Chapter 48
The security guard at the studio entrance checked our club name against his list and waved us through.
The two training weeks were behind us, and they could be summed up quickly: Wakiya's schedule worked, everyone improved, and nobody thanked him for it, because thanking him would have ended it. That was the whole story. The interesting part started today.
The broadcast studio swallowed us the moment we stepped onto the floor. Thirty-two clubs, all in uniform, packed between camera cranes and cable runs, and the noise of it hit like a wall. Valt stopped dead two steps in.
"Valt, what are you stopping for?" I asked him.
"Ryo, look over there. It's Lui. And he's watching us. Or I should say, you."
Lui? Where? I followed Valt's finger across the floor, and there he was, half a studio away, and yes, he was watching me. He did not look pleased about anything.
"He doesn't look that happy to see me, then."
"No, this is his serious face, so it's not unhappy, it's serious. I think he might be looking forward to your battle, if it happens this tournament."
"Shu, what do you think?" I asked.
"I think you need to stop staring and start moving again. It's getting weird."
"Says you. First look at yourself, then at me."
Rantaro had already located the catering table by pure instinct and was calculating something. Shu had gone back to reading the room the way he reads a stadium. Wakiya positioned himself with his arms crossed, radiating boredom, and it took him under a minute to drift to the exact spot where two different camera lines crossed. I said nothing. Some hungers you don't feed by naming them.
"Well, well, well."
I knew the voice before I turned. Zac came through the crowd the way he does everything, like a spotlight was contractually following him, his team trailing behind in matching jackets that had to be custom.
"The man of the hour," he said, spreading his arms. "The whole country is still talking about our little dance, you know. My agent says my clip views doubled. I lost, and my views doubled. You're good for business, Ryo."
"Happy to help. Send my share to the club, we need a new whiteboard."
He laughed, big and real, then leaned in a half step closer, and his volume came down to something private. "Watch the bracket today. If the machine is kind, we get to do it again with a trophy in the room, and I want that. Not for the cameras this time." He straightened, showman's smile snapping back on. "Well. Also for the cameras."
He swept off toward his risers. Behind him, one of his teammates, older, captain's band on his sleeve, held my eyes a moment too long before following. That one hadn't been in the stadium that night, and he clearly thought his star had lost to a trick. Fine. Everyone gets one free wrong opinion.
The floor manager herded us to our riser, and the lights came down, and the ceremony started with the exact amount of pyrotechnics you'd expect from national television.
The bracket went up on a screen the size of our gym wall, and they filled it one team at a time, dragging every reveal out for the broadcast.
Our name landed early, top quarter. Our opener: a coastal club that had come through the wildcard round. Polite applause. Nobody gasped.
Zac's club dropped in two lines below ours.
"Second round," Valt whispered, doing the bracket math on his fingers. "If we both win. That's, wait, that's really soon. That's REALLY soon, Ryo."
"I noticed."
Across the studio, Zac had found our riser. He held up two fingers, unhurried, and even from that distance the grin carried.
The reveals rolled on. Then a name went up in the opposite half, and next to me Shu went very still.
Xander's club.
I didn't need to look at the screen to track it, because Xander himself did the tracking for the whole studio. A voice like a landslide came rolling over the crowd from somewhere on the far risers.
"VALT! HEY, VALT! OTHER SIDE OF THE BRACKET! YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS! SEMIFINALS! DON'T YOU DARE LOSE BEFORE THEN!"
Half the studio turned around. A floor manager made desperate quieting gestures that Xander either didn't see or elected not to see. Shu raised one hand in acknowledgment, calm as still water, but his jaw had set into a line I recognized from the Regionals block final, and it stayed set for a while after the noise moved on.
"Friend of yours?" Wakiya asked dryly.
"Since we were kids," Valt said, and offered nothing further, and Wakiya was smart enough to leave it.
The bracket kept filling. And the thing I was waiting for happened last, because of course it did, because television knows how to build to things.
The final pod, bottom of the far side, as distant from our name as the bracket allowed.
Lui Shirosagi.
The studio changed. Not silence exactly, more like the volume of three hundred people dropped one notch at the same instant, all those conversations suddenly needing less air. The camera found him on his risers and put his face on the big screen next to the bracket, and he stood there under his own forty-foot portrait looking profoundly unimpressed by it.
He wasn't looking at the screen. He was looking across the floor.
At our riser. Again.
It lasted maybe two seconds this time, and there was even less in his face than at the entrance. No smirk, no challenge. Just confirmation, like the bracket had told him something he'd already decided on his own. Then he turned away and said something to a teammate, and the moment closed like it had never been open.
Only the final could put us in front of him. And standing there with the bracket glowing overhead, I made myself hold the thought I'd been walking around all week instead of through: everything Drago had, everything the rubber ring did, worked on right spin. Longinus turned the other way. If we made it that far, I'd be walking into the biggest match of this new life with my best weapon hanging dead at my side.
Later. That problem lived at the far end of the bracket, and between here and there stood a coastal wildcard team, and Zac, and a road's worth of clubs who all thought they were the story.
The ceremony wrapped, the house lights came up, and the thirty-two clubs began the slow shuffle toward the exits. Valt planted himself in front of the four of us before we'd taken a step, and stuck out his fist.
For once he wasn't loud. The grin came on slow.
"First match is Monday morning. Everybody launches when I say launch."
Rantaro's fist landed first, then Shu's, then mine. Wakiya looked at the stack for a long moment, sighed like a man paying a parking fine, and put his on top.
"This is childish," he said, fist firmly in place.
"Extremely,"
The lights of the studio followed us out into the afternoon, and it was real now, all of it, dates on a calendar and a name on a bracket, and Monday was three days away.