Chapter 35: King's Territory
THE DISH
Kyoya emerged from the tunnel to find that the chill had seeped into the floorboards. Although it shouldn't be possible to have a breeze in an indoor arena in the middle of Summer the concrete was cold to the touch. Kyoya had seen on the monitors in his waiting room that the temperature sensors had shown it to be 4 degrees colder since Kai's bey landed. It irritated him slightly but he pressed on.
There was a growing buzz as his name reached the crowds.He didn't look at the crowd. He'd stopped doing that somewhere around his third regional circuit win, when he'd understood that looking at them meant performing for them, and performing for them meant you were fighting their fight instead of your own. He walked to his mark and stood there and focused on the south tunnel exit.
Earth Leone was warm in his hand. Madoka had moved the counterweight blocks by less then half a millimetre three weeks ago. It had taken him two sessions to notice. The brass core kept the heat of the walk from warming up. The golden centre reflected the stadium lights. The edges were an unusual colour. He couldn't think of any words to describe the colour under the fluorescent light. It wasn't the golden colour of the original Leone. It was a design to answer a different question for whatever came next through the tunnel.
As he stared at it,
Kyoya shifted his weight onto his toes.
Reiji Mizuchi came out of the south tunnel picking at his thumbnail.
Not looking at the crowd or the Jumbotron or the DJ platform swaying on its cables Reiji casually picked at the dead skin near his thumb nail. He bit it off and wiped his thumb along his sleeve.
He stopped 8 feet away from his launch spot and looked up to see Kyoya with that smile.
"The mechanics stink." He said. He was not putting on a show. "The girl that works on the beys had it all down her nails and up her arms. Smelled like a mechanic shop."
Kyoa had seen Reiji fight in dark nebula. The path of destroyed gear Reiji left behind just to get to this point. He knew what Reiji did to the people he beat. It wasn't just the beys. It was the people. Kyoa once watched an nameless opponent's face after and filed it away somewhere that wasn't pity. Kyoya didn't do pity. But it wasn't nothing either.
Kyoya's weight shifted forward onto the balls of his feet.
"You've been watching."
"She worked on yours, didn't she." Reiji turned Poison Serpent over in his palm without looking at it. The snake facebolt was badly scratched, the green paint chipped down to bare zinc at the edges. "Very clean now. Very shiny." He tilted his head. "My brother had a toy like that. A yellow bird. He kept it on a shelf so it wouldn't get scratched."
The stadium lights shifted to hard white.
"I broke the wings off," Reiji said, still smiling. "He looked for the pieces for three days. I'd put them down the bathroom drain."
Kyoya raised his launcher. Leone locked into the prongs with a clean, heavy clack— the specific sound of something settling exactly where it belongs.
"You're not Kai," he said. "And I'm not him either."
He let that sit for one second.
"Touch my bey and I'll take your hands off."
Reiji let his launcher hang loose from one finger by the cord and rocked slightly on his heels, smile holding.
"THREE—"
The crowd took the count.
"TWO—"
"ONE—"
"LET IT RIP."
RRRIP—
---
Poison Serpent dropped from a high vertical angle and hit Leone's fusion wheel with a sound like a car door being shut firmly — thwump — not the crack of a real impact, something absorbed, deflected, sent sideways without ceremony.
Leone didn't move from center.
Tik. Tik-tik.
Reiji's head tilted. He tried again — SW145 dropping the bey from a different angle, the track shifting mid-orbit to find the gap his footage had told him existed.
Thwump.
The gap wasn't there. It had been there in the old Leone. Madoka had closed it when she rebuilt the wheel profile three weeks ago, hunched over the workbench at two in the morning with her hair pinned back and her hands moving in that particular way she had when she stopped thinking about what she was doing and started just knowing.
Leone absorbed the second strike the same way it absorbed the first. Patient. Heavy. Immovable in the way of something rebuilt with different priorities than the version it replaced.
"Aww." Reiji's voice went soft, almost childlike. "Look at that. You upgraded your little toy."
"I noticed," Kyoya said.
He wasn't performing. He wasn't playing to the crowd already starting to chant his name in the upper sections. He was watching Reiji's feet, watching the way the smile didn't reach the muscles around his eyes, watching for the thing underneath the thing.
Thwump. Thwump. Thwump.
Serpent came in again. And again. Each strike perfectly calculated, hitting the exact points Reiji's footage had marked as vulnerable — and each time the new wheel profile turned the hit sideways, sent Serpent skidding wide with a thin skrrrt across the dish floor, costing Reiji stamina without giving him anything back.
The smile started to slip.
"Switch track — attack mode—" Reiji's voice climbed slightly. "Go down, Serpent. Bite him from above—"
*Thwump.*
Leone absorbed it.
Tik. Tik-tik. Tik.
The smile was gone.
---
What came out from under it wasn't anger. Kyoya had fought angry people — Benkei was angry, Gingka got angry, even Kyoya himself operated at a register most people would've called rage and that he simply called focus. This was different. What came off Reiji when the smile finally broke was something that had been living under the performance for a long time, waiting for exactly this moment — the instant when the careful, calculated cruelty stopped working and left nothing behind to hide with.
WHUMMMMP.
The dark aura came up off him in a wave. Black-purple, dense, the kind of pressure that hit the front rows like a change in weather. People leaned back without deciding to.
Poison Serpent's orbit changed. The bey stopped calculating, stopped using the track height, stopped doing anything resembling strategy. It moved like something in pain trying to spread the pain outward — krk-krk-KRRK— erratic, slamming, each impact wrong in a way that made Leone's rebuilt wheel work harder than anything Reiji's controlled strikes had managed.
GHHHNK.
Leone rattled.
Kyoya felt it up his arm, through his shoulder, into his chest — the specific vibration of his bey under genuine pressure for the first time since the match started. His feet slid back half a step on the dish floor with a low skff of rubber on concrete.
"Tch—"
"Die," Reiji said. Not performing. Not to the crowd. Just a word he meant. "Die, die, die — cry for me, Kyoya — let me see the terror in your eyes—"
Kyoya planted his feet.
He thought about Gingka on that mountain. Down and up and down and up until something cracked open that wasn't a bone. He thought about what it had taken to build Leone into what it was now — not just Madoka's hands on the workbench at two in the morning, but his own willingness to let the old version go. To admit that what had carried him this far wasn't enough for what was coming.
He laughed.
It came out loud and genuine — HA— and it echoed off the dish walls in a way that made Reiji's head snap back slightly, like he'd been expecting anything except that.
"Terrified?"
FWOOMPH — Kyoya's green aura punched outward, driving the oppressive purple pressure back a foot, two feet, the front rows feeling it like a sudden clearing of air. "Don't make me laugh, you miserable little worm. You think dark power is enough to tame the wind?"
Leone answered him with a rising hmmmmm off the dish floor — a held note climbing in pitch, finding the frequency it had been rebuilt to reach.
"Break from center — TERRA-CYCLONE!"
*KRRRRRRRR—*
The RF tip bit into the concrete and Leone moved — not the steady orbit of a defensive bey, not the wide sweep of an attack type, but a jagged, stalking zigzag that threw sparks off the dish floor with every direction change. Skrzt. Skrzt-skrzt. Skrzt.The sparks scattered like thrown gravel and the air above the dish churned, a localized whoooosh building from Leone's orbit as the heavy wheel dragged a low-pressure current in its wake.
WHUMPH. WHUMPH. WHUMPH.
The dust storm erupted from the dish floor in a blinding column, debris spiraling outward in Leone's wake.
"What?!" Reiji squinted through it, turning. "Where — Serpent, find it — find it and—"
"It's over."
Kyoya's arm came forward.
"KING LION TEARING BLAST—"
SKRRAAAK—
A straight line. It had gone from being a jagged line to becoming a single straight line. There was no wobbling. The Metal Bolt was doing what it was intended to do. It took the recoil from every part of Leone's body and pushed it forwards. The rebuilt wheel smashed into Poison Serpent with a sound that wasn't loud but was definitely final—
THOOM.
One heavy, settling sound, like a door closing on something that had needed closing for a long time.
CRACK-CRACK-CRACK — Serpent's balance shattered outward and the bey hit the dish wall with a CLANG that rang through the steel and stayed there, embedded, spinning its last few rotations against concrete before going tik... tik... tik... and falling silent.
Reiji's knees hit the floor — thud — before the crowd finished processing what had happened. His hands flew up to his head and he made a sound without a shape — nnnh — not rage, not the sadistic performance, just something small and lost that had been buried under all of it from the beginning and was now the only thing left.
"STADIUM OUT—" DJ's voice arrived from somewhere above the noise. "KYOYA TATEGAMI, EARTH LEONE, ADVANCES—"
SNAP.
Kyoya caught Leone out of the air. Looked at it once — the warm gold at its center, the colder edges where the new work began, both of them his now — and slid it into his pocket with a soft shk.
He stepped forward and looked down at Reiji.
"You thought you were the predator because you carry venom." His voice came out flat. Not cruel — something past cruel, something that had stopped needing cruelty to land. "You're standing in the king's territory, snake. Learn the difference."
He turned and walked toward the tunnel.
At the mouth of it, something made him glance at the bracket screen — old habit, the same reflex that had made him calculate beypoints in his sleep for three months straight. Gingka Hagane's card sat active in the bracket, gold-lit, waiting.
He held his gaze on it for one second.
Then he walked into the dark, Leone warm in his pocket, the crowd noise folding to a whumm-whumm-whumm of muffled roaring behind the tunnel walls and then nothing at all.
***
Three corridors over, Kai blinked his eyes open.
The heat in his fist had subsided. It wasn't gone though, instead it was just calmer and more at ease. As if it had finally found a place to settle.
Slowly he opened his fingers to reveal the phoenix crowned fusion wheel of the black Dranzer. The dim light of the room reflected off the phoenix emblem, making it look almost like gold.
Tik.
A faint beep echoed from inside the bey.
Kai stared at it.
A click echoed from the monitor embedded in the concrete wall. The live footage of the arena cut out and the results board was displayed. The thick door to the holding room he was in was still locked so he was still isolated from the rest of the stadium but a new name appeared beneath his on the screen.
Kai tightened his grip on the Dranzer letting out a soft fwump as he did so. He didn't move towards the door. He just stood there staring at the monitor as he analysed his next victim.
[END CHAPTER 35]