Battle of the ULTRAs Read Free Page B

me. It made me close my eyes. Hold my breath.
    There was an explosion right beside Ember’s head. An explosion from the ULTRAbot’s gun.
    Ember’s head wasn’t there anymore.
    Neither was Ember.
    I’d managed to form a wormhole around him just in time.
    Now, Ember by my side, I fired ice at the ULTRAbots. I threw them aside using telekinesis. I re-routed their bullets through wormholes, threw them into one another, and I watched as Ember covered them in flames.
    Together, we stood at the side of the building. I put my hands on my knees. The pain in my side was still bad. I’d used my powers way too soon after healing. I’d have to heal myself properly when we’d won this place.
    “You okay?” I asked.
    Ember shook his head. We didn’t exactly get on like a house in… yeah, embers. Witty me. “No thanks to you.”
    “Hey. I just saved your ass.”
    “If you’d been here in the first place instead of chasing after shadows, you wouldn’t’ve had to save my ass!”
    I watched Ember walk to the side of the rooftop. Focused on healing myself. All around, up above, I saw the ULTRAbot numbers waning. The Resistance still stood strong. Manchester looked a little brighter all of a sudden.
    I put my hand on Ember’s back. “Looks like you did a good job.”
    When I heard the rumbling, humming sound behind me, I realized I might just’ve spoken too soon.
    I looked back. Saw exactly what I’d feared but exactly what I’d expected.
    More ULTRAbots. A thick wall of them, moving in a spherical mass. More than we’d fought here. More than we could deal with.
    The Resistance floated by my side.
    “What do we do?” Ember asked.
    I looked at Orion. Although I couldn’t see his eyes underneath his black mask, I knew he wasn’t happy. He had that demeanor he always had when he was pissed with me. “We do the only thing we can do,” he said. “We run.”
    I shook my head. Many of the others in the Resistance groaned and cursed. “We don’t have to give up,” I said.
    “Yes we do,” Orion said. “There’s more than we can handle. Way more than we can handle. Maybe if we’d dealt with the first wave in time, we could’ve prevented a second wave from following.”
    “You don’t know that.”
    “We had a chance, Kyle. We could’ve stopped this. We could’ve traced down their production facility. We could’ve prevented this, if we’d all been here to prevent it.”
    I heard the disappointment in Orion’s voice. I felt it, too. Felt it from all the ULTRAs around me. I knew what they were disappointed about. I knew what they were hinting at. This was my fault. I’d gone after Saint, so this was my fault.
    “So what about Manchester?” Roadrunner asked.
    Orion took a few seconds to answer as he stared at the oncoming mass of ULTRAbots.
    Then, he finally spoke the words that none of us wanted to hear.
    “Manchester is lost.”

5
    “ Y ou were irresponsible and you know you were irresponsible. At least be responsible enough to recognize and accept that much.”
    I listened to Orion’s voice droning on and I wanted to be anywhere but here right now.
    It was night. We were on an island in the middle of the Pacific. The island was so small that it was pretty much nameless, but the Resistance had taken to it since the rest of the world was pretty much a no-go zone. It was a good place to have. A safe place, which got absolutely boiling in the day. Even Vortex had managed to catch herself a bit of a tan.
    But when Saint was out there raining chaos on the world, I couldn’t help feeling I was wasting my time here.
    “I did what I had to do,” I said.
    “You could’ve got Vortex killed.”
    “But I didn’t.”
    “You could’ve got Ember—”
    “But I didn’t.”
    Orion sighed. He turned away and looked out to sea. As much as I got frustrated being stuck on this island, the sea calmed me. I saw the ripples in the water, the moon shimmering across its surface. All around, total silence. Peace. I wanted