Chapter 149: Australia Vs Brazil
"AUSTRALIA... VERSUS... BRAZIL!"
The wheel had barely finished speaking before both alcoves answered it.
From the Brazilian side, Raoi vaulted the rail without waiting to be named, riding his wind down to the stage with his arms spread wide to catch the roar of his people. Four hundred points of stolen German gold rode with him, and every nation in the arena had spent the day sharpening knives for it.
From the Australian side came the small figure in the oversized team jacket, and this time the colosseum did not make the mistake of laughing.
"THE STORM OF A THOUSAND HANDS AGAINST THE GIRL WHO CARRIES AN ECOSYSTEM!" Julie was already at full volume. "Raoi, undefeated today and carrying the richest pockets in this tournament! Furry, the giant-killer of the morning! Ladies and gentlemen, whoever wins this match doesn’t just take points, they take the LEAD in the entire Combat Event!"
[Opalion: the jackpot fight. THE JACKPOT FIGHT IS HERE]
[yanko_abreu: Raoi has 7 bodies and she has every animal that ever existed. this is a nature documentary with a budget]
[Marshall_prat_4819: brazil risking the vault?? they must really believe in this man]
[Will_1631: after what she did to the shark?? brave. genuinely brave]
The two met at the center of the rebuilt stage.
"The little legend of match four," Raoi said, grinning down at her. "I watched you drop a megalodon on a blacksmith. Beautiful work. Truly." The grin sharpened. "So I want you to know I’m not going to be polite."
Furry looked up at him. She bowed, small and neat.
"Okay," she said softly. "Me neither."
Something amber flickered across her eyes, and Raoi, undefeated, four hundred points deep, veteran of a hundred arenas, felt the small animal at the base of his skull sit up and pay attention.
"FIGHT!!"
There was no measuring phase. There was no first probe.
Raoi split on the first syllable of the horn, one body tearing into seven across the width of the stage, fire and stone and lightning and ice and wind and water blooming around the original in a crescent of instant war. And Furry did not wait to see it finish. She was already inside the crescent before the seventh body fully formed, cheetah muscle rolling down her legs, and her opening strike was a gorilla-armed hammer blow that caught the ice Raoi mid-manifestation and put him through the stage floor.
The ice body burst into golden motes. Six remained.
Then the storm fell on her, and the match became exactly what both of them had promised.
Fire came as a flood, not a wall, rolling across the whole eastern stage in a tide that left the stone glowing. She went over it, kangaroo legs firing her through the smoke, and the lightning was waiting above the fire, forking after her silhouette. Grey fur rippled down her spine mid-leap, thick and rubbery, and the bolt that caught her shoulder ran down her body and bled away into the air off an electric eel’s insulated hide, stinging, smoking, survivable.
She landed running. The stone Raoi rose in front of her like a wall given legs and swung a fist the size of a door.
She did not dodge it. Her right arm banded with color, coiled, and answered.
The mantis shrimp met the mountain, and the mountain lost the argument, stone body detonating from the wrist to the elbow to the shoulder, cracks racing through its torso before the whole clone came apart in golden light.
Five.
"TWO DOWN IN FORTY SECONDS!" Julie’s voice cracked. "SHE’S HUNTING THEM LIKE A CHECKLIST!"
But the storm had learned from the morning, and the storm did not merely reform.
The storm combined.
Wind and fire found each other over the ruined stage and married into a firestorm, a rotating pillar of flame that swallowed the arena’s center and screamed like a jet engine. Water and lightning wove together into a rolling thundercloud that hugged the ground, spitting arcs in every direction, herding her with walls of live current. And through the chaos, the remaining bodies fought in perfect coordination, no wasted motion between them, seven minds’ worth of attention with one will behind it.
The colosseum stopped breathing again. In the officials’ box, the man in the black suit rested his hand near the covered switch for the second time in an hour.
Inside the firestorm’s screaming edge, Furry changed, and changed, and changed.
Falcon eyes to read the lightning’s fork a heartbeat early. Thorny devil skin drinking the steam and shrugging the heat. Crocodile plate across her back when the water hammered her flat and tried to drown her against the stone. She came out of the thundercloud on all fours, smoking, bleeding from a dozen shallow burns, and she was laughing, a small breathless sound entirely unlike her, because the amber had eaten most of the brown now and the beasts loved this the way she was never allowed to.
’Sir Jackson said no stacking past two,’ some polite corner of her reminded her.
The rest of her looked at five bodies of one man trying their absolute best to kill her.
’Sir Jackson isn’t fighting a storm.’
She stacked four.
Cheetah legs. Gorilla arms. Falcon eyes. Eel hide. All at once, layered through her small frame in bands of fur and muscle and shimmer, and in the Australian alcove Jackson came off the rail like he’d been shot, hands cupped, shouting something the firestorm ate whole. Mercury caught his sleeve and did not pull him back, because Mercury was watching the stage with her tea forgotten, and what she saw there was the thing they had argued about in training rooms for two years finally let off its leash.
The girl became a blur that the cameras gave up on.
The next thirty seconds broke every replay system in the building. She was through the firestorm before it could turn, and the wind Raoi burst apart around her fist. She rode the thundercloud’s own current down a falcon-read gap and the water Raoi lost his head to a crocodile bite that came from a girl-shaped smear of speed. The fire body threw everything, a second sun’s worth of flame, and hit nothing but afterimage, and then an eel-sheathed elbow came out of his blind side and golden motes rained across the stage.
Two bodies left. The lightning. The original.
And in the American alcove, Nicholas leaned forward with his heart beating hard for reasons that had nothing to do with fear.
’She’s not hunting bodies anymore,’ he thought, eyes tracking the blur between detonations. ’She’s herding the count down. Thinning the storm so there’s less noise. She’s listening for something.’
His own words from the morning came back to him. Seven originals. One will. One string holding it all together.
’...You felt it too, little beast. Didn’t you?’
On the stage, the lightning Raoi and the original stood back to back at the center of the wreckage, and for the first time all tournament, the Storm of a Thousand Hands was sweating through his grin.
"What ARE you?!" he shouted across the ruin, and both bodies said it at once, perfectly synchronized, one voice from two throats.
And there, in that perfect synchronization, Furry stopped moving entirely.
She stood amid the settling debris, chest heaving, four beasts still banded through her small body, and she closed her eyes. Her ears shifted, lengthening slightly, furring at the tips, borrowed from something that could hear a heartbeat through a hillside.
The colosseum’s roar faded from her hearing. The fires’ crackle faded. The thundercloud’s dying hiss faded.
And underneath everything, she found it.
Thump.
Thump.
Two bodies. Two hearts. One rhythm. Not similar. Not close. Identical, beat for beat, rising together, falling together, a single drum played through every chest he wore.
Her eyes opened, amber to the rim.
’There you are.’
Both Raois felt it at the same instant, because of course they did, they shared everything, including the sudden cold weight of being found. The lightning body raised its storm. The original dropped his stance for the first time all day.
Furry smiled, small and sharp and not entirely hers, and vanished forward.
She was not aiming at the lightning.
She was not aiming at the original.
She was aiming between them, at the empty air both bodies had kept perfectly, precisely, carefully equidistant from every clone through every second of the entire match.
Raoi’s eyes went wide in two faces at once.
"NO..."