Malacoda walked behind a line of yzorak-al’ghul. He took long, deliberate strides in his tall Dahjaat form. Each ghoul wore shimmering patterned-steel armor. Each had a golden ankh emblazoned across the breastplate. Each ghoul’s eyes bulged from the sockets. Each ghoul’s muscles bulged from their sinewy joints. They looked like creatures made solely from bone, tendon, and muscle. Even their skin hung taught and thin over their frame. Very little pigment remained in the emaciated skin. It hung on like cellophane. Each lifted his arms in unison with the others. Each fired his weapon on Malacoda’s command.

Across the field, another line of ghouls faced off against Malacoda’s line. One short, stocky ghoul who moved with a spastic furor barked orders to his comrades. The orders were no more than loud tonal grunts, but the ghouls understood the meaning. They too, lifted their arms in unison. From beneath their reflective vambraces, three ductile metal braided tubes extended like snakes. The tubes ended in short beveled barrels mounted on a wristguard. The barrels did not look intimidating, but they unleashed devastating particle beams.

A small pool of mercury plasma sat in a small disk buried in the vambrace of each ghoul. A advanced device sucked atoms out of the pool and ionized them in the process. At will, the user could open a spigot that released the charged particles through the vacuum-filled barrels. The result was a supercharged pulse that could approach the speed of light. At the tip of the barrel, atomically thin sheets of powerful magnets would capture the pulse and slow it down to a manageable speed. When the ion beam affected by the magnet hit the air, it would travel at a speed that the user could adjust. When the beam contacted a solid object, the particles would decay rapidly into violent particulate jets. As the energy dissipated, the beam would effectively evaporate its target. It was a clean, efficient, and deadly weapon. A small dial on the vambrace allowed the user to adjust the power levels. Today, the levels were set to the lowest setting. Rather than evaporating the target, the beams would only cause an unpleasant shock.

“On my mark.” Malacoda said loudly.

Both lines of psychically programmed warriors prepared for the exercise.

“Begin.” Malacoda said.

At his word, both lines lifted their weapons and fired. Half of each side went to the ground. After the first round of shots, they regrouped and scrambled into place. One row of ghouls would duck and let the row behind fire. Then the back row would duck and the front row would fire. Other ghouls split off of the main group and feinted to the left or to the right in order to distract the opposing line. Occasionally, a feinting group would go down under heavy fire and attention would be turned back to the main line. A single warrior in the feinting troop would have gone down without being hit. He would play dead for a minute, then pop up and start shooting. If the ploy worked, he would take down large numbers of ghouls on the other side before they could stop him. The ghouls got increasingly ingenious in their stratagems as the weeks had worn on. Malacoda knew that they could teach themselves to fight. He acted only as their coach. Soon, they would exhaust the level of training that they could perform in open fields and would need more varied terrain. Malacoda mused over whether he should take the training to the jungle or whether he should attempt to build an arena full of obstacles and buildings right there on the fields. Toward the end of the exercise, Malacoda became distracted by a faint tremor.

“Did I really feel that?” He asked himself under his breath.

Malacoda thought he had felt the earth shake ever so slightly beneath his feet. The tremor could mean that Ghaelvord had declopsed, but why would he? He would be in his study working diligently on their conquest plan. In less than two weeks, their army would be ready for its first task. With the large ship that they had hidden in the abandoned Minguri port, they could choose their first target from anywhere along the African, European, or Asian coast. Ghaelvord had many decisions to make and much research to perform. He should be stuck in the study, buried in his preparations all afternoon, and yet…

Malacoda hated to take a break from his training exercises. The beginning of their campaign would be the most crucial point in the whole scheme. He had a long way to go before he felt fully comfortable with his troop’s competency. Still, he decided to fly a few perambulatory circles around the compound just to make sure things were copacetic. His bat wings sprung wide open and flapped. He rose high into the air. He decided to check the road first. As he flew southeast, he saw a flash as the sky opened up. Somehow, the man from the labyrinth had found them.

“Rack.” He uttered a four-letter expletive in his native tongue.

Instinctively, he stopped and turned in a long, wide swoop. He pumped his wings hard to pick up speed. He swooped low as he turned. He thought he heard a faint rustling sound from underneath the tree cover. He shirked the sound aside and pumped his wings harder as he sped towards the scene of the battle. As he flew over the main hall, a stroke of uncharacteristic insight hit him. He knew that the wizard was crafty and had outfoxed him many times. He knew that if he rushed into the battle that a trap await await him. He thought about how he could do the unexpected. He realized that the rustling sound should have gone unheeded. No one would expect him to check it out in the middle of the battle. Rather than rush in like a fool, maybe he should do the non-obvious thing and check out the sound. He turned around a second time and backtracked for the jungle.

Tiyana, meanwhile, had also seen the flash in the sky. Up until the flash, she had been listening to Virgil and Hunter on her earpiece. After the flash, the communication faded. She checked her satellite phone and saw only one meager half bar. She gripped the steering wheel of the Khan till her knuckles turned pure white. Every fiber in her body told her to take action, but she fought it. She tried to remain seated so that she could hit the gas when the time came. She could not take it. The suspense overwhelmed her. She threw the door open and ran around a circle with her phone held high in the air, desperately trying to catch a signal. It was at that very moment that Malacoda had heard the rustling in the jungle. The rustling had come from the frantic movement of Tiyana Price.