew down slowly, knowing not to scare the wolf.
Speaking of the wolf, it padded away, off into the
forest.
They landed beside me, and I realised I was
forgetting something really important.
“Sorry, I forgot something. Be right back,” I
told Rodriguez. He nodded and I jumped off the cliff
and hovered over to the crew door. I opened it and

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walked in. I ran to the hangar, where the baggage

hovercraft was and grabbed the sword my father had
sent me. I knew somewhere inside me that I needed
it. Maybe it was because it was one of the last
memories of my father. Maybe there was some other,
more sinister reason for it. I just needed it and I
didn't really care why.
Leaving the carrier, I joined Helena and
Rodriguez. There was something going on. I could feel
it. Helena was looking really angry and Rodriguez wore
a nervous expression. Curious about this new
development, I hovered towards them.
“What's going on now?” I asked.
“Well, your wolf has just set off a howl. Which,
I might add, was answered. From all over the forest.”
Helena informed me.
“Firstly, he's not my wolf. Secondly, did you
record this howl?” I inquired.
“Oh yeah, we'd really think to record a noise
when a herd of ten foot wolves could burst through
the forest at any moment. Why didn't you just kill the
wolf in the first place?” Rodriguez said, looking
terrified.
“Because other wolves would have found the
carcass, not to mention the fact that a ten foot wolf

is a useful ally. Anyway, there's nothing we can do

now. We'll just have to get going and hope wolfie
doesn't find us,” I said, in what I hoped was a
reassuring tone.
I climbed onto my hover bike and veered off
into the trees. They followed. We were almost
immediately swallowed up by the trees. The hydra's
wave of hopelessness overcame me again. It might
have been something to do with meeting its eyes. Or it
was just the trees. Either way, I was worried. I had a
feeling Eriana had another crazy monster waiting for
me.
***
The further in we got, the closer together the

trees got. My imagination began to play tricks on me.
Behind every tree, a monster lurked. The invincible
nemean lion was behind one, while Hephaestus' bronze
bulls were behind two more. The mouth of hell opened
behind me and the hydra and chimera walked out to
say hi and ask me to dinner with Satan. But despite all
of these fantasies, one creature never appeared to
invite me to tea and torture. I knew it was it who
waited for me in Erianna's fortress and I was

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terrified.
***
After about an hour of tree trekking, we

reached a point where the trees were impenetrable.
They were so close together there was no way to get
through. I looked up and saw they stretched high up
into the sky. The trees here had more of a steely look
to them than the other trees. Much steelier in fact.
So steely in fact, that they could only be that way
because they were made of steel.
We dismounted and walked towards the wall of
steel, looking for a gate. Rodriguez tripped over a root
that seemed to have come from nowhere. He shook
himself and got up.
I smiled, and kept walking. A branch
matierialized in front of me and I smacked my head
off it. I ducked under it and walked on.
Something about the third time was what set
me off. Helena was laughing at both of us when
suddenly, she was grabbed by two of the trees.
Rodriguez was instantly beside one, attempting to
hack it to pieces with his axe. I went for a more
dignified approach, ripping out the flamethrower and

smothering the trees in an inferno. It proved more

effective than I had thought. The nearest ten or so
trees all shrivelled away to ashes. Helena fell over.
Rodriguez's axe sliced right through the withered
husk.
Helena picked herself up and glared indignantly
at the fortress.
“That thing is coming down. Right now,” She
said.
“Wrong. It's going up. Way up,” I smiled. My
arm went rocket launcher and Rodriguez and Helena
stepped back. I ignored them and concentrated on a
hole in the nearest tree. I loaded the rocket launcher
with a frag shell and knelt on one knee. I took very
careful aim and fired. The rocket smashed across the
air, went right into the hole and exploded when it hit
the steel back of the tree. The explosive fragments
blew a few more holes in it.
The tree was still there. I blinked and it was
still there. That wasn't much of a problem because I
had lots more tricks up my sleeve. The next in line was
a black hole missile. I pushed it into the barrel of the
launcher and took aim. Once again, I concentrated on
the hole in the steel tree. I fired and the missile
jetted through the air before impacting with the back

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of the tree and causing a black hole for a fraction of

a second. That fraction of a second was enough and
the tree imploded into the hole.
As the smoke cleared, I became aware that
something was wrong. Rodriguez and Helena noticed it
to. So did Tom, coming to join us from the attack
hovercraft's cockpit. Even the eagle was worried. I
could smell something that can only be described as
bad. A shadow formed in the smoke, and out walked
the nemean lion.

Chapter eleven When creation was begun

Eric's journal
The nemean lion stood blocking the entrance to

Erianna's second fortess. It was exactly as described
in mythology. A massive lion, with a golden coat.
Thankfully no wings.
It roared a roar that shook the earth and
charged at me. Helena had pummelled it with more
bullets than there are stars in the sky before it
reached me, but her machine gun bullets bounced off
its coat harmlessly.
It impacted with me and knocked me to the
ground. I looked up at the massive golden jungle cat
standing on top of me and smiled. As it opened its maw
to bite my head off, I threw it with all my superhuman
strength. The lion flew off me and hit the wall of
steel trees with a mighty crunch. Helena opened fire
on it as it sailed through the air. She was firing
plasma bolts at it, to no avail.
The lion hit the wall and sank down. It was on
its feet before it landed and was fighting off
Rodriguez's axe. I was immediately beside him, with
my sword set to plasma. I was using my father's sword
in my left hand and it felt very uncomfortable and

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unwieldy. I realized I would have to do something

about that. Again and again our blows bounced off it.
Helena's eagle swooped down from the trees
and pecked the lion in the eye. It roared its
earthquake roar and its eye grew back. It found the
eagle and batted it against a tree. Helena stopped
firing and dropped her machine gun to run to the
eagle. The lion saw her running, and realised she would
be vulnerable. It turned away from us and began
running.
As the lion ran towards Helena, time seemed to
slow down for me. I could see all the muscles moving
under the lion's coat. Numbers raced through my head
and I realised that if the lion hit Helena, she would be
dead as a doornail. I bended my knees and leapt off
the ground, my rocket feet sending me there in what
would have appeared to Rodriguez and his cousin as
atto-seconds. I flew, spinning like a top, straight at
the lion. Helena turned round, to see me crash into
the lion and lift it off the ground, to fly it into a tree.
Or just a blur. Or the lion dissapear.
I let go of the lion a few metres before it hit
the tree and sent it flying through the tree. I landed
back on the ground, feeling like a god. Rodriguez,
Helena and Tom just stood there staring at me. I

grinned and fell over.

That, of course, was when the lion jumped
through the hole in the tree I had thrown it through,
and landed millimeters away from me. It roared again
and the earthquake shook me into standing.
Rodriguez's axe was bouncing off it again. Helena was
pummelling rounds at it already. This was all very well,
but it wasn't hurting the beast in the slightest. There
was definitely some way to hurt it. I knew that. But
how?
Tom, floating silently behind Rodriguez, picked
up the lion with his mind and hurled it against the
ground. I was still watching the world in slow motion
through a veil of numbers and arrows. As the lion went
up, I could see the psychic arm lifting it up and
throwing it at the ground. It fell and I could see the
wind lifting the hairs on its coat in glorious
technicolour. As the hairs lifted up, I could see the
skin below it which rippled in a way that just didn't
seem natural.
The lion landed with a crash, the shockwave
sending me up into the sky.
Having recovered from its tea party with the
tree, the eagle swooped down below me and pecked
the lion in the eyes, this time managing to get away.

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I landed smoothly on the ground as the lion

opened its mouth and roared for a fourth time. As its
maw opened, One of the arrows that veiled my vision
pointed inside the mouth. At the side of my vision, I
saw an icon like the atom spear flashing. I knew
exactly what my supercharged unconscience was
trying to tell me.
I leapt off the ground and jetted towards the
enormous toothy hole, my arm an atom spear, pointed
out in front of me. As I flew towards the closing pit,
my speed ever increasing, I remembered something
about the lion. It's coat was completely separate from
it and also completely immune to all harm. That was
why the spear couldn't work its magic on the lion.
I suddenly flew into the lion, my spear
connecting with its tonsils. The brute instantly rotted
away to biological soup of some form or another. The
coat fell on top of the golden syrup. I picked it up and
put it on Tom, before collapsing.
When I had recovered and managed to get up, I

walked over to Rodriguez.
“What in God's name was that?” Rodriguez

asked, incredulously.
“Not sure. Could have been the energy reserve
though. Shall we get to work?” I answered him.
“Let's go.” We set off into the fortress of
doom, a bunch of young hopefuls who probably weren't
going to survive the next hour.
*
Rodriguez's diary
As we walked through the great steel maze, I
noticed a change in Eric. He was becoming more and
more agitated, the further in we went. Helena noticed
it too. It was having a bad effect on her. Eric was
walking faster, so it was easy for the two of us to
hang back and talk while he went on ahead, talking to
himself and fidgeting. We met a couple of guards, but
he vaporised them, chopped them up or otherwise
maimed them. Eventually, he was far enough ahead for
us to whisper without him noticing.
“What's wrong with him?” Helena whispered.
“You're the one who's been all close to him, you
tell me,” I whispered back.
“He's been talking to himself,”
“Has he been expecting a reply?”
“No,”

Naoise Mchugh
“Good. What's he been talking about?”

“Something about someone or something coming
to get him,”
“Oh. Has he mentioned us?”
“He said he had to fight it alone. And then he
kept repeating the last word,”
“What's the hell is he doing now?” We had
reached a place where the corridor turned right and
then kept going in its original direction. The wall in
front of us was made of stone, while the rest of the
place was made of steel. Eric was standing in front of
the stone wall and tracing something on it. He finished
and the wall slid aside. He was now completely calm
and was that a trace of resignation?
“This is where we must part. I may come back,
but I probably will not. Do not follow me. He is coming
for me and I must face him alone even if it is – and it
probably will be – the last thing I do,” He said this
gravely, in a way that I didn't think was possible for a
thirteen year old. Helena started to protest, but he
was gone, into the tunnel and the wall had slid back.
The squeak of a mouse made all three of us turn
around and when we looked back, the stone wall had
disappeared, to be replaced by a steel one. I had a
feeling the steel wall was just a covering, but we all

knew that even if we removed the covering and blew

the stone wall to pieces, there would just be the
glades beyond it.
I was the first to move. A sign above the
corridor said command center. I turned the stealth
field on my armour on, sent my bike back to the
carrier and crept along, my back flat against the wall.
Before long we were inside the command center.
The center was a large octagonal room. Three
sides of the room had a large glass window on them.
Through this I could see what looked like a factory
floor. People were working at different station. They
were making different types of weapons.
The remainder of the sides were covered in
buttons, levers and all sorts of other crazy things. It
probably would have been a paradise for Eric. I could
just imagine him going crazy there. He probably would
have blown the factory to pieces within a minute.
The room had about eight people in it, apart
from Eriana. They were all working at different sides
of the room. Three were overseeing the work on the
floor. In the center of the room was an octagonal
pillar which went about halfway to the ceiling. It was a
holo-communicator. Eriana was facing this and talking.
There was a hologram on the ccommunicator but I

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couldn't see it properly.

“Have you moved the prisoner yet Eriana?” The
figure spoke. It was a deep sinister voice. The
prisoner – mother?
“Yes, my lord. Are you absolutely certain she is
the one we need for our plan?” What plan?
“For the last time, Eriana, yes she is. The
commission is annoyed with the manner in which you
performed the abduction. They found the fact that
there was survivors was irritating, to say the least,”
Survivors? That could only mean one thing: us.
“I understand my lord. I am eternally grateful
for your intercession,” Intercession? That was what
people prayed to saints for. It wasn't used anywhere
else, so perhaps the figure was regarded as a saint
and this was some sort of twisted cult? Or worse,
perhaps he was regarded as a messiah. That would
probably mean a new world order. What had started
as a simple mission to find and rescue my mother had
turned into something a lot more important, something
that would probably mean the end of the world as we
know it, or even the complete end of the world. I
shuddered, remembering how I had thought the
apocalypse was over.
“I had to intervene. We could not do without

your skills,” What skills? Does being able to mess up

loads of innocent animals count as a skill? I could make
fortune then!
“Oh? You had no personal reasons?” Personal
reasons? Then, could this be the fourth husband Eric
had talked about?
“Of course I had personal reasons, Eriana.
There is a personal reason behind everything I do.
What I meant was that the commission agreed not to
kill you because of your skills,” Who the hell were the
commission?
“That is good. Now, this boy,” Eric? Or me? Or
some other poor sucker?
“Have you set the trap for him?” Trap? Eric,
then. Probably somewhere in that tunnel.
“Yes. Are you certain that he is the boy in the
prophesy?” Prophesy? What prophesy?
“No. But if he survived a fall like that, I don't
think he could be anyone else,” Almost certainly Eric.
“If he survived a fall like that, what makes you
think the beast can kill him in time?” I relaxed. Eric's
monster slaying skills had been proved to me twice
already.
“Nothing. The trap is there to test him. He will
definitely not kill the creature, however. The reason I

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set the trap was to see if he would go alone, which his

nature will almost certainly command him to,” He is
coming for me and I must face him alone. The
sentence suddenly had a lot more weight to it. Beside
me, Helena squirmed, dangerously. I grabbed her
shoulder to try and calm her.
“Whatever they may say in Iceland, I think
project HADES was a tremendous success, don't
you?” Project HADES? What in God's name was that?
Could it have been the explosion that killed Eric's
father?
“Yes. People will forever remember it as the day
the creators succeeded,” The creators?
“The cult,” Helena hissed to me, reading my
thoughts.
“The day when creation was begun”

Chapter twelve Son of Pasiphae

Eric's journal
As I walked along the winding tunnels of the

labyrinth, doubts began to gnaw away at me, yet again.
I knew that, despite her obsession with mythology,
Eriana could not have made the labyrinth. Could that
mean that there was more to the greek legends than
just myths? And then there was the sign. Where had
that come from? I had seen it before somewhere.
Could my father have shown it to me? I doubted that.
Maybe I had gone “exploring” in the room in my house
where my father had kept all my mother's old things.
The maze was rather interesting. I had been
wandering for around an hour, but I was neither
hungry, thirsty nor tired. The maze was hewn into the
rock and I felt like I was wandering round in a wall
carving belonging to some twisted god.
There was gemstones on the walls and these
cast light on the tunnels. Except that they flashed
rather than provide solid light. The tunnels were long
circular corridors with caves scattered at random.
There was a lot of interesting things in the caves. I
found some really cool rock formations in one.
There was a rock that was carved like the

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world. Water filled all the gaps where the sea should
be and the rock rotated just like the world. There was
a long thin piece of rock that went through the rock
like a skewer and the rock rotated around this. Scary.
A ray of sunshine came down and hit the rock and a
little area around it. This one area was the only place
of green in the whole labyrinth. I wouldn't have been
surprised if there was a life tree sapling growing in
the center of the globe.
I walked into another cave. This one was much
more sinister. The cave was spherical and there was a
ring of lava around a circular rock floor. There was
two corridors leading into it. The one I had come in
through and another straight ahead of me. I could
hear his breathing. Smell his last meal – which
probably hadn't been in a week.
“Are you going to just skulk around there like a
worm or are you going to come and get me, rat
breath?” The challenge was improvised, but I felt it
was still pretty good.
There was a bellow, the likes of which I have
never heard from another source and which I know I
will never forget, in this life or the next. The
gemstones flashed and I saw a shadow. Another flash
made that shadow into his silhouette, dark and

powerful.
The next flash broke out of the usual rythm of
Pink, orange, blue, purple, brown, green and yellow. It
should have been blue, but instead, it was a deep, rich
red, the colour of blood and rage. Several of the
gemstones glowed black or white, amidst the blood. As
if by magic, he was standing in front of me. The
minotaur. Son of pasiphae, half-man, half-bull. He had
the head and lower legs of a bull, but from his knees
to his neck, he was all man. He wore a tunic which used
to be blue as the sea, but was now brown with dried
blood.
He held an axe many times the size of me. I
didn't want to think about the heads that had rolled
because of that axe. More than a just few of his
bovine brethren, probably. The twelve foot tall bull
demon lifted his axe and began to swing. The fusion
shield spoke to his axe as only a blocked killing blow
can.
The beast roared at me and swung his battleaxe
again. I stepped out of the way, rather neatly. The
axe embedded itself in the ground and rat-breath
attempted a punch at me. The fusion shield blocked
the impact, but I still went flying.
I stabilized myself with rocket boosters and

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locked eyes with the brute. He had tiny little red

things that there was no way he could see through.
Inspiration struck me. The great ugly brute was blind!
That meant he used smell, hearing or echolocation. If
he used smell, I could smoke him with the
flamethrower. Smell was highly likely. If he used
hearing then I probably had something in my big bag
of tricks to deafen him. If he used echolocation, then
deafening him would have the same effect and so
would jamming whatever was making the noises, but
that would probably require hitting something inside
him. If he was using all three, which seemed the most
likely thing, then it would just be the same.
I opted to hit the smell first, it being the
easiest way. The flamethrower exploded out of my
arm and I pointed it at the bull. It refueled with some
of the stuff from all the food I ate on the carrier. It
was hard to hold it up in the air. I guessed that the
exoskeleton wasn't able to do airlifting. I hovered
down to the ground and took careful aim.
I activated the weapon.
He was immediately engulfed by the inferno. It
blazed around him like a thousand bonfires put
together never could. But it wasn't what I wanted.
There was no smoke. As much as my pyromaniacal side

wanted to keep burning him, I knew I would never be

able to beat him unless I could trick him.
There was a lever on the body of the
flamethrower. I slid it from the top to the bottom. As
I moved the lever from the top to the bottom, the
flames began to turn to change to smoke. It got in his
nostrils which was just what I wanted. The stuff was
acrid. It wouldn't be able to get me through my
armour, but smell sensors on the suit helped to keep
me aware of my surroundings.
The brute charged at me. I jumped to the side,
keeping the flamethrower trained on him and wished I
hadn't spent my reserve on the nemean kitten. As he
charged past me, I noticed his nostrils flaring and
shrinking, as though he was trying to smell me through
the smoke. I knew I was going to have to take out his
nose permanently.
There was a dial beside the lever. In
desperation, I twisted this and the smoke coming
from the nozzle changed color. While it had been grey
before, it now turned green, interlaced with purple
and pink. I recognised it from chemistry. It was
haloseon, a substance formulated to be so repulsive to
the nose that when it was burned, breathing in the
smoke would render the nose completely and utterly

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useless.
The minotaur turned and charged me again. This
time I didn't have to perform any kind of dodge. He
ran straight into the wall of the cave, right over the
circle of lava. His horns embedded themselves in the
wall and he vainly tried to pull them out. I walked
closer to him, being careful of the lava. He might be
able to run right over it, but I didn't have ironshod
hoofs and all that. As I walked closer, I saw his ears
twitching. I switched my arm back to normal and
leaped away, just in time. He planted his hooves firmly
on the lava and pulled himself out, springing towards
me like a jack in the box.
I managed to avoid the killer leap and landed a
few meters away from him. I was going to have to deal
with his ears, and fast. My arm saved me again. My
hand exploded into a loudspeaker. His ears would have
to be much more sensitive than a human's for him to
be able to use them to find his way around. That
meant I wouldn't have to dull my ears, which was
helpful. The noise of a siren would probably be enough.
The loudspeaker blared out a song and the minotaur
clutched his ears.
He lifted his head up to roar and I saw my
chance. I turned my arm to the superheated sword

and leapt towards his throat. I rebounded off it and

went flying.
Many hours later, I went through the tunnel
roof, ricocheted around in some crazy room before
landing in a heap on the floor. I was utterly lost and
confused, but some animalistic instinct told me I was
near Rodriguez's mother. Which was when I conked it.

Naoise Mchugh
Chapter thirteen Out of the fire, into the....?

Rodriguez's diary
The image flickered and died. Helena stopped

thinking about Eric and switched her annoyingly logical
focus to the much more obvious danger we were in.
We had climbed up onto the wall where we could
observe events. Now we had to escape without being
noticed.
Eriana turned around and stared straight at us.
If it weren't for our stealth fields, we would have
been seen instantly.
“Because I am feeling generous, I am going to
give you twenty seconds to run. Do not make me
regret it,” Damn. I grabbed the edge of the wall and
hurled myself to the ground. Helena followed me with
a flip and we were off down the corridor.
We kept running in a straight line and I knew
something was wrong with that. Helena knew exactly
what it was. She kept looking back and suddenly it
came to me. The wall where Eric had dissapeared into
was gone!
I didn't have time to care because the guards
had begun chasing us. I began running backwards, as I
vaguely remembered Eric doing, and pulled my railgun

off my back. I checked the charge meter. It had just

enough energy to take out the five guards who were
chasing us.
Projectile number one, away. The little dart
sped out of the weapon and smashed into the guard on
the furthest left. The guard crumpled into a heap and
didn't get up.
Projectile numbers two and three, away. They
shot along the barrel and flew into two of the guards
who were close together.
Projectile number four, away. It blasted
through the guard, who promptly fell over, clutching
his stomach, blood fountaining out his mouth, as the
dart pinned him to the metal wall.
Projectile number five, away. It bounced off
the robotically-armoured fifth guard. I stared in
horror. Railguns were supposed to be capable of
sinking adamantite pellican aircraft carriers in one
shot. How could this suit of armour have deflected
something so powerful? The guard grinned and held up
his left hand to show me the force field generator.
I'd like to be able to say I had soaked him with
plasma bolts. I'd like to say my axe had claimed his
head. I'd like to say Helena would've been dead if it
weren't for me.

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I stood there staring at him as he lifted up his

fusion cannon and primed it. I thought about how I
should have thought of a force field when I'd seen his
armour, as he'd pulled the trigger and the burst shot
towards me.
Helena's notes
I really can't understand what makes people

shut down. When the guard revealed his force field
generator, the first thing I did was load my machine
gun with a plasma clip. When Rodriguez blanked out, I
deployed a shield and ran to block the fusion blast.
I'd have liked to say he recovered, but he just stood
there.
My eagle swooped down and smacked
Rodriguez's dopey head. Thankfully, he copped the
hell on and got under cover. The guard turned his
fusion cannon on me and fired. My shield blocked it
and deflected it. I one-handed my machine gun and
plasma volted the living daylights out of his
forcefield.
I took out a buzz saw and flipped over his head.

As I thought, the power unit for his armour was well

protected. I put a diamond blade into the buzz saw
and switched it on. I was just about to cut through it
when the guard managed to turn around and tried to
hit me with a chainsaw that was slung under his fusion
cannon. I ducked and rolled away. The guard lumbered
after me with a vengeance.
I rolled into a little mettallic cave beside
Rodriguez and grabbed his railgun from him. I hooked
it up to the powerplant on my armour and pumped a
dart into the guard. The dart smashed a hole through
his armour, but didn't hit anything important. He kept
walking towards us and I fired another dart, with the
same result.
I ran out of the alcove and jumped over his
head again. Just as he was trying to turn around, I got
a dart through his powerplant. The armour shut down
and the guard was suddenly frozen. All he could do
was move his head. I faced the guard and put a dart
straight through his brain canal, and another through
his occupital lobe. I don't know what it is or what it
does, I just know that shooting one kills the owner.
Rodriguez was in shock and simply would not
move. Tom helped me lug him as far as we could, but
the sirens in the fortress were still blaring and the

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guards would be on us soon. I was going to have to

resort to extremes.
There was a little volt dispenser on one of the
unarmoured guard's belts. I picked it up and poked
Rodriguez's arm with the needle. It punctured his arm
and I flicked the switch. Immediately, I saw the
effect. Sparks jumped around his arm and his eyes
snapped open. He seemed to instantly become much
more pliable. Tom and I picked him up and ran as fast
as the wind towards the shiny beam of hope that I
knew was around the corner.
I reached the exit, and my breath caught in my
throat. Eric had left us a present.
Eriana looked at a screen showing the outside

of the fortress. Her lips curled in a smile.
“Prepare the experiment for launch!” she
shouted.
“But, ma'am, it's still in the testing stages. It
could malfunction violently!” One of the scientist on
the factory floor turned to respond.
“Excellent,”
“But,”

“Do I look like I care, Stevens?”

“Nno, ma'am. It will be done immediately,
ma'am,”

Naoise Mchugh
Chapter fourteen Nature's wrath

Helena's notes
Whenever a place of nature becomes so abused

that the inhhabitants just can't take it anymore, they
go on a rampage. It is known as nature's wrath and it
is the one thing that the whole world fears more than
a nuclear apocalypse. Because when nature gets angry,
nature decides who can be a survivor.
Take a forest, for instance. Now, imagine you
are some big business person who comes and plants a
factory in the middle of this forest. You might have a
few hundred peaceful years, but eventually the
catalyst is going to come along. It's usually some crazy
naturalist. But, whoever it is, the forest goes
absolutely insane. The rocks get up and become
golems. The trees wake up and decide that somebody
is getting a one-way ticket to hell. The trolls jump out
of the golems and beat their chests and shout and
run. And hit. The flowers uproot themselves and turn
dryad. And all the animals. From the worms and
beetles all the way to the elephants and decawhales.
It's scary. As in run for your life scary. As in so
absolutely terrifying that you forget things like how
to breath.

The drama that was unfolding before my very

eyes was just that. Eric and his wolf had been the
catalyst. The enormous horde of flora and fauna
arrayed before us was insane.
There was griffin eagles and grizzly wolves,
squirrels and sugar bats. There was goaraffes and
sparvens, there was even a few sheep. The animals
were all neatly arrangend into units, companies and
regiments. There was the grizzly wolves at the fore,
and it went all the way back, getting progressively
stronger and tougher, all the way to ankylodiles (an
interesting attempt to recreate some dinosaurs had
resulted in a bit of success. Then the montreal
incident had crossed an ankylosaur with a crocodile.
Apparently they chose the subjects randomly) and a
sky decawhale. A whale is given a prefix when it
becomes that length. In the case of decawhales, this
length was ten meters or a decameter. This one was
closer to a hectometer (hundred meters) – the size
when they leave the ground to cruise the skies. It had
the telltale magma traces that showed its island was
starting to form. There was three baby sky turtles.
Baby seemed an inapropriate word as they were each
twenty meters across at the very least. Their wings
were beginning to protrude from the shells and soon

Naoise Mchugh
they would knock the legs out like baby teeth.

Around the front of the column was all the less
dangerous creatures of the forest. The mice and the
gerbils.
Then there was the other things. The ents, the
dryads, the trolls and the golems. There was all sorts
of trees. There was oaks and yews, there was maples
and pines. There was the creepy blue trees that had
come from neptune as a gift when we resolved to stop
using nuclear weapons. (According to my grandfather,
President Obama II (Presidents of the UN had
started using the papal tradition of taking the name
of historical world leaders. The first to do so was
President Napoleon II and the current one was the
Irish President Collins IXV) had made a big speech
after a long campaign for an anti-nuclear aggreement
when all the national leaders had finally aggreed in
2034. When he finished, the spaceship had appeared
out of the sky. It had looked like a cross between a b-
2 bomber and a doubledecker bus. Look it up. It
seriously happened. Two aliens got out and presented
the President with the two potted trees. There had
been an applause and everyone had gone crazy – aliens
do exist. They are watching us. And get this Martha,
they like flowers! Bloody North American tourists.

The stereo-typical ones anyway. All the other ones are

just fine- He said it was a crazy time. Unsurprising. )
There was fir trees, eucalyptus, all sorts of crazy
trees.
Dryads. Night of the living photosynthesisers.
A bed of orange daffodils was chewing their way
through an unfortunate guard. A wallfull of ivy was
corroding his wind kayak. Golden roses were chasing
three more round in circles. And then there was all
the others.
Then, there was the golems. When rocks get up
and walk, you know you're in a bad place. There was all
the sedimentary rocks, in all sorts of shapes and
sizes. There was a few igneous ones as well, mostly
basalt and pumice. There was three metamorphic ones
– two slate, one marble – which stood out from the
rest because of their size and their smoothness.
And trolls. They were once thought to be a
myth because no one had ever actually seen a Wrath
and lived, but then a herd of them tore down an
airbase. Everybody there had escaped and a few brave
souls had taken cameras to get proper footage of real
trolls. There had been a few more sightings of them
and there had been a few documentaries. They were
all bestsellers because everyone wanted to learn

Naoise Mchugh
about what they actually were.

A troll itself is huge. If you've ever seen lord
of the rings, they got it pretty close. All they got
wrong was that the trolls actuallly do have horns, and
they have bones in their tails. And clubs on the end.
Some have spikes instead. The biggest and meanest
have spines as well. There was ten of them here. All
had spines and five had spike tails. They had dark
hides and long, twisting horns.
The trees had retreated back from the
fortress and now I could see it clearly. It was like a
castle made from metal pine trees. The keep was a
large mithril oak with a gargantuan cannon at the top.
I shuddered at the thought of what it could do in one
shot.
If it weren't for Rodriguez, I would've stayed
and fought. But Rodriguez's lockdown meant I had to
get him to the carrier's infirmary and quickly. By the
time my brain had registered what was going on, we
were halfway through the field, wondering where all
the trees were.
I saw one of the Wrath leaders, a large golden
tree, which I guessed through a process that even
Eric wouldn't have described as too logical was the
forest's life tree, turn around and look dissaprovingly

at me and Tom as we carried Rodriguez's limp form

towards the carrier.
We reached the carrier and ran in through the
cargo door. As soon as we were inside, I knew
something wasn't right. I gave Rodriguez entirely to
Tom and took out my buzz saw. I put in the diamond
blade and crept silently towards the cockpit, Tom
following behind me. Tom dropped Rodriguez's body in
the infirmary and within seconds, the medic bot had
him hooked up to some crazy machine and he was
sound asleep.
Tom and I proceeded towards the cockpit, not
knowing what awaited us there. We reached the
cockpit guard chamber. Immediately I saw what it
was. There was a little table in the corner of the
circular room. On this table were four items. There
was a bowl of bell shaped thingies around which a
ribbon was wrapped with a card saying Rodriguez. A
pitcher of something or other displayed Tom's name.
My name was branded on a silver plate which simply
screamed suspicious. Eric's name was ribboned on a
large black and red speckled egg shaped thingymajig.
The horde outside had given us gifts. That
simply canned it. In ten seconds I had started up the
carrier and turned it around towards the forest. Tom

Naoise Mchugh
had taken on the role of overseeing the guard-bots,

who were filling up all available weapon turrets.
We were back at the field within a few minutes
and very little had changed. A few more animals and
plants had joined, and some of the grass was beginning
to get up. The trolls had moved over towards a dam,
accompanied by several brain bears – the janitor
wasn't the only human merger. There had been a few
reports of “volunteers”. The original brain bear was
the result of one of them. These bears were
ridiculously clever and had built many crazy
contraptions for themselves, such as robotic armour,
intelligent houses, freight planes and all sorts of
other zany things. My father had told me that
because of their gung-ho attitude, they were soon
going to be much more advanced than humans and
dolphins.
Seeing the carrier, a hawk squirrel (guess what?
Montreal again) turned to the rest of the horde and
squeaked out a bit of gibberish to the rest of the
army. They screamed and squealed and motorised
themselves into acting. There was a surge and they all
ran towards the fortress.
“Are we on the right side, or should we get
moving?” Rodriguez walked into the cockpit, now fully

recovered.
“We're okay. Are you feeling okay?”
“I should be fine. Why?”
“Grab a hovercraft and take the rest of the
guard-bots with you. Now,”
“I should've stayed in bed,”
“But you didn't. Get moving,”
Soon enough, Rodriguez's fleet was attacking
the fortress. Somehow, Tom had managed to get the
guard-bots to fire at the fortress, and I was
controlling all the other guns.
The cannon on top of the oak shook. It did
something that looked like swallowing, and then
subsequently vomited out a boulder large enough to be
a hill. It barrelled down at an enormous pace, and was
inches from crushing the animals.
It stopped.
I could see all the golems straining under its
weight. The life tree did something and suddenly the
rock came alive. Huge legs popped out of it, as well as
arms twice the size of me. The new golem got to its
feet after its brief moment of crowd surfing.
All the birds were bombing the top of the
fortress with young pebble golems. Rodriguez's army
of craft were assisting. All the small creatures were

Naoise Mchugh
running havoc along the battlements. It was like

whack-a-mole, except that the moles were doing all
the whacking, and they were popping out of the holes
far faster than anyone could manage. An iron scorpion
was leading a horde of arachninds up the wall. Its
deadly metal pincers had claimed three guards before
it even finished crawling over the wall. No matter how
many times I heard someone say they weren't
poisonous, I still thought about antidotes whenever I
saw one working. Which was quite a lot because they
were domesticated. Wild ones were rare.
SMASH! The titan golem had reached the wall
and made an earth shattering punch. One of the steel
pines fell over like a domino. Problem was, it was
facing the wrong way and fell down into the area
behind the walls. Rodriguez found the gap and was
through it in a millisecond. He and his fighters had
immediately surrounded the oak tower and were filling
it with holes, scorch marks, tears, anything they could
bring to bear on it.
The cannon on the oak slid underneath the roof
of the tower and was replaced by hatch. There was a
whining noise and then the hatch slid open. A large
metal thing lifted itself out of the hatch and I saw it
was a huge metal dragon. Eriana sat on its neck.

The dragon opened its mouth, revealing mithril

fangs the size of me. It prepared to snap Rodriguez's
lightwing. In typical Rodriguez style, he panicked and
cut the power to the rotors and thrusters. His craft
shot towards the ground, before he regained his
senses and pulled it out of its tail dive. I fired a clip
of automatic at the huge metal wyvern, before, in
traditional automatic fashion, a hundred more clips
were emptied at it. I shuddered to think that people
who designed such idiocy were running the world.
The dragon wheeled on me, and as it did so, I
could see a flicker of intelligence in its eyes. Maybe
even fear. That flicker was lost as the thing shot
about a hundred wing mounted torpedoes at me. The
defender craft, that some of the guard-bots had
manned and were hovering around me, pulled up a
shield that bounced the missiles off, and then they
exploded each individual missile with self destruct
signals. And people tell us they're not smart? Christ,
how are we still alive?!
When all questions of why the guard-bots
hadn't rebelled, only one question remained. What on
earth and anywhere else was I going to do about the
enormous dragon that was roaring at me?
I had a hard time doing anything about it. I

Naoise Mchugh
shifted into grav mode and began barrel rolling to

dodge all the bullets. A large cannon appeared out of
the dragon's chest. I had a feeling that it would be a
bad idea to be around when it fired.
There was a battery of fat man missile
launchers underneath the carrier. These weapons
were supposedly a black market modification of the
mk XCII “Cherry Bomber” missile launchers that
utilised railgun technology. The modification was that
they used energy bombs. The force fields on the
dragon looked impressive, so the bombs, in theory,
would dissapitate them and scare the dragon a little.
If I was wrong, well, there was two things that could
happen. Trust me, you do not want to think about
either.
I reached over to the weapon panel and pressed
the button for the fat men. A reticule appeared on
the spherical viewscreen that replaced a vulnerable
glass wind shield favoured by lighter duty craft. The
bonus of viewscreens was that they made targeting
very easy. Especially when they were touch screen,
like the ones they use for hover carriers.
I tapped the area on the screen showing the
dragon. The reticule moved to the dragon. The
100 The adventures of Eric the

Invincible
computer locked on to it. A readout showed me the

distance it was from the ship, two hundred and thirty
nine meters, how many hits it could take, seven, and
the materials it was made of. Mainly poly optimised
hydroconigenical ethanoic flamium. I don't know, so
don't ask.
A dialog box opened up, asking me if I wanted
to fire. I tapped yes. Another one came up, asking me
if I was sure. I really, honestly wanted to scream at
the computer. Suppressing the anger wave, I tapped
yes.
A pinkish sphere shot out from under the
carrier. It crackled towards the dragon at a merry
speed, impacting with a snap, crackle and a sonic
BOOM.
The forcefields looked weakened, and the
dragon was freaking out. Better yet, it was completely
undamaged. But the boom had been pretty loud and
the big metal beastie was terrified. It swished its
tail, retracted the cannon and flipped over. Eriana
looked annoyed. As in, blown a fuse, annoyed. Not like
teacher annoyed. Whatever. As long as the dragon was
fleeing, and taking its deranged master with it.
After my brief battle with an messed up
computer and a giant metal dragon, the fortress

Naoise Mchugh
collapsed pretty quickly. Rodriguez and Tom brought

the guard-bots back to the holding bay, where they all
powered down and slotted neatly on their charging
rail.
I took Rodriguez to the cupboard where I had
put the gifts. I opened the wooden doors and he
immediately recognised what his gift was.
“Life tree seeds!” He grinned.
“Uh?”
“If we bring these back to Uruguay and plant
them, we can turn it back into the paradise it was
before!”
“That's great. Now what about this altogether
more suspicious plate?”
“It's only suspicious to you because it has your
name on it,”
“Right. That's reassuring,”
“Tom's thing?”
“There's something on the back of it. 'Cure all
health solutions' it says.”
“Maybe it'll help him talk again?”
“Or grow his legs back,”
“That's just ridiculous,” We argued on and on,
both of us knowing exactly why the other didn't want

Invincible
to drop it. Two words: The Egg. We argued for a long

time. That was around when Tom came in, grabbed the
pitcher and drank it all in one go. No more cause for
argument. Time for procrastination.

Naoise Mchugh
Chapter fifteen Vent running

Eric's journal
I woke up with a rather large headache.

Sleeping on a metal floor does that to you, you know?
My hoverbike was humming beside me, like a pet dog.
But what had woken me up? My hoverbike had been
doing that for the whole night, the hole in the floor I
had come through was mysteriously closed so no noise
coild come through there and I had only been asleep
for three hours. I still needed a lot more.
There was another sound. A sort of screechy
cutting sound. It reminded me of glass cracking
slowly, crack by crack. Suddenly, a tear opened in
front of me. It looked like a wormhole. Through it I
could see Helena, Rodriguez and Tom. They were
sitting in the carrier's sitting room.
“Eric!” Helena shouted
“It's good to see you too,” I replied, relishing
her smile. “So, I guess I was wrong. I did survive,”
“Yay. Now we have to figure out where you are,
and then go get you. Whoopee,” Rodriguez's voice cut
through our happy reunion. I silently made a note to
punch him in the face for eating the last carrier

Invincible
cookie.
“I think I have an idea of where I am,”
“Does it involve hordes of guards and lots of
fighting?” Rodriguez replied.
“Probably,”
“All the more fun for us,” Helena's laugh gave
me a warm, glowing feeling.
“So where do you think you are?”
“The next base,” Even Helena wouldn't have
described that as too imaginative. “There's something
else,” here goes...
“What is it, Eric?” Helena had that innocent
look on that always made me hate myself. Don't ask.
“I think your mother is here,” I looked straight
at Rodriguez. He was the one who was being ripped
apart by all this. Helena had taken it all in her stride.
“Okay. That makes things that little bit
harder,”
“So how do you plan on getting in?”
“The computer says that the next base is in
Newfondland. The plans say there's a window on the
second floor. Helena, you're bike diving from the
carrier -”
“Don't you think you'd be better at that,
considering what happened this afternoon?” Helena

Naoise Mchugh
interrupted him.
“Huh?”
“A giant metal dragon was about to snap his
lightwing, so he did a tail dive,”
“That was smart,”
“-I don't really care, I'm still alive, so obviously
it worked. Anyway, Helena, you're bike diving,”
“Whatever,” From behind Rodriguez's back, she
winked at me. Not being able to wink without
Rodriguez seeing me, I returned it with a smile.
“Eric, do you still have your bike?”
“It won't stop following me,”
“Well, you've got your getaway vehicle, then. Go
explore and figure out where my mother is. We'll
contact you in an hour,”
“Just a minute. How are you contacting me
now?”
“Long story short, it's your fault,”
“That's a little too short,” Whatever they were
using, I doubted it was actually a wormhole. Anyway,
the tear closed before I could pry out a detailed
answer. I wondered how they were going to contact
me again, but I didn't have time to ponder on this.
There was a lot of work to be done and not enough

Invincible
workers.
I set my hoverbike to invisible and silent, then
changed the altitude so it was against the ceiling.
Then, I walked out the door, to find I had been in a
rather large supply closet. Interesting.
I walked down a few long grey corridors. What
was it with Eriana and grey?!
Suddenly I heard voices coming from around
the corner. I now had a choice. Face the guards and
risk an alarm going off, resulting in the package's
movement, or escape. The convenient vent made me
think option number two. I thought of a grapple
launcher, and immediately the arm turned into one.
I was just about to trigger it when I realised
the guards were too close. I switched on my armour's
stealth field and pressed myself against the wall. I
turned my arm into the its normal self and pressed
myself flat against the wall.
The guards walked past, chattering to each
other about wages, the morality of their job, social
possibilities, managers, overseers, The Boss and other
guardish stuff. I almost regretted killing them, they
seemed so normal. I said almost. One of the many
things my father had made me was a soldier. And
soldiers know when to switch between warm and cold.

Naoise Mchugh
Right now, I was in cold.

I crept up behind the guards and grabbed them
in a one arm headlock. Before they could say a word, I
had turned my arm into the poison sword and gashed
their throats, making sure to fill them with as much
poison as possible.
I fire sworded the corpses, making a mental
note to check where I actually got the fire sword. The
fire disposed of them completely, without any ashes.
The grapple pulled out the grill from the vent.
Flipping up into it, I checked the power on all my
systems, both biological and mechanical. The armor
was running grand, my stomach was fifty percent and
the hoverbike was flying high. Literally. Others
reported seventy-five, a hundred and thirty two. All
reports were good.
I crawled along the vent, feeling like a spy.
Voices drifted down the miniature corridor. One stood
out as the hawkish voice Rodriguez had told me
belonged to Eriana. I identified that and tuned all
listening devices to that one sound.
I decided there and then to invent a new sport:
vent running. All the contestants would race along a
maze of vents, filled with obstacles.

Invincible
A listener on the neck of my exo-skeleton

identified the noise as coming from a vent to my left.
I scurried off down the corridor, feeling like a cliche
hero. Speaking of which, crawling through a vent was
one of the admission challenges for the heroes guild.
Other challenges included killing a monster without
any help (been there, done that) and being able to pick
a lock (my father's stuff was never safe).
I came to the grill I wanted. It was in the floor
of the vent.
“Is she ready for transport?” Eriana asked a
guard beside her. They were standing in front of a
cot, in which Rodriguez's mother lay in deep and
probably eternal slumber.
“Yes, ma'am. May I ask why she is so
important?” The guard replied.
“Why?”
“All this fuss over one person. I feel and I know
the rest of the guards feel the same way, that there
is something you are not telling us,”
“There are many things I am not telling you.
Most of them, I am not being told either. What you
want to know is why I have gone to such great lengths
to secure this woman,”
“Yes, ma'am,”

Naoise Mchugh
“This woman is important, because she alone can

create our new world,” WHAAAAAAAAAAAT? I
checked my watch. Rodriguez should have contacted
me by now. I was going to have to move, but I was
intrigued. How could his mother make a new world? It
seemed the guard wanted to know the same thing.
“How is this possible ma'am?”
“The world was created by a very large
explosion. To create another, we shall need to
replicate this explosion, on a miniature scale. The new
world will slowly expand, eating this universe to fuel
its growth. In order to contain the explosion, it has to
be absolutely microscopic, just like the last one. The
machine needs a sacrifice to create any explosion, and
this woman is the only one that will make it just the
right size,” Rodriguez was not going to like this. Not
one bit.
“So what does the boy with the sword have to
do with all of this?” Boy with a sword. Sounds familiar.
Especially the sword part. I curled my hand around
the hilt of it, glad to have it there on my back.
“There was an ancient prophesy, made many
years ago by one of our organisation. This prophesy
described how a boy weilding a legendary sword would
restore creation,” There was something missing here,

and I had a feeling I did not want to know what it

was.
“Restore creation. Does that mean destroy our
new world, or take it from us?”
“I have no idea. But you made two slight errors
in your question,” The suspense was killing me.
“Ma'am?” The guard knew exactly what was
coming.
“I have told you far more than I should. There
will be no place for you in the new world,” Oh, how did
I know?
The guard fell to the floor. His head lingered in
the air for a second, before falling on his chest. The
guard fell with his arms spread out. His hand unfolded
and I saw the tape recorder. No more secrets.

Naoise Mchugh
Chapter sixteen Operation Extermination

Rodriguez's diary
Piloting the carrier made me feel in control. It

made me feel tougher. It made me feel that if
anything was idiotic enough to get in my way, I could
blast it all the way to the Grainial Ridge on Mars. I
could send it into the void. I could wormhole it to the
other side of the galaxy. And all without batting an
eyelid.
The cockpit was simply a semi-sphere. Inside, it
looked as if you were just standing in the air. The
furniture and controls could all be made invisible so as
to give a fully spherical view of the surroundings.
The carrier itself was essentially a big metal
block, covered in apocalyptic weapons. Three together
had managed to save the world from a rampaging sky
turtle. Don't mess with those things. They shoot
energy beams from their mouth. There's not much a
carrier can't take down. Especially black market
upgraded ones like our's and the three that took down
the sky turtle. And if one carrier can't take it down,
it probably ain't worth fighting. I said probably. When
it's an angry sky turtle, it's a different kettle of fish.
The carrier was equiped with more heavy

weapons than you could ever imagine. There was

twenty automatic gatling guns, three missile launchers
designed to fire almost any kind of bomb, from vortex
to inferno, there was sixty torpedo launchers mounted
on the retractable wings, six energy rifles, one
mounted on each face, a bomb hatch that could hold a
sixty tonne payload of quantum fusion bombs, more
machine guns than you could ever count, three
batteries of railguns, forty-two laser turrets and
then there was the battery of ten fat men. As well as
the destroyer cannon.
The destroyer cannon.
The most powerful weapon legally used by
anyone. And ten times more powerful then most illegal
ones too. The destroyer cannon was retractable and
could be fired from either the top or the bottom of
the carrier. It could scorch, wither with a viral shell,
destroy with a green laser, smother communications
with an emp or just create absolute havoc with a super
bomb. Helena and I had made an agreement not to use
it until we retrieved Eric. It was really hard.
Helena practically exploded into the cockpit. It
was something bad. Really bad. I sighed.
“What fresh hell have we wandered into now?” I
asked, tired of all the problems we had run into since

Naoise Mchugh
we had split up.

“We're not getting Eric's signal. I've tried
contacting his helmet every kilometer. Something's
wrong here. Really wrong,” she told me, sounding
agitated, exhausted and stressed. And that's not a
combination meant for a thirteen year old girl.
The news was also bad. If Eric had canned it,
our chances of finding mother were almost nil.
“So what do you think went wrong?”
“I don't know. We could be approaching the
wrong base, or, more likely, the base could be jamming
him,” I nodded. She had come up with practical and
logical solutions, even in a crisis. More than anyone
should ever be asked.
“So, shall we stick to the plan?”
“Yeah. I'll sweep the building and you keep tabs,
then we blow the place,”
“Sounds like fun,”
The carrier suddenly went crazy. Alarm bells
clanged, the radar beeped and I could hear all the
guard bots tromping to battle stations.
Hostiles detected. Hostiles detected. Red
Alert. Red Alert. The alert-bot shouted through the
voice transmitter. I knew it would be taking its
shotgun out inside its booth and pointing it out the

murder hole. In battle everyone on the carrier

pitched in.
“It's my turn to pilot,” I said, before Helena
could get anywhere near the controls. She nodded and
ran to the hangar bay.
“Show equipment,” I said to the carrier. The
chair, wheel and controls faded into view. I checked
the radar. Helena was pouring the fleet out the back,
but what was most worrying was the huge number of
hovercraft coming our way. There was around a
hundred lightwings on the flanks, three hundred
attack spearheading and two hundred defenders at
the back. I extended the wings. Party time.
I opened fire.
Sixty proton torpedoes shot out from the
wings. Sixty attack hovercraft exploded and fell to
the ground. The gatling guns started firing. Over a
million bullets filled up twenty more attack
hovercraft. Two vortex bombs removed the flanks of
all the lightwings. An inferno bomb engulfed the
defenders, leaving a hundred remaining. The railguns
pumped darts into the enemies. Thirty more attack
hovercraft fell to the ground. They were quickly
followed by the forty-two laser turret casualties. The
fat men spoke, leaving eleven attack hovercraft

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remaining. Perfect.
I ordered Helena and Tom to cease fire.
Switching on the tractor beam, I watched as the
attack hovercraft were dragged towards the hangar
bay. I flicked a switch and they were emptied of
pilots. The hovercraft were brought into the hangar,
one by one and parked in the spaces where the
originals would have gone if we hadn't destroyed
them.
“Did you have fun taking all my kills?” Helena
strolled in, a bit more calm now.
“Oh, absolutely. Operation Extermination is
complete,”

Chapter seventeen Explosives for dummmies

Rodriguez's diary
“So what do we do now?” Helena asked. Sure, go

to someone else for leadership. Nice to know my twin
sister had initiative
“I say we stick to the plan, but you'll have to
blow the place from inside,” I told her. Reassuring,
yeah right.
“Alright. We can see whether you were right
about the book,”
“Huh?”
“Remember, you said that I wasn't going to
learn anything from explosives for dummies,” Helena
had bravely taken on the role of explosives expert
when we found the book in the carrier's library. It
had officially become her bible. In my experience, for
dummies books never taught you anything. Well,
maybe that was because I wasn't exactly a dummy
when it came to weapons.
“Right. I only said that because that one on
guns was about as useful as a bucket of water against
the hindenburg fire,”
“That's because you know more about guns than
most armoury managers. Which isn't neccesarily a

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good thing,”
“Whatever. Get moving,” I rolled my eyes. She
walked out, going to get ready.
I turned back to the screens and saw the
building looming up ahead. It looked like a fortified
bunker. It was in the middle of a large rectangular pit
and it was a big grey thing. It was three floors. The
first floor was hidden by the lip of the pit, as was
most of the second. The window Helena was going
through was the third from the right. It also
happened to be the first from the left. It was at
least two hundred, maybe three hundred feet across
with three window each for three floors. These crazy
scientist psychos like the odd bit of light once in a
while. Now why couldn't I keep a straight face when I
said that. Eric wouldn't've been able to conceal his
hysteria if he was arguing with blind guy. There was
gatling gun emplacements all over the place. God
forbid we could do this easily. I was glad the carrier
was on invisible.
I relayed this information to Helena and then
dispatched a few guard-bots to take control of the
defender hovercraft. I would've used attack, but they
can't go invisible. My life is full of tough choices, you
know?

The group of invisible flying triangles spilled

out of the hangar bay. The first thing the guards and
I knew of our assualt was when a window shattered
they were showered with raindrops. Yeah right.
Lethal, jagged, sparkling raindrops that just happened
to be stored in the window. And all the glass just
vanished. Oh come on. A window made of water? For
Christ's sake!
So, because Helena's little trick to add pain to
the surprise had jumped out the window and under a
train, I now had to get the carrier to target the
guards. Which, when it eventually happened, meant I
had thirty of the guards locked on and torpedoes
three, four and thirty two out of sixty had streaked
the space between us and blown the thirty guards to
something.
During the time it had taken me to lock on to
the guards and pull a pop-up trigger, Helena had
managed to get in a fight with three pathetic little
scientists that were experimenting on a hamster. Her
eagle, hovering beside her, had seemed much more
intent on the goal. And I'd be surprised if that thing
can even think properly. Jesus Christ, It's a bloody
hamster! You might as well risk your life over a
pebble.

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“Pebbles can't fly.” She cut in,sensing the

direction of my thoughts. I'm not sure but I wouldn't
put it past my sister to be telepathic. I had my hands
full keeping my secrets from Tom, for God's sake!
“Oh, yeah. Like that makes a difference,” I
said.
“Yeah i-”
“Pebbles can't what?” I asked, suddenly
catching on.
“It's a butterfly hamster, Rodriguez,”
“Set it free. We're not bringing it,”
“But-”
“I said we're not bringing it!” I almost
screamed. It was pointless. Helena might be tough, a
freaking tomboy and everything that isn't girlish, but
there was no way I could stop her bringing a butterfly
hamster. Oh, well.
The defenders had dealt with the rest of the
guards and Helena had set free a lot of mutants.
Including a human-dragonfly hybrid. I would've put my
foot down, but that was when Tom walked in and
mentally told me that he didn't mind sharing a room
with six year old dragonfly girl if it meant he had
someone for company. I began to realise that the

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drink had been a lot more powerful than we had

thought.
“Rodriguez!” Helena said through the speaker
thing.
“Yeah?”
“Dragonfly-girl's gonna be a hell of a lot more
important now,” I realised what she meant with a
sinking feeling.
“They're not here are they?” I like it when
people make my life easy, don't you?
“No, although I'd say we could find some non-
evil scientists here who would agree to kitting out the
carrier,”
“The guards are gone. I'll come with you,”
I won't bore you with the details of my perfect
carrier landing and how Tom somehow managed to get
us both in and over to Helena.
So then we were walking along, minding our own
business, when suddnly, a door to our right falls down
and a small grizzly wolf leaps out. A crowd of other
mutants walked out to. There was some scary things
there. Like the eight-legged dog.
Helena, Tom and the Dragonfly-girl who had
told us her name was Ellen stopped behind me. If I'm
the leader, why was it always Eric who did these

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thing? Except now, when it would have been helpful.

Well more so than normal.
I looked at the wolf. When I said it was small, I
meant seven foot tall. Small for a grizzly wolf. It was
crouching on the door. It looked a bit leaner than the
normal ones and its fur was shinier and less steely.
I grinned weakly. Big mistake. The wolf leaped
at me and sank its fangs into my shoulder. I winced
and dived it to the ground.
“Ok, ok! I give up!” I nearly fell over. Except I
was already over. In fact, I was lying on a seven foot,
talking wolf.
“What? Since when can grizzly wolves talk?!”
Helena said from behind me.
“I'm not a grizzly wolf. I'm experiment thirty
two. And at some stage in my life, I was human,” I
noticed the ragged clothes he was wearing.
“Sorry about the shoulder. I'd do something if
I could, but I've got a herd to lead,” He pushed me
off him and got up on two legs. He ran off the way we
came and I saw him become a little thinner, smaller
and less furry. I blinked and I saw a blond, twelve
year old boy running down the corridor. My shoulder
was throbbing oddly. Not good.

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Ellen traced a circle around my shoulder and

the wound closed. Great. A magic, freaking dragonfly-
girl. Apart from the wings and antennae, she was a
normal person. I wondered if she was actually able to
fly. As if reading my mind, she hovered at least a foot
in the air.
“Right. You can fly. Welcome to the team. Now
shall we find some scientists?” I asked.
“There should be some in there,” Ellen pointed
to a door. I walked through, and found a rather odd
scene.
A pair of scientist were talking to a gorilla.
They were all sitting on stools and drinking coffee.
“So, what's it like being a monkey?” One of the
scientists asked the gorilla.
“Well, the boss could've turned me into
something a lot worse,” She responded
“Like what?” the second scientist asked.
“A baboon, perhaps?” I suggested. On hearing
an unfamiliar voice, the trio froze. I smiled at them.
“It's okay, guys. We're not going to try to kill
you. Actually, we just stormed this hellhole,” Helena,
tactful as ever.
“Hellhole it may be, but it could be a lot worse
for the experiments,” the gorilla told us.

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“Right. Well I'm Helena, this is Rodriguez, my

brother, Tom, our cousin and you probably already
know Ellen,”
“Bill, Micheal and Fiona,”
“Experiments, like number thirty two?” I asked.
Curiosity had overwhelmed my fear of actually
knowing why my shoulder was still sore.
“You met him? Um, right,” Bill said, more being
conversational than informative. It was about then
that I realised something was wrong.
“Anyway, we were wondering if you would mind
terribly if we asked you to kit out our hover carrier,”
“No, not at all. In fact, we were working on this
cool new engine part a few days ago,” Fiona put in. She
was fairly small for a gorilla.
“It's the warp thingy they made me test, isn't
it?” Ellen asked.
“Yep. Sorry about that. I hate testing as much
as you guys do. Same can't be said for the boss.
We've also got some neat new weapons,” Micheal
responded. The tall, sandy scientist was evidently in it
for the money and not for the kick of torturing
innocent creatures.
“Like?”

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“A plasma railgun?” Bill, squat and copper

haired, seemed compassionate as well, but he also
seemed a little machine oriented.
“That sounds cool, alright,”
We managed to get all our new gear fitted on

the carrier. After a new flame paintjob, done by
Fiona, it was looking pretty mean. As well as all the
cool new hand weapons the scientists had given us to
test. We had agreed to send them the odd bit of
information on how well they worked.
By the time we left, the three of them were
turning the place into a much nicer research facility,
where the mutants who decided to remain were going
to be studied in a happier environment, with proper
bedrooms for all those who needed them, all the
intelligent hybrids were given mutant animals to look
after as pets and Fiona was on the phone with a
mainland orphanage, offering to take in any babies
under six months that the orphanage couldn't handle.
I would've objected if Ellen hadn't stopped me, with
all these things about how it was for the good of
science, the orphans would definitely be properly

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looked after and blah blah blah. Coming from a six

year old. Jesus.
So we set the carrier to take us to the next
base, in the middle of the atlantic. There was a purple
flare, yellow lines streaked past the carrier, and the
hyperdrive engine fired up. We were on our way.

Invincible
Chapter Eighteen Troll casserole

Eric's Journal
I was now officially worried. Eriana had taken

the tape recorder, realised it was live and shouted
into it about how there would be a place in the new
world for all those who followed orders, yak yak yak.
She then proceeded to throw the tape recorder at
the nearest wall.
But what was worrying me wasn't the comic
scene below me. It was the fact that no contact had
been made. I wasn't really worried about my own
predicament. What was worrying me was the fact that
something could've happened to Helena.
I ran the vent, pulled a right at the turn off
and scampered off to where I had entered the vent.
As I jumped out of the vent, I checked my suit's
messages. Nothing.
I landed with a crash. Oh well. Running down the
mesh of corridors to where I had left my bike was
easy enough.
I strolled into the room, taking in the
investigative guards. They were scanning the room for
anything. Unfortunately for them, they were not going
to live to find anything.

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I turned my arm into a sniper rifle and popped

the two of them before they could say or do anything.
My bike came down from the ceiling at a signal from
my armour and I got onto it.
From then on it was like a computer game where
you've used all the cheats. Easy and very quickly
boring. I was looking for something to blow the base.
Something big and angry.
Care to guess what I found? A golem? Wrong. A
brain bear? Cruel, gross, horrible and wrong. A grizzly
wolf? I wish, but still wrong. A gorilla bear? Nope.
Okay, you're not going to guess it. I never
would've either. I was going through what looked like
a fairly main corridor, when I came upon a large
circular room. In the middle of this room was a giant,
juddering cage. And you know what was in this cage?
A humongous, hairy, spiny, spike tailed troll.
Perfect.
I switched to rocket launcher and blew a hole in
the ceiling. When water rushed in, I yelped with
surprise.
My sword made ridiculously quick work of the
bars. Something wasn't right about that but I wasn't
about to complain.

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I re-sheathed my sword, now altogether more

wary of it. The troll took an angry run at me and I
shot through the hole.
With a gasp, I realized where the water was
coming from. My helmet processed it and told me it
was seawater. I was at the bottom of the atlantic!
Three cheers for oxygen masks!
Beneath me I heard muffled thumps and
realised the troll was doing its job. Worse was the
realisation that I was flooding the place as well. Trolls
aren't fond of drowning, you know?
For just such occasions, my suit had a big metal
plate dispenser. Because armour manufacturers really
care about something other than money. Yeah right.
Ok, seriously, I found the big metal plate
floating around. How random was that? My life is full
of questions. And the annoying thing is that a
ridiculous amount of them do not have answers.
Feeling nice, I patched up my exit hole to stop
the people inside from having a death less painless
than being beaten to death by an angry troll.
Now time to move out. There was a roaring
sound like a jet engine firing up and the hoverbike's
turboes activated. I streaked through the water like a
rocket and breached the surface, my speed carrying

Naoise Mchugh
me a hundred meters into the air. I arced across the

sky, returning to the surface and jetskiing along the
water. Best ten seconds of my life so far. And it would
be a millions times better when I repeated the
experience with Helena. The thought made me smile.
Returning to the present, I grinned as I shot
across the surface, very quickly reaching an island. I
landed and climbed off the bike. The island was fairly
large and a little sinister.
Feeling tired, I leaned on a rock and began to
think. I now understood that I had mucked it up a
little, not realising that I had actually skipped a base.
But what had happened to Eriana? She had said
something about transport, hadn't she? My question
was answered when I saw a large fin breach the
surface, followed by a spherical thing with fins on the
left and right. A big jet engine fired up and the
bubble boat shot eastwards. Guess where? That's
right. Home.
What I thought was a shooting star suddenly
took on a carrier shape. The carrier shape. With a
sudden rush I grabbed a flare and pulled out a match.
I got as far as lighting the match before I noticed
the hyperdrive glow around it and extinguished the

Invincible
match.
I returned to the rock. Or rather, where the
rock had been. There was a hole where it had been.
Similarly, all the features of the island had vanished.
No way was that good.
There was an almighty roar and a shape flew out
of the ground. The sand covering it fell off and I saw
that what I had mistaken for a rock was in fact the
tail of an enormous, metal dragon.
An enormous, angry, metal dragon.

Naoise Mchugh
Chapter nineteen We got it wrong again, didn't we?

Rodriguez's diary
We had about three hours till we arrived at our

destination. I spent that time clattering through
dummies in the training hall. Helena spent it playing
with her hamster. Tom spent it playing with Ellen, who
completely understood everything he told her. I guess
it was good for him to have somone his own age
around. Even better if that someone was a mutant as
well.
I speared a dummy, jumped over its head and
performed a perfect shockwave landing on the next
one. Rising from my crouch, I drew my flail and spun
around, creaming the next snowman. The flail turned
back into a mace and I slotted it into my belt in a
matter of seconds. Immediately, I was running at the
last snowman, grabbing my axe from my its bindings on
my shoulder. I jumped, halving the snowman in a
downward stroke and rolling through its mushy
remains. I rebound my axe and walked out, activating
the cleaner bot as I went.
I strolled into the living room where Tom and
Ellen were chasing each other round the room. It was

Invincible
an interesting sight, one hovering while the other

flew.
Ellen flew up to the ceiling and pressed herself
flat. Tom, perplexed, wandered round, trying to figure
out where she had gone. Suddenly she dropped on him,
catching him on the shoulder, before flying off to a
corner of the room. Tom did the obvious thing and
mentally dragged her back. He let go of her in order
to catch her. That was his mistake. As he brought his
arm down to catch her, she rolled away, laughing. A
very familiar laugh.
“Ellen, who did you say your mother was?” I
asked, hating to break up the game.
“Did I not tell you?” She asked, keeping away
from Tom, wary of another psychic attack.
“No,” I said, curious.
“Thing is, Rodriguez, I don't actually know.
Eriana gave birth to me, but she's not actually my
mother,” I was shocked, but I knew it anyway. Well I
had thought Eriana was her mother at least.
“Nice mother to have,” was about all I could say.
“So did you live with her or something?”
“For the first three years of my life,” Tom
seemed to be following this with mild interest.
“Did she sell you to the lab then?” Both of us

Naoise Mchugh
jumped. Tom had spoken a very clear sentence. That

juice seemed to have been potent stuff.
“No. She owned the lab, so the essence of what
she did was donate me. I'd love to say that I, at least,
was properly looked after, but it wasn't like that. The
day I tested the hyperdrive, Fiona had been planning
to “accidentally” drop the force field stopping me
from escaping. Eriana found out and turned her into a
gorilla. It was three days before she could think
properly again. And it was a hell of a lot worse for
me,” Life in the lab sounded fun. Fun enough for a six-
year-old to take up mild swearing.
“Due to a rather odd and completely unforseen
navigational error known as a virus, which the alert-
bot is currently hunting through the system, we're
not going to the atlantic anymore. We're going to the
next base. Ireland,” Helena walked in, the bearer of
bad news. Her hamster and eagle flew beside her. The
hamster distracted Tom and Ellen instantly.
“So can we take this thing out of hyperdrive
and turn round?”
“No. The tunnel won't collapse until we land.
We're on a no-stop trip to-”
“The land of Eric?” I suggested, through raised

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eyebrows.
“I was going to say the Emerald Isle, but that
works,” She agreed.
“How long will it take us?”
“An extra hour, I'd say,”
“I'm going to get some sleep then. Watch the
kids,” I grinned. If looks could kill, my corpse would
have been found with three different look marks. I
briefly wondered why I bothered with company that
doesn't appreciate my humour.

Naoise Mchugh
Chapter twenty Meet Crunchy

Eric's journal
“Care to tell me who you are?” I asked the giant

metal wyvern.
“Sure. I'm Crunchy. Who're you?”
“Wha?” I was blown off my feet. Since when
could robots talk like that?
“I'm Crunchy. Who're you?”
“Oh, right. I'm Eric. Are you one of Eriana's
toys or something?”
“Was. I got scared when she made me fight a
hover carrier and I flew here as fast as I could. This
was where I was made, you see. Then she got angry
and left me on the island,” Crunchy landed on the
island again. Getting scared by a hover carrier?
Rodriguez would've blown him to bits. Crunchy must've
been the dragon Helena had been talking about.
“Would you be willing to take me to Ireland?” I
asked. Crunchy might be scary and all, but I sure as
hell was not going on my hoverbike.
“Sure. Shall I hold your bike?”
“Thanks,”

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I sat at the base of Crunchy's massive steel

neck. The rest of his neck, back and tail was covered
in spines that he told me were retractable. If his
whole neck was covered in these spines, then I really
didn't want to think about where I was going to be
stabbed if I annoyed him. You might wanna try and
avoid doing so as well.
Crunchy's wings were around twice the size of
him, and that was pretty big already. Over the trip, he
reacted to odd noises we heard, and a whole row of
torpedoes unfolded out of each wing. His claws were
made of diamond and I'd wouldn't fear for my money
if I bet it on my bike being scratched. He had offered
to take it in a bomb hatch where his stomach should
be, but I felt it would've been a bad idea to relieve
him of the bombs. Especially since it's hard to safely
jettison those things.
Crunchy's head was the size of a family car and
probably made of one too. His neck was huge, like a
small train. When a bird made the mistake of flying
close to us, he snapped at it, unveiling teeth the size
of katanas. Unsurprisingly, they also looked exactly
like katanas. Eriana had definitely scraped the bottom

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of the pan for resources to make him. Well, the

bottom of the recycling bin, anyway. Despite that,
she'd found some pretty cool junk. I resolved there
and then to never pass by a scrapyard again without
taking a dive.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are approaching our
cruising altitude and should be at our destination in
approximately thirty minutes. Please fasten your seat
belts,” Crunchy's robotic voice grated through my
thoughts. He sounded exactly like an air hostess. He
swished his tail and we reached our cruising altitude.
He lifted up his tail and fired up the turbo
engine. I have never gone so fast in my life. At least,
not in the open air, anyway.
“We are experiencing some turbulence. Please
hold on tight,” Crunchy grated. I grabbed the spines in
front of me as he barrel rolled into a cloud. The sword
tail swished over my head and cut the cloud in two.
Like Moses parting the red sea, we flew through the
gap, the clouds reforming behind us. Crunchy dived
underneath a cloud, loop de looping and shooting along.
I shouted wordlessly, caught up in the sheer joy of it
all.
Far too soon, the green fields of home came

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into view. As we slowed down and returned to flapping,

I thought I could make out the blobby mess of
dunliath. Carountouhill reared up out of Munster. We
came upon the province of Dublin, or Leinster or
whatever else you want to call it. It was sad that all
the green fields of Leinster were no more. If people
wanted to farm they went to Connacht, Ulster or
Munster. All the urbanisation had been removed from
there and plonked into an amazingly capable Dublin,
which reorganized itself to fuel its enormous urban
growth spurt. The new, better city filled up all of
Leinster. That was my home.
I drove back a tear of homesickness with
thoughts of how I would be with Helena soon. But
before I took the fight to the tip of Donegal, I had
something to do.
“Crunchy, can you see Dublin Castle?” I asked,
communicating with the dragon through my helmet.
“Yes,” Came a virtualised reply.
“Take us down there,” I said, “I'm going home,”
We didn't actually own Dublin Castle. We
shared it with a three other families. I realised that,
all though I was the rightful heir of our part, my
uncles would have taken it “to keep it from going to
ruin”, although ruining it was more likely what they

Naoise Mchugh
would do.
Ten minutes later, I had left a note for each of

the three other families, warning them against the
likelihood of treachery on the part of my uncles and
was back in the air, on the way to Donegal. Mission
Acquired. Mission Name: Seek and Destroy.

Invincible
Chapter twenty one Two headed terror

Helena's notes
The dark fortress of Donegal loomed into view.

Rodriguez, beside me, was ridiculously tense. Who
could blame him. I didn't know how I could cope with
the pressure. We had realised that one false move
could cost us our lives. And that any slip-ups and it
was no more mother.
“What's that?” Rodriguez asked. There was a
big shape coming at us through the gloom. It was a big
lump, with two long twisting things coming out of the
top of it.
“No idea. It looks like another mutant, though.
And a flying one too,” I could now distinguish wings o
it.
I screamed as it solidified into a two-headed
dragon. Ellen rushed in to the cockpit, Tom following.
“It's Ladon! Oh, God!” She cried. Were we
missing something here?
“Who is Ladon?” Tom asked. His mentality
seemed to be reaching six-year-old level again.
“Ladon, is Eriana's pet. When she finished
making him in the lab, he ate my best friend, Crystal.
She was a human-wolf hybrid. When Ladon was made,

Naoise Mchugh
he was the size of a family car. Now his necks are the
bigger than most freight trains,” It was true. The
thing was huge. It's heads were the size of the lead
train in a caravan of freight trains.
There comes a time in every crazy bio-
chemist's life where only a dragon will do. For Eriana,
that time was now. And the friendly dragon slayers
popping in were us. It was time to see how powerful
the dragon actually was.
The torpedoes shot. The gatling and machine
guns roared. The lasers whistled. Fat men shrieked. In
short we hit it with almost everything we had. Where
Ladon had been was a huge cloud of smoke. The area
surrounding the fortress was blackened. Not that it
had been pretty in the first place. Like the stronghold
of the evil witch is going to be pretty. I smiled.
My smile quickly faded as the smoke cleared.
Ladon was coming through it, looking rather angry.
And completely unhurt.
There was an almighty, earthrending roar and a
giant shape shot out from under us, like a bullet from
hell and careened into Ladon, sending him flying over
the horizon.
I grinned at our narrow brush with death. Far

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too narrow for comfort.

There was a thud and the cockpit doors fell
down behind us.
“Somebody order a pizza?”

Naoise Mchugh
Chapter twenty two Wolf boy

Eric's journal
We streaked towards Donegal, flying fast as

the wind. I saw the carrier blaze its heart out into
Ladon. I gritted my teeth when it cleared the smoke.
Crunchy moved towards the carrier, about to fly
under it.
“Bye,” he said to me through the helmet.
“I'll see you soon,” I replied. I bunched up my
legs and sprang off his neck. The spines, that I had
spent the whole journey worrying about, popped out of
his neck as he flew under the carrier, roaring at
Ladon. I landed on the roof without a sound and
watched as Crunchy drove his foe over the horizon.
I found the elevator behind the destroyer
cannon and went down to the cockpit guard chamber.
Silently, I crept to the kitchen and grabbed a
pizza. I returned and kicked open the doors.
“Somebody order a pizza?” I shouted and then
“Who the hell is she?” I pointed at the dragonfly girl.
Of course, everyone was too shocked by my
wonderful entrance.
Helena reacted first, running over and hugging

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me. Rodriguez was next, with a rather fake grin.

“Hey Eric,” he said, shaking my hand “welcome
back,” He threw the bucket of ice over my head.
“Ever heard of armour, numbskull?” I'd love to
say that snappy comeback was me, but it came from a
much less expected source: Tom!
“Is it just me or did Tom just speak?” I said,
shaking the ice cubes off my helmet, then taking it
off.
So that was when I was told everything that
had happened since we had separated. An unusual tale
to say the least. And the least I did say. Of course,
then I had to wear out my jaw muscles describing
what had happened to me. It was only then that I
realised how much we had each been through since we
split.
Naturally, Rodriguez's instincts told him that
where he wanted to be was in the fortress, but
Helena and I convinced him that we all needed three
hours to rest and that it would be suicide to waltz into
the fortress without an hour of good planning. And I
needed to fix the door of the cockpit. Oops.
*
Rodriguez's dairy

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The carrier was quiet. The guards were on

minor alert mode. True to his word, Eric had fixed the
door. He had then dissapeared, along with Helena. I
didn't have a clue where they were, and I was fairly
close to certain I didn't want to walk in on them.
Ellen and Tom were getting as close as six-year-
olds can get to sparring in the arena. I watched for a
while, then decided that watching my six-year-old
cousin getting his ass kicked rapidly lost its merit.
I felt like hanging on to my life, so looking for
Eric and Helena was out of the question. Watching
Tom and Ellen was simply boring. And there was
absolutely no way I was going to be able to sleep.
I found myself in my room. On a military
carrier, it would've been the captain's room so that
made it mine. Democracy must be weeded out! Rulers
must be selected by completely random and un-people
related means! Well, actually, I was in charge mainly
because I was the driving force on the mission. Un-
people related, but not really random.
The first officer's room, across the corridor
from me, had been given to Helena. It should've been
given to Eric, but when we were arguing, we eventually

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realised that we weren't going to get Helena to share

with Tom. Ellen had been given a sleeping bag and a
hammock in Helena's room and with two girls in
control of the room, I shuddered to think what the
inside of it must look like.
Anyway, I found myself in my room planning the
assault. It really was hard work. After a few minutes
I drifted off.
*
Helena's notes
An alarm sounded. Eric scowled and ran off to

the cockpit. I tried to convince him to stay, but he
just wouldn't. I followed him, realising it would be a
long time before we got any time alone again.
*
Eric's journal
I leaned over the controls, staring at the three
defender hovercraft floating towards us. From the
way they were moving, they looked like they were
simply on patrol.
“What is it?” Helena asked.
“A patrol. If we open fire now, we could give

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ourselves away. I'm taking my bike out,” I told her.

“Take a set of the armour we got from the
research lab,” I nodded and was off.
A minute later, I hopped on my bike and rode
out the back of the carrier. I fired up the turbo,
making sure my bike reared up in front of the cockpit
viewscreen. The bike leapt forward, eager to kick ass.
The three defenders turned towards me. I slid
the visor on my helmet up just enough to let the pilots
see my grin. They opened fire and I dodged and
weaved through them, flipping around when I found
myself behind them.
My arm turned into a machine gun and I
emptied a belt of clips into them. Bullets smashed into
the glass of their windscreens. The pilot closest to
the carrier exploded in a spray of blood and guts.
Another hovercraft completely exploded. The third
just fell.
I dived down and grabbed the comms aerial on
it. A nice present for Helena.
*
Rodriguez's diary

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I woke up. What was going on? An alarm had

sounded, hadn't it? I heard a machine gun burst, then
the sound of a head exploding and then a boom of a
hovercraft exploding.
I smelled blood. Suddenly I went lightheaded.
My biceps bulged. I looked down. There was a large
furry barrel where my chest used to be.
I sniffed. The room was filled with a red smell.
I licked my lips and lifted my head high. I howled.
*
Helena's notes
I was in a forest. It was night. A wolf howled.

I snapped out of the daydream. Eric ran into
the cockpit, followed by Tom and Ellen.
“Where the hell is your brother?” He panted.
Then we both heard it. A wolfish howl.
“That one wasn't a daydream!” I said.
The door fell down and Eric slapped his
forehead.
“No way am I fixing that!” He growled.
Then something else growled.
A wolf stood in the doorway, dressed in
Rodriguez's clothes. I met Eric's eyes. Rodriguez had

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been complaining about his shoulder, where

experiment thirty two bit him!
A true hero, Eric strode towards Rodriguez.
There was an odd silvery colour to his arm.
He held his hand up in front of Rodriguez, who
growled. Immediately, Eric grabbed his arm and
squeezed. Rodriguez relaxed and turned back into
himself.
“Wh...where? What happened?” He said.
“You're fixing the door this time, Rodriguez,”
Eric snapped.
“Eric, I think he could do with a little
information. What we think happened is you turned
into a wolf. Like the one that bit you,”
“So, I'm a werewolf now?”
“Yeah. The smell of blood changes you to a wolf,
I think. Silver seems to change you back, but I have a
feeling we could use it to keep you in control of the
wolf,” Eric said.
“I think there's a few silver spoons in my room.
We could try melting them,” I said, running off to get
them.
I returned and Eric turned his arm into a
flamethrower. He melted the spoons and then

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hammered them into a disc, which I put on a string

and then Rodriguez put it around his neck. He
suddenly seemed a lot more relaxed.
“Right then, let's get going, wolf boy,” Eric said.

Naoise Mchugh
Chapter twenty three Into the dark

Eric's journal
We flew towards the castle, Rodriguez on his

bike, Tom and Helena on mine. Ellen and I just flew
ourselves. I had to disable a few patrols, making sure
that there was no blood to incite Rodriguez's animal
tendency.
We flew around a mountain that was blocking
our view of the castle. The garantuan stone
construction loomed over the surrounding countryside
like a.....giant castle over the surrounding countryside?
As we approached the gate, I turned my arm
rocket launcher. We flew down to the ground and I
ate a few energy bars.
I shoved the bomb that we had found on our
way to the first base, so long ago, into the barrel of
the rocket launcher. Everyone cleared well out of the
way and I crouched down on one knee. I primed the
weapon, preparing for a boom.
I fired.
A jet trail burst out the back of the rocket
launcher. The bomb flew at the wall, before
detonating.

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There was a sonic boom. A huge flash. Where

the wall had been, there was a huge gap. We were
just about to walk through when I realised just how
much I had underestimated Eriana.
There was a sort of squealing roar. One of the
most dreaded sounds on the entire earth. An energy
beam shot out from the blackness, just missing us. I
knew I was right.
She had a sky turtle.
The scariest creatures under the sun. It had
taken three hover carriers to stop the only one that
had ever rampaged. They hadn't come anywhere near
killing it either. And this one wasn't rampaging. This
one was just plain evil.
It flew out of the hole in the wall. It had two
huge spikes jutting out of the back of its pointy head.
While most sky turtles were green, this one was black.
Its wings were like those of bats and when it roared,
we could see the fangs in the mouth that was
supposed to be toothless.
I knew what I had to do. I leapt onto the shell
of the evil thing. Before I landed, the shell suddenly
came alive with spikes. I hovered a meter above it,
searching for the weak spot that all sky turtles had.
Before I could find it, a leathery bat wing tried to bat

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Helena's face, missing her by inches. Another wing

shot up and whacked me away from the shell. I
stabilised myself inches away from the ground.
There was no way we could kill that thing
ourselves. Crunchy was still fighting Ladon. That was
when it struck me. I flew to my hoverbike and turboed
towards where the two dragons were still fighting. My
helmet told me that Crunchy was winning, on account
of his inability to feel pain. But he wasn't winning
quick enough. My bike's machine guns found their
mark. Ladon's one remaining head.
Crunchy followed me back to where the rest of
the gang were dodging and weaving through attacks.
He managed to distract the turtle with a few
torpedoes.
That was when I heard another sound. A
squealing roar. And it wasn't coming from Eriana's
beast. I looked back at the mountain. A silhouette was
flying towards us. It was Gigantos!
The evil turtle brought its wings together,
making a huge shockwave. Crunchy went flying, pelting
the evil turtle with gatling fire as he went.
I rode back towards where the gang were
taking cover in a hollowed out section of the wall and

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joined them.
Gigantos had engaged the his opponent, while
Crunchy was shooting it from a distance.
The two turtles reared up vertically and began
slapping each other with their wings. If the stakes
hadn't been so high, we all would've laughed. The
contest of parry and slap was simply comical.
Suddenly, Crunchy hit something. Something on
Gigantos. He had hit the turtle's weak spot. Gigantos
grabbed his opponent in an an all smothering embrace.
With shocked eyes, we watched as the heroic reptile
began to expand. The shell that had once saved my
life began to buckle as it struggled to contain the
deadly force of the reptilian death throes.
The two reptiles turned yellow, the colour of
their energy beams.
Gigantos exploded.
He blossomed into an all-engulfing shining orb.
Crunchy went flying, again. The walls of the fortess
completely fell down. The orb began to contract,
retreating into itself till it was tiny, then flying up
into the heavens.
The evil turtle was still there.
For a second, anyway. Then it combusted. It
burned for about a moment, before it was consumed.

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The ashes fell to the ground, forming a small hill.

“Right, better get moving then,” I said, eager to
turn my back on the tragic scene behind us.
We strode bravely into the dark.

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Chapter twenty four Project HADES

Rodriguez's diary
We ran along a curving path until we came to

another iron gate. Eric began searching his arsenal for
something.
Ellen pressed herself flat against the gate and
began feeling it with her antennae. After a few
seconds, she pointed to where the gate connected to
its frame at the top. Eric shot it with his machine gun
and the gate swung towards the interior.
There was a lava moat on the inside. Whether
by design or design flaw, the gate formed a nice metal
bridge across the flowing superheated canal. A bubble
popped with a bang, making us jump.
Across the bridge there was a huge grid. It was
like a maze, with lasers for walls.
We walked across the bridge, wary of any
movement. As soon as we were in the maze, lasers
activated behind us, blocking our escape.
“Looks like we won't be making an exit any time
soon,” Eric stated, “What say you to scrambling like
mountain monkeys across this mazelike structure and
out the other side?”
“I, for one, say 'why are we talking like this?'” I

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said.
“To be honest, because I feel like it. To be
dishonest, I don't know,” Eric replied.
“Whatever that means,” I retorted. I'll save
you the boring details of how much we argued.
*
Helena's notes
We walked on, Rodriguez at the front and Eric
watching the back. Ellen and Tom went in front of me
and I went behind them (if you didn't get that
already).
Suddenly Ellen stopped dead, her antennae high
in the air.
“Six guards, headed this way,” she said.
If the guards had been planning on ambushing
us, they had certainly got it wrong. Eric shredded one
with a machine gun and that made Rodriguez change.
He had clawed through all five of them before you
could even blink. It was only then that we began to
worry about whether the amulet was doing its job.
Rodriguez's lips curled in a snarl as he
struggled with his most deadly enemy yet: himself.
Slowly, but surely, he began to relax. When he was

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himself again, we started moving, all relieved.

It came as something of a surprise when Ellen
stopped dead again.
“There's something up ahead. Something that
we need to see,” she said, “but it's very heavily
guarded,”
Eric grinned sickly. The kind of grin he always
had when he went on a killing frenzy. His robotic
forearm extended and narrowed, turning into a sword.
The chain blades popped up and began moving along
the length of the sword. He drew his father's sword
as well.
Rodriguez howled, morphing very rapidly into his
lupine form. The sound changed a little as his teeth
sharpened. His muscles bulged and he grew a foot
taller, bringing him up to eight feet.
“Sick'em boy!” Eric laughed maniacally as the
pair of them ran into the room.
*
Eric's journal
As soon as we came into the room, Rodriguez
turned into a howling, furry whirlwind, scything
through guards like a storm of blades. I leaped around
the room, dismembering anything that got too close.

Naoise Mchugh
As we swept around the room like a pair of

avenging furies, we suddenly ran out of guards to kill.
I don't know about you, but I certainly find that very
annoying. Especially when I'm having fun.
I looked out the entrance to the room.
“Apart from a furry death magnet and a crazy
guy with a lethal sword, the room is secure,” I shouted
to the rest of the gang, who walked into the room.
Rodriguez had turned back into himself and was
busy licking the blood off his lips.
“...mmm...tasty,” he gurgled, “....eugh, this guy
needed to lose weight,”
“You still sane over there, Lassie?” I called. The
scowl on his face was hilarious.
“This is coming from the guy who killed sixty
guards without caring and he wants to know if I'm still
sane?” Rodriguez retorted. I smiled back.
“What is this place?” I asked, to no one in
particular. It was a huge room. The floor and walls
were made of metal, as opposed to the red rock
outside. The room looked like a museum. Exhibits in
glass cases were everywhere. The room was bathed in
a blue light.
Helena ran over to an exhibit entitled the

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HADES stone. It was a dull black rock that seemed to

be crying out. Helena read the information.
“The Hades stone was found in 2090 by the
explorers Jatheck Drindle and Canorn Fairway. They
found the stone at the end of a long tunnel full of
sharp rocks. A third member of the expedition,
Danisiel Merwan tripped and cut his throat on one of
the razor sharp rocks. Drindle said that a black shape
rose out of Merwan's corpse and went into the stone.
Fairway said the shape was white, but both agree that
it went into the stone. Thinking that it might house
the souls of the dead, the two men carried the rock
out of the tunnel. On April 20th, 2091-”
“April 20th, 2091? That's the date my father
began working on the project in Iceland!” I said.
“-scientists began running tests on the rock.
Tests made it seem as if the two explorers were
right. Exactly eight years after work began on the
stone, at 7:20am, scientists took an atom of it and
attempted to split it using nuclear fission. The
resulting explosion echoed across the world,” She
finished.
“That sounds like the explosion that destroyed
destroyed so much of the world,” Rodriguez
interjected.

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“There's something else written here: Thanks

to the efforts of the creators, the process of
creating a new world was started,” Helena said.
“You said that Eriana mentioned the Creators to
her boss in the Everglades,” I said, “That could be the
organisation she belongs to,” Helena nodded.
I saw something else which caught my
attention. I strode over to the glass case, hoping I
was wrong.
I wasn't.
In the case was a green scabbard. Along it was
written: This is the sword of Patrick McGalaran. The
sword that saved the world from a sky turtle. This is
the Sky Slicer.
Patrick McGalaran was my father before he was
accepted into the ruling clan of Ireland. It wasn't
exactly a monarchy, it was a court of some kind. I
didn't know the politics.
If what I held in my hand was the Sky Slicer,
that would explain why it had torn through the bars on
the troll cage.
And then there was my father. He had often
told me of how a lone hero had managed to bring down
a sky turtle that was starting a rampage in around

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2064. No matter how much I pestered him, he would

never tell me the hero's name.
The Sky Slicer had been fabled to be able to
cut through anything, even a lie. If I could figure out
how to use it, I would be able to cut through space
and time, open up portals to other dimensions, see
through lies, the list goes on and I would be here next
week and only an eight of the way through if I tried
to list them all.
There was one simplistic conclusion to be drawn
from this: Eriana had killed my mother. That
ratcheted up my feud with her from being Helena
related to being personal.
And I was angry.

Naoise Mchugh
Chapter twenty four The new world

Rodriguez's diary
There was a sort of fork at the end of the

museum. To the left was a path that led towards the
animuti-temporal machine. Eric had said something
about a machine creating the neccesary explosion.
Helena and I decided we would take that way.
The one on the right led to the command
center. Previous experience had told us that this was
usually a good place to find Eriana. Tom, Ellen and Eric
each had a bone to pick with her. Tom had lost his legs
to her, Ellen had had six years of abuse from her and
she had killed Eric's mother. Eric had punched open
the glass containing his scabbard, smiling as alarms
went off.
“Scream all you want, I'll still kick your and the
next guy's ass all the way to next year!” He shouted.
We realised that the death of his mother had driven
him to the edge of insanity. And his rocket feet
weren't going to be any help to him when he fell off
that cliff.
So we took the path on the left and the others
took the right. Our path was a tubular construction, f

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of tiny porous holes in the metalwork. As we walked

down the swiss cheese tunnel, our feet clattered on
the metal floor. The echoes reverbrating along the
corridor told me that the tunnel was long. It was lit by
spherical orbs embedded in the wall. These cast a
yellowish green light on the tunnel.
After about an hour of walking, the tunnel
ballooned out in an amphitheatre like construction.
This had a floor and several balconies. All filled with
(what else?) guards.
I felt my heart beat shoot up, my head filled
with rage that needed an opening. My body began to
take on the form of an eight foot wolf. My arms and
legs bulged, my chest turned into a barrel and I was
covered in fur. If it weren't for the elasticity of my
suit, it would be hugely ripped.
Helena ducked back into the tunnel, before
lobbing a greek fire jar at the closest balcony.
I had six guards shredded before they could
take their weapons out. Another six before they could
point them at me. Another six before they could pull
the trigger. And that's when things started getting
difficult.
Helena helped me with her machine gun, but the
storm of whistling bullets was hard to weather. I

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ducked and weaved through as many as I could, picking

off the guards who ran out of ammo. My back was
riddled with bullet holes, although they were all
healing extremely fast. The bullets would pop out the
way they came and then the holes would fill over.
I leapt up to the closest balcony, shredding its
occupants before springing off it to the next. I
managed to clear the entire left side of the
amphitheatre before jumping down to the bottom
balcony on the right side and working my way up.
Which left the ones on the ground. And most of them
were out of bullets anyway.
I landed on the ground in a shockwave crouch
landing, flattening the closest guards and knocking the
rest. I got up and sliced the hell out of the survivors.
The storm of bullets died down and quiet returned to
the room.
At the end of the room was a door. And on that
door was a big sign saying keep out. Which in meddler
language means come on in, there's valuable stuff in
here.
I kicked open the door, taking in the sight in
front of me. When I realised there were no guards in
here, I allowed myself to relax.

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My mother was chained to a chairish thing.

Except it was upside down. Below her was a huge ball.
Wires connected to the ball and these were all
connected to an ominous looking machine. A hawkish
laugh sounded. We looked at the source. Eriana was
looking out of a glass room.
“And now, after a hundred simulations, we can
finally perform the act itself. Now, in this very room,
history SHALL BE MADE!” She caught sight of us.
“But things just got interesting,” she cackled.
The door slid down behind us. Oh, damn.

Naoise Mchugh
Chapter twenty five For their greater glory

Eric's journal
“And now, after a hundred simulations, we can

finally perform the act itself. Now, in this very room,
history SHALL BE MADE!” We filed in behind Eriana,
grins on our faces.
“But things just got interesting,” the grin on my
face ran away with the snarl and was replaced by the
frown as I realised the twins were in there. Eriana
pushed a button and a covering on the huge ball slid
open.
“The ball must be absolutely airtight in order to
contain the explosion. However, the force of the
explosion will be so great that the ball will be
vaporised as it tries to contain the explosion. Much
like the subject will die as she creates the explosion,”
Eriana explained to a huge group of spectators. An
easy guess told me they were members and sponsors
of the creators.
There was a murmur of approval from the
spectator. Eriana pressed another button and
Rodriguez's mother screamed as she was dropped into
the ball. The hatch slid over and Eriana pushed

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another button. There was a scary noise that got

steadily louder. It got louder and louder until the ball
exploded. The twins were thrown against the wall.
Rodriguez began changing as he struggled to resist
the force of the explosion.
The glass shattered and a shard embedded
itself in Tom's head. Instead of crying out, he
shattered it, fragments flying into Eriana, whose
armor was beginning to appear out of nowhere.
Fragments jammed the mechanisms and the armor fell
away, useless.
Tom slumped against the wall, blood fountaining
from his head. There was a blurriness as Ellen zipped
across the room, a lot faster than one would expect
from a dragonfly. And dragonflies are fast.
Unfortunately, Eriana knew exactly where she was
going to appear and kicked her into the wall beside
Tom. A red patch appeared over her heart.
“Well, I think it's time to drop a bombshell,”
Eriana said.
“You killed my mother, bitch! No way am I gonna
stand here and listen to your mad ravings!” I shouted
at her.
“No, Eric. I didn't kill your mother. I am your
mother. And Tom is your brother,”

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“What lies are you going to tell us next? That

I'm a bottlenosed dolphin?” Ellen said coolly, oblivious
to the red stain on her heart.
“You may not be a dolphin, but you certainly eat
like a pig,” Eriana replied angrily.
“She's not lying, Ellen. I knew this the moment
I found the scabbard,”
“Right then. Who's my real mother?” Ellen shot
at Eriana.
“Your mother is dead. All we know about her is
that she was a nobody who sold your embryo for five
hundred dollars,” Ellen looked shocked. I mean, who
wouldn't be? If you're going to sell something so
valuable, you ought to be able to know a fair price.
Five hundred dollars? I wouldn't have sold an unborn
child for five hundred million dollars! Or euro.
“Bad woman go boom?” Tom asked with all the
innocence of a mass murderer. That's my brother.
“Sorry bro, but as fun as making her explode
would be, it's just not painful or slow enough for her,”
I answered, “But I'll make sure she dies horribly. I'll
make sure she pays for her crimes with her last drop
of blood,” And who wouldn't?
“One more bombshell, Eric. Your father

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sabotaged the HADES project for me,” I transferred

my attention from my dying brother to my insane
mother. “He had no spine, Eric. He did it because I
threatened you,” I suddenly found it hard to associate
my heroic father with the poor spineless creature
Eriana had just described.
Rage welled up within me. I leapt at Eriana,
landing a shattering blow to the stomach. She spun
around, hitting me with a roundhouse kick. I
somersaulted backwards, standing and raising my arms
in a defensive stance. I grabbed Eriana's leg as she
tried to land a flying kick on me and spun her into the
wall. In a split second, she hit me with a slide kick. I
went flying, before landing and hitting an uppercut on
her. She smashed me in the jaw, making me bite my
tongue. I landed a succesion of lightning quick punches
to her face, finishing off the combo by kicking her in
the stomach. Once again, she spun around, this time
elbowing me in the stomach. I grabbed her in a
headlock and boxed her insane face.
Hatred of the crazy, deranged depraved bitch
fuelled my robotically enhanced limbs as I went all out
in my efforts to kill my own mother. War puts us all in
strange positions.
My mother twisted herself free of my grip and

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she managed to kick me to the ground from behind.

She howled in triumph as she grabbed my sword off
my back.
“You're going to kill your own son?” I snarled,
“What happened to motherly love?”
“It's not that hard. I killed my other son and
my adopted daughter, didn't I? Why should I worry
about killing you, the worst one?”
“We're not dead!” My sibling and foster sister
echoed. Eriana glanced at them. That was my moment.
The reserve engaged.
“Should'nt have let me talk!” I shouted as I
pushed my self of the ground, flying into the air. I
landed on my feet and twisted into Eriana, knocking
her back as I grabbed my sword out of her hand.
I kicked her into the wall, grabbing her by the
throat, the deadly blade glinting as I poised it in front
of her forehead, angling it so that it would go through
the center of her brain.
“You're going to kill you're own mother?” Eriana
asked, with all the kindness and charm of a drunk guy
pointing a machine gun at you.
“Whether you are my mother or not, it was you
who killed her, bitch!” I shouted at her.

Invincible
I plunged the sword through her, making it

come out the other side. My mother died with a scowl
on her ugly face.

Naoise Mchugh
Chapter twenty six Through the rift

Rodriguez's diary
A burst of machine gun fire echoing from the

command center dispersed the spectators who had
remained after the explosion. I relaxed, staring at
the black ball that was all that was left of my mother.
It had been invisible at first, leading me to
believe that she had died for absolutely nothing. But
it had slowly grown as Eric duelled with the bitch that
had brought him into the world as nothing more than
leverage to use against his father. Killed by your
eldest son, who wants that? She deserved it.
Eric jumped out of the window, carrying Tom
and Ellen under his arms. Both were dead.
“So, my mother works her whole life for this
and what does she leave behind? A golf ball!” Eric
grinned.
“That leaves the question of what we do with
said golf ball,” Helena interjected.
“I say we destroy it,” I said.
“Destroy it?! Are you insane? That golf ball is
all that's left of your mother and you want to destroy
it?” Eric practically screamed. I guess killing your own

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mother isn't good for your sanity. It certainly gives

you mood swings anyway.
“What do you suggest, then?” I said.
“We can't just leave it or we're all going to be
eaten by it. And I really can't think of anything else
to do,” Helena piped up.
Eric grinned, the grin he fixes on his face when
he's about to do something big. He took his sword and
ran a fingernail along the flat edge of it. He stabbed
at what seemed like nothing, but suddenly appeared a
whole lot more substantial when his sword stopped in
mid-stab. He traced a circle in the air and as we
watched in amazement, it looked like the very air was
tearing. He completed the circle and the patch of
space fell away.
Eric picked up the floating golfball and put it in
the hole. Where it had been black before, it suddenly
turned greyish.
“Space and time are huge woven pieces of cloth.
What I just cut is one of the many seams in space,” he
said, pointing to the hole.
“No need to get metaphorical, Eric,” I said,
caring nothing for his imagination.
“I'm not being metaphorical, Rodriguez. They
literally are huge woven pieces of cloth. Eriana was

Naoise Mchugh
planning to slice open space if the world grew too

fast,” Eric answered.
“How exactly do you know this?” I said.
“The path we followed was filled with articles
on the subject and there was a button that looked like
a huge knife in the command center,” he explained.
“So, what happens now?” Helena asked.
“You two can do whatever you want,” Eric
replied.
“What's that supposed to mea-”
“You're not serious?” I gasped as it dawned on
me.
“What?” Helena asked, puzzled.
“Eric, if you go in there, you're not coming
back,” I warned him.
“My father and brother are never coming back
either. This is my mission, Rodriguez,” he replied.
“Please Eric, don't go,” Helena pleaded,
suddenly understanding what he was going to do.
“Helena, my mother just killed her own son. The
McIrons are going to be baying for my blood. My
father had no spine. And most of all, I stabbed my
own mother in the head. I have a job to do and
there's no reason for me not to do it anymore,” he

Invincible
stepped into the rift, waved and closed the hole.

It was the last time I ever saw him alive.

Naoise Mchugh
Epilogue In the beginning

Eric's journal
In the beginning, there was chaos. I had been

mysteriously shrunk down to the scale of everything
living here. I only realised that when I figured out
that all the animals and plants were nothing more than
blobs because they were in fact, bacteria.
There was absolutely no order of any form
here. The creatures were all vastly different from
anything else I've ever seen and believe me, I've seen
a lot.
Everything here fights each other. The plants
are all carnivorous. There's one plant that lives
underground in a little hole. It's essentially just a
little conical thing. It covers the hole with its leaves
and whenever something decides to wander over it, it
springs up and pulls it down. Then it somehow
relocates itself and digs another hole. I managed to
trap one as it sprang on some creature and picked its
flower. It's a nice flower, so I'm gonna keep it for
Helena.
Some of the animals are just crazy. One type
moves around on six tentacles, which are covered with

Invincible
suckers. Knowing this, you would expect it to look like

an octopus, but it looks more like a cow. It is
armoured like a beetle and has similar wings. I'm not
joking, this place seriously has things like this. Its
mouth is full of things that look a little like the blades
from blenders. It certainly looks like they work in a
similar way when you see the things eat.
Speaking of eat, it's remarkably hard to find
anything edible. If it weren't for the arm's analysis, I
would've died of indigestion a long time ago.
I've been here for three weeks and during that
time I've grown rapidly. The only way I notice it is
because some things around me stop growing. By my
estimation, I'm about the size of a small mouse now.
Soon enough, I won't be able to see the bacteria
anymore. This world is expanding and the population in
it is as well.
When I use the reserve, I can sometimes look
into my prey's mind. The creatures here are afraid of
something. Something alien. I was fairly certain I
closed the portal, so it couldn't have followed me in
without activating my mother's portal opener, in which
case, it's unlikely they would've gotten the right
dimension. What I do know is that if the creatures
here are afraid of it, it must be pretty bad. The only

Naoise Mchugh
thing other than it that the creatures are afraid of is

me. And judging by that, this thing is scary.
Interestingly enough, it was only when I closed
the rift that I realised I had taken the egg with me
from the carrier.
And of course, I only realised that because it
hatched.
The first of the adventures of Eric the

invincible is finished. The tale will
continue in Book II, Century.

Invincible

For Their Greater Glory

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For Their Greater Glory

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For their greater glory

For their greater glory

It is important to note that there is three narrators

Prologue Feel no pain

It was right in front of me. This thing that I

1 The adventures of Eric the Invincible

2 The adventures of Eric the Invincible

he didn't try anything. I noticed he was throwing his

3 The adventures of Eric the Invincible

unconscious at this point so I pegged it for our tank,

4 The adventures of Eric the Invincible

I woke up in a box. Not a small confined box but

5 The adventures of Eric the Invincible

“I wish my father would do that for me.” My

6 The adventures of Eric the Invincible

talons, shotgun and a sniper rifle.” My arm changed to

7 The adventures of Eric the Invincible

untangled myself, just in case I tripped up because my

Several seconds later, a huge explosion woke me

8 The adventures of Eric the Invincible

of them. I just hoped that Brian wouldn't try to take

9 The adventures of Eric the Invincible

Chapter Two Bitter Defeat

Oh my God. As soon as I got home after the

10 The adventures of Eric the Invincible

I would have cared about having to pay for the guy's

A few minutes later, I was exploring the

11 The adventures of Eric the Invincible

flowers in the Air City of Punta Del Este than in the

12 The adventures of Eric the Invincible

field because every shot bounced to the ground. I

13 The adventures of Eric the Invincible

Chapter three A helping hand

The first paper I read told me about a

14 The adventures of Eric the Invincible

Along with the sword had come a note, saying

A party was a big relief after losing my father

15 The adventures of Eric the Invincible

there was another which read Mass-destruction plan –

16 The adventures of Eric the Invincible

wrong, which I guessed he could.

17 The adventures of Eric the Invincible

Eric seemed to have been through a lot.

Tension was all I could feel. I had won the cup,

18 The adventures of Eric the Invincible

Rodriguez handed me the cup. It was smooth to touch.

Rodriguez and Helena invited me over to their

19 The adventures of Eric the Invincible

When we got there, I somehow managed to

20 The adventures of Eric the Invincible

Chapter four Leaving

The next day, we left. I had never left Uruguay.

21 The adventures of Eric the Invincible

actually had it's own motor, so it was just making us

About an hour later, we saw an actual living bird.

22 The adventures of Eric the Invincible

looked like the inside of a computer.

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24 The adventures of Eric the Invincible

25 The adventures of Eric the Invincible

He was diving, assisted by his rocket propelled

26 The adventures of Eric the Invincible

Chapter five Through prison bars

Damnation. My defense had ended in me falling