Abou pawed the ground and prepared for one final charge; the charge that would end this fight. William knew that if he failed to evade this attack it would be the end. Without warning his hindquarters collapsed beneath him and black spots started to appear across his vision, even as the rhino hurtled with lethal intent towards him.
No! Don’t give in!
Just as the huge beast was almost upon him, he roared and burst liquid electricity through his muscles, launching himself into a vertical jump in an attempt to vault clear over the charging rhino.
And he would have made it … had Aboubakar not reared up onto his hind legs and flicked his head, his horns catching William’s airborne body with an uppercut. William careened wildly, smashing into the ground and rolling like a crashing motorcyclist, ragdolling and tumbling until he came to rest against the concrete barrier at the edge of the roof.
In a daze of fading consciousness, from a bright, dreamy fog billowing around the edges of his vision, her voice called out to him – she who had been ripped so cruelly from his grasp all those years ago. In the blink of an eye she was standing before him, aglow with a dazzling ethereal aura, a beguiling smile radiating from the lips and eyes that had been the alpha and omega of every one of William’s hopes, dreams and desires. There she stood, as real and tangible as the rhinoceros that was now turning around to make his final, killing charge.
I’ve failed, my love. I’ve reached the end of the line, and I’ve failed. But it’s okay, because now we’ll be together again, together for all eternity, just like I promised you.
‘We will be together again,’ she said, her voice crisp inside his head. ‘But not yet. Use the power, William, use it!’
As she vanished from William’s vision, his almost glazed-over eyes lit up with one last burst of iridescent fire, and with a growl he staggered to his feet. In a split-second he tapped into the deepest core of his being, and his mind began to warp the unbendable cage bars of time-space. As milliseconds rushed past in the bullet-train present, minutes trickled languidly by in the realm to which his consciousness was travelling.
There he was, abruptly, in the mountain monastery, back in a time and a place that had both vanished long years ago. A storm was raging across the craggy peaks and dragon-tooth spires, and blinding bolts of lightning and earth-rending claps of thunder were shaking the walls and the very foundations of this ancient and holy place. However, as William sat in the lotus position, perfectly still in a state of deep meditation, the cataclysmic booms and searing strobe-flashes of purplish light went by almost unnoticed.
‘Catch the lightning, Tiger!’ whispered that familiar voice, that gentle yet immensely powerful voice, hoarse and gravelly yet regal and majestic, saturated with all the wisdom of many lifetimes of study and meditation. ‘Catch the lightning … catch it, bend it to your will, meld it with your spirit, let it course through your veins and fire up every single atom of your being, and then focus it into a singularity and redirect it.’
The words passed through the conduit of his ear canal and then rippled into a fading and disparate echo inside his mind, morphing into little bursts of electricity that divided themselves up with the frenetic chaos of primordial amoeba. These particles of energy began spreading like a glorious virus through William’s entire body, binding themselves to blood, bone, muscle and sinew. Through the cannon-roaring thunder and lightning of the tempest, a power started to crackle and hum deep within his core, like the coughing to life and first testy rotations of some incomprehensibly vast engine. As the power spread its heat through every cubic inch of his being, William levitated, floating above the wooden floor of the monastery cell. A streak of lightning blasted through one of the windows, shattering the ornate wooden shutters into a million blackened splinters, and the beam of hyperfocused heat and unbridled strength rocketed into William, forking into twin beams just before it struck him. One hit his heart and the other struck the invisible third eye between his eyebrows. As the titanic fusion of heat, light and power smashed into this fragile entity of meat and bone and blood, the lightning met a force that it had not expected to: a great wall, as vast as the Himalayas yet as smooth and round and unending in its sphericity as a precision-machined titanium orb.
In a sliver of a millisecond every particle of magma-heated electricity dissipated and spread throughout his body, travelling along the millions of pathways that spread outward from his core to each of his extremities. There all the electrons reconvened, focusing their strength into a singular, viciously crackling ball of blinding blue energy, tethered by the most tenuous of bonds to the fingertips of William’s right hand.
He opened his eyes, and with a deafening roar howling in his ears and a hypersonic boost of acceleration yanking his body like the snapping shut of an impossibly-stretched elastic band, he was hurled back into the present, into his battered tiger body, with the hurtling rhinoceros about to deliver the coup de grâce.
Now, however, the power was there, crackling its world-splitting intensity at the end of William’s right paw. With a roar he lunged forward, swiping at the rhino with his power-charged paw, and with an earth-rending boom the balled-up lightning was released. Aboubakar took the brunt of the explosion, and it punted his body backwards and up, and not only did it completely shatter the momentum of his furious charge, it also threw his massive bulk forty feet back. The shock wave of the gargantuan electrical explosion flung the flimsy human bodies of the Huntsmen troops with violent force against the walls, plunging half of them into unconsciousness with its
