Chapter 56 — The Match of Dragons
Lui jumped.
He went up with the call, turned a full circle in the air, and ripped Longinus loose on the way down.
"NIGHTMARE BOOST!"
I had never seen him use that launch. Nobody had. He had never needed it against anyone else, and he wanted me to know that before the Beys even touched.
Longinus crossed the stadium in a straight line. Drago met it in the center, and the first contact blew both Beys back to opposite rims with the shock of it climbing up through the floor and into my knees.
They caught themselves on the banks and went straight back in. The second hit was harder than the first. The third was harder than the second. No circling, no probing, just two left-spin Beys hammering each other in the middle of the national final with sparks coming off every contact.
"Huh," Lui said across the stadium. "So you can take a hit. Good. I was worried the bench had made you soft." He rolled his shoulders, loose, unbothered. "Five rounds of hiding. Five rounds of your teammates bleeding so nobody would get a look at you. And for what? A rubber ring that does nothing against me. You built your whole plan around a trick, and you spent it on the one opponent it doesn't work on."
"The plan was never the rubber," I said. "The plan was you knowing nothing. And look at you. First time in your life you had to open with your best launch."
His mouth twitched. Longinus came again.
Drago cut inside the exchange and struck under the layer, the rising angle that had opened up Shu in the district final. It landed clean.
Longinus rode it. It rolled with the contact, let the strike feed its own turn, and came back through the middle of Drago's recovery with the full weight of that launch still behind it. Drago got carried a quarter of the stadium sideways, grinding, before it tore free.
"That angle again," Lui said. "The one from your district final. I've seen it eleven times. Shu fell for it because Shu studies opponents instead of beating them." He watched Longinus turn. "He rebuilt his whole style after I broke him last year, did you know that? A year of work. I needed ninety seconds to make it necessary. What are you going to rebuild, Ryo?"
Behind me I heard Shu's breath go out slow through his nose. He said nothing. Lui heard it too, and smiled, and that was the point of the sentence. It had never been aimed at me.
'He's working the whole bench.'
*Let him talk.* Drago's voice came up through my hand, low and slow, the way fire sounds when it has all night. *The white one is not talking. It is screaming. It has waited for us as long as I have waited for it.*
Longinus committed to the next charge, full weight, the same line that had taken ground from us three times. I didn't call anything. I didn't steer. Drago was inside the turn before the line finished, under the layer, rising, and the hit landed where Drago chose, not where I did.
Longinus staggered.
The whole arena saw it. The noise dropped into one gasp, because nobody in this country had ever watched that Bey lose a step, and Lui's eyes came off me for the first time since the tunnel and went down to the stadium.
"Valt launches off walls for camera phones," he said, quieter now. "The rich one folds when the crowd stops clapping. The bench is who they are. Now show me who YOU are."
"You're standing in it," I said. "DRAGO! DRAGON CRASH!"
Gold and crimson stood up out of the stadium. The dragon rose inside the light, gold and black, head dropping level with the rim, and the same fire ran up my arms and set into my shoulders. Drago came out of the light and drove the full weight of the launch through one point of Longinus's layer.
Longinus went backwards up the bank, all four blades of its layer sparking, and had to fight the slope to keep its feet. On our bench Valt was screaming. On his bench, nobody moved at all.
Lui looked at his Bey for a long second. Then he started to laugh.
"AHAHAHA!"
It hit the roof and stopped dead, like a door slammed on it.
"Finally," he said, and dropped into his stance, lower than I had ever seen him go. "LONGINUS! LOST SPIRAL!"
Pale blue light flooded up out of the stadium. The white dragon stood over the floor, antlers crowned, a mane of pale fire running the length of its body and the spear standing off its tail, and the azure poured down over Lui until his hair lifted off his neck. Longinus dropped onto the point of its tip and began to accelerate. One lap. Two. Faster every pass, a white line drawing itself around the stadium, and there was no rim far enough and no angle sharp enough for what was coming off that bank.
'Everything.'
*Everything.*
"ECLIPSE DESTRUCTION!"
Gold and crimson, then darker. Black bled off the edges of the light, and our dragon rose to meet his, wings spreading over the entire floor, until the two of them stood jaw to jaw above the stadium. Gold and black. White and azure. Drago folded every turn of spin it owned into one line and took it forward.
Longinus came off the bank.
They hit in the dead center.
The sound underneath was not a clash. It was a crack, deep, under the floor, a sound the building made and not the Beys, and a dark line jumped out from beneath the contact point and tore down the slope.
For one full second the two Beys ground against each other on that broken floor, neither giving a millimeter, sparks fountaining over the rim, the dragons locked above them jaw to jaw. My arms burned. Across the stadium Lui had both feet driven into his stance and his teeth showing.
Then it broke.
Longinus went backwards, up, all the way to the rim, and hung there with its speed gone, wobbling on the edge of its own spin. Drago came out of the center faster than it went in, the way it always comes out of that move, and turned toward the finish with eight meters of open floor in front of it.
The whole building could see it. Longinus drained on the rim. Drago at full spin, closing.
Lui saw it too. I watched him see it. His hands went dead still and his face emptied out, and that was how I knew we had him, because boredom is what Lui shows when he's winning, and there was no boredom left.
Drago crossed the floor.
The dark line from the collision ran straight through the finishing lane, and Drago's Nova Rush tip caught the edge of it. A stutter. A quarter of a second, a few millimeters off line. Nothing, on a floor that holds, against anyone else alive.
Longinus came off the rim into that quarter second with everything it had left.
The angle was perfect, because his angles are always perfect. The strike caught Drago mid-correction, square on the seam of the layer, and Drago burst.
The pieces went up through the fading gold of their own avatar, turned over against the arena lights, and came down on the broken floor.
The referee's arm went up. The screens put their team over ours. One apiece.
I stood in the noise for a moment. Then I stepped over the rim, walked down the slope, and picked the pieces of my Bey up off the crack that had beaten them. The floor was split half a meter along the line, wide enough to lay a finger in. Drago was warm in my hand. Both halves of it.
'Still here?'
*Still here.* A pause. *Ryo. We were faster.*
'I know we were.'
When I straightened up, Lui was standing at the edge of the stadium with Longinus in his fist. The crowd was chanting his name. He hadn't looked at the screens once.
"Again," he said.
"The match is over, Lui."
"Nothing is over." He came around the rim and right in my face, and his voice stayed flat the whole way, which was worse than shouting. "You were one second from finishing it. One second, and then the floor did my job for me. I don't accept gifts. Not from referees, not from crowds, not from a broken floor." Up close his breathing was ragged. "Get your Bey. We go again. Right now."
The referee started toward us. Lui looked at him once, and the man stopped walking.
"No," I said.
"That was not a question."
"And this is not a negotiation." I clicked Drago's layer back into place, slow, right in front of him, so he could watch it come back together. Then I put my Bey away. "You don't want a replay on a patched floor with a trophy in the way, and neither do I. You want the real one. One battle, everything on it, a floor that holds. The rematch comes at the individual Nationals, Lui. Make sure you reach the final."
I was three steps up before he answered.
"AHAHAHA!"
It cut dead, and when I looked back his teeth were showing, and there was nothing bored anywhere in him.
"Reach the final," he said. "You're the first person alive who has ever said that to ME." He turned for his own bench and threw the rest over his shoulder without slowing down. "Win your tournament, Ryo. And don't lose to anyone before me. Nobody is allowed to burst you but me."
The bench came down around me the moment I reached it. Valt first, both hands on my shoulders, looking me over like something might be physically broken.
"I'm fine, Valt."
"You HAD him! The crack, the floor, that's not, that shouldn't count..."
"It's beyblade. Floors break, and he still had to hit a window a quarter of a second wide, and he hit it. Both things are true." I sat down and let the breath go all the way out. "He knows what really happened out there. So do I. The score says one apiece, and for the next twenty minutes that's the only part that exists."
I looked past Valt, at Shu, who was already looking back at me with his launcher in his hand.
"One battle left," I said. "Deciding battle."
Shu nodded slowly. But he wasn't looking at the stadium anymore, and he wasn't looking at me either.
He was looking at Valt.
I stood up while the two of them started on battle three, and told nobody where I was going.
I kept walking back to the locker room and sat down by the lockers. I was strong for only two seconds. Then my fist went into the nearest locker. The sound slammed around the empty room, and I did it again, and again, until the metal had a dent in it the shape of my hand.
*RYO. STOP. NOW.*
I turned around, and Drago was glowing. I could hear him in my head. I stopped, with my fist still up and my knuckles screaming at me now that I was letting them.
"We almost had him. So close. But that STUPID FLOOR ruined it all."
*I know.*
"Do you? Because I've launched you a thousand times and I have never once picked you up in two pieces. Never. Not against Shu, not against Zac, not on the mountain. And the first time it finally happens, it isn't even HIM that does it, it's a crack in the ground." My voice was bouncing off the lockers and I didn't care. "And then I stood there and told him to reach the final like I was calm. I'm not calm, Drago. I looked calm. That's a different thing."
The glow off the layer rose.
*You think I am calm?* The voice was lower than I had ever heard it, and slower, the way a fire sounds right before it takes a house. *I have waited longer than you have been alive for an opponent worth all of me, and a dead slab of concrete pulled him out of my teeth. I am not calm, Ryo. I am choosing where to put it. So choose. You can spend it on this locker, or you can carry it home and feed it into every launch between now and the day we stand across from him again.*
I looked at my hand. The dent in the metal. The white marks across my knuckles.
"Five rounds they covered for me," I said, quieter. "The whole tournament, so nobody would get a look at us. And the one battle that was mine, I came back with pieces."
*You came back with the truth. He needed a perfect strike AND a broken floor, on the same quarter second, and even then he would not accept his own win. He begged you for a rematch in front of his own crowd, in front of his own team. That is what you gave them back for five rounds. Nobody in that building thinks he beat us. Including him.*
I walked to the sink and ran the cold water and put my hands under it, and stood there until my breathing came down to something I recognized.
*We still have a final. We will train hard, but on our own. And it will not be here. But not now. Now your team needs you on that bench.*
"You are right. Okay. Give me a minute, and we go back."
In the doorway, you could see Valt standing around the corner with a worried look, but he did not say anything, and turned around and walked back to the rest.