Deadly Wands by Brent Reilly

next fifty thousand arrived. And the next. Genghis had to leave
just to find replacements. By the time a large enough force
arrived, the Americans had sailed. With another half a million wand
sets and a quarter-million more coin sacks.
    When the ships returned to San Francisco,
American University carefully counted it. Entitled to half of the
spoils, William knew he couldn’t spend it in a thousand lifetimes,
so he started an organization to fund highways linking the largest
cities in the Americas. The first highway would pave over the old
dirt trail from San Francisco to Anchorage to speed up heavy
supplies.
    Losing that much wealth shook the Mongol
Empire to his core. And the Peking Stock Market fell into a
financial coma, losing 90% of its value as soon as investors
appreciated the magnitude of the disaster.
    Maybe he was delusional, but William could
hear his grandma laughing hysterically.
     

CHAPTER 11
     
    With the Mongol leadership racing north,
Billy was free to duel during and after the Olympics. But now he
fought two at a time, so opponents would still volunteer, and did
not limit himself to one hundred duels daily, injuries permitting.
Instead, he dueled literally from dawn to dusk, day after day, when
not competing in Olympic races.
    Athletes prepare for the games their entire
lives. They had teams to optimize their performance. Companies paid
enormous sums to sponsor likely winners. Only for the Boy Wonder to
make them look pathetic as Billy dominated every wand event the
Olympics offered.
    As expected, the assassination attempts began
as soon as the games ended and the tourists left. Elizabeth hired
the quads wise enough to not duel her son. She thought a few
hundred super-quads would deter attacks, but instead it only turned
them into battles.
    Betting huge on the implosion of publicly
traded companies paid unexpected dividends. When those
counter-parties could not pay in full, Elizabeth seized their
assets. She never before fully appreciated having a family full of
bankers. Virtually overnight, Global Bank became China’s largest
property owner. The month before, William had sent for several
thousand English employees to manage the transition. Some of them
sailed a ship full of Billy’s winnings to Lisbon to lend more to
France and Spain.
    Global Bank would sell the real estate,
eventually, but in the meantime Elizabeth used mansions built like
fortresses for protection.
    Whoever Genghis put in charge of killing the
Boy Wonder tried mercenaries first. Several hundred attacked the
estate and lost badly. They tried ambushing Billy on his way to and
from the arena. Because she paid so well, Elizabeth had no trouble
hiring a few thousand super-quads, while the best of her own
relatives acted as an inner guard since she couldn’t trust her
mercenaries. Billy loved it. War was even better than dueling. He
ate up his first taste of battle and hungered for more. His
obsession with dueling broadened into an obsession with war. He
read more books that year than in the rest of his life
combined.
    Then the Mongols started using regular
troops. They wore civilian uniforms, but even Liz noticed the
difference. Apparently the enemy was running out of mercenaries.
Her bank relatives were hiring in neighboring cities as fast as
they could, but Billy was still losing hundreds every week.
    “I think we should run,” Billy told her as
the attackers descended from the night sky.
    “There’s only a thousand of them.” It made
Liz feel weird to prefer fighting when Billy wanted to flee because
it was always the other way around.
    “But they’ve trained together to fly in
formation. Our mercs can’t beat them.” Billy paused deliciously.
“But they can die trying.”
    That was the beauty of hiring Mongols to
fight Mongols. Liz left with the English while Billy led his
bodyguards. After the initial clash, he kept rising higher to deal
with just several enemies at a time. His guards lasted until
midnight. Billy had to