# Chapter 36 – What the Mountain Gave
It was our last morning on the mountain, and I woke up before everyone else again. This is gonna be the last day, let's make the most of it and get some last bit of training in. I took Drago off the windowsill and turned him over in my hand. I think I need to battle someone and see how far I've come, and that someone is Xander. He's up before the rest of us every morning, so I already knew where he'd be.
The moment I walked down to the stadiums, I saw him sitting on a rock, looking at the sky like he was looking for something. He heard me coming and didn't turn around.
"Ahh, look who it is, like every morning, first one down."
I came up beside him and looked where he was looking. There was nothing up there but flat grey sky. "What are you looking for?"
"Weather coming in off the far ridge. Force of habit." He pushed up off the rock and finally turned around. "You're down even earlier than usual. Couldn't sleep?"
"Last morning. I didn't want to waste it."
"Good." He pulled his launcher out from behind his back. "I wanted to ask you something anyway. Do you want to finish our battle from the first day you got here? We never got to finish it because we blew up the stadium."
I stopped at the edge of the bowl. The others weren't up yet. It was just us.
"You want a rematch," I said.
"I want to finish the one we started." He locked Xcalibur into the launcher. "Same as that day. But this time you leave my stadium standing. Last time you cracked it straight down the middle before either of us went down. Hit me just as hard, and don't break it. That's the only thing I want to see."
"Then I'll give you all of it," I said. "Without the mess this time."
We took opposite sides of the bowl. I put Drago on the launcher and lined up. There was no wind this morning to set my foot against, so I had to find the still part of it on my own. I lined up the angle and let my head go quiet.
"Three," Xander said.
The whole place went still.
"Two. One. Let it rip!"
Both cords went at once. Drago hit the bowl and the wings snapped open in the same breath, gold flaring wide before he even reached the center. Perfect launch. Xcalibur came off Xander's launch heavy and low, no tricks, straight at the middle like it owned it.
They met dead center and the stone rang under them. I knew that sound. It was the one from my first day up here, right before the floor gave out and we lost the whole stadium. This time I didn't meet it head on. I took the hit at an angle and let Drago slide off the side of Xcalibur, steering the force across instead of letting it punch straight down. Fast and low, then back around.
"Dragon Crash."
Drago cut in clean and slammed Xcalibur from the flank, then peeled off before the weight could answer. Xcalibur skidded a hand's width and dug back in. Xander grinned at me across the stadium.
"Better. Now do it while I'm actually trying."
Then he stopped going easy.
Xcalibur came around the rim and built speed, then turned and drove for the center with everything Xander had behind it, one straight line of weight.
"Sword Flash!"
It hit like a truck. Drago took the edge of it and got thrown wide, skidding up the slope, the gold light on the wings stuttering. I felt the spin drop. Xander didn't give me a second. Xcalibur chased Drago up the rim, pressing, hunting to walk him out before he could set.
This was where the wings cost me. Open, Drago was faster than anything in the bowl, but the spin bled out under it, and Xander wasn't the type to let me rest and get it back.
So I didn't fight the hit. I rode it.
"Reverse Inferno."
Drago caught Xcalibur's next drive and folded the push back into his own curve, left spin turning all that weight against the one who threw it. For a second Xcalibur was the one sliding, knocked off its line, and Drago came off the counter with his speed back up.
We traded like that, back and forth, neither one able to put the other down. The stone kept ringing. Xcalibur drove and Drago turned it away, Drago cut in and Xcalibur shrugged it off. Somewhere behind me a door banged and I heard Valt's voice, but I couldn't spare it any attention.
Both Beys were running down now. I could hear it in Drago's hum, that thin edge creeping in, and I could see Xcalibur starting to wobble on its drive. We were close to the end, and it was dead even.
One move left in each of us.
Xander saw it the same time I did. He didn't pull back and play it safe. He went the other way.
"All of it, kid. Show me you can hold it."
Xcalibur climbed to the high lip of the bowl and came down the slope with the last of its spin packed behind one strike, the biggest thing Xander had. I lined Drago up against it. Full commitment, both of us.
The wings were still open. I didn't let them fold. I drove them.
"Eclipse Destruction!"
They flared full open at the point of impact and Drago met Xcalibur head on with everything left in him. I kept every bit of it aimed at Xcalibur and let none of it loose.
The clash went off like something breaking. White light, both Beys screaming on their tips.
Both came off the hit spinning crooked, wobbling hard, scraping along the bowl. Drago tipped one way and Xcalibur tipped the other, both down to the last of it, neither one going over first.
Then they both stopped. Almost on the same breath.
For a second nobody said anything.
"A DRAW?!" Valt was halfway across the clearing with his jacket half on. "You did the wing thing AND the big finisher and it's a DRAW?!"
Xander started to laugh. He crossed to the bowl and picked Xcalibur up, turned it over in his hand, then looked down at the stone under it. Not a crack in it.
"There it is." He looked up at me. "You hit me with everything you had. The finisher, all of it. Same power that split this stadium clean down the middle on day one." He clipped Xcalibur away. "And it's still standing. That's the whole thing. That's what I kept you up here for."
I crouched and picked Drago up. Hot, the good kind, not the hollow burned-out kind from a real overrun. Spent, but not wasted.
"Day one you told me I trusted my release too much," I said.
"You did. You'd throw the whole thing and stand there proud of the hole it left. That's not control, that's a kid with a strong arm." He shrugged. "Control is picking how much, and picking it in the half second before it's gone. You've got that now. The rest comes with mileage."
Rantaro came up behind Valt complaining about the cold, and Ken came last with a puppet on each hand and didn't say a word. Xander looked over at them, then back at me, and dropped his voice so it stayed between us.
"One more thing before you go. The blue one. Ukyo." He waited until I looked at him. "You watched him take Valt apart, then watched Valt climb back out of it. You learned more sitting on the side of that battle than most people learn in a year of their own. I saw you doing it. You went quiet and went off somewhere behind your eyes."
"He counters everything Valt's good at," I said. "Everything I'm good at too."
"He does. And he won't be the last one built like that. The next one won't be nice about it." He picked his bag up off the rock. "You fight by coming at people from every side at once. It's your best thing. It's also a pattern, and patterns get read. Someone out there will read yours, sit right where you're about to go, and make you eat the whole thing in one bite. You felt that watching Ukyo. Don't lose it on the way down."
I didn't say anything back. He didn't seem to want me to.
That night my bag was packed by the door and everyone else was asleep. I held Drago in the dark and felt the warmth come up, until I was in that other space and Drago was standing there looking at me.
"We're better than when we came up here," I said.
"We are. You stopped holding me back, and I stopped waiting for you to." His voice came up from inside more than through the air. "You kept me reined in for a long time because you were scared of what came out when you let go. With Shu you finally let it out, and you trusted yourself to know where to stop. Today against Xander you let go all the way and didn't pull back from it. That was always the thing. Not how hard we can hit. Whether you'd trust yourself enough to stop holding it in."
"I do trust you," I said. "That part's done. I'm not scared of it anymore."
"Then say the rest. The thing you've been turning over since you watched Valt."
I let it sit for a second.
"It's not Ukyo," I said. "Ukyo lost to Valt, and I'm past where Valt is. If I had to face him I think I'd take him. It's not about him." I turned Drago over in my hand. "It's the way he fights. He stands still and lets you bring everything to him, then gives it straight back. Coming at someone with everything we've got is the best thing we do. His whole style is built to make that the thing that gets us beaten. Ukyo's a weak version of it. Somewhere out there is a strong one, someone I can't just out-hit, and that's the one I don't have an answer for yet."
Drago didn't tell me it would be fine. He never does.
"You don't know yet," he said. "Neither do I. Nobody's pushed us that far, because nobody's made us. Someone will. When they do, we figure it out then, not before. Chewing on it all night won't teach us anything. Get me to that edge and I'll tell you what's there."
"That's not exactly comforting."
"You didn't bring me up here to be comforted. You asked me to be straight with you." The cold was already coming back at the edges. "We're enough for everything we've had to face so far. The rest we find out when it's standing in front of us."
Then it was just my room again, dark and quiet, Drago warm in my hand.
We went down the next morning.
Xander walked us as far as the trees, which for him was a long way, and stopped where the path dropped off toward the road. Valt tried to talk him into one more battle for the trip down, and Xander told him to put the energy into his legs instead. Rantaro asked, not really expecting an answer, if we'd ever have to run that ridge again. Ken held both puppets up at Xander, and Beus said in that flat voice that the mountain's training had been thorough, and Keru said it had also been deeply unfair, and that got a bigger laugh out of Xander than anything Valt had said all week.
"Go win things." He said it looking at Valt and Shu. Then he looked at me and didn't say go win, because I'd already won the thing that got me through. "You. Stay stable when it stops being a quiet bowl on a mountain and turns into a crowd that wants to watch you lose. That's the one part I couldn't test up here."
We left him standing at the trees. I looked back once on the way down and he was already gone, the way he always is.
The path flattened out and the city came up through the haze ahead of us, and the second we hit level ground Valt got all his energy back and talked the whole way about Regionals like he'd already won it.
That was the next thing. Regionals. Four blocks, the winners going through. Valt in one, Shu in another, both of them with a real shot now. I wasn't in it. The District had already carried me past it, straight to Nationals, and it felt strange walking back toward a tournament I'd be sitting out while my friends fought for the seats next to mine.
I'd watch every match anyway. I'd read every blader in that hall the way I read Ukyo, quiet, from the side, putting away what I saw for later.
Because somewhere past all of it was the one Drago and I hadn't been pushed far enough to answer yet. I didn't have a face for him. Not yet.