Chapter 42 — Sunrise
Zac's festival was loud before we were even through the gate.
Music from somewhere we couldn't see, food stalls breathing smoke and sugar, kids running past with light-up launchers and Zac's grinning face printed on everything that would hold ink. Valt walked into the middle of it and turned in a slow circle with his mouth open.
"Woah, this is GREAT!" Valt said, excitement all over him. "I love this already, all these people, and look, look..." He pointed and came right up in my face.
"Yeah, Valt, what's over there," I said, with a lot less excitement on my face.I don't mind these kinds of events, but all these people and the screaming, omg get me home and some training already.
"Ryo, why aren't you excited at all for this?" Why does he even need to ask.
"I just don't like all these people here, a bit too busy for me."
Now he looked confused. "Less people? I've always had the motto, the more the merrier. I like it when it's lively, just a lot of people around."
Yeah, right. "Says the guy who can't even speak in front of a group of more than ten people."
Now I was smiling. Got you there.
"HEYY, we don't talk about that here, not everyone needs to know, okay! And the place I was pointing to is a nice looking food stall, so now I'm off." He stuck his tongue out and ran off.
Such a child sometimes.
We let the crowd carry us for a while. I kept half an eye out the whole time, not for anything in particular, just the habit of reading a room that had this many strong bladers folded into it. You could feel them in it if you knew how to look. Most of the crowd was here for the show. A few were here for the same reason we were.
I spotted one of them by a stall near the stadium wall, leaning against it with his arms crossed and a stick of something grilled forgotten in one hand, watching the crowd the way a wall watches a road.
Xander.
He saw me about the same time I saw him, and his face split into that grin that always looked one size too big for a normal day.
"There he is." He pushed off the wall. "I was wondering if Zac actually got you to come. The District kid." He looked me over once and nodded to himself. "Still owe you a real one, you know. The mountain doesn't count, that was a draw and you know it."
"It counts to me," I said. "A draw with you is worth keeping."
He laughed, loud enough that Valt's head turned. "Smart answer. Save it. Nationals, you and me, no mountain, no weather, just the floor." Then he caught sight of Valt coming over, and the grin changed into something older and warmer. "There he is. Aoi."
"Xander!" Valt collided with him in a half-hug that Xander returned with one arm, the other still holding the grilled stick out of the way. "You're here, I should've known you'd be here, this is so like you to just be leaning on a wall like you own the place."
"I do own the wall. I called it." Xander shoved him off, but he was smiling, and it reached his eyes in a way it hadn't with me. "Didn't think I'd see you again this soon. What's it been, a couple weeks since the mountain?"
"Long enough that I missed you, you big idiot." Valt was beaming now, the festival lights catching him, and for a second the thing he'd been carrying all day lifted clean off his face. "Didn't think you were the festival type."
"I'm not. Zac asked. You don't say no to Zac, you'll find that out." Xander cuffed him on the shoulder, gentler than the clap he'd given before. For a moment the two of them just stood there grinning at each other, two who'd grown up swinging launchers in the same dirt and come out the other side at the top of two different mountains.
Then Xander's eyes moved past us, toward the stadium, and the easy thing in his face folded back up. "Better find seats, both of you. He's about to start, and you don't want to be standing when Zac the Sunrise turns the lights on. Trust me."
---
Zac's arena wasn't a tournament bowl. It was a stage.
The stadium sat in the middle of it like a jewel in a setting, and the seats ran up steep on every side, already packed, already roaring. When the lights came down the whole crowd made one sound, and then a single spotlight hit the center of the floor, and he was just there, like he'd been folded out of the light itself.
Zac the Sunrise.
I'll give him this. The pictures didn't do it. He stood in the center of that spotlight with a launcher in one hand and a rose in the other, and he lifted the rose to the crowd, and the noise that came back could have lifted the roof.
"Thank you for coming to play with me," he said, and his voice carried to every seat without him seeming to push it. "Here's how today works. I'm going to take on a few of the bladers who've earned their way into this crowd, one at a time, right here, for all of you. No brackets. No stakes. Just the best the country's got, and me, and a floor."
The crowd ate that up.
"And speaking of the best." He lifted a hand, and the spotlight split off him and ran up into the seats. "You all know the Supreme Four. Four of us hold the top of this sport. I'm one." The light found a figure leaning at the rail of an upper box, arms crossed, that big grin already on. "Xander Shakadera is another, and he's here tonight, say hello, Xander." The crowd roared and Xander raised one lazy hand without uncrossing his arms.
"There's Shu Kurenai." The light jumped again, to a white-haired boy sitting alone near the top, apart from everyone, who did not wave and only tipped his head a fraction at the light. "Came up the hard way. Don't let the quiet fool you."
"And." Zac let it hang, and the spotlight climbed slowly, and the crowd's noise dropped with it. "The strongest of all of us. He doesn't come to things like this. He came to this one." The light stopped on a white-haired figure standing alone at the back, hands in his pockets, who did not so much as blink at it. "Lui Shirosagi, everyone."
The applause that went up was real, but it had a nervous edge under it, like clapping for weather.
Lui didn't react at all. The light gave up on him after a moment and slid back down to Zac.
"So." Zac turned a slow circle, working the room back up. "Let's begin. I want the boy who tore through his Regional block without dropping a single point. Valt Aoi, where are you?"
The light found Valt, and the whole place turned to look at him, and Valt's face did about four things at once before it landed on pure joy.
"ME?" he shouted, already on his feet. "He means me, right? He means me!"
"He means you," I said. "Go."
He went down those steps two at a time.
---
Down on the floor Zac met him like he'd known him for years, both hands out, that smile turned all the way up.
"Valt Aoi. I watched your Regional block twice." He said it like a gift, and Valt, who'd been carrying a stone in his chest all day, lit up despite himself. "That second round, the way you read the counter and came in from the side instead of straight on. That was good. That was really good. Where'd you learn to hold back like that?"
"A friend taught me." Valt's voice caught on the word, just slightly, but he covered it with a grin. "I'm still learning it."
"Aren't we all." Zac stepped back to his end of the floor and spun his launcher around one finger and caught it, and the crowd ate it up. "Then show me. Don't go easy because I'm me. I'll know, and I'll be insulted, and you don't want to insult a man in front of his own crowd."
"Wouldn't dream of it." But Valt's hands had already gone tight on his launcher, and I could see it from the seats, the brightness sitting on top of something heavier that hadn't gone anywhere.
He shouldn't have stepped onto that floor today. I'd known it since the station. He'd been carrying Ken all day, hiding it under the bright and the noise, and the thing about Valt is that whatever he's feeling ends up in his hands. The worst place in the world to stand against a Supreme Four blader is with your hands full of something else.
And Zac saw it. I watched him see it, that flicker behind the smile as they set their feet, the man reading exactly what Valt had brought onto his floor.
They took their places.
"Three. Two. One."
"Let it rip!"
Valtryek came off hard and fast, blue and bright, and went straight for the center the way Valt always did when he wanted to end a thing before his own doubt could catch him. Zeutron met it dead in the middle, low and heavy and patient, and it did not move.
It just took the hit. And the next one. And the next.
"And the Sunrise stands his ground!" the announcer roared. "That's Zillion Zeutron, ladies and gentlemen, the wall that doesn't fall! How long can the Regional star keep swinging?"
"Why isn't it doing anything?" Rantaro leaned forward. "Valt's hitting it clean every time and it just sits there."
"Because it's got moving weights inside it, weights, that keep it level. You really need to hit it hard to knock it off there, and on top of that it's a stamina type. Learn from this match. Look at what Zac is doing," I said.
"So Valt should stop hitting it."
"Yeah, Valt should stop hitting it." I watched the blue blur throw itself at the wall again. "He won't. He can't think straight right now. His head's still with Ken,he never got to say a normal goodbye, so this match he's going to lose."
Rantaro went quiet. We both did.
Down on the floor Valt kept throwing himself at the wall, because the wall was easier than what was in his head.
Zac let him spend it all. Then he raised one hand, and the crowd went quiet the way only his crowd could.
"You're a beautiful blader," Zac called across the floor, and he meant it, you could hear that he meant it. "But you're not here. Wherever the rest of you is tonight, I hope it's worth it." He spun once on his heel, light as a dancer, and brought the launcher across his body. "Let me wake you up. Solstice Boost!"
Zeutron lit gold. The light poured up out of it until a great wreathed shape stood over the floor, a thing of rings and rays like a small sun on a stand, and the gold ran up off the Bey and wrapped around Zac where he stood, and Zeutron stopped being a wall.
It moved.
All that hoarded stamina turned at once into speed, and Zeutron came off the center like an attack type, circling the rim, faster every lap, and Valtryek had nothing left in the tank to answer it. Valt had spent his whole spin on the wall. Zeutron came around and hit him clean in the side, once, and the blue light guttered, and Valtryek wobbled, caught, and stopped.
Not a burst. Worse, almost. It just ran out, and lay down, and stopped.
"SPIN FINISH! Zac the Sunrise takes it, and the Regional star goes home early!"
The crowd loved him for it. Of course they did.
Down on the floor Valt knelt and picked Valtryek up out of the dish, and he didn't look up at the seats, and he didn't look at Zac. He just looked at the Bey in his hand for a long moment, and his shoulders said everything his face was trying not to.
---
He came up the steps slow.
The crowd had already moved on, the spotlight already swinging somewhere else, the noise already rolling toward whatever Zac did next. Nobody boos at a festival. They just stop looking at you, and they were already not looking at Valt.
He sat down next to me without a word and turned Valtryek over in his hands.
I placed a hand on his shoulder. "Valt, it's okay..."
He slapped my hand away. "Don't." He didn't look up from the Bey. "I know. I felt it the whole time. I just couldn't get out of my own head." He let out a breath that shook on the way. "Some captain, right? Can't even hold it together for one show match."
"One of your friends moved this week without a warning, without a normal way to say goodbye. I get it. We get it."
"NO. NOT OUT THERE." Now he looked at me, wet eyes and mad at himself. "I let Zac down, you down, Shu down, all of you. I didn't even try. I feel really bad about it."
I was still trying to find an answer to that when the air beside us changed.
I felt him before I saw him. A boy our age had come down the aisle without a sound, and he stood at the end of our row with his hands in his pockets, and he was not watching the floor where Zac was working the crowd. He was watching Valt.
White hair. Pale eyes that didn't seem to hold any heat at all. I knew the face from a screen, a still figure on a broadcast I'd half caught once.
Lui Shirosagi.
"That," Lui said, and there was a low edge under the quiet of it, "was pathetic."
Valt's head came up.
"You think you're owed a place on that floor?" Lui's eyes didn't move off him. "He went out there and gave you everything he had. That's what the floor is for. And you handed him half a blader and a head full of somewhere else. You spat on it." He pulled one hand out of his pocket, and his fingers had curled without him seeming to notice. "I watched you blade once, on a screen. You made me look twice, and I do not look twice. So I know what that was down there, and it wasn't you. You chose to bring less than you are, and that is the one thing I will not forgive."
"I wasn't." Valt's voice cracked on it.
"You were." Flat, hard, no give in it at all. "Do it again and I'll make sure you regret it. Not him, not anyone, and especially not me." He turned to go, then stopped, and looked back, and the cold in his eyes had something burning at the bottom of it. "Nationals. You bring all of it, every scrap, or you stay off my floor. I will not waste my time on the half of you. It's an insult, and I burst people for less."
And then he was gone back up the aisle, as quiet as he'd come, and Valt sat very still beside me with Valtryek dead in his hands, and for the first time since I'd known him he didn't have a single word to throw at anything.