Chapter 142: Furry’s Resolve [Bonus]
Only one of them was still standing.
And she was small.
The dust fell away in sheets, and the colosseum saw her clearly: a slight girl in the middle of a crater field, jacket gone, hair matted with powdered stone, the grey-white plate melting off her arms like frost in the sun. The abyssal black was draining from her eyes, amber first, then, slowly, the soft brown underneath.
She stood behind the giant.
Blutschmied was on his knees, facing the wrong way entirely, his furnace armor guttering out seam by seam. And buried point-first in the stage where his final strike had landed, ten meters from anything, stood the Masterwork, intact, unmarked, faintly steaming.
The one thing that did not break.
Silence held the arena in both hands.
"...What happened?" Julie’s whisper carried across the planet. "Ladies and gentlemen, I... I need the replay. WORLD, we ALL need the replay. Booth, slow it down. Slow it ALL the way down."
The giant screens flickered, and time crawled backward, then forward again at a hundredth speed.
There was the launch. The red star falling, the black tide rising, two legends crossing the center of the stage.
And then, mid-flight, at the precise instant the Masterwork committed to its arc, the black tide changed.
Frame by frame, the megalodon left her. Four meters of leviathan collapsed inward like a wave withdrawing from a beach, mass and plate and fin dissolving in the space of three frames, and what remained was a girl the size of a doubt, and in the fourth frame her skin rippled, scattered the light, and she was gone.
Not dodged. Not blocked.
Gone.
The dying-star blade completed its perfect, unbreakable arc through the space where a leviathan had been promised, met nothing but the lie of her silhouette hanging in the dust, and delivered thirty years of banked blood into the empty stage. That was the detonation. That was the pillar of light. A masterpiece, spent on an absence.
And through the whiteout, low to the ground, invisible, riding the shockwave of her enemy’s own ultimate like a swimmer riding surf, the smallest competitor in the tournament slid past the executioner’s stance, curled behind him, and reappeared exactly once.
The replay caught it from the northern camera. A shimmer at the giant’s back. A small fist, wrapped in coiled, banded shell.
The mantis shrimp, fired point-blank into armor that no longer had a smith to feed it.
"CHAMELEON," Julie breathed, and then her voice climbed and climbed until it broke against the roof of the sky. "SHE SWAPPED MID-AIR! SHE DROPPED THE STRONGEST BEAST IN HISTORY AT THE LAST POSSIBLE SECOND FOR THE CHAMELEON! HE WASN’T FIGHTING A MONSTER, EVERYONE, HE WAS FIGHTING A GIRL WHO COULD CHOOSE!"
The colosseum went from silence to eruption with nothing in between.
[Boddlly: SHE FAKED THE KAIJU FIGHT. THE WHOLE KAIJU FIGHT WAS THE SETUP!!]
[Marypaz13: dropped a MEGALODON for a LIZARD and won. I’m going to lie down]
[Kamzy_1234: think about the discipline though?? the frenzy had her. and she still let go of the deep AT THE DECISIVE MOMENT]
[Will_1631: ’stay in the shallows’ 🥹 she heard him. she went to the trench and STILL came back to the shallows]
On the stage, Blutschmied knelt in the ruins of his own detonation, and inside the cooling helm, the craftsman laughed. It was a quiet, wheezing, genuinely delighted sound.
His ledger was empty. He could feel it, the papery flutter where a heartbeat should be, the armor crumbling off him in dry crimson flakes now that there was nothing left to pay it with. He could not have risen if the stage were on fire.
His eyes found the Masterwork, standing perfect and pristine in the rock.
’Nothing I have ever made has survived me,’ he thought, and the laugh wheezed again. ’Look at you. Outliving me in public. Disgraceful child.’
A shadow fell across him. Small. Hesitant.
Furry stood there, brown-eyed and mortified, hands fluttering like she couldn’t decide whether to help him up or apologize to each of his wounds individually.
"I’m sorry," she blurted. "About the. Um. The back. Attacking from behind isn’t very polite, I know, Sir Jackson says in a real fight there’s no such thing as behind, but it still feels rude, and also I’m sorry about your sword, well no, your sword is fine, it’s very beautiful actually, I meant the rest of..."
"Little beast." The helm crumbled away, and the smith’s scarred, exhausted face was smiling wide. "You gave an old craftsman the finest commission of his life. Do not ruin it with apologies."
His hand rose, trembling with emptiness, and slapped the stone twice.
BWOOOOOM.
"SURRENDER!!" Julie detonated. "BLUTSCHMIED YIELDS! MATCH FOUR GOES TO... AUSTRALIAAAA!!"
The screens flashed.
{VICTORY: FURRY. AUSTRALIA}
{POINT TRANSFER IN PROGRESS...}
{BLUTSCHMIED: 100 PTS. FURRY}
"And with that, everyone, Germany’s tournament is all but finished," Julie said, the arena settling into a hum of disbelief and delight beneath her. "One fighter remaining, one hundred points to their name. They came to this convention with a plan, and the plan met this field. Meanwhile Australia STOPS the bleeding and answers China’s statement with one of their own! What a DAY!"
Down on the stage, Furry had gotten one of the giant’s arms over her narrow shoulders and was helping four hundred pounds of drained blacksmith toward the medics with the earnest determination of an ant carrying a beetle. The crowd’s roar turned warm, almost fond. Somewhere in the stands, the German section began to applaud their fallen smith, and the Australian section applauded with them.
In the Australian alcove, Jackson finally peeled his hands off the rail, tipped his head back, and let out a breath he’d been holding since the jacket hit the floor.
Beside him, Mercury picked her tea back up. "She came back on her own this time," she said, to no one in particular. "Good."
It was, from Mercury, a parade.
In the American alcove, Selena let out a low whistle. "Remind me never to call anyone ’the nice one’ again."
"Mm." Dana was writing fast. "Invisibility with full sensory tracking underneath it. Frame-perfect transformation control under frenzy conditions. And the temperament to sell a bluff for four straight minutes at the cost of her own sanity." She clicked her pen. "That’s not a berserker, that’s an actress with a bite force."
Nicholas said nothing for a moment, watching the small figure deliver her opponent to the stretcher and bow to him twice.
’The megalodon was never the weapon,’ he thought. ’The megalodon was the story. She fed him a monster worth spending his whole ledger on, and the instant he paid, she became nothing at all.’
His fingers drummed the rail, once.
’Bait the ultimate. Vanish from its arc. Arrive behind the payment.’ The corner of his mouth moved a fraction. ’I’ve written that contract before. Word for word.’
He filed her at the top of the threat ledger, directly beside the monk and the tea drinker.
’If we meet, little beast, I can’t let you choose. The fight has to be over before your second shape.’
"AND WE ROLL ON!" Julie’s voice swept the arena back to attention as the screens wiped clean and the circle of flags reassembled. "Four matches gone! Brazil rich, China rolling, America efficient, Australia avenged, Germany on life support! The day’s blood is UP, the standings are chaos, and the selection system is HUNGRY! Give us... MATCH FIVE!"
The flags spun.
By now the colosseum had learned the ritual. The hush fell on its own. Sixty thousand people watched the blurring ring of nations, and in the alcoves, every remaining fighter stood at their rail.
The wheel slowed.
Slower.
Slower...
Two flags tore loose and slammed into the center of the screen.
The first flag was red, white, and blue.
[A/N: Nyr01 thanks for the Goldentickets! Thegreatestscape67 thanks for the Goldentickets! DaoistcKoDcu and Thank you all for reading and for the support!]