Chapter 47
I walked into the gym expecting to be the first one there, and instead I found Valt standing at a whiteboard he had dragged out of storage, covered top to bottom in what I could only assume was a training schedule, because it definitely wasn't handwriting.
There were columns, or things trying to be columns. There were arrows that looped back into themselves. In the corner he had drawn Valtryek wearing a crown, and the crown was better than any of the letters. He had also, somewhere along the way, gotten marker on his cheek.
"Ryo! Good, you're early!" He spun around and smacked the board with his palm. "I made a plan for the whole two weeks! Stamina in the mornings, launch drills after school, practice matches on the weekend, and LOOK, I drew where the trophy goes!"
A week ago this boy had begged us on his knees not to make him captain. Now he was up before seven drawing crowned Beyblades. He wasn't leading yet. He was compensating at full volume, and I've watched enough brand-new managers in my old life to know how thin the ice under that is.
"It's a good plan," I said, and meant it, once I mentally rotated some of the arrows. "I also think the plan survives about eleven minutes of contact with Wakiya, so enjoy these eleven minutes."
"He signed the letter! He's on the team now!"
"He signed a letter, Valt. He didn't sign over his opinion of you."
The others trickled in over the next ten minutes. Shu with his gear bag already unzipped, Rantaro with a melon bun for now and a second one for later, and Wakiya last, walking in like he was inspecting a property he had no intention of buying.
Valt bounced through the schedule at double speed. Stamina rotations first, then paired launch drills. Shu nodded along. Rantaro saluted with the spare bun. It worked, for exactly as long as it took Valt to read out the pairings.
"Wakiya, you're with Rantaro on the endurance dish!"
"No, I'm not."
The gym went quiet in that specific way where everyone suddenly gets very interested in their own launcher.
Wakiya crossed his arms. "Let me explain something, since apparently nobody else here is going to say it out loud. I accepted you as captain on paper. That was the deal, and I keep my deals. But paper doesn't make you smarter than me, and I'm not going to burn two weeks running drills invented by a guy whose match plan has always been 'launch hard and scream.' You got voted captain because your friends like you. That's a popularity contest, not a qualification."
I felt my mouth start to open and made it stay shut.
It physically itched. I had the whole speech loaded and ready, and I knew exactly where to put the knife in, because I had done it once already in the club room and it had worked. That was the problem. It had worked when I did it. If I stepped in front of Valt every time Wakiya pushed, then the team would have a captain and also a separate person everyone actually listened to, and teams like that don't lose in the finals. They lose in the first round, quietly, while everyone smiles for the cameras.
So I kept my mouth shut and looked at Valt instead. So did Shu. So did Rantaro, mid-bite.
Valt stood there under all of it, and I watched him almost fold. His eyes did a quick lap around the room looking for backup and found four people deliberately not providing any. His shoulders started to drop, and for one bad second I thought we were going to get an apology.
Then his whole face scrunched up, and instead of an apology, Valt exploded.
"FINE! You know what? Fine! You think my drills are dumb? Then battle Rantaro right now, and if you win, you can make your own schedule and I'll never bother you again!"
Wakiya snorted. "That's not a challenge, that's a gift."
"Without your counter!"
That stopped him. It stopped everyone. I'm fairly sure it stopped Valt too, judging by his face, which looked like it was hearing the sentence at the same time the rest of us were.
"What?" Wakiya said flatly.
"No Shield Crash, no Hyper Shield Crash, nothing! You sit in that center and you win on defense alone!" Valt was jabbing his finger at the stadium now, running on pure momentum. "Because everybody already knows your counter, Wakiya! EVERYBODY! Even I know your counter, and I don't study anything! You think those teams at the tournament haven't watched you? My little brother could draw your counter from memory and he's like this tall!"
Silence. Rantaro slowly lowered his melon bun.
It was the least professional tactical briefing I had ever witnessed, and underneath the volume and the finger-jabbing and the little brother, it was also completely correct. Wakiya's counter was the first line of his scouting report. Every team in that bracket would plan around it. What was left of him when it was off the table was a question somebody was going to ask eventually, and better us, in an empty gym, than a team with a trophy on the line.
I glanced at Shu. Shu was looking at Valt with one eyebrow slightly raised, running the same math I was.
Wakiya stared at Valt for a long moment, jaw working. Then he pulled Wyvron out of his pocket and walked to the stadium without another word, which from Wakiya was a signature on a second contract.
On his way past Rantaro, Valt grabbed his sleeve and whispered something. Rantaro's grin went from cheerful to deeply unsettling.
The match took four minutes, and it was ugly in the way useful things are ugly. Rantaro came in loose and cheerful and vicious, hammering Ragnaruk into the center again and again, leaving gaps on purpose, practically holding a door open with a sign on it that said counterattack here. I watched Wakiya see every single invitation. I watched his launch arm tense each time, the counter sitting right there in his hands, and I watched him swallow it and hold the center instead.
Ragnaruk ran out of spin first. It wobbled, toppled, and died on the slope while Wyvron kept turning in the middle, slow and stubborn and alive.
"Survivor finish, Wyvron!" Rantaro announced to nobody, then scooped up his Bey and grinned. "Duuude, you have no idea how hard I was fishing. Valt told me right before we started, the second you counter, I flatten you. I had a whole thing ready. You'd have been out of that dish so fast."
Wakiya's head came around slowly. "He told you WHAT?"
Everyone looked at Valt.
Valt blinked back at us. "I mean. I just really didn't want him to counter? Because that was the whole point? Of the no counters?"
"You set a trap," Wakiya said, in the tone of a man being personally insulted by the universe. "You set an actual trap. You?"
"It's not a trap! It's..." Valt visibly searched for the word, gave up halfway, and landed on, "...a surprise drill!"
"What he did," Shu said quietly from the side, arms crossed, "is confirm that you can follow a game plan that hurts your pride, under pressure, with a live punishment waiting the second you slipped. That's the one thing about you nobody could know from your matches. Now we know it." He paused. "Whether he did it on purpose is a separate discussion."
"It was on purpose!" Valt protested, to a room where not one single person believed him, including, I suspect, himself.
I looked at Valt, marker smudge still on his cheek, and quietly revised a few opinions I'd been holding since the day I met him. He doesn't think his way to the right answer. He trips, falls, and lands on it, every time, and I honestly don't know which of those two skills is scarier to stand across from.
Wakiya opened his mouth. Nothing came out on the first attempt. On the second attempt he managed, "Your schedule is still wrong. Stamina work should come after launch practice, not before. Warm launches give cleaner data. Any idiot knows that."
"Great note!" Valt held the marker out to him. "You're in charge of the morning block!"
And Wakiya took it. He snatched it, and he complained the entire time he was writing, and he stayed at that whiteboard for twenty minutes fixing a schedule he had called a waste of his time an hour earlier, occasionally demanding to know what certain letters were supposed to be and getting answers that helped nobody. Rantaro caught my eye across the gym and mouthed a silent wow, and I had to turn away before my face did something undiplomatic.
We trained until the light through the high windows went orange. It wasn't smooth. Wakiya argued the drills, Shu overruled him twice with numbers, Valt got shouted at and shouted right back, and underneath all of it five Beys kept landing in dishes over and over, which was the only part that would show up on a scoreboard later.
Afterward, Valt made a small ceremony out of the confirmation letter. He sealed the envelope at the front office with all of us standing around him like witnesses at a wedding, five names inside, and dropped it through the mail slot with both hands.
"No taking it back now," he said, and his grin had something underneath it that hadn't been there a week ago.
We split up outside the gate. Shu toward the bakery, Rantaro toward food in general, Valt bouncing off toward home with his bag half open.
I was halfway down the street when I realized I'd left my water bottle by the stadium and turned back.
The gym lights were still on. Through the doorway I could see Wakiya, alone, crouched at the dish, launching Wyvron into the center over and over. Not the counter. The holding pattern. The exact thing he had spent all afternoon calling beneath him, again and again, checking something in the way it settled.
I stood there for a moment. Then I left the water bottle where it was and walked home.
Some things you're not supposed to have seen.