Chapter 39 — Loud Enough
Valt had launched Valtryek into the practice net eleven times, and eleven times he had walked over to pick it up without looking at the readout.
The door opened without a knock, and Ryo stood in it long enough to see all of that before Valt heard him. The bouncing back foot. The hand working at the back of his neck. The dull mountain scuff on Valtryek that he hadn't buffed out.
The change came over Valt in half a second. His spine snapped straight, the hand dropped off his neck, and the grin came up like someone had thrown a switch behind his face.
"Ryo! There you are!"
He spun on the bench and threw both arms wide, Valtryek still clutched in one fist.
"Front row seat to me punching my ticket, right? Because this one's gonna be EASY. Ukyo's good, I'm not saying he's not good, but I already cracked him once. A thing doesn't get harder to crack the second time. It gets easier." He was up off the bench now, pacing it out. "I've got the whole battle mapped. Start to finish. And at the finish he's looking up at the lights wondering what hit him. You should sit close."
Ryo let him get all the way to the end of it. Then he came in, let the door swing shut, and leaned his shoulder against the lockers.
"You launched at that net eleven times before I opened the door," he said. "I counted from the hallway. Eleven launches, and you didn't look at the readout once."
The grin flickered.
"That's not a guy with the battle mapped. That's a guy who can't hold still long enough to read his own launches." He nodded at Valtryek. "And you've still got the mountain scuff on your layer. You buff that thing after every battle, Valt. Every one. You left this one so you'd have something to rub when your hands ran out of jobs."
The grin didn't make it back up this time.
"I saw all of it before you saw me. You can put it away. It's just me in here."
The grin held one more breath, the way a thrown ball hangs at the top of its arc. Then it came down, and Valt's shoulders came down with it. He sat back on the bench and turned Valtryek over in his hands and stopped looking at Ryo.
"It's not him," he said. Slower now, each word lifted up off the floor. "It's not even about Ukyo."
He turned the Bey over again.
"On the mountain I almost lost. Everyone tells it like I beat him fair. I didn't. I charged him three times and he turned all three back on me and I was finished. Valtryek woke up at the last second and dragged me out of a fire I walked straight into." His thumb found the scuff. "That's the only reason there's a story."
The arena noise rose and fell against the wall. Ryo didn't fill the gap.
"And now there's this door," Valt said. "Behind it is Nationals. And behind Nationals are people who don't get pulled out of fires by luck, because they never walk into the fire in the first place." He looked up, and there was something raw in it. "If my best is barely scraping past a guy I already fought, then what am I even doing in line for that door? Maybe I don't belong on the other side of it."
Ryo let that one sit a second so Valt would know it had landed somewhere instead of bouncing off.
"You think the people waiting at Nationals don't walk into fires." He pushed off the lockers. "Valt. They ARE the fire. Every one of them got there by walking into someone bigger and not stopping. Nobody gets handed that door for being tidy about it."
He crouched in front of the bench so Valt had to look at him.
"And Valtryek didn't wake up out of nowhere to save you. It woke up the exact second you stopped throwing yourself at his face and started thinking. That wasn't luck arriving late. That was you doing the thing that beats him, and the Bey answered because you earned the answer."
Valt's hands had gone still around the Bey.
"You keep calling it luck because luck's easier to live with than the truth," Ryo said. "And the truth is you're already good enough to be scared of. You just haven't decided to believe it."
"Good enough to be scared of," Valt repeated, quiet.
"The people behind that door aren't scared of a kid who scrapes by. They're scared of the one who keeps reaching no matter how many times it doesn't open, because that's the one who eventually pulls it off the hinges." Ryo held out his fist. "I've watched you do that since the day I met you. You have never once stopped reaching. That terrifies the right people, trust me."
Valt looked at the fist.
"So go terrify Ukyo first. His whole game's the counter. Unicrest sits low and waits because it wants you coming straight in, so it can take your speed and drive it through the floor." Ryo's voice dropped, steady. "Don't give it the straight line. Circle him. Make him spend the Alicorn on empty air. He gets one good counter, and the second he throws it at nothing, the whole bowl is yours."
Valt knocked his knuckles against the fist hard enough that it stung them both. When he came up off the bench, the slow weight had gone out of him.
"On purpose this time," he said, and shoved Valtryek's launcher into his belt. "Yeah. Okay." The grin came back, different from the one at the door. "Go find a seat and be LOUD. If I can't pick your voice out of that whole crowd I'm taking it personally."
"You'll hear me. I'm going to yell your name wrong on purpose so you've got something to be mad about."
"Do that and I'll win twice as fast just to come up there and shut you up myself."
---
Ryo found his seat in the third row with the group, close enough to the floor to see the lacquer on the bowl. Rantaro had his feet up on the rail and a bag of something fried in his lap. Ken sat with Keru on one knee and Beus on the other, the small puppet leaning out over the rail as if it had bought its own ticket.
"He's twitchy," Rantaro said around a mouthful. "He bounces on his back foot when he's twitchy. Watch, he's doing it right now."
"He's done being twitchy," Ryo said, and took the aisle seat. "Watch his feet, not his hands. The hands always move and they tell you nothing. The feet tell you the second he's actually decided something."
Ken turned Beus toward the floor and the big puppet dipped its head in a slow, solemn nod, granting Valt permission to begin. Rantaro snorted and flicked a piece of his snack at it.
Across the bowl, on the far benches, a knot of bladers from the other block sat watching. Ryo's eye went over them once out of habit and caught on Wakiya. Arms folded, chin up. He was not watching the floor, though. He was watching the third row. He was watching Ryo.
Ryo held the look. Wakiya did not glance away the way most people did when they got caught at it. He let Ryo see that he had been seen, then turned back to the floor slowly, the way a person turns when they want you to know it was a choice and not a flinch.
So that was where it sat. Wakiya had lost to him at District, two nothing, and he had carried the whole thing all the way up here. Tomorrow he would walk onto that floor against Shu with all of it loaded behind his launcher, and he would aim every bit of it at a boy who was not even on the card. Ryo filed the thought and looked back down, where Valt was walking out under the lights.
---
The announcer's voice rolled over the speakers, bright and fast.
"Block C final, and the winner books their ticket to the National stage tonight! In the red corner, the boy who's been turning heads all tournament, it's Valt Aoi and Valtryek! And across from him, a Sword Flames blader who has dropped exactly one battle the whole way here, Ukyo Ibuki and Uber Unicrest! First to three points takes it, and one of these two is going to Nationals! Bladers, to your positions!"
Ukyo set his stance low and angled, launcher pointed down at the ridge. He did not look at Valt once. The whole line of him was turned inward, shoulders curled, holding something still by force.
Valt grinned across the bowl at him anyway, wide and easy, and Ukyo's jaw went tight.
"Three."
Valt rolled his wrist to loosen it.
"Two."
He set his angle wide, off-center, aimed at the rim instead of the middle.
"One. Let it rip!"
Both bladers ripped. Valtryek hit the slope and Ukyo's hand snapped through a half-beat behind, the way a counter-type always launches, late on purpose, reading before it moves.
Valt did not go for him.
Valtryek peeled wide and rode the high rim, fast and loose, carving a full circle around the bowl without once cutting toward the center. Down on the ridge Uber Unicrest sat heavy and low, turning in place, its thick defensive ring catching the light.
"And Valt's not engaging!" The surprise was plain in the announcer's voice. "He's hugging the rim, keeping his distance. This is not the head-down Valt Aoi who tore through the earlier rounds. What is he waiting for?"
"He's making him wait," Ken said quietly, and Keru's small head bobbed along on his knee.
Ukyo's patience went first. Unicrest broke from the center and lunged up the slope to meet Valtryek, its layer tilting up into the move it had ridden the whole way up the bracket, the counter that takes an attacker's speed and drives it into the floor. The Alicorn.
It met nothing.
Valt had already cut up and away, off the line Unicrest had thrown itself along, and the counter closed on empty air. For one beat Unicrest hung high on the slope with all its weight committed forward and nothing in front of it to bite.
Valt's heel came down hard. Now.
Valtryek dropped off the rim like a stone, every bit of speed it had banked across that circling minute coming due at once, and came in across the open flank. It hit Unicrest square in the side the counter had left bare, and the crack went off the back walls of the hall. Unicrest skipped, caught on the ridge, and burst, parts scattering across the bowl.
The light above the stadium flashed.
"BURST FINISH! Two points to Valt Aoi, and just like that he is one finish away from Nationals!"
The third row was up and roaring, but it was not over and Ryo knew it. Down on the floor Valt did not celebrate either. He scooped Valtryek out of the bowl and walked back to his corner with his eyes already on Ukyo, who was kneeling in the wreck of his Bey, reassembling it with hands that had gone very precise.
"He's not going to fall for the same thing twice," Ryo said, half to Ken, half to himself. "Watch. He won't commit now."
He was right. Round two opened and Unicrest hit the bowl and went straight to the dead center, low and tight, and it did not move. Valtryek circled and circled, baiting, dipping in and pulling back, and Unicrest simply turned in place and refused every invitation. Ukyo had stopped trying to counter. He was going to sit on his stamina and starve the round to a stalemate, betting that Valt could not hold his patience twice in a row, that sooner or later the old Valt would come roaring back and throw himself onto the wall.
"Come on," Rantaro muttered. "Come on, he's just sitting there, this is going nowhere."
"It's going exactly where Valt wants it," Ryo said, and felt something settle in his own chest as he watched. "Ukyo's betting Valt charges. Two months ago he'd have been right."
On the floor Valt's jaw was set, but his feet had stopped bouncing. He kept circling, controlled, refusing to take the bait Ukyo was now offering him in reverse. A straight charge at that dead-center wall was exactly what Ukyo was waiting for, because Unicrest's horn would turn into the hit and throw it back, and one solid charge into the horn meant Valtryek bouncing off and Ukyo taking the opening. The seconds stretched. Then Valt's expression changed, the puzzle clicking over behind his eyes.
He dropped his launcher hand low and flat, parallel to the bowl, the stance Ryo had seen him drill a hundred times and almost never trust under pressure.
"There it is," Ryo said, and came halfway up out of his seat without meaning to. "Flash Launch."
Valtryek dipped down off the rim and its tip bit into the outer edge of the bowl, and instead of charging the center it ran the rim itself, and every lap around the curve fed it speed it had no business holding. The whine of it climbed over the crowd. When it finally came off the rim it did not come once. It came as a blitz, hammering Unicrest from the flank, peeling away before the horn could swing around to meet it, lapping the bowl and coming back in from a new angle while Ukyo was still turning to find where the last hit had gone. The horn kept reaching for a Bey that was already somewhere else.
"He can't catch it!" the announcer was shouting. "Valtryek is too fast for the counter, Unicrest can't get its guard around in time, and it's being driven to the wall!"
Each pass shoved Unicrest a little further up the slope. Ukyo tried to plant it, tried to angle the horn into the path, but the path kept moving, and the defensive ring that had eaten every clean hit all tournament could not eat a hit that never landed in the same place twice. On the fifth pass Valtryek caught it square on the rise and ran it the last stretch up the slope, over the ridge, and off the lip of the bowl.
Unicrest landed outside the bowl and rolled to a stop, still spinning, on the floor of the hall.
"RING-OUT! The point that does it! Valt Aoi takes the match three to nothing, a clean sweep, and Valt Aoi is going to NATIONALS!"
The third row came up as one. Rantaro's snack went over the rail in a spray and he never looked at it go. Ken had both puppets over his head, Beus booming across the hall, Keru shrieking beside it. Ryo was on his feet with both hands cupped at his mouth, his shout swallowed whole in the wall of sound, his throat going raw anyway.
Down on the floor Valt caught Valtryek out of the air and dropped into a crouch with it pressed to his chest, head down, shoulders heaving. He stayed there a beat longer than a winner usually does. Then he came up, and instead of turning for the crowd he turned for the third row, found Ryo through all of it, and pointed at him with the Bey in his fist, grinning so hard it looked like it hurt. Ryo pointed back. Whatever Valt yelled across the bowl was lost in the roar, but his mouth shaped it clear enough. On purpose.
Across the way Ukyo walked out to where Unicrest had stopped and crouched and gathered it up in both hands. He looked at it for a long moment before he stood. He did not look up into the stands. He carried his Bey off the floor, and the corner where he had sat with his eyes shut stayed empty.
---
Ryo sat back down as the crew came out to reset the bowl. His chest was still going from the shouting. Beside him Rantaro had given up on the snack entirely and was just bellowing Valt's name, no words left in it, only volume.
Ryo let his eyes drift back to the far benches one last time. Wakiya had sat through all of it with his arms folded, and he was looking straight back.
"This next match, Shu and Wakiya, that's going to be one to watch," Ryo said to Rantaro and Ken. "I hope Shu takes it. I want to battle him again on the big stage."
"Wakiya's been unbearable all week," Rantaro groaned, hauling himself up off the rail. "If Shu shuts him up I'll buy the whole row lunch."
Ken lifted Beus, and the big puppet boomed in its low, solemn voice. "Shu Kurenai does not lose to noise." Then Keru popped up beside it, shrill and bouncing. "But Wakiya's gonna SCREAM about it either way!"
Ryo huffed a laugh and got to his feet. "That's all for later. Come on, let's go find Valt before the crowd swallows him."