Autobiography of a Legend

The Actual Final Battle

Given that I had just taken the ground to the face four times in a row, blasted by pure darkness and broken my leg, we waited until morning before we began discussing how to proceed. I was in and out of painful sleep the entire time. The ninja wanted to find a way off the island, as the Bounty being crashed meant we had no way to get home. Given that Garmadon had stripped his camp clean of spare parts, we didn't have the chance to repair it. At the time I physically couldn't do much other than hobble. We scavenged what we could from the Bounty which was when I started passing out. When I awoke for the fifth or sixth time, it was already morning. Dr. Julien had just finished wrapping up my leg, and informed me my leg was going to take weeks to heal. I tried to protest that would be too long, but I knew he was right.

So much changed in just a few hours. When that day began, I thought I'd be standing over my father. Now, I was laying on a beach barely able to get up without making my leg feel like my whole body did when the Overlord blasted me. The others had tried all night to fix the Bounty, but whatever the Garmatron fired meant just getting close to the main deck was, as Jay put it, "like walking into a sick ward." I wanted to help, but I was either passed out, waking up from being passed out, mumbling in pain, or passing out again. I spent a lot of time passed out that night and morning.

While we were waiting, we watched Ninjago go dark. It was strange to watch, but slowly, we saw it get shrouded in a massive dark cloud. Ninjago relies upon a hard balance of light and dark, and by attacking the light it was like taking weight off one side of a scale. It didn't take long for almost all of Ninjago to get swallowed up in the darkness. I'd say that it made me feel sick inside, but I was again hurting pretty bad on the inside. I event more ashamed of myself for letting this happen.

When the Overlord started attacking Ninjago, it made me think long and hard. The final battle, was never just about me and my dad. Like I said, it was always going to be me and the Overlord. The First Spinjitzu Master hadn't been able to finish the fight on his own, and I bet he even saw one day that just splitting the islands wasn't going to be enough. I hope that he didn't know it was going to be Garmadon that did it, since that would mean he maybe let the Devourer bite his son. But, he had to have known this would happen. He carved our battles into the Temple of Light, he built this place for us to find, he'd set up so many things just for us. He knew what would happen, and that meant he'd decided that we were going to finish the fight.

Maybe he did know that my dad was going to be involved. Maybe he didn't know. It didn't matter. He knew he couldn't win, but he somehow, someway, knew that I could. I wasn't dead, and that had to be for a reason. Maybe the Overlord was just cocky, maybe my dad was the reason, but I was still breathing. I could form a fist. I could fight him. In those early hours while I was in between pain induced blackouts, I was thinking about this. About my place in this world. This, wasn't just about me and my dad anymore.

Knowing that everything was bigger than me now... that's a feeling that's scary. I was going to have to fight someone like that. Even when he was still gathering power, he was beyond me. He was going to blast me away as I was now, if I didn't stop looking at this as just me, and my dad. I had to fight. I had to win. So, when the ninja started to lose faith on the beach, I felt angry. I felt angry, because I knew this was my fault. I'd hesitated. I'd tried to be someone I wasn't. I had to grow up, and be stronger for it.

All things considered, I think that was my first 'inspiring speech' I'd ever given. I wasn't even trying to. I was more or less just venting my angry thoughts to them to get them to realize what I was thinking. This fight was more than just saving Ninjago. We'd been chosen by him, the one that literally created the world. It didn't matter if we were ready for it, if we wanted it, we were now in his shoes. We all had to pull together our strength, and make it off this island. The ninja had pulled me away from evil and shown me how the world should work. Now, I had to have them support me again while we went to save our home we'd been spending this entire time defending.