him as he did so.
Broadsword went instantly limp, blood flowing from the gaping hole in his neck and dribbling down into the abyss like a macabre waterfall.
Then Switchblade callously cut Broadsword’s harness and the dying Delta operator fell from the peak of the pyramid, dropping into the fathomless void, his limp figure disappearing into darkness.
“What the fuck…?” Wolf said. “Switchblade!”
From his position on the nearest tower, Jack also watched as Switchblade killed Broadsword.
“Oh, God…” he breathed as he saw Broadsword fall.
Out on the pyramid, Switchblade now hung from his own harness, holding the Pillar in one hand. He held it up for Wolf to see and shouted, “Welcome to the end of the world, Wolf! A world that gloried in the humiliation of my people! Now that world will be no more! Nippon was never defeated!”
“Switchblade! No!” Wolf yelled.
Switchblade snarled, “Covetous man! You want earthly power. There is no greater power on this planet than the ability to destroy it. Now witness that power, and know that, in the end, we won the war!”
He then thrust the Pillar out from his body, his arm fully outstretched, preparing to drop it into the abyss.
“See you in Hell!” he roared.
And with those final hateful words, Switchblade dropped the cleansed Second Pillar into the abyss.
SWITCHBLADE let go of the Pillar—at the exact moment that someone came thudding into him, swinging on a rope of some kind.
It was Jack, hanging on to the end of Astro’s Maghook,having swung across from his tower, two hundred feet away!
With nothing else to call on, he’d fired the Maghook’s magnetic head into the side of the pyramid and hoped to God that the structure had magnetic properties.
It did, and the bulbous magnetic head stuck fast against the pyramid, and Jack swung—a long, swooping arc over the bottomless abyss, an absolutely astonishing two-hundred-foot swing—arriving at the peak just as Switchblade yelled his final insult to Wolf and released the Pillar…
…which Jack caught……a nanosecond before he slammed into Switchblade himself and stopped abruptly, becoming entangled in the insane Marine’s harness! Clutching desperately for a handhold, he was forced to release the Maghook and it swung back toward the city, leaving him clinging to Switchblade at the peak of the pyramid.
Switchblade was furious. His eyes blazed with rage at this intrusion on his triumph.
He punched Jack hard in the face, a withering blow, and Jack recoiled sharply, his helmet-camera dislodging from his head. It plummeted down into the abyss, cartwheeling wildly. As he was flung backward by the blow, Jack only just managed to keep hold of the Pillar with his right hand while clinging to Switchblade’s chest harness with his left.
Hanging on desperately, he looked up into Switchblade’s eyes……and saw that the Japanese madman wasn’t finished.
Switchblade glared at Jack as he began to unclip the central buckle of his harness.
“Oh, you’re not…” Jack said.
He was.
He was going to drop them both into the abyss!
“We’re both going to die anyway!” Switchblade yelled. “Might as well die now!”
And with those words, he managed to unclip the buckle—just as Jack made a final lunge, yanking himself up Switchblade’s body, reaching with his outstretched arm for the peak of the pyramid—and in the very instant that the buckle unclasped and they both dropped together,he jammed the Pillar into its slot in the summit of the pyramid and then fell, with Switchblade but no longer holding the Pillar, dropping away from the pyramid’s peak, watching it get smaller and smaller as the sheer walls of the abyss closed in around him.
And thus Jack West Jr. and the fanatic named Switchblade fell down into the abyss beneath the inverted pyramid of the Second Vertex of the Machine, an abyss that for all anyone knew went all the way to the center of the Earth.
AS THE TWO tiny figures disappeared into the dark abyss beneath the pyramid, the great structure’s mysterious mechanism came loudly and spectacularly to life.
First there was heard an ominous thrumming, then a deafening thunderboom that shook the entire supercavern. Then a dazzling laserlike beam of light lanced out from the pyramid’s apex, shooting down into the abyss, before a moment later it sucked back up into the pyramid’s peak.
Silence.
The combination of the ancient spectacle and the fall of Switchblade and Jack hit the various spectators in different ways.
Wolf.
At first, he’d been shocked by the reappearance of Jack, but he regathered quickly and after the light show he dispatched Rapier to go and grab the now-charged Pillar from the pyramid and thus garner the reward, the secret of perpetual motion.
Once the Pillar was retrieved and in his hands, Wolf swept out of the underground city.
Someone asked him what they should do with the boy, Alby, and he cast a dismissive wave.
