Chapter 31 – No Holding Back
"Let it rip!"
Drago hit the stone stadium the same instant Xcalibur did.
The difference in spin direction tore the air between them apart almost immediately. Left against right. The first collision came so fast it barely looked real one violent flash of red and black and steel-bright gold before the impact cracked through the clearing hard enough to echo off the trees.
Valt actually jumped.
"Whoa!"
But I wasn't watching the clash.
I was watching Drago.
The launch had been perfect. I'd known it the moment the ripcord left my fingers that particular sensation where everything in the motion lines up exactly right and the Bey doesn't just enter the stadium, it arrives with intention. And Drago had answered it.
The wings snapped open before he'd even reached the center ring.
Not as some dramatic mechanical reveal. Not slowly, not with warning. They opened the way a fist closes fast, decisive, final. The metallic edges caught the mountain light for just a moment before Drago drove straight into his first clash with Xcalibur, and the sound of that contact rang off every stone surface in the clearing.
Rantaro took a step back on instinct.
Ken lifted both puppets higher.
Xander laughed.
Not because he was surprised.
Because he was thrilled.
"Yes!" he shouted, eyes bright as Xcalibur answered the hit with brutal force. "That's what I'm talking about!"
I didn't answer him.
I was watching the stadium.
Watching the wind.
Watching the way Xcalibur moved.
It was heavier than Valkyrie. Cleaner than I'd expected. Less chaotic too. There was force in every line of its movement, but it wasn't mindless Xander was driving it, not just throwing power around. Every strike had a direction. Every impact had a purpose.
Xcalibur came in again, hard and direct, trying to force Drago inward toward the center where the spin pressure would be hardest to maintain. I felt the weight of the hit travel through the rhythm of the battle instantly.
I didn't redirect.
I let Drago hit back.
The third collision was louder than the first two.
Drago slammed into Xcalibur with full commitment and this time it was Xander's Bey that got knocked off line, cutting wide along the stadium wall before correcting itself.
Xander's grin widened.
"There you are."
Valt blinked, looking from the stadium to me and back. "He's seriously doing it"
Shu said nothing. But his arms tightened across his chest.
Another clash. Then another. Neither Bey pulled away.
The stone stadium held the impacts well wide enough to build real speed, heavy enough that the first hard exchanges didn't throw either Bey out immediately. But every collision still rang through the clearing like metal striking bone, and the wings meant every hit Drago landed carried more edge than it should have this early in a battle.
That was the cost of opening them on the launch.
I knew it. Drago knew it.
We'd made the choice anyway.
Xcalibur surged forward again with another direct hit, trying to blow straight through Drago's center of rotation. No layered feint. No setup. Just pressure relentless, front-loaded, overwhelming attack power.
So that was the game.
Good.
"You really do like this," Xander called across the stadium, laughing under his breath now. "You're not trying to manage him at all."
I kept my eyes on the battle.
"No," I said. "Not today."
Drago met Xcalibur head-on again.
The impact was monstrous.
A burst of sparks jumped from the point of contact as the two Beys ground against each other for half a second before breaking apart. The stadium wall vibrated from the force of it.
Valt stared. "That should've thrown both of them back"
"They're both digging in," Shu said quietly.
Keru tilted its head from Ken's hand. "A terrible idea."
Beus nodded solemnly. "An excellent spectacle."
I could feel it now.
The difference.
The shift that came when I stopped trying to monitor every angle, every tiny adjustment, every possible correction before it happened. On the rooftop, precision had mattered. Control had mattered.
Here the mountain wind was sweeping through the clearing in long, hard currents, and Xander was grinning at every collision like he wanted the whole stadium to crack open beneath them.
This battle didn't want restraint.
Drago didn't want it either.
Xcalibur came in at a steeper line, a heavy descending strike that clipped Drago high and drove him out toward the stadium edge. The stone rim sang under the scrape of contact.
Valt winced. "That one was bad"
But Drago rebounded off the rim with a sudden burst of acceleration, rotation hardening instead of breaking. The energy of the hit folded into his movement, his line sharpening as he tore back across the stadium with more speed than he'd had a second before.
Shu's eyes narrowed.
"Reverse Inferno."
Xander's eyebrows lifted.
"Oh?"
He leaned forward slightly, reading the movement with real interest now as Drago smashed back into Xcalibur from the left instead of the center, the counterattack fast enough to throw Xander's Bey half a ring outward.
That hit I felt.
Not physically. Not through the launcher still in my hand.
Through the connection.
Through the rhythm.
It was always hard to explain that part the point where Drago stopped feeling like something I had launched and started feeling like something I was moving with. Not controlling. Not forcing.
Matching.
"Again!" Xander shouted, delighted. "Come on!"
Xcalibur answered like it had heard him, powering forward in another heavy line. The blade motif of its layer caught the light, and for a moment just a moment the shape behind it seemed to blur.
A presence.
A suggestion of something larger.
Drago hit it before the image could settle.
The impact shook the whole stadium.
This time Xcalibur didn't give way at all. It bit straight into the clash and shoved back with brutal force, the two Beys grinding against each other in a screaming burst of friction before exploding apart.
"Ha!" Xander barked, laughing outright. "That's it!"
He took one step forward without even realizing he'd done it.
"That's exactly what I wanted to see!"
I exhaled slowly.
The clearing had disappeared.
Not literally. I still knew where everyone was Valt at the near edge, Shu just behind him, Rantaro somewhere off to the side pretending not to be invested even though he hadn't blinked in thirty seconds, Ken holding both puppets up like witnesses at a trial.
But none of that mattered.
The stadium mattered. The wind mattered. Drago mattered.
Xcalibur cut low and hard, its attack pattern growing more aggressive with every exchange, as if the fight itself was feeding it. Maybe it was. Maybe that was just what happened when a Bey like that met a blader like Xander no hesitation, no defense, no holding back.
It should have been reckless.
Instead it was beautiful.
Drago drove into the next hit.
Forced the angle.
Stayed in the contact longer than he should have, metal scraping, sparks flaring, both Beys locked in that impossible point between control and destruction where one wrong adjustment could have sent either of them flying.
Xander's grin changed.
Still wide. Still bright.
But focused now.
"You're not just matching the power," he said, and even over the noise of the fight I heard the excitement in his voice sharpen. "You're feeding it back."
I didn't look at him.
Drago slammed into Xcalibur again.
"Yes."
"Oh, this is good."
The mountain wind came hard across the clearing, pushing dust over the edge of the stadium and tugging at our clothes, but neither Bey broke pattern. Every correction mattered more up here. Every bad line would be punished harder. Every choice carried weight.
And the avatars came.
Not as full creatures at first. Not clear and separate and floating over the battle like something out of a dream.
They came the way they always did in real fights.
In pieces. In flashes.
A rising shape behind the movement.
A sense of scale the stadium suddenly couldn't contain.
Gold-red light coiled behind Drago's path in the shape of something vast and draconic, its outline forming in the blur of motion jaws open, eyes burning with focused hunger. At the same time a harsher energy broke around Xcalibur, steel-bright and relentless, the shape of something built entirely to cut.
Valt forgot to breathe.
Shu's expression didn't change, but the intensity in his eyes did.
Xander saw it.
Of course he did.
His grin turned fierce.
"Don't pull him back!"
I felt the words hit something already open.
The promise I'd made.
Not to fear that edge anymore. Not to hold Drago back just because I was used to thinking three steps ahead, used to worrying about what too much power might cost.
This was choice.
I tightened my hand around the launcher.
"Drago," I said quietly.
The next collision shook the stadium hard enough that a line of dust jumped from the stone rim.
"Go."
Drago answered.
The dragon avatar surged clearer not separate from the Bey but erupting through its movement, every turn of the layer tracing lines of gold and crimson through the air. Xcalibur's presence flared in answer, blade-like and merciless, and the meeting point between them felt too bright to look at directly.
Reverse Inferno triggered again on the next hard strike.
Not as a technique name in my head. Not as some clean mechanical process.
As the violent snap of recoil becoming momentum.
As resistance becoming fuel.
Drago took Xcalibur's crushing downward hit and turned it into a savage burst of speed that flung him back into the center ring almost instantly, where he struck Xcalibur from below with enough force to lift it a fraction off its intended line.
Xander's eyes widened.
Then he laughed even harder.
"Oh, you're dangerous."
The stamina burn was real now. I could feel it at the edges of the spin the cost building with every overcommitted exchange, the wings taking their toll. But Drago didn't want to stop. He wanted the final clash. Wanted to meet that power one more time and decide the battle not with caution or theory but with impact.
I understood him perfectly.
Xcalibur slammed Drago into the outer rim again.
Drago came back twice as vicious.
Xander stepped in with his whole body now, no longer pretending this was casual.
"Xeno Xcalibur! Break through!"
The energy around his Bey sharpened like a drawn weapon. Xcalibur's line changed with total commitment every ounce of attack power condensed into a devastating forward strike designed to split the battle open in one hit.
Valt sucked in a breath. "Xander's special—"
I didn't wait for the name.
I felt Drago coil.
Knew what he wanted.
Knew what I wanted.
And for once there was no difference between the two.
" Drago! Dragon Crash!"
Drago launched into the intercept with brutal speed, dragon energy arcing around the layer as he hit Xcalibur before the attack could fully descend. The collision was catastrophic.
Stone screamed.
The stadium shook.
Both avatars surged into full clarity for one blinding instant the dragon roaring against the descending sword-force of Xcalibur and the shockwave burst outward hard enough to send grit skittering across the clearing.
Everyone took a step back.
Then the crack appeared.
I saw it the moment the Beys broke apart and circled wide a fracture cutting through the inner ring where the repeated impacts had landed too hard, too often, in too short a time.
Shu saw it too.
"Stop."
Neither of us listened.
Not because we wanted to ignore him. Because the battle had already moved past that point.
Xcalibur came in again, faster than before.
Drago answered with no hesitation.
"Ryo!"
Shu's voice cracked through the clearing just as the Beys met in the center for one last collision.
Xcalibur's attack crashed downward.
Drago hit upward.
The avatars exploded into view.
And the stadium broke.
The sound of cracking stone split the clearing in half. The center of the arena fractured under the force of the impact, one whole section of the inner ring shattering outward as the Beys were thrown apart by the collapse beneath them. Dust burst into the air. Chunks of stone scattered across the training ground. The dragon aura vanished in a violent flicker, and Xcalibur's energy tore apart with it.
By the time the dust settled, both Beys had been knocked out of clean rotation.
Xcalibur spun unevenly near the broken edge, wobbling hard before toppling sideways.
Drago landed beyond the cracked center, one wing half-folded, spin shuddering once twice before collapsing into stillness.
Silence.
No one moved.
The only sound in the clearing was the mountain wind moving through the settling dust.
Then Keru raised one tiny arm.
"Literal," it said.
Beus nodded solemnly. "As predicted."
Rantaro let out a long breath. "You two destroyed the stadium."
Valt looked somewhere between horrified and amazed. "You really destroyed the stadium."
I stared at Drago.
Not at the crack. Not at the dust.
At Drago.
My heart was still racing hard enough to drown out everything else, but underneath that was something steadier. Not regret. Something closer to clarity.
He hadn't wanted me to control him.
He had wanted me to trust him.
Xander was the first one to laugh.
Low at first. Then louder. Then openly, one hand on his hip as he looked at the ruined stadium and the two motionless Beys inside it.
"That," he said, still laughing, "was fantastic."
He walked through the settling dust and stopped at the broken edge of the stone ring, looking down at the damage like it was the best possible outcome.
Valt stared at him. "Fantastic?!"
Xander pointed at the crack. "If a training battle breaks the stadium, that means the battle was worth having."
"That is not how stadiums work!"
Xander ignored him completely and looked at me instead. His grin had returned, but it was different now bigger somehow, but steadier. Less the grin of someone meeting a challenge and more the grin of someone who had found exactly what he was hoping for.
"You weren't lucky," he said.
I bent down and picked Drago up carefully, checking the layer, the wings, the contact points. Nothing broken. Stressed, maybe. Tired, definitely. But intact.
"I know," I said.
That made Xander laugh again.
"Oh, I like you."
Shu stepped forward. The sharpness in his expression hadn't fully faded. He looked at the broken stadium, then at me, then at Xander.
"That battle should have been stopped earlier."
"Probably," Xander agreed easily.
"You knew the stadium was cracking."
"So did he."
Shu's jaw tightened.
He wasn't wrong. I had known. I had chosen to keep going anyway.
Xander rested his launcher across his shoulder.
"We'll finish it another time," he said.
Another time.
Valt's eyes went wide. "Wait, so there wasn't a winner?"
Rantaro looked at the destroyed stone bowl. "I think the mountain lost."
Ken gave the smallest nod. Keru lifted one arm toward me.
"Congratulations," it said. "You have made a terrible first impression in the best possible way."
Beus turned toward Xander.
"And you," it said gravely, "continue to encourage violence."
Xander grinned. "Correct."
The wind moved through the clearing again, cooler now that the dust was settling. Not finished just interrupted at the exact point where it had become too large to fit inside a single stadium.
Xander turned away from the broken arena and spread his arms toward the rest of the training ground as if none of this had been a problem at all.
"Well," he said brightly, "now that introductions are over"
Valt stared at the destroyed arena. "That was the introduction?!"
Xander's grin turned sharp.
"Training starts now."