Page 102 of The Knights of Gaia

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

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

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

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

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

“Put your helmet back on, Jareth.”

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

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

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

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

“Because our adversary cannot use magic.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER6

THE MIRROR OF WOE

Kato’s statement propelled the other Knights into a heated debate.

“Human?” Eris prodded the armor debris pile with the toe of her boot. “You think that fiend is human?”

“Ridiculous,” Orion scoffed. “More likely, he is one of the Rebels. He attackedus, Kato, not the humans. They were just collateral damage.”

“It’s not the Rebels,” Kato said. Turbulence swirled beneath his icy tone.

“He could be a supernatural being from another realm,” Eris suggested.

“No, he’s from Gaia.” Kato held up a chunk of armor. “See that? The armor’s made of materials from this realm.”

I took the piece from him and turned it over in my hands. “Scrap. Kato means the armor is made of old scrap. Scrap from the World That Was.” I tossed the lump of warped metal back into the junk heap.

Kato dipped his head in acknowledgement. “The armor was made by someone with a lot of skill but limited resources and no magic. Someone human. He built a suit to mimic magic. That’s probably why he stole the two WANDs: to see if he could reverse-engineer them using mundane means.”

“You can’t reverse-engineer magic,” Eris said, her laugh uneven. “And you can’t mimic magic with technology either.”

“Why not?” Kato replied. “Think of it this way: when you summon something like a tornado, your magic manipulates the atmospheric conditions around you. Why can’t technology do the same?”

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