Excerpt Twenty-Three

“The Vahi,” Gali whispered. “Oh, Tahu, do you know what you are doing? You have doomed us all!”

“We have no choice,” Tahu replied. “I must use this power… master it… or all is lost.”

“And if you fail, more than Mata Nui will be lost… this entire reality may fall!”

“Then I will not fail,” Tahu answered, summoning every last erg of his might to bend the mask to his ends.

Slowly, the Vahi began to respond, sending out temporal waves toward the Bohrok-Kal. As the chrono-energy struck them, time began to slow… to crawl… virtually to stop around the elite squad of Bohrok. The icons were inches away from their slots, frozen in time and space.

“I cannot… maintain this… much longer…” Tahu breathed. “Go! Get your symbols back!”

“Wait! Look there!” Onua cried. “Their krana are… changing!”

Before the startled eyes of the Toa Nuva, the krana-kal turned to silver. An instant later, these silver creatures had combined their energies to form a powerful force field around the Bohrok-Kal.

“We should have expected this,” Kopaka Nuva said. “In the final moments before they accomplish their task, they are protected from all harm.”

“Then… we’ve lost,” Pohatu Nuva said. “Nothing will survive… our villages, our people…”

“Wait a moment,” Gali said. “Wait. Our people… Our people identified those symbols with us. Their belief invested out powers into them… so when they were stolen, out powers were stolen as well.”

“They are nothing but stone, metal, and ice…” Kopaka said.

“We don’t have time to argue,” Gali replied. “Our people believe in us… now we have to believe in them. We have to accept that they were right — that we are connected to those symbols — and we have to use that connection now!”

In the past, the Toa had shared their physical forms when they merged into kaita… shared countless dangers… and the glory of victory after victory. Now they faced their greatest challenge: pooling their willpower in a last, desperate effort to save their home.

As they focused on their symbols, and the power locked inside of them, the Toa Nuva began to glow like stars. As their concentrated will pierced the Bohrok-Kal’s force field, time began to flow normally once again. But it was already too late for the Kal.

The Toa Nuva symbols were glowing now too, and their sheer power feeding into the Bohrok-Kal. “Do you feel it, brothers?” Gahlok-Kal cried out. “The power! Cahdok and Gahdok do not need the swarms — we can do all they can, and more now!”

“Yes!” Nuhvok-Kal said. “We will return Mata Nui to the before-time! We will rule beside the Bahrag! We will… will…” Nuhvok-Kal staggered, reaching in vain to tear the symbol from himself. “No! We have been tricked! The power… too much power… can’t control…”

What happened next happened in seconds, but to the Toa Nuva, it seemed to take eternity. The power of the Bohrok-Kal, merged with that of the Toa Nuva, proved too great to master. It ran wild, with devastating effect:

Nuhvok-Kal, master of gravity, felt his own personal gravity increase beyond anything imaginable… until his armored form collapsed in on itself, forming a micro-black hole in space…

Gahlok-Kal, who so effortlessly controlled magnetism, now found every piece of metallic debris nearby — the Exo-Toa armor, rubble, even rocks in the walls with metallic ores in them — flying toward him at lightning speed. In an instant, he was buried beneath it all…

Kohrak-Kal’s sonics were beyond his control, but now turned inward, causing his form to crumble to dust. Only his silver krana-kal remained intact on the floor…

And so it went… Tahnok-Kal short-circuited by electricity run wild, Pahrak-Kal superheating and melting through the surface, and Lehvak-Kal’s vacuum power sending him crashing through the ceiling, up, up, and out over the sea…