The air in the Gutter Circuit warehouse was gumming to taste, a combustion of sweat, ozone and bare-knuckled ambition. The semi-finals. Kai had not believed that he would get this far. His last match had already been spent on his winner purse, a good meal and a new roll of duct tape, kings ransom in his midst. Now he was opposite the man who was all that the Circuit admired and whom it scorned: Mecha Lord Barrox.
So, the scrap pile has contrived to litter its way to the top, Barrox said booming a little because of his collar. Titan Gear Fortress was on the arena floor and this was an artifact of polished chrome and glowing blue hydraulics, and Rusty Rex was a fossil unsteadied at his feet. This is a tribute to the poor taste of this... establishment. But everything that is cluttered will be cleared off finally.
Kai said nothing. It was a mad beating of his heart against his ribs, but his head was unusually calm. He recalled what Mira had said: His Relic is modular. Powerful. But all these transformations and all transfers of forms must have the joint mechanisms accurately in line. It is an advantage, but mechanical weakness as well.
The buzzer blared.
"Fortress, Siege Mode!" Barrox ordered it, and made a dramatic gesture.
The Titan Gear Fortress reconfigured with a succession of pleasant clunks and hisses. Plates moved, its legs spread to a more stable base, a gigantic cannon-barrel arrangement sprang out of the back of it, the barrel vibrating with the power carried in. It was a ghastly show of force and construction.
"Barrage Fire!"
Then a salvo of concussive energy exploded out of the cannon. There was no dodging them all. Kai had to scream, "Rex, keep off! The toy plunged behind a metal box which had been discarded after a past match. The explosions beat upon it, tearing it into pieces, vomiting out bullets. Rex pushed back a new cut came on its chest plate.
A crowd, which was squarely with Barrox, cheered approval.
"You see?" Barrox laughed--without even sweating. "This is power! This is control! Thou art quail thy pathetic junk can break!
Kai ground his teeth remembering Rex. The toy was rattling and its new spring-arm vibrating. Think, don't just charge. It was not the Relic, but Barrox that he watched. He perceived the complacent expression, the acting up flowers. Barrox was not merely fighting to win, he was fighting to an occasion. He was putting on a show.
Not as tough, when you can't simply blow everything to pieces, are you? Kai taunted, the voice interrupted the noise. It was the danger, of prodding the ego of a giant.
Barrox's smirk tightened. "You dare? Very well. Let's make this more... hands-on. Assault Mode!"
The cannon retracted. The shape of the mech became smoother, the arms lengthening into evil curling energy blades. It leaped suddenly forward, much more quickly than Siege Mode. This was the snare--get him into close quarters.
"Run, Rex! Don't let it touch you!" Kai shouted.
It was a pathetic, degrading retreat. Rex scrampled and ran, the energy blades making gouges in the floor where it had just been. Barrox stopped, and told of himself.
"A graceful dodge! But ultimately futile! Blade Symphony!" The arms of the Titan turned into light whirlwind.
Rex got a glancing blow, and it tossed it in the air. It dropped and, to a disturbing degree, one of its legs was bent at an angle that was painful to the eye, and the duct tapes were straining. The people shouted, and cheered. This was the end.
But when Kai saw Rex crawling to his feet, his fighting-instinct at last snapped. He saw it--the pattern. Every change of form in Barrox was followed after a half-second pause. An instance in which the plates of the mech fell back into place. An instant of raw, naked, mechanical action. And everywhere upon the floor of the arena was the rubbish of the first discharges of Barrox himself, broken fragments of the container, scraped metal, and nuts and bolts that had been shaken off by the heavy blows.
Barrox towered above the prostrate Rex. "The performance is over. Final Lance!" Its arms, with their energy blades, shone even more, and met in a last blow.
"Now, Rex!" Neither screaming nor panicking, but with clear purpose, Kai screamed. "The debris! Its shoulder joint!"
It was not an order to attack the Titan. It was an order to strike its metamorphosis.
Rusty Rex made no attempt to avoid with a last, spasmodic leap of strength. It stranded on its side, not at the mech, but at the debris. The springarm of it, the springarm which was the product of an earlier desperate venture, caught hold upon a mass of shrapnel--thick and L-shaped. Rex drove the piece of metal right into the whirring mechanism of the shoulder-joint of the Titan, with all its force, directly and at the very moment the latter was about to strike its finishing stroke.
A sort of a gear-grinder screaming in agony.
The Titan Gear Fortress froze in the middle of the hit. It has one right arm which, though glowing, is stuck in position. There were warning lights flashing over its chassis. It attempted to move but the stuck joint brought about an irreconcilable loop of feedback in its systems. Its shoulder began to spurt and all the mech shuddered as it dropped down on one knee.
A stupefied silence overcame the warehouse.
His mouth open like Barrox stared. "Impossible! My Fortress! What did you do to my--?"
"Rex!" Yell, yell, yell, said Ki, and the triumph in his voice was naked. "Pile-driver!"
Rusty Rex, dragging a leg, scrambled up the frozen arm of the Titan, wrapped its spring-arm round it, and struck it a piston-like blow against the primaryoptic sensor of the mech. The light in the head of the Titan went out with a loud CRACK.
With a prolonged shocked pause the referee called it. "Winner... Kai."
The silence was broken by a stormy roar of disparagement, applause, and the angry intellectual raving of bet-slips being tore up.
Kai was left to pant and his body trembled with adrenaline. And he gazed at Barrox, who was kneeling over his sparking, paralyzed Relic, with an expression of irreconcilable devastation on his face. The great ones were not raised to a higher power, but to a fragment of their own rubbish.
Sulking, his arms folded, Juno Kaze, who had stood in the shadows near the entrance, had been watching all the match, and his lips were smiling slowly and deliberately. The mess was taking on a methodology. The disorder was exposing a trend.
this time he had really seen it. The Scrap Kid hadn't just won. He had rewritten the principles of the battle at midday. He did not overpower the Titan, but outmanoeuvred the pilot.
The disappointment Juno felt before had been condensed down to one thought. This was no longer an obsession. This was a challenge.
His eyes had fixed narrowly on Kai, who was picking his even more battered, yet conquered companion tenderly.
Well, then--well, then, Kaito Renshiro, thought Juno to himself, with his Spinblade Phantom quietly hissing in his hand. It appears our business so far is now all the more interested.