Chapter 57 — Empty Head, Full Hands
I came back to the bench with cold hands and sat down in my spot, and nobody asked me where I had been. Valt looked at my knuckles once. He opened his mouth, closed it again, and slid his water bottle along the bench to me instead.
Down on the floor, a crew of six was lifting the broken stadium out of its housing. The crack had run all the way to the rim. They rolled a new one in on a cart, lowered it into place, and tested the locks, and the whole arena watched it happen in a strange low hum, because everyone understood what the old one had decided.
"Fifteen minutes to battle three," the referee announced.
Shu stood up.
But he didn't walk toward the floor. He walked two steps along the bench and stopped in front of Valt, and held out his hand with something in it. His registration pass.
"Trade me," Shu said.
Valt stared at him. "What? No. Shu, you're battle three, the card says..."
"The card says whoever the captain confirms before the whistle. I checked the rulebook the day we registered." He was still holding out the pass. "Their third is Raiga. Attack type, all pressure, ends his battles fast or not at all. I've spent this whole tournament studying people, and you heard Lui out there. He was needling me, and he was also right. Against pure aggression I study one exchange too long, and one exchange is all Jackal needs. What beats a blader like that isn't a plan." He looked at Valt evenly. "It's you."
"Shu, this is the FINAL, if I lose it..."
"Then you lose it as our best answer, and I'll stand behind that. But you won't." He put the pass in Valt's hand and closed his fingers over it. "One thing from the scouting, and then I'm done coaching. If Jackal doesn't finish you inside the first ninety seconds, he starts making mistakes. Survive the storm. Then be yourself at him."
Valt looked at the pass. Then at me.
"He's right," I said. "You're the decider, captain. You always were. We just took the long way to the paperwork."
Rantaro leaned in and stuck a lollipop in Valt's jacket pocket. "For after. Winners get two."
Valt breathed in, and something in his face settled into place. He turned to the referee's table, held up the pass, and his voice came out steady. "Substitution. Aoi Valt, battle three."
The screens changed, and the noise doubled. Somewhere high up in the stands a voice screamed "DO THE POSE!", and Valt's ears went red, and he kept walking.
Across the floor, Raiga stood up too fast.
He caught himself, rolled his shoulders the way Lui rolls his shoulders, and came down the steps with Lui's exact walk, hands in his pockets, chin up. It was good. It was almost right. But Lui walks like the building belongs to him, and Raiga walked like someone checking whether the owner was watching.
Lui was watching. Not him, though. His eyes were on Valt the whole way down.
---
They met at the new stadium.
"The wall clip guy," Raiga said. His voice was pitched low, flatter than a kid his age talks. "I watched your teammate lose to a floor. Now I get to finish it. You should have sent the white-haired one. At least he'd have lasted long enough to be worth my..."
"You're doing him," Valt said.
Raiga blinked. "What?"
"Lui. The voice, the walk, the little shoulder thing. You're doing him." There was no mockery in it at all, and that made it worse. "I train with my heroes' posters on my wall too. But they don't launch for me."
For half a second Raiga's whole act cracked down the middle, and what was under it was fourteen years old and furious. Then he snapped his launcher up.
"Jagged Jackal is going to take your head off."
"BLADERS, READY? SET..."
"LET IT RIP!"
Jackal came out of the launch like a thrown knife. Valtryek barely got its feet under it before the first hit arrived, flank-on, hard, and the second was already coming from the other side, and the third from behind that. No rhythm to lock onto. No lap pattern. Jackal cut its angles short and changed direction off every contact, ice-white blurring around blue, and Valtryek was giving ground in pieces, a hand-width at a time, up the slope toward the rim.
"He's fast," Rantaro said. "Why is the SMALL one always fast?"
"It's Lui's opening," I said. Because it was. I had felt this exact storm from the other side twenty minutes ago. "Same angles, same tempo. He's running Longinus's first minute on a lighter Bey."
"Copied homework," Wakiya said. "Question is whether Valt survives long enough to grade it."
Down at the stadium, Raiga was pressing. "Come ON!" His voice cracked out of the flat pitch and went up into his own. "Fight back! He fought back! JACKAL! JACKAL RUSH!"
Ice-blue light stood up out of the stadium. The jackal rose inside it, lean and long-legged, ears flat, lips off its teeth, and the pale light dropped over Raiga's shoulders and burned there. Jackal went from fast to something else, a chain of strikes with no gaps between them, four hits, six, eight, each one rocking Valtryek harder, walking it backwards up the bank with nowhere to plant.
Valt took a step back off the rim of the stadium, riding the shocks up through his arms.
He didn't call anything. And I watched it come over him, the thing that came over him against Zac, the thing that was missing against Homura. The crowd went out of his face. The score went out of his face. Everything went out of his face except the Bey in front of him, and Valt Aoi got very, very quiet.
Ninety seconds. Jackal's chain was still landing, and Valtryek was still standing, and Raiga's next call came half a beat late.
"There," Shu said softly, beside me.
Jackal overcut one angle. Its recovery turn went a blade's width wide, exactly the mistake Longinus never makes, and Valtryek slipped through the gap in the chain and ran. Not away. Up. It caught the bank at full speed, carried the speed up the slope, and left the stadium wall at an angle no coach in the country teaches, because only one person in the country ever launches there.
"VALTRYEK! WINGED LAUNCH!"
Blue light filled the whole floor. The winged knight rose over the stadium with its wings thrown wide, the aura came down over Valt in one drop, and Valtryek came off the wall with everything the climb had given it and fell on Jagged Jackal out of the lights.
Raiga looked up. Whatever Lui does in that situation, he had never gotten far enough into the footage to learn it.
The strike landed dead center.
Jackal burst on contact, three pieces ringing off the stadium floor, and the sound the building made shook dust off the rigging.
"BURST FINISH! THE MATCH GOES TO BEIGOMA!"
I don't really remember standing up. None of us do, probably. The bench emptied in one motion and Valt disappeared under all four of us at once, screaming, and Rantaro was screaming, and Wakiya was screaming with his collar finally crooked, and somewhere in the middle of the pile Shu was laughing his real laugh for the second time in two days.
Across the floor, Raiga knelt over the pieces of Jackal and didn't pick them up. He was looking at his own bench. At Lui.
Lui stood, hung his launcher on his belt, and walked over to him. He looked down at the pieces for a moment. Then he said something none of us could hear, short, two sentences at most, and walked on toward the tunnel without breaking stride.
Raiga sat there like he'd been hit. Then he gathered the pieces of his Bey, stood up, and bowed to Valt, stiff and fast and real, before running after his team.
Iwao was the last of them to leave. He stopped at the edge of the floor, looked at our pile of a team for a moment, and gave Rantaro a single nod. Rantaro, from under Valt's arm, gave him back a thumbs-up and half a lollipop stick.
Then the confetti cannons went, and the trophy came out.
They gave it to Valt, because captains lift trophies. He held it over his head and the arena roared, and then he did the thing only Valt would do: he called the rest of us in with both hands, wouldn't lift it again until every one of us had a hand somewhere on it, and twenty thousand people took photos of five sets of knuckles on one gold cup.
"BEIGOMA! BEIGOMA! BEIGOMA!"
Under the noise, with his hand next to mine on the trophy, Valt leaned over.
"Your rematch," he said. "At Nationals. He has to go through the whole bracket to reach the final. So do you."
"I know."
"So we might meet first. You and me." He grinned, and there was nothing soft in it at all. "I'm not yielding battles anymore, Ryo. Not even to you."
"Good," I said, and meant it all the way down. "Then it finally counts."
---
The party moved to the changing room, and then to the corridor, and then to the front doors, and somewhere between the doors and the bus I stopped walking.
They went on ahead of me. Valt with the trophy under one arm, telling the story of the wall launch to people who had watched it happen. Rantaro with the bag of lollipops open for the whole world. Wakiya on the phone with someone, saying "yes, FIRST place" for the fourth time. Shu carrying Valt's bag, because Valt had forgotten it, because of course he had.
Drago was warm in my pocket.
'It has to be tonight, doesn't it. If I stay for the party, I stay for the week.'
*Ryo. You said it yourself. We still have a final. We will train hard, but on our own. I think you need to go home, to your parents, and train there as hard as we can, non-stop, and come back stronger, so that a stupid floor can't stop us again.*
"You are right," I said out loud, to nobody, in the empty half of the corridor. "I'm not gonna say goodbye today. I will head out now."
I looked at their backs one more time. Five rounds they had covered for me, and a trophy, and the best team in the country, and the only way to pay any of it back properly was waiting at the Nationals with white hair and a left-spin Bey.
At the end of the corridor, Shu turned around, the only one who did.
He looked at me across the whole distance, at my bag over my shoulder and the exit sign over my head. He didn't say anything, and he didn't come back. He gave me one short nod, the kind he'd given Xander before the battle of his life.
Then he turned and caught up to the others, and I pushed the door open and walked out into the night alone.
The rematch is for later. The work starts now.