Chapter 50 — By the Book
Valt tried to give a captain's speech in the tunnel and got four words in before his voice did the thing. "Team. Today we are..." and then a squeak like a door hinge.
Rantaro, leaning on the wall with a lollipop parked in his cheek, repeated it back at him. "Today we are..." Same squeak, note perfect. Then he dug in his jacket and held out a second lollipop. "For the nerves, captain. Kiyama family recipe. Works better than speeches."
"I don't need... okay, give me that."
Somewhere above us, ten thousand people were stamping their feet, and the sound came down through the concrete like weather.
I took the lineup card out of Valt's hand before he could sweat through it. He'd already filled it in on the train, my writing under his because his second attempt tore the paper. Battle one, me. Battle two, Wakiya. Battle three, Valt.
"Gou opened for them in round one," I said. "If he does it again, I get the captain. And you get Zac."
Valt nodded and kept nodding, a little too long, and looked at a poster on the tunnel wall. Zac was on it. Zac was on most of them.
"Their opener was 2-0," Shu said from the bench by the lockers, not looking up from his notebook. Benched again, same logic as round one, and taking it exactly as well as last time, which meant a notebook full of other people's launch angles. "Their third blader never stood up. Neither did ours. On paper we're the same team."
"On paper." Wakiya snapped his launcher closed with more wrist than necessary. "Their number two won by sitting in a corner for two minutes. I watched it from the tunnel and I nearly fell asleep standing up. This'll be over before Valt finishes panicking."
"I'm not panicking. This is focus."
"You're vibrating."
"FOCUSED vibrating."
The tunnel light went green. We walked up into the noise.
---
Gou was already at the stadium when I got there. Of course he was.
Up close he was older than I'd guessed, nineteen maybe, sleeves folded to the elbow with a crease in them, captain's band flat against his arm. He wiped the grip of his launcher with a cloth, folded the cloth, put it away. Then he looked at me for the first time.
"I watched your festival match eleven times. Frame by frame." His voice didn't carry any particular feeling with it. "Whatever you did to Zac, it doesn't work on me. I don't leave openings for tricks."
"It wasn't a trick the first time," I said. "But I get why you need it to be one. If it was real, then Zac lost fair. And you've built every drill since around the idea that he didn't."
His mouth went thin. On the far bench, Zac had stopped signing whatever he was signing.
"Ready. Set."
"LET IT RIP!"
Gigant Gargoyle hit the stadium dead on the center line and stuck there, slate-grey, layer like cut stone, orbit so tight it could have been stamped into the floor. Drago swung wide around him and I let it ride, one full lap, listening through my feet.
I probed the outer ring. Gargoyle rotated its guard into me. Contact, shrug, reset. Shallow from the left. Same. Steep from the right. Same, to the half-second, like the answer had been filed somewhere before I asked.
Behind me Valt was giving advice. "GO LEFT! No wait, THE OTHER LEFT!" Rantaro pulled him back into his seat by the hood.
Drilled. All those hours on the arena floor after a won match, and this was what they bought. It was flawless. It was the same flawless every single time, and somewhere in that sentence there was a door, if I could stay in the stadium long enough to find it.
"You feel it," Gou called over the rim. "No openings. GARGOYLE FORTRESS!"
Grey light came up out of the layer like dust blown off a slab. The avatar unfolded above the stadium, a stone gargoyle, wings mantling forward into a wall, and the same grey rolled over Gou until his jacket looked carved. Gargoyle stopped taking hits and started returning them. Drago's next pass bounced off the guard with a crack I felt in my back teeth, and my Bey went up the slope backwards, rim first.
The whole arena came up out of its seats. Someone screamed. It might have been Valt.
Drago caught the last inch of curve. Wobbled. Held.
My heart was somewhere up near my ears. I made myself breathe out before I touched anything, because a launch arm full of panic is worse than no launch arm at all.
"Close," Gou said. He wasn't gloating. He was making a note.
Fine. He'd studied the exam. Every angle, every entry, every line I'd ever shown a camera. So I stopped giving him angles and started stealing his clock. Same approach, again, again, but half a beat early, then late, and Gargoyle's guard kept arriving where I used to be. Each contact shaved a sliver off his rhythm. His posture, launch-perfect the whole battle, leaned. Barely. Chasing now.
"Drago. He practiced the test. Give him the question that isn't on it."
Off-tempo, inside line, full weight. Drago hit the guard a quarter turn before it finished resetting, caught the stone layer right at the seam, and lifted. Gargoyle went up, over the rim, out, and clattered into the gutter still spinning.
Ring-out. Battle one, ours.
The bench went off behind me. Valt's voice cracked again, mid-scream this time, and Rantaro was up next to him with the lollipop stick clamped in his teeth, roaring loud enough for both of them.
No aura. No name called. Nothing on anyone's tablet worth watching twice.
Gou looked at his Bey in the gutter. Three seconds, four. When he looked back up at me, something in his face had shifted, small, like a picture knocked one degree off level.
"That wasn't a trick either," he said.
"No. And the festival wasn't a fluke. Your team's going to need you to know that before this match is over, not after."
He picked Gargoyle out of the gutter, wiped it with the cloth, and walked back to his bench in step with nobody. Zac watched him the whole way. Not me. Him.
---
Wakiya stood up and rolled his shoulders like the battle was a formality between him and his highlight.
"One up. Now watch closely, everyone. This is what defense looks like when the training budget isn't zero."
"Wakiya." I caught his sleeve on the way past. "Their number two countered in round one. He let his opponent lead for two full minutes and won on one hit. He waits for you."
"Then he'll wait, and lose. Waiting is just losing slowly."
He went down the steps two at a time. Shu's pen stopped moving.
"Ten says he showboats," Rantaro said around the lollipop.
"No bet," Shu said.
Renji was small and quick-eyed and gave Wakiya a polite bow. Wakiya returned about a third of it. Riot Raptor loaded on the launcher, burnt orange, layer swept back like folded wings.
"Ready. Set."
"LET IT RIP!"
It went Wakiya's way immediately.
Wyvron took the center, shield high, and Raptor circled the banks without committing. One lap. Three. Wakiya's grin got wider with every one of them, and then he started narrating.
"This is your counter specialist? He's a spectator with a launcher! Come down here and lose properly!"
Raptor dipped in once, touched shields, retreated with a wobble. The crowd oohed. Wyvron chased two steps up the slope and Wakiya had it right there. Shoulder into the smaller Bey, ring-out, done.
He didn't take it.
He pulled Wyvron back to center and spread his arms to the arena, drinking it in, and I felt Rantaro go still beside me, because Rantaro's survivor finish had owned every replay screen since round one, and Wakiya was not the type to let a lollipop enthusiast keep a record.
"Rantaro! Watch how you finish a specialist! HYPER SHIELD CRASH!"
"Finish him first, THEN talk!" Rantaro yelled back, but it was already moving.
Purple light. The Wyvern rose over the stadium with its wings flared wide, the aura poured down Wakiya's arms until his hair lifted with it, and Wyvron came off the bank with the full weight of the move behind it, aimed straight at the wobble.
Except Raptor wasn't wobbling anymore.
The wobble was the bait. Drilled, rehearsed, same as everything else that team did, and the second Wyvron committed to the arc, Renji's voice cut through the arena, flat and ready.
"RAPTOR DIVE."
Orange light snapped up the stadium walls. The avatar came down out of it, a bird of prey with its wings folded to nothing, all beak and speed, and the same orange wrapped Renji from collar to boots. Raptor slipped inside the arc of Hyper Shield Crash, under the shield line where the seams sit widest, and hit the one angle Wyvron couldn't cover mid-move.
The click was audible in the cheap seats.
Wyvron burst across the stadium floor. Layer one way, disc another, driver spinning sadly by the wall, all of it still faintly purple, and Riot Raptor carved a single lap around the pieces before Renji called it home.
Burst finish. Battle two, theirs. One and one.
Nobody on our bench said anything. Wakiya gathered the pieces of Wyvron with his back very straight, and the walk up the steps was long.
"I had the ring-out." He sat down hard, not talking to any of us. Talking to the pieces in his hand. "I had it. And I wanted the highlight instead."
Rantaro opened his mouth. Shu closed it for him with a look.
"Yes. You had it," I said. "Remember exactly how this feels. Semifinals, you'll be standing across from Xander's team, and the version of you that performs first loses that battle too."
Wakiya didn't answer. But the hand around Wyvron's layer went from white-knuckled to just holding it, and after a moment Rantaro reached over without a word and dropped a lollipop in his lap. Wakiya looked at it like it was a foreign object. He didn't throw it away.
The referee's voice rolled through the speakers. Battle three.
Valt stood up. The lineup card was in his fist again, crushed past reading, and I watched him arrive at what one and one meant. Deciding battle. Quarterfinal. Him.
Across the arena, Zac rose from the bench and handed his jacket to a teammate without looking. The crowd noise doubled just from that.
"Hey, captain." I waited until his eyes came to me instead of the ten thousand people. "It's a stadium, it's Zac, and it's you. Start there."
He nodded, too many times, and went down the steps. The lollipop stick was still in the corner of his mouth.