Kovol roared. Then Tubs threw the rock at him, which bounced off his chest like a rubber ball. Kovol widened his hands for some magic.
"No!" Elliot leapt from his hiding place and dove for Tubs to knock him out of the way. However, just as before when they had played Capture the Flag, Tubs wasn't going anywhere. He was a lot thicker than Elliot, so Elliot only crashed into the side of Tubs's body and landed on the ground.
Tubs grabbed Elliot's arm and yanked him to his feet, then said, "If I don't get to bully this dork, then nobody does!" Tubs's idea of friendship, Elliot figured.
"Everyone start throwing things," Elliot yelled. "Whatever you can find!"
From their hiding places, Elliot's family and Cami threw rocks, sticks, and whatever else they had. Wendy threw a tube of her favorite lipstick. Reed threw packages of pickle relish. Cami threw some coins from her pocket. At first Elliot wasn't sure what the twins were throwing, but then he recognized them as the burned chicken nuggets from Wendy's dinner last night. He didn't blame them. If his pants pockets weren't full of holes, he'd have hidden his dinner there too. He wondered whether Wendy would be happy or angry to learn that her dinner had just been turned into a weapon. Probably a little of both.
None of the items hurt Kovol, but they distracted him. He couldn't defend against everything, so he tried just zapping the items as they got close to him.
The distraction gave Elliot a chance to run behind Kovol. He might not have any magic yet for a fight, but when he did have magic earlier he had prepared something special for a moment just like this.
Once Elliot had gotten a good head start, he yelled at Kovol, "Tubs was right. You're nothing but a bully. I'm not afraid of you, and you'll never catch me."
Then he ran. If Elliot had learned anything from his days of being bullied, it was how to run away.
Still, Kovol was catching up to him fast, and the place Elliot wanted to get to was farther away than he remembered. But every plan has a point where there's no turning back. Elliot was way, way past that point.
Kovol started sending shots of magic forward, almost like lasers. They hit the trees beside Elliot, punching huge holes through their trunks. Elliot began running in a zigzag pattern so that Kovol wouldn't know where his target would be next.
The zigzag slowed Elliot down, and Kovol was still getting closer. If he hadn't been so interested in hitting Elliot with magic, he might have figured out that he could probably grab Elliot if he reached out far enough.
Just ahead was a patch of ground with a brown haze over it. Elliot headed directly for it. He recognized the carefully laid-out leaves where he had magically marked the place where he should jump. When he reached it, he leapt forward as far as he could.
Kovol clearly didn't know the leaves were a signal to jump. He continued running forward...straight into the gripping mud...again.
"There's no gripping mud on the surface world," Kovol said, thrashing at the mud.
Elliot stopped and turned back to him. "There is now." He raised his hand to see if he had any magic to use on Kovol, but still there was nothing. He didn't think Kovol had gotten all of his magic, but he'd taken a lot of it, and he needed time to build it up again. Time was the one thing Elliot didn't have. (Well, that, and a solid gold time machine, but he wasn't thinking about that just then.)
"I can still fight you from here," Kovol growled.
"Not if you can't see me," Elliot said, already running away. "Until then, you're stuck."
Elliot left the mud pit and ran toward his brothers and sister, who were on their way to find him. Wendy grabbed him first and closed him into a hug almost as tightly as the way Kovol had squished him before.
"Okay, okay." Elliot pushed away until he could breathe. "I'm fine."
"Hey, Elliot," Kyle said. "Me and Cole were thinking that if you're the king of these cookies--"
"Brownies."
"Yeah, Brownies. If you're the king, then what can we be?"
Cole punched a fist into the air. "We want to be your royal knights of the round table."
"I don't have a round table," Elliot said. "And I don't have any knights."
"Still, this is pretty big news," Reed said. "I thought it was exciting when I got that promotion last month at the Quack Shack, but that wasn't nearly as cool as this."
"I'm sorry I didn't tell any of you," Elliot said. "I couldn't, or else the Brownies would have gone away forever. And they needed my help."
"That's forgiven," Wendy said. "But now that we know, we want to help you. Cami said you have magic."
Elliot shrugged. "Kovol pulled most of the magic out of me. The Brownies say that when they use their magic too much, they have to wait a while until it works again, sort of like recharging a battery. All I can hope is that I have enough magic left to charge up."
"Where's Kovol now?" Cami asked.