Chapter Seven

“Get out of here, now!” Brutaka shouted to Matoro. “Get back to the other Toa — I’ll handle Makuta!”

“As you handled the Toa Nuva and the Toa Inika?” sneered Makuta. “Are you fool enough to think you can trust him, Matoro?”

Toa Matoro weighed his choice. Brutaka had once been a member of the Order of Mata Nui before he had turned bad, but Makuta? His spirit had been black from the day he had been created. There was no choice at all. He swam away as fast as he could, heading for a rendezvous with his teammates.

“You cost me the Nui Stone,” growled Makuta, hurling a burst of shadow energy at Brutaka. “You have become... an annoyance.”

But the shadow bolt never reached its target. Triggering the power of his Kanohi mask, Brutaka opened a dimensional portal and shunted the energy into the Zone of Darkness, where it could harm nothing.

“Then let’s see if I can move up to an irritation,” said Brutaka, firing his own blast of energy from his sword. The blast knocked Makuta’s weapon from his hand. “You know, Makuta, we could do this all day, but it won’t get you what you want.”

“And that is?” asked Makuta, even as he used his control over gravity to slam Brutaka into a nearby mountain.

“Ow!” said Brutaka. “Well, you don’t want the Mask of Life. If you did, you would never have hired those bumbling Piraka to get it for you. But you do want to be there when it’s found, pulling everyone’s strings. You want to decide who has it, how they use it, and when. Am I getting warm?”

“A little too warm for comfort,” answered Makuta, throwing a stasis field around Brutaka. But the former Order of Mata Nui member demolished the field with one swipe of his blade.

“Please,” said Brutaka, “I was getting out of stasis fields when you were still on Destral raising archives moles.”

“What is it you want, Brutaka?”

“Once I would have said I wanted the mask myself,” Brutaka replied. “Once I would have seen myself ruling a universe with it. Now I guess you could say my vision’s improved, and I just want to see you sweat.” Brutaka smiled. “Oh, and by the way, Nocturn had the mask last I saw, but Hydraxon was about to take it away from him. And who knows what that lunatic will do with it. So maybe you better go see.”

Makuta’s instinct was to continue the battle, but Brutaka was right — he couldn’t afford to lose control of events, not at this late stage. “This isn’t over,” warned the master of shadows.

Brutaka ran a finger along the razor-sharp edge of his sword. “Oh, Makuta, I’m counting on that!”