Chapter 35 – The Shadow in the Trees
I was running the ridge like everyone else. I thought we were done. But then Xander's voice came booming up behind us.
"Come on, guys, one more! You're acting like a bunch of ladies. Come on, run, one more, faster now!" *clap* *clap* "COME ON, VALT, YOU CAN DO IT!"
I looked over at Valt. He looked half dead.
"Come on... Xander..." Valt had both hands on his knees, head down, hauling in a breath between every couple of words. "I want to... beyblade... not this."
"Beyblading is this." Xander thumped him on the back. "Strong legs make a strong launch. Now move."
By the time we got back down the sun was up and the frost was gone from the open ground. Xander put us straight on the practice bowls and didn't let up once. Launch, catch, launch again, and every few rounds he'd switch which side of the stadium he wanted us hitting, usually right after we'd already committed to the other one.
"Left side. No. Right. Right, Valt, your other right."
"My brain doesn't turn that fast!" Valt snatched Valtryek out of the air and shook out his hand. "Can we do one, just one, where the target stays in the same spot for longer than a second? One? For me?"
"In a real match nothing stays where you want it." Xander didn't even glance over. "Again. And stop telegraphing, I can see where you're going before your Bey does."
Valt grumbled something and launched anyway. Two bowls down, Shu hit the new call clean without being told twice, the way he always does, then caught Spryzen and reset before the sound faded.
"Show-off," Valt said, loud enough to carry.
Shu looked up with a bit of a smile. "It only looks like showing off because you're still aiming at where the target was a second ago."
Valt opened his mouth, thought better of it, and launched again without the comeback.
That's about when I felt it.
It was the same thing from a few days back. A prickle at the back of my neck, like somebody had their eyes on me and wasn't in a hurry to look away. I'd felt it up here before and talked myself out of it every time, told myself it was wind in the treeline. This time I didn't. I kept Drago on the launcher, turned, and looked straight at the spot where the shadows under the trees sat thickest.
Nothing moved. The feeling stayed exactly where it was.
"You feel it too." Xander wasn't looking at the trees. He was looking at me, and the corner of his mouth had gone up. "Took you long enough. Most of my students never feel him at all." He raised his voice without any real effort, the way you call to someone you already know is listening. "Ukyo. The kid felt you. No point hiding from somebody who's already found the trick."
For a second the treeline just sat there.
Then part of the shadow peeled off the rest and walked into the open.
He was about our age, tall, with long blue hair tied back in a split tail over one shoulder. Pale blue eyes that didn't blink much. He didn't make a sound when he walked, not a footstep, not a shifted stone, and he came to a stop a few feet from the bowls with his hands folded behind his back like he'd been standing there the whole time.
His eyes went to me first.
"You felt me before you saw me," he said. His voice was soft, almost friendly. "Your friends didn't feel me at all, not once. That's worth something." He tilted his head a fraction. "And you're the one who beat Shu Kurenai."
It wasn't a question, so I didn't answer it.
"This is Ukyo." Xander folded his arms. "He's on my team, the Sword Flames, on the days he feels like showing up. The rest of the time he's wherever you're not looking. You won't win a game of find-him, so don't go starting one."
Valt was already halfway across the clearing.
"Okay, that was actually amazing, how long were you standing there? The whole time? Were you there when I ate it on the ridge? Please tell me you didn't see that part." He stuck his hand out, grinning. "I'm Valt, by the way."
Ukyo looked at the hand. He left it where it was.
"I launch with that hand," he said. "I'd rather the people I'm going to face one day never get to touch it. A blader's hand is his own. I'll shake yours in my head, and I mean that as a compliment."
Valt's hand stayed up in the air a second too long. "You'll shake it... in your head."
"It's already done." Ukyo's eyes moved off Valt and went over the rest of us, one at a time, in no hurry at all. They came back to me, held a moment, and moved on. "I came up here to watch the one who beat Shu. But I think I'll watch the loud one first. You tell me everything about how you fight before you've even finished saying hello."
Valt didn't catch the insult buried in that. "Wait, you want to battle me? Right now?"
"You make the most noise." Ukyo brought a launcher out from behind his back, a Bey already locked into it, white and blue with a single long horn curving up off the top of the layer. "Noisy bladers are the easiest ones to read. So go on. Show me I've got you wrong."
I stepped back and gave them the bowl. I wasn't in this one, and I didn't want to be. I wanted to see how this guy fought.
Rantaro counted them down and the whole clearing went quiet under it.
"Three. Two. One. Let it rip!"
Valtryek came off the launch fast and loud, all Valt, and shot straight for the middle. Unicrest dropped in light and low and just sat there turning, the horn flashing on every rotation. It didn't move to meet the attack. It waited.
Valtryek slammed into it head on. The crack rang off the rocks.
Unicrest barely moved. It took the hit, dipped, let the force slide off the round of its body, and rolled back into the center like nothing had touched it.
"Spin-defense," Shu said beside me, quiet. "He's heavy right where it counts. Valt can't just shove that out of the way."
Valt wasn't listening to anybody. "Okay, again! And again!" Valtryek wheeled around and went back in, twice, three times, the blades on its layer shrieking down Unicrest's side. Every hit looked like it should have ended things. Every one of them slid off into nothing.
"You attack the exact same way each time." Ukyo still hadn't raised his voice. "Hard, then harder, like the next one is finally going to be the one. It isn't. All you're doing is teaching me your rhythm, and I learn fast. By now I could hum it back to you."
"Then I'll hit you off-beat!"
"You don't know how. You've only got the one song."
Valtryek came in again, and this time Unicrest moved.
It tipped onto the horn, dug the point into the floor for half a heartbeat to set itself, then whipped sideways into Valtryek's path with the tip leading the way.
"Alicorn Launch."
The horn took Valtryek clean in the side, all of Unicrest's weight driven down through that one sharp point, and Valtryek jumped off the floor. It came down spinning crooked, the blue light on its layer stuttering. Valt's grin finally dropped off his face.
"That's the problem with charging straight at me," Ukyo said. "I don't have to hit harder than you. I just have to be standing where you were already going."
Valtryek scraped along the rim, fighting to find its line again. It was bleeding speed, the wobble opening wider with every turn, leaning into that slow tilt a Bey gets right before it taps out. Valt saw it. His hands clamped down on the launcher even though there was nothing left to launch, and there was nothing playful left in his face.
"No. No, come on." He wasn't talking to us anymore. He was down close to the bowl, talking to his Bey. "Get up. We are not losing to a guy who wouldn't even shake my hand. Get up."
I talk to Drago all the time, so I know what it usually sounds like. This wasn't that. Valt wasn't hyping himself up. He was asking for something, and he meant every word of it.
Valtryek answered.
The wobble pulled back in. I don't have a cleaner way to say it. One turn it was tipping over, and the next its spin snapped tight and the blue light ran all the way around the layer instead of stuttering, and it came up off the rim with a sound it hadn't made before, lower and steadier, like something in it had finally woken all the way up.
"There it is," Xander said, almost too low to hear.
Valt was grinning again, but it was a different grin, sharper. "Okay. Okay, I get it now. I keep running straight at you because that's just how I am, right? But you already handed me the answer. You only have to be there when I show up." He jabbed a finger at the bowl. "So I'm not gonna show up where you are."
Valtryek stopped going for the middle. It swung out wide and rode the slope, light and quick, and instead of ramming the horn head on it slashed across the front of it, close enough that Ukyo had to turn to cover, then it was already gone to the far side before the counter could come down.
Ukyo turned Unicrest to chase it. For the first time all battle, he was the one reacting to Valt.
"Much better," he said, and the taunt had gone out of his voice.
Valtryek hit from a side the horn wasn't pointed at, peeled off before Ukyo could line up the counter, came back from somewhere new. Unicrest was still solid, but the whole thing was built to punish a blader who came to it, and Valt had finally quit coming to it. The hits started to land for real, shaving Unicrest's spin down a little more on every pass it couldn't answer.
"This is the last one!" Valt yelled. "Go!"
Valtryek dropped off the high lip of the bowl with everything it had left and caught Unicrest at the base of the horn, where all that weight couldn't save it, and knocked it clean off its line. Unicrest skated out wide, clipped the rim, and stopped.
Valtryek kept turning in the middle. Slow, nearly spent. But up.
Nobody said anything for a second. Then Valt threw both fists in the air and yelled loud enough that it came back off the far rocks.
Ukyo crossed to the rim and picked Unicrest up, turned it over once in his fingers, then looked at Valt for a long moment.
"You changed in the middle of a battle," he said. "Most people can't do that. They decide who they are before they ever launch, and then they go and lose as that person, every single time, and never once work out why." Something crossed his face that might have been a smile if it had lasted longer than half a second. "You started that battle as one blader and finished it as a better one. I underestimated you. It's a bad habit of mine. I keep trying to put it down."
"So does that mean we can go again?" Valt was bouncing on his feet already. "Right now? Best of three? I'll even let you launch first."
"It means I'll be around." Ukyo clipped Unicrest away and stepped back toward the trees. "Watching all of you. Some of you sooner than the rest." His eyes came to me one more time on the way past, just long enough to land, and then he stepped in among the trunks.
I looked away for half a second. When I looked back, he was gone.
"Where'd he go?!" Valt spun in a full circle. "He was right there, I was looking right at him!"
"He does that." Xander was already heading back toward the bowls. "Don't go after him. You'll wander those trees till dark and come back with nothing. And we're not done for the day, in case you were hoping."
Everybody groaned. I didn't, because I was still looking at the patch of dirt where Unicrest had stopped.
Valt won by changing in the middle of it, dropping the one move he always falls back on. That stuck with me more than I expected. Coming in hard from every angle is the best thing I've got, and a counter like Ukyo's is built to turn that straight back on me. The day before, I'd held the wings back against Shu and thought I had the lesson. Watching Valt, I think I got more of it.
Somewhere out there was a blader who'd want me to throw everything at him, and then make me pay for every bit of it.
I clipped Drago into his case and went to take my spot at the next bowl.
Plenty of swings to learn before then.