Chapter 51 — Sundown
Valt stood at the stadium and the arena found him. Ten thousand faces, four camera drones, his own head three meters tall on the big screen, and his shoulders climbed up toward his ears one centimeter per heartbeat.
"He's going to be sick," Wakiya said. Quiet, for Wakiya. He'd been quiet since battle two.
"No," Shu said. "Watch his hands."
I was already watching them. Everything above Valt's elbows was pure stage fright. Below them, nothing was. His hands set Valtryek on the launcher calm and sure, winding the cord like he was alone in the Bey Club after school. The stadium was the one place in the world that had never been too big a crowd for him.
Across the rim, Zac raised one hand, and the arena went up like he'd flipped a switch.
"Valt Aoi." His voice carried without the microphones even trying. "Captain. Last time we battled, I promised the cameras a show."
"Last time you beat me!" Valt yelled back, and his voice held, all the way across. "But this time I'm gonna beat you!"
"Details, just details. We will see what happens, Mister Aoi."
"Ready. Set."
"LET IT RIP!"
Zillion Zeutron dropped dead center, gold catching every light in the building, and parked there like it intended to stay the night. Valtryek hit the bank running and attacked on the first lap.
The first hit landed head-on, and Zeutron gave half a step under it and settled straight back onto the mark. Valtryek circled and came in again off the slope, and Zeutron rolled with the contact and let the bank carry Valtryek away. The third pass came in low and flat and got the same answer as the first two. Three attacks in, and Zeutron hadn't moved a hand's width off the center.
"Why won't you MOVE!" Valt shouted across the stadium.
"Why would I?" Zac said, and his eyes never left the Beys.
The crowd found a chant. ZAC. ZAC. ZAC. His name, ten thousand voices, and he didn't look up at them once. There was no wave, no wink, no slow turn for the drones, nothing, from the man I'd watched blow kisses in the middle of his own launch at the festival.
"He's not performing," Shu said beside me.
"No," I said. "He's making sure. That festival loss is still in there somewhere, and he's decided nobody takes him by surprise twice. Look at how he's standing. That's not a showman, that's a man guarding a door."
Valtryek kept working. Around, in, bounce, around, and every pass came back with a little less speed than it took in, and Zac watched it all through narrowed eyes until he decided the guarding was done.
"SOLSTICE BOOST!"
Gold light erupted out of Zeutron, and above the stadium the sun rose. The avatar came up out of the glare, rings turning around a burning core, rays reaching all the way to the top rows, and the same gold flooded down over Zac until he shone like his own poster. Zeutron surged outward from the center in a wave.
It caught Valtryek mid-approach, at the worst possible moment, and threw it backwards up the slope with the rim rushing to meet it. Valt made a sound that was half word and half yelp.
Valtryek hit the top of the curve and hung there, one edge over open air, and the whole arena inhaled at the same time.
It came down on the inside, by less than a finger's width.
"That's the match," Wakiya breathed next to me. "The next one like that finishes it."
Zeutron slid back to the center mark and parked again. On the big screen, Valt's face was white. His eyes went from Valtryek, limping a slow lap along the outer bank, to Zac, still watching nothing but the stadium, and then I saw my captain do the thing I could never coach into him and would never coach out of him.
He stopped thinking.
His shoulders came down off his ears. The crumpled lineup card fell out of his pocket and he didn't even notice it go. He looked at Zeutron sitting in its safe center, and he laughed. He actually laughed, alone, in front of ten thousand people.
"You're not even having fun!" he shouted. "I've SEEN how you battle, and this isn't it! Where's the guy from the festival? Bring HIM out, and I'll beat HIM!"
The arena went strange and quiet. Something crossed Zac's face that no camera in the building had a name for.
From their bench, Gou's voice cut through the hush with the safe call. "Zac! Stay on the center! Hold it and this is finished!"
Zac heard him. And then Zac did what Zac has done with every instruction anyone has ever given him in his entire life.
He rolled his neck, and he grinned at Valt, and it was a completely different grin from the one on the posters. "Okay, captain Aoi. Him. For you? Him."
Zeutron left the center.
Rantaro nearly lost his lollipop. "He gave up the middle! He's a stamina type, why would he EVER give up the middle?"
"Because holding the middle wasn't beating Valt," I said. "It was beating the replay in his head. Watch him now. Now he battles."
Zeutron swung up onto the bank and ran the rim, one full showman's lap that pulled the front rows out of their seats, and on the way past it flicked its hips into Valtryek and knocked it sideways, and the crowd screamed, and Zac finally raised his face to them and smiled like the lights had been waiting for him.
"Keep up, captain!" he called across the stadium. "The cameras love a chase!"
"YOU keep up!" Valt yelled back.
"He's so bad at trash talk," Rantaro said, somewhere between pain and pride. "He's winning the battle and losing the interview."
Then Zac went to work. Zeutron feinted inside, and Valtryek bit on it and turned to meet an attack that was no longer there. Zeutron rolled off the feint, came around the blind side, caught Valtryek's flank full-on and drove it straight at the pocket, and for the second time in the battle, Valt's whole tournament hung over open air. Valtryek scraped the lip of the pocket and spun off it, alive by the width of its own layer.
The sound off the stands came in two waves, one for the danger and one for the escape.
"He's showing off with every exchange now." Shu's pen was moving again. "Every flourish costs him spin. If Valtryek is still standing two minutes from now, Zac runs dry first, and he knows it."
He knew it better than anyone in the building, and he didn't care. Zeutron danced and feinted and ran the rim for the crowd and hunted Valt through every second of it, and Valt met him laughing, swinging Valtryek in wide reckless arcs, the two of them battling like the tournament was something happening to other people.
But Shu's two minutes were counting down, and everyone could feel where it was heading. One more real chance for Zac, one for Valt, and the battle would belong to whoever landed theirs first.
Zeutron cut inside off another feint, hunting the finish. Valtryek dodged it by nothing, and then Valt pulled his Bey out wide, up the bank, the wrong direction, away from Zeutron entirely. At their bench Gou shouted a warning, because it looked like a retreat.
It wasn't a retreat. It was a runway.
"VALTRYEK! WINGED LAUNCH!"
Blue exploded out of the stadium. The Valkyrie rose over the arena with its wings thrown wide and its sword up, turning every light in the building sky-colored, and the same blue tore down Valt's arms and lifted his hair like wind. Valtryek hit the stadium wall at full speed and used it as a ramp.
Off the wall, airborne, a blue arc over the whole stadium, and there was nothing Zeutron's beautiful footwork could do about any of it, because no defense ever drilled covers the attack that comes from the sky. Valtryek dropped onto Zeutron's flank with the entire building's held breath behind it and drove it up the far slope, over the rim, and out.
Zillion Zeutron landed in the gutter, gold and spinning and done.
Ring-out. Battle three. Match, Beigoma.
The sound that came down off those stands had weight to it. Valt stood in the middle of it with both fists in the air, screaming nothing in particular, and then the bench hit him. Rantaro first, then Wakiya, who would deny to his grave that he ran down the steps, then Shu, who walked, but walked fast.
I came down last and got there in time to hear Zac lean across the rim, Bey in hand.
"That," he said to Valt, "was the best loss of my career. I want the rematch at Individuals, and I want it deep in the bracket, so train like you mean it." He looked past Valt, at me, and tipped an invisible hat. "You too, festival boy. Everyone keeps taking my spotlight. I should start charging rent."
He turned back to his bench. Gou stood there with his arms no longer folded, and the two of them looked at each other across ten meters of floor.
Gou bowed. It was small and stiff, maybe five degrees, but it was there, and half the arena saw it.
Zac's laugh rolled all the way up to the cheap seats. He slung an arm around his captain's shoulders and steered him toward the tunnel, already talking, and whatever he was saying, Gou was listening to it.
Our own walk to the tunnel took three times longer than it should have, because Valt kept stopping.
"Did you guys SEE it though?" Fourth time he'd asked. "The wall, and then the JUMP, and then Zac's FACE..."
"We were sitting right there," Wakiya said. "We have eyes. All of us."
"But did you SEE it?"
"Somebody take his launcher away," Rantaro said, "before he tries to Winged Launch off the tunnel wall and breaks his arm before the semifinal."
"I wasn't going to." Valt paused. "Okay, I was thinking about it a little."
Shu fell in beside him and said, quietly, in the voice he saves for things he actually means, "The exit angle off the wall was perfect. Two degrees flatter and Zeutron survives it. You didn't measure that. You just knew it."
Valt looked at him, and for a second the whole bouncing mess of him went still. "Yeah," he said. "I just knew it."
"That's the part nobody can scout," I said.
Wakiya made a sound in his throat, worked his jaw, and finally forced it out like it cost him money. "It was adequate."
Valt lit up like the big screen. Coming from Wakiya, that was a trophy with his name engraved on it, and everybody in the tunnel knew it, including Wakiya, who was already walking faster to get away from what he'd just said. Rantaro dug out his bag of lollipops and went down the line handing them out, one for Valt, one for Shu, who took it to everyone's surprise, one pressed into my hand without a word.
The evening air outside the arena was cool and smelled like rain that hadn't started yet, and behind us the building was still roaring about a battle we'd won.