“Sir, wait!” Merlin’s voice begged. “She’s Avalonian and that is an Avalonian mecha. She can pilot it like no other. Perhaps you should pull out now.”
Mab laughed. “Maybe you should listen to the D.R.U.I.D. He speaks wisdom at last.” Her Avamech turned its head. “Oh, look! Another recruit for Vortigern no doubt!”
Uther followed her eyes and his breath froze in his throat.
“Galois?” he gasped.
Speeding towards Vortigern’s palace, already inside the city walls, a tera-bike rider hovered alone at lightning speed. The rider’s green cloak streamed behind him with Galois’s crest clearly visible even from Uther’s great height. He had no weapon on his bike or on his hip, but speed depicted his intent.
“What is he doing?” Uther shouted out.
“No doubt warning Vortigern of your coming.” Mab laughed softly. “A little late, but very noble none the less.”
Uther cried out in rage as he piloted Excalibur to pull back and punch Mab’s Avamech hard in the face where the pilot seat rested behind the windows. To his annoyance, he felt his own hand sting and his bones vibrate with the impact. It would be hand-to-hand combat on a mecha-scale.
“He betrayed me!” The rage fueled Uther even as the Avamech’s fuel began to drain in the ensuing fight.
Mab danced back out of the way of the palace and far from the city walls. She protected the city and her master at risk to her own life.
“I will finish this quickly,” Uther said through gnashed teeth. “I have other work to do.”
He fired one small rocket at Mab, which she barely dodged. She crouched down and then sprang at Excalibur, her foot out to kick as soon as it got near enough. Excalibur spun out of the way and came back around with an elbow into Mab’s back. She lurched and stumbled, causing stone from the nearby mountains to slide and clatter to the base.
“You hardly know the power of what you wield,” she said to him. “Give it back to Avalon and stay here on your own planet and fight with your own means.”
“I’ll learn soon enough what this Avamech can do,” he replied. “Already I feel a power in it that I cannot reach.”
Mab’s stance relaxed a little. “The Mist. That is what it’s called. Only a D.R.U.I.D can use it properly. It may kill you.”
“Why are you smiling, Mab?” Uther said casually. “You knew me. My father too. What made you run after Vortigern? You’ve become a traitor. You could have taught me, helped me.”
He kicked at her, but she caught his foot and pushed him away. “You keep saying that, I hear. Traitor to whom? Camelot has no king and never should. That is not what your father wanted.”
“How do you know what he wanted?”
Mab struck a defensive pose. “Perhaps I didn’t. Perhaps I just wanted to follow a real man. Not a simpering, whining, weak, captain’s son whose only thoughts are that of revenge and planet control!”
In a spree of charges and punches, the Avamechs were engaged again, rattling the stones and toppling trees as they summersaulted and leapt through the ones that were unlucky enough to be close by.
“I have plans for Camelot,” Uther panted as he stood up from Mab’s barrage of seemingly endless attacks. “It greatly involves you D.R.U.I.Ds.”
“I knew it, Uther. Slavery!” she cried.
Lunging into a dramatic punch that came up too short to hit Excalibur, Mab launched a form of light energy that blasted from her Avamech’s hand in a vibrant beam. Too entranced to move, Excalibur took the energy beam straight to the chest. Uther gasped and clutched his physical diaphragm where the beam had struck.
Coughing, he laughed. “Is that all? And if it is Avalonian DNA that it takes to find that power in this mecha, well,” he smirked, “I may be able to accommodate you there.”
“What?”
He heard the fear in Mab’s voice as he stood up. Clearly, she had not expected him to survive the Mist blast.
With a war cry like none other, Uther charged at Mab and with quick and graceful movements, kicked her down and pinned her to the shaking earth in just a few strokes. He drove Excalibur’s knee into her stomach and pinned her arms down. With his own strength, he butted his head into hers and fractured the pilot window. They were so close now that he could see her inside, panting and holding onto the controls for life. Her purple hair turned to a medusa-like mess and her eyes were streaming tears. He didn’t know if she winced in pain or cried from weakness.
“Well-played, D.R.U.I.D,” he laughed. “But you and your king lose this round.”
Grasping her forearm in Excalibur’s long metal fingers, Uther flexed and pulled, relishing in her scream as the mecha’s arms sparked and exploded at the joint he had just torn it from.
“Weak, am I?” he cackled as he tossed it aside into a group of now-smoldering trees. If he didn’t engage carefully, he’d burn down the whole forest as well as Vortigern’s city. “Uther Pendragon is no weak human to be beaten by D.R.U.I.Ds!”
“Uther, stop!” Merlin’s voice pled over the com-unit. “You came for Vortigern. Not his D.R.U.I.Ds nor his city. Your army has sacked the city. Too many have died already.”
Uther had to breathe a moment before he saw the sense in what Merlin said. Grudgingly, he pushed off of Mab’s broken Avamech and stood up, surveying the damage before him. His trooops had done their job well. Every turret had been leveled and the walls were nearly gone. Half the city now turned to ruble on the ground beneath the army of mecha feet.
“Do not oppose me, Vortigern!” Uther cried from Excalibur’s cockpit. “Where is he, Mab? Doesn’t he have an Avamech to pilot?”
“No,” she
