The Guardians - The Collapsing of the Wall (Book 3)
Chapter 11: Pieces of time

Even if there are shouts around her, Tamara feels like the time has stopped. The view with the attackers is in slow motion, and she doesn’t hear anything in the end. She feels like she is going deaf but, all these considered, the silence seems to be howling inside her mind. She takes her attacking position, for she sees the others coming fast at them. A shot, which seems to come from close and behind her, makes her come back to reality. She turns around suddenly, and so do the other Guardians who are accompanying her, and they all see Gloria lying on the ground, shot in the head.

Addison shouts out of terror and anger when the Guardians are taken by surprise by another group of attackers, who had come out from behind some ruins. The plan was to wait for them there and to corner them after they had caught their attention. They had been fooled, and Tamara feels despair because she doesn’t know where to hit next. They lose too many Guardians at once, and they barely manage to regroup to stay alive.

Dean is there too, behind everyone, next to Leonor and Ray. He is standing surrounded by Guardians, with crossed hands, praying that Matt’s plan works and he deactivates the chips on time. But no one told him about the diabolic plan to take the others by surprise and he is agitated, looking at the beginning of the battle worried. He can’t move for now, and he needs to wait because what difference can do on his own? He wants to fight, and he feels so bad because he can’t, that he would stick his sword in Leonor, but he didn’t receive any weapons. He would choke her, but there are three Guardians between them.

He looks for Lily, but he can’t replace her in the angry crowd. He prays that she won’t be there, for he had saved her only to keep her alive. He would have wanted to see her again, in different circumstances, to tell her how sorry he was for everything, to tell her how he feels, for he had gathered too much inside him, as she had inside her as well.

“Faster, Brook!” shouts Lily putting on the costume.

Brook is controlling the car, which is going too fast already, jumping over the sand dunes, but Lily feels it is too slow. It’s like something is choking her, and it’s certainly not the suit.

“Can’t you see the speed we are heading there? We can’t go any faster!”

“Damn, something is not good!”

“What?”

“I can feel it burning!” she says touching the Dragon’s Sign.

“And what is it?”

“I think the prophecy is coming true! The Wall is going to collapse soon.”

“This can’t be happening…”

“I hope not too soon!” she shouts hanging tight not to fall from the car.

There’s the Wall in front of them, and Brook fixes its colors with her eyes. There’s mark, and she wants to kill him with any cost. She wants Leonor dead too, and she would kill her with her bare hands. She would kill every single one who brought them to this point, for she wants revenge more than freedom at those moments.

A strange sound makes them look at each other. The car makes an infernal noise, and a huge flame makes them jump on the sand from an instinct. In her jump, Lily pulls the backpack with her, and the next moment the car is on fire, and it explodes throwing sharp pieces at them.

“Damn it!” shouts Brook pulling out a piece from her leg.

Lily is staring at the sky and she’s feeling a huge pain in her chest. She slowly lifts up her neck, and when she looks down her body she sees a lot of small pieces stuck in her. From the chest to her knees, her body seems torn apart.

“Oh, God! The healer!” shouts Brook scattering through the backpack.

But it’s nowhere to be found, and Lily doesn’t feel any pain anymore.

“Damn! It was in the car!” shouts Brook running at it.

After a few minutes of searching among the hot irons, she finally replaces it. But the problem is that it is not working anymore. She throws it on the ground, swearing and pissed off, and she turns at Lily, who had remained in the same position.

“It will be fine, just stay still”, Brook tries to comfort her.

But Lily’s at peace, maybe too calm, and Brook seems the agitated one at those times.

“Maybe it’s the adrenaline, but nothing hurts me”, Lily says in the end and lifts up.

“Are you insane? How?”

Lily pulls out the piece from her chest, and a trace of yellow blood falls on her body, and then she pulls the others out, without any problem at all, under Brook’s shocked eyes. The wounds are still opened, but she can’t feel the pain. She gets up, grabs a bag from the backpack and starts eating.

“It looks like we’re walking from here.”

Brook follows her shocked, pulling the sword through the sand. She knows that Lily’s not lying because she can’t feel anything.

“If you weren’t my friend, I swear to God I would be terrified right now. How the hell can you say it doesn’t hurt you? What if it’s just the adrenaline?”

“I suppose we will replace out on our way. We don’t have that long, anyway. There’s the Wall.”

Brook is crossed by a shiver and she can’t even imagine losing the only person she could have called sister. They speed up, through the warm sand, while the sunset lights their bodies.

Isaac and Addison keep their words and they’re forming a team, standing back to back and protecting each other from their attackers. They don’t want to kill them because they know they are controlled by the chips, so they try to put them down with hits that aren’t lethal, but that’s a little difficult when their lives are in danger.

Mark slowly walks between the Guardians, and Tamara notices how neither of them, one group or another, attacks him. Then she takes a quick look around and she realizes that if Brook and Leo would have been there they would have come out by now. She remembers how he had gone out the last from her office, how he gave her a fake information that someone was looking for her, how she walked around like a fool asking the Guardians stupid things.

“Shit”, she says and runs to him.

But she is stooped by the others, and Mark manages to arrive on the other side. The moment when Dean notices him among them is the moment when he feels like he is about to vomit. Some connections take place inside his head, and he realizes that he had been the inside man all the time. He doesn’t have the time to play the broken-hearted friend, for his eyes fly around him, looking for a familiar face. He can’t keep staying there, while his people are slaughtered under his watch.

Mark rushes to approach Leonor and Ray, ready to tell them the news, with his eyes glowing of impatience. But he is pushed by a Guardian, and the battle covers their area now, forcing Leonor and Ray to take part in it.

Dean grabs a sword from one of the fallen Guardians, looks for Leonor, but when he realizes that she was hiding between the Guardians, he gets lost in the crowd to replace someone known. He looks for Mark, but he was gone too. He is fighting for Lily’s side now, trying not to kill the soldiers he had brought on the battlefield, for he was waiting for Matt to end his plan.

Lily and Brook step on the sand fast, for since they had seen the battle they had been running without stopping. They were now heading to their camp, to give them their help. But Brook pulls her behind some ruins when she sees Gloria’s body lying on the ground.

“It’s bad”, she says covering her mouth.

Lily looks in the same direction and shouts when she sees her dead friend. That sound is covered by the hitting swords and the screams from the heart of the battle.

“We have to stop them!” says Lily and heads to the battlefield with her sword out.

Brook follows her, searching for Mark with her desperate revenge in her eyes. Lily feels the energy flowing through her veins, and she runs ahead with a jump, hitting two Guardians when she notices Dean on the battlefield. He kills a Guardian, saving Tamara, who needs some moments to come along.

The second when Dean sees Lily seems taken from imagination, for their eyes meet, passing through everyone who is there, defying the danger and death, without looking in other places. That’s the moment when Lily knows that he is on their side, that he had always been there, that she needed just to look a little deeper and believe in him.

The fight wakes her up and she is forced to defend herself, but Dean takes a step at her, and then another one, and he replaces himself running without control at Lily. The moment is not a good one for him, because Isaac notices him and, losing his focus on the fight he has teaming with Addison, all he can see is Dean running at his sister.

“No!” he says and splits from Addison.

She moves after him, pulling his sleeve.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“It’s Dean! He is running at Lily!”

She looks at him for a second and then she is forced to come back to battle.

“Isaac, don’t go there! I assure you that Dean is not running at her to hurt her!”

“I can’t be sure!”

“What are you going to do? Trust me! I am a woman, I know what I’m seeing! And what I see now is a man fighting to get near the woman he loves!”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t take that risk!”

Isaac leaves Addison to cover his back, and he rushes at Dean with his sword pulled out, taking him by surprise while he is occupied fighting. He is ready to attack him, to hit him, even if he knows that Lily will never forgive him for it. But she turns around and sees her brother’s mad look, who is ready to throw over Dean, and she shouts out of anger, jumping in front of Isaac. She puts him down, stopping him from what he was going to do, and turning Dean’s attention to them.

“I asked you not to do this! Why would you do that?” asks Lily with her hands on Isaac’s chest.

“I can’t be sure!”

“But I am!”

During their contradiction, Dean notices two attackers approaching them, so he decides to make a quick jump to them and save their lives. His gesture leaves Isaac speechless, and he falls out from the tension which had taken control over him.

“Now what do you believe?” asks Lily more in a shout.

“It’s fine. Get off me. I needed to be sure that he won’t kill you…”

She throws him an angry look and steps aside. Addison appears soon in their area, and she joins Isaac, who takes a few steps away from Lily and her mad look. She’s looking for Dean and, from an instinct, they end up back to back, protecting themselves just the way Isaac and Addison are doing and fighting together.

“I’d rather be face to face with you right now”, says Dean while they were walking around.

“And what stops you?”

“Well… the situation doesn’t exactly suit us. But what are you doing here? Didn’t you get my message?”

“Yes, I did, but I couldn’t stay there…”

“I was sure that I will see you around…”

“What was your plan? Did I ruin it?”

“The truth is that…”

“You didn’t have a plan, did you?”

“I didn’t. All I wanted was to save you. But I have one now, and you’re not ruining it.”

“That’s good”, says Lily crossing her fingers between his, in one of their moments of a break from the fight.

Addison looks at Isaac with a facial expression that says: I told you so! , but he knows too well how wrong he had been in his choices. Anyway, if he could turn back the clock, he wouldn’t have done anything differently, for he didn’t want to see Lily dying under his eyes ever again. He would have preferred a life with her by his side, one where she would have hated him, but she would be there, alive.

“What the hell is this? A bad joke?” Leonor shouts at Mark, who was protecting her by fighting for her.

“No! This is why I called you! But something came up! I wanted to tell you, but I needed to say the important things first!”

“Oh, and the fact that Dean has managed to keep Lily alive somehow doesn’t seem so important to you?! Bastards! I will kill them!”

“You will! You stalled too much already!” Ray shouts at her.

Mark is thrown aside, pushed, hit, and Ray with Leonor are forced again to fight on their owns. He gets up and walks away from the two of them, because he thinks he is not safe anymore around them, as long as he had attacked the ones from his team to protect her.

But he sees Brook in his runaway, and he mumbles a swearing, trying to disappear into the crowd. But she sees him and aims with her gun, without hitting the target though. She shots again, still without aim, and when he turns at her to shot she hits him, shooting him in the arm. She runs at him, thinking of what she can do to torture him more, and she ends up throwing over him and hitting him with her fists in the face. The blood is flowing, her fingers get bloody, and she can’t stop anymore, for she’s seeing only hatred in front of her teary eyes.

When Lily and Dean manage to put down some other Guardians, a strong sound hears among them, drawing all their attention. It’s like the sky is falling, the ground shaking, and what they had heard when the dragons had visited them the last time can’t compare with what they are hearing now. It’s a deep sound like something was exploding under them, and the Wall’s Portal becomes blue, throws burning lights at the Guardians, hurting them, and a crack appears right in the middle of the Portal.

Lily feels her body burning, and she grabs Dean’s arm, squeezing it, for the Dragon’s Sign hurts and burns her, and it lets her know that the Wall is collapsing. She makes a sound of pain when the Wall’s Portal creaks under everyone’s eyes, with a sharp and loud sound, breaking into a million of shining pieces.

Through the darkness left behind the blue from the Portal, they can see now thousands of shining eyes, and the dragons with the shadow-demons start coming out quickly, attacking them all and flying all around. The disaster had already begun, for the numbers of the Guardians is too small to stop the monsters which are about to destroy their world, and then the other worlds, one by one.