Chapter 29 – The Climb
It had only been a few days since the Regional invitations arrived, but the rooftop had already changed.
Training used to feel loose up here. People launched when they felt like it, argued about angles, laughed when someone's Bey bounced the wrong way. There had been a kind of comfortable chaos to it the kind that comes when nobody's really scared yet. Now the launches came faster. The corrections came sooner. And the laughter, when it came at all, had a sharper edge to it.
Valt reset his stance for what had to be the eighth time.
He adjusted his grip. Shifted his weight forward. Rolled his shoulder back the way Shu had shown him twice already this afternoon.
"Okay," he said, more to himself than anyone else. "This time I got it."
Shu folded his arms. "You said that five launches ago."
"This time I mean it."
"You said that too."
Valt ignored him and pulled the ripcord.
"Go, Valkyrie!"
Valkyrie struck the concrete and surged forward, the spin clean and powerful but then the entry angle dipped, that same slight drop, before the Bey caught itself and stabilized in the outer ring of the makeshift stadium they'd chalked onto the rooftop.
Shu shook his head.
"Too sharp again."
Valt let out a groan that echoed off every surrounding rooftop in a three-block radius. "How?! How is it still too sharp?! I changed the angle!"
"You changed the wrong part of the angle," Shu said.
"That sentence doesn't even make sense!"
Rantaro was leaning against the fence with his arms crossed, watching the whole thing with the look of someone who had long since accepted that this was just his life now. "You keep launching like you're trying to punch the stadium," he offered. "It's in the wrist. You're snapping too hard at the end."
"I am not punching the stadium!"
Ken held up Keru, his smaller puppet, with quiet ceremony.
"The stadium," Keru announced in a thin, dignified voice, "would like to respectfully disagree."
Valt spun around. "Whose side are you on?!"
Ken raised Beus now, his larger puppet, who folded his cloth arms with great solemnity.
"We are on the side of objective observation," Beus said. "And objectively, that launch looked like an act of aggression."
"It was not an act of aggression"
"Valkyrie clearly had opinions," Keru added helpfully.
I'd launched Drago while they were arguing.
No announcement, no build-up. I just stepped to the edge of the chalk circle, set my stance, and pulled the cord in one smooth motion. Drago hit the concrete at a low, controlled angle and swept wide along the outer rim before settling into a steady orbit near the center.
Clean entry. Stable spin. Nothing flashy.
Shu had been watching from the corner of his eye. He turned now.
"You're consistent," he said.
"That's what I'm going for," I said, retrieving Drago as the spin slowed.
Valt looked between us with the expression of someone who couldn't decide if he was annoyed at Shu for pointing it out or at me for being the example. He settled on annoyed at both of us simultaneously, which honestly seemed fair.
"Must be nice," he muttered.
"You'll get there," I said.
He glanced at me, surprised, like he hadn't expected that. Then he looked away and picked up Valkyrie again.
"Not fast enough," Shu said quietly.
Valt looked up. "What?"
Shu stepped forward, studying the angle marks we'd chalked on the concrete.
"At this rate, you will improve," he said. "I'm not saying you won't. But the pace you're improving at right now it won't be enough for what's coming at Regionals."
The rooftop went a little quieter.
Rantaro pushed off the fence. Ken lowered his puppets slightly. Even the wind seemed to slow down, the way it sometimes does when something true gets said out loud.
Valt stood very still.
"So what do we do?" he asked.
Shu looked around the rooftop the chalked circles, the worn patches of concrete, the makeshift setup we'd been using for weeks now.
"This place has been good," he said. "But it's not enough for what's coming."
"So what, we need a bigger roof?" Rantaro said.
Keru raised a small hand. "Preferably one with fewer gravity hazards near the edges."
Beus nodded solemnly. "This roof has always felt judgmental."
I looked out over the city from the fence line. Rooftops and streets and the distant haze of buildings spreading out in every direction. Everything flat. Everything familiar.
"We need proper stadiums," I said. "Real ones. And ground we can actually use for endurance work. Up here we're limited by the space."
Shu glanced at me and gave a small nod.
Valt had gone quiet in that particular way he sometimes did not the distracted quiet, but the thinking quiet, where something was working its way to the surface.
Then he straightened up all at once.
"Wait."
Everyone looked at him.
"Wait. Wait, wait, wait"
"Please stop saying wait," Rantaro said.
"Xander," Valt said.
Shu blinked. Just barely, but I caught it.
"His place," Valt continued, already starting to pace. "Up on the mountain. He's got a full training ground up there real stadiums, open space, the whole thing. He trains there all year. It'd be way harder than this, way better than this"
"A mountain dojo," Keru said slowly.
"Yes!"
Beus tilted his head. "Mountain dojos are, statistically speaking, designed to make people suffer."
Valt pointed at the puppet. "Exactly!"
"That was not encouragement," Beus replied.
"It was to me!"
Rantaro rubbed the back of his neck, staring at the sky like he was asking it for patience. "Do you actually think Xander would let us come train there? Just like that?"
"He's Xander," Valt said, already pulling out his phone. "There's only one way to find out."
He dialed. We watched him.
The phone rang twice.
Then the line connected, and even through the small speaker, the voice on the other end landed like a physical presence big and immediate and completely filling the space.
"Valt! Haven't heard from you in a while!"
Valt grinned so hard he almost dropped the phone. "Hey! Yeah, sorry, things have been really busy"
"Busy beating people, from what I've heard."
Valt scratched the back of his head. "...Something like that."
Shu closed his eyes briefly.
I kept my expression neutral, though I'd heard about the matches in question. Valt had won them, yes. He'd also nearly lost two of them in ways that would have been very easy to learn from, and I wasn't sure he had yet.
"Hey, listen," Valt said, pulling himself together. "Regionals are coming up. We've been training hard but we need something more serious, you know? I was wondering — is there any chance the BeyClub could come train at your dojo for a few days?"
A pause.
Then a laugh, full and immediate, like the question was the best thing Xander had heard all week.
"Of course!"
Valt's eyes went wide. "Wait seriously?"
"On one condition."
"Name it."
"You'd better be ready to suffer."
The grin that broke across Valt's face could have lit up the whole rooftop.
"We'll be there!"
He ended the call and turned to face us with an energy that suggested he'd completely forgotten about his launch problems.
"Pack your stuff. We're going."
Rantaro stared at him. "You didn't even ask when."
"Tomorrow morning." He was already heading for the stairwell door. "Actually today. Let's go today, we can make it by afternoon"
"Valt."
"Fine, tomorrow morning."
Rantaro looked at me. "Why do I feel like I just agreed to something terrible?"
"Because you did," I said. "But it's the right kind of terrible."
He considered that for a moment. "I hate that that makes sense."
Keru and Beus were already being tucked carefully into Ken's bag. Ken patted the outside of the bag twice, the way he always did, like a small reassurance.
"Mountains," Beus said quietly from inside the bag, "have historically not cared about human comfort."
"Neither does Regionals," I said.
The bag went quiet.
---
The trip took most of the next morning.
We took the train to the edge of the city, then a bus that wound up into the hills, then a narrow road that eventually stopped being a road at all and became a dirt track flanked by pines. The air changed as we climbed cooler, thinner, carrying the smell of earth and resin instead of concrete and exhaust. The city disappeared in pieces behind us, first the skyline, then the noise, then the particular kind of light that only exists near lots of buildings.
By the time we reached the base of the trail, it felt like we'd traveled somewhere entirely separate from where we'd started.
Valt was the first out of the bus.
"Come on!" He was already ten steps up the path before the rest of us had even adjusted our bags.
Rantaro looked at the slope.
It wasn't gentle. It wasn't the kind of mountain that apologized for being a mountain. The path cut steeply upward between rocks and thick tree roots, switching back on itself twice before disappearing around a ridge.
"You have got to be kidding," Rantaro said.
"This is just the warm-up," Keru announced from Ken's bag.
"That is genuinely the worst thing anyone has said to me today."
We started climbing.
The path was uneven sometimes packed dirt, sometimes loose stones, sometimes wide flat rocks that had been worn smooth by years of use. At a certain point the trees thinned and the trail narrowed to barely a shoulder's width, hugging the side of the mountain with a sharp drop on one side that opened into a view of the valley below, distant and green and completely indifferent to how high we'd climbed.
Rantaro stopped in the middle of the narrow section.
"Nope."
Valt turned around without stopping walking. "What do you mean nope?"
"I mean exactly what nope means."
"It's fine, just don't look down."
"I am absolutely looking down. That's the whole problem."
I caught up to Rantaro and fell into step beside him, close to the rock face rather than the edge. "Look at Shu," I said. "He's not looking down. Just match his steps."
Rantaro glanced at Shu, who was climbing with calm, steady efficiency, like the drop on the other side was simply not relevant information.
"How is he doing that?"
"Practice," Shu said, without turning around.
Rantaro muttered something under his breath but kept moving.
Further up, the trail turned into rough-cut stone steps that climbed steeply through a section of exposed rock. Real steps, ancient ones, worn down in the middle from a long time of use. Valt took them two at a time. Shu climbed steadily, conserving energy. Ken moved carefully, keeping his bag steady.
I took the steps at an even pace, feeling the burn in my legs build gradually, and let my mind run through what I knew about Xander.
Big. Strong. His Beyblading style was power-first, built on overwhelming force rather than technique. He'd beaten Valt before more than once. But Valt had grown.
The climb itself was probably part of the training philosophy.
Good, I thought. Hard approaches built the right mindset.
"Almost there," Valt called from above.
"You've said that three times," Rantaro replied.
"This time I mean it!"
And then the path levelled.
The trees broke open into a wide, flat clearing at the top of the ridge, and the training ground appeared all at once like it had been waiting for us without any particular patience.
Packed earth. Solid stone at the edges. Old training stadiums arranged around the field in a rough semi-circle, their surfaces worn but sturdy, built for serious use. And the mountain wind sweeping across everything in long, steady pulls that would affect spin and trajectory in ways the rooftop back home had never tested.
Valt stepped into the clearing first, the way he always did.
"We made it," he said, quieter than usual. More serious.
I stepped in beside him and looked across the field. The wind moved through the clearing from the west, angling slightly downhill.
"Better," I said.
Shu was already walking the perimeter, studying the ground, checking distances. Rantaro set down his bag and stretched his back. Ken stood at the edge of the clearing and looked out at the view the valley below, the city a distant smudge on the horizon and for once, neither Keru nor Beus said anything at all.
The wind moved through the clearing again.
And somewhere at the far edge of the training field, just beyond the last stadium, where the trees started again and the shadow was deep and still
Something shifted.
A shape. A presence. Still and patient, watching from the dark between the trees.
It didn't move.
It didn't speak.
But it had been there a long time before we arrived.