Chapter 52
The clip was everywhere by Monday morning.
Someone in the third row had filmed the Winged Launch on their phone, vertical, shaky, screaming directly into the microphone, and that was the version the whole country decided it loved. Not the broadcast angle. The fan one. By the time we got to school it had more views than our town had people, and Valt, who had stood in front of ten thousand people and laughed, could not survive first period.
"Do the pose," a kid at the classroom door said.
"No, we are in school and I'm not doing a pose, and FOR THE RECORD, IT WAS A LAUNCH, NOT A POSE!" Valt screamed, his head as red as a tomato, but about nine kids still stood at the door with phones up, filming it all.
"Ahh, come on, do the 'launch' then, if you call it that. It was more of a pose."
Okay, now I could see Valt getting mad.
"Okay, people." I stood at the door. "It is time to go to your own class and get out of here. Or you can stay and get Valtryek launched at your head. So if I were you, I would move now."
All the kids looked at me, and then at Valt, who had his launcher in his hand, aiming, and all of them ran off.
"Okay, bye, it was great, until next time!" you could hear some kids scream across the hall.
The semifinal was nine days out. Xander's team had taken their own quarterfinal apart the same weekend we beat Zac, three battles, three finishes, the whole match over in under twenty minutes. Shu watched the footage more than the rest of us combined. He didn't say much about it, and we let him not say much about it, and in between there was school, and training, and Wakiya showing up to morning practice before anyone else and leaving after everyone else.
---
We heard Xander before we saw him.
Not him battling. Him arriving. The corridor under the semifinal arena had concrete walls half a meter thick, and his voice came through them anyway, and then the door at the end banged open and Xander filled it.
"VAAAALT!"
Valt got airborne. Not by choice. Xander crossed the corridor in about four steps, picked him up under the arms like a sack of rice, and held him at eye level, which put Valt's feet somewhere around knee height for everybody else.
"I watched the Zac match six times!" Xander's grin took up most of the corridor. "Off the WALL! Who taught you that? Nobody taught you that! A few weeks ago you were falling face-first into the stream on my mountain, and now you're launching off WALLS!"
"Put me DOWN, we're OPPONENTS today, this is EMBARRASSING..."
"Opponents in an hour. Right now you're still the kid who couldn't finish my morning run." He set Valt down, finally, and his eyes went along our line. They stopped on Shu. Shu looked back at him. One short nod each, and that was their whole conversation. Then Xander laughed again and clapped Valt's shoulder hard enough to fold him.
"An hour," he said, walking backwards toward his own tunnel, arms wide. "Bring everything. All of you. Anything less and I'll be insulted."
The door boomed shut behind him. Valt straightened his jacket, cleared his throat, and tried to reassemble his captain face.
"He got louder," Rantaro said. "How is that possible? The mountain was supposed to wear HIM out too."
"Is he like that every single day?" Wakiya asked. "Does he sleep? Do his neighbors survive?"
"You weren't at the mountain," Rantaro said, patting his shoulder. "That back there? That was him calm. And he has no neighbors. There's a reason."
"Every day," Valt said. "Since forever. You get used to it around year six."
"Wait until he launches," Shu said quietly, and went back to his notebook.
In the changing room, Rantaro dropped onto the bench next to me while I zipped my bag shut. "Bench again, huh. You know half this arena bought a ticket hoping to see the festival guy."
"The festival guy's saving his material," I said. "Lui is watching this match, whether that's somewhere up in those stands or in front of a screen. Every launch he doesn't see from me is a question he has to answer in the dark if we make the final."
"But do you think Lui really cares? For me, he just goes with the flow of the match, or just launches the hardest."
"Well, true, but we are both left-spin Beys, so the style he's always used will not work on me. Or it will. We have never fought before."
"Yeah, that is true. Well, we will see what happens this match, if we even make the final. They already had their match and are in, so this will decide which team will fight in the final."
Shu finished lacing his shoes and stood. "Ryo, if I were you, I would not think about it too much. Today, or ever. You will see how he fights if you face him, because he fights everyone different, so you can't really look him up. But one thing I can say: he will always give 110% to every match, so you need to as well. Earn his respect, and then face him."
I nodded at that. He was right. Focus on this match first, even if I'm not fighting, and then we will see what happens.
So the card read: Wakiya first, Valt second, Shu third.
---
Battle one. Wakiya against Musashi, a guy built like a vending machine, who pointed at him across the stadium before the referee even opened his mouth.
"You're the rich one! I saw your last battle, you got popped like a balloon! Xander says you're the weak link!"
"Did he." Wakiya loaded Wyvron without looking up. "Then I'll complain to Xander after I beat you. Personally."
"Ready. Set."
"LET IT RIP!"
Mad Minotaur hit the stadium like something falling off a truck and went straight through the middle of it. No laps, no reads. Wyvron had barely found its footing when the first charge arrived, caught the shield square, and shoved the whole Bey grinding backwards up the slope in a shower of sparks, and half a second later the rim was right there behind it.
Wakiya yanked his weight sideways and Wyvron slipped off the horn and swung away along the bank, alive by a step, and the arena was up and roaring and Musashi was laughing over all of it.
"See?! ONE hit! Come here, balloon, let's finish it!"
Minotaur came again, and this time Wyvron was set for it and gave ground on purpose, rolling off the contact, sliding a quarter circle, letting the charge blow through empty space so hard that Minotaur ran halfway up the far bank before it could turn. Then again. Charge, slip, slide. Charge, slip, slide. Musashi kept shouting, and Wakiya gave him nothing back, not a word, not a look, both eyes on the stadium and his grip shifting half a centimeter between every exchange.
"Okay, I have to say it," Rantaro said next to me, lollipop dead still in his mouth. "Wakiya's being quiet. WAKIYA. Is he sick?"
"He's counting," Shu said. "Every charge Minotaur makes costs it more than it costs him. He's letting Musashi empty his own tank."
It cost him too. One charge cut back faster than the rest and clipped Wyvron before it finished sliding, and a piece of purple armor the size of a fingernail went skittering across the stadium floor, and Wakiya's jaw tightened and his feet did not move. Musashi saw the chip and went from loud to deafening.
"He's CRACKING! Now, Minotaur, RUN HIM DOWN!"
Minotaur charged and it was half a beat slow coming out of the turn, the horn dipping, and everyone on our bench saw Wakiya see it. The old Wakiya would have called the move right there, big and loud for the replay screens, the way he did against Renji with the whole arena watching him instead of his Bey.
He let that charge blow past too. He waited for the next one.
And when it came, slower still, dragging its own weight, Wyvron finally stopped giving ground. "WILD WYVRON." His voice was level, almost quiet, and it cut through Musashi's shouting like a knife through a curtain. "HYPER SHIELD CRASH!"
Purple light rose out of the stadium. The Wyvern spread its wings over everything, the aura came down Wakiya's arms steady instead of showy, and Wyvron met the exhausted charge head-on and threw it. Minotaur went up the slope backwards, clipped the rim, and clattered into the gutter, horn still twitching.
Ring-out. Battle one, ours.
"WHAT," said Musashi, to nobody, to everybody.
"I don't get popped twice," Wakiya told him, and walked back up to a wave of applause, and sat down between Rantaro and me, and permitted himself exactly one more sentence. "That's how you finish a power type."
"No speech?" Rantaro offered him a lollipop. "No bow? Nothing for the cameras?"
"The cameras," Wakiya said, taking the lollipop, "can watch me win."
---
Battle two. Valt against Homura, a tall, calm girl with her hair tied back, and Hammer Hydra was the widest, heaviest layer we'd seen all tournament.
She looked at Valt across the stadium while they loaded their Beys. "I watched the wall clip forty times," she said. "Frame by frame. I've spent nine days on my answer."
"Then you know what's coming!" Valt shot back, pointing his launcher at her.
"Yes," Homura said. "Do you?"
"...What's that supposed to mean?"
"Ready. Set."
"LET IT RIP!"
Hydra dropped low and flat in the center and Valtryek went at it like it owed him money. The first hit landed clean and moved Hydra nothing. Valt swung wide and came back harder, caught the layer's edge, sparks, and Hydra sat through it the way a rock sits through rain.
"Come ON!" Valt was bouncing on his toes. "Valtryek, again, low!"
Low got nothing. High got nothing. Hydra was too wide to lift and too heavy to shove, and Homura stood over it with her hands folded and watched him work.
"That's your attack?" she said. "All of it?"
"That's ROUND ONE of it!"
"Good. Because I can't beat you this way either." She said it plainly, like a weather report. "I can't catch Valtryek. It's too fast. So we can circle each other for four minutes and go to a stamina finish, boring, forgettable." Her eyes went, deliberately, up the stadium wall. "Or you can show them what they came for."
And the crowd heard her, and the crowd agreed. It started in the cheap seats and rolled downhill, ten thousand people finding the same word at the same time.
"WALL! WALL! WALL! WALL!"
"Don't," Shu said on our bench, low, to a person who couldn't hear him.
Valt tried not to. You could see him try. He sent Valtryek on another attack run, and another, and the chant got louder instead of softer, and Homura just waited, hands folded, patient as furniture, and somewhere in there the trying ran out.
His eyes went up the wall. Measuring. Every phone in the arena came up at once.
"VALTRYEK! WINGED LAUNCH!"
Blue light rose. The Valkyrie lifted its wings over the stadium, the crowd noise went from chant to scream, and Valtryek came off the bank, hit the wall, and left it.
"Too flat," Shu said, already on his feet.
He'd said it about the Zac match nine days ago, as a compliment. Two degrees flatter and Zeutron survives it. Tonight the arc came off the wall low and long and exactly those two degrees wrong, because against Zac there had been nothing in Valt's head but the battle, and tonight there was a chant in there, and you can't ride a wall and listen to your own crowd at the same time.
Homura moved Hydra one hand-width. That was her whole nine-day answer: don't dodge the eagle, shift the nest. Valtryek came down where the flank should have been, hit heavy shoulder instead of open seam, and all that airborne speed skidded off sideways up the bank with Valt's voice cracking after it.
"No no no, catch it, CATCH IT..."
"HYDRA FANG."
Dark green light stood up out of the stadium, three heads rising on three necks over the rim, and the same green wrapped her still shoulders. Hydra caught Valtryek before it found its balance and drove it up and over the rim.
Ring-out. Battle two, theirs. One and one.
The chant died mid-word. Ten thousand people had come out of their seats for the wall, and the wall had failed, and what was left in the building was a low murmur and the referee's whistle. Valt stood at the rim with his launcher still raised, looking at the empty stadium in front of him.
Across it, Homura picked up Hydra and gave him a small, real bow. "It's a beautiful move," she said. "It deserved a better reason."
He came back up the steps slowly. Sat down. Looked at his hands.
"It worked before," he said. "I did everything the same."
"Hey, it's one battle," Rantaro started. "We're still level, Shu's got this, nobody's..."
"I did everything the same," Valt said again, louder, to his hands.
"No, you didn't." Wakiya. Everybody looked at him. He was turning his launcher over on his knees, not looking at Valt, and when he spoke it came out rough. "You launched for them. The clip people. They wanted the sequel and you gave it to them." He paused. "I did the same thing last week. Mine cost us the battle too. So don't sit there telling your hands you did everything the same, because I know exactly what that launch was, and so do you."
Valt stared at him. Of everyone on that bench, he hadn't expected it from Wakiya.
"That's..." He stopped. Breathed. "Yeah. Okay. Yeah."
The referee called battle three, and the roar on the far side of the arena meant Xander was already coming down with his arms spread wide for it.
Shu closed his notebook and held it out to me. "Hold this."
"You don't want it down there?"
"There's nothing in it about Xander." He rolled his shoulder once, the way he does before a serious launch, and looked at Valt on his way past. "For what it's worth, captain, she's wrong about one thing. The reason was fine. The timing was the problem, and timing comes back."
Then he went down the steps into the noise, white hair, red scarf, launcher already in his hand, and across the stadium Xander stopped smiling for the first time all day.