Chapter 128: The Sky Had to Come Down
There wasn’t time to invent anything, and Jin knew better than to try.
He had a short break, a bruised-but-cleared lizard, and the same kit he’d walked in with. No anti-air technique was going to materialize in ten minutes. What he had was what he’d always have: Glitch’s fast response to commands, his low centre of gravity, his claws and balance, the mobility they’d drilled, Harden when he called for it, the arena’s blocks, and his own eyes.
Data Appraisal could give him the Kite’s registered basics and whatever its visible body revealed. The Engine could not register another Tamer’s contracted beast, expose its hidden information, or model it as a playable avatar, so everything beyond the basic readout Jin would have to learn while it was trying to score on him.
Glitch watched the Razorwing wheel over the far end of the arena with narrowing eyes. Through the bond came a firm mix of irritation and disdain, aimed entirely upward: flying was apparently a more sophisticated and socially tolerated way of refusing to fight properly.
"Might be right," Jin murmured. "Doesn’t help us."
Mira crossed halfway before the barrier, and she was exactly as sharp as her match had suggested.
"You beat Corven by making his Ram pick a lane," she said, calm, with no edge to it. "Three routes on the ground, one wall to cover them. It was good." She glanced up at her Kite, then back. "The Razorwing doesn’t have to respect ground routes. I can watch all of them from up there and only come down when I choose."
It wasn’t a boast. It was a clean, accurate description of the problem, and Jin took it as one.
"Yeah," he said. "I noticed."
She nodded, like that was the right answer, and went back to her zone.
The barrier hummed up.
"Begin."
The Razorwing climbed instantly, folding altitude around itself like armour, while Glitch coiled to chase it from below.
"No. Stay." Jin held him before he could launch. Running under a flying beast burned stamina for nothing and left their marker naked. "Close to home. We defend first."
Glitch stalked back toward their marker, seething, while Mira went to work. She did not do the stupid thing and send the Kite diving at the marker on the first pass to get swatted.
She tested.
The Razorwing dropped toward the marker and pulled up before committing, reading how fast Glitch broke to intercept. On the next pass it swept in as if it were going for the objective, then banked toward Glitch instead and forced him to react to the wrong threat. After that it threatened Glitch directly, trying to draw him a step off the marker before cutting for the open ground behind him.
Every pass was a question, and Mira was reading the answers, clocking how fast Glitch stopped, turned, and returned. Jin refused the first traps. He kept Glitch home and kept him from lunging at bait, but the shape of the loss was forming anyway.
Mira could do this all day. She could orbit overhead, pressure his defence, and pile up positioning points without ever putting her beast in real danger. Jin could not win a match by standing next to his marker until the clock ran out.
Glitch found defensive patience even less educational than touching markers, and said so continuously through the bond in increasingly sour pulses.
Then Mira committed for real.
The Razorwing came down at Glitch—not a blind run at the marker, but a genuine attack, dropping fast with its natural talons out.
"Dodge left—Harden, now!"
Glitch’s scales flushed dark as he twisted. The talons raked across his hardened shoulder with a screech, scoring a shallow, controlled contact before the Kite climbed again on its own momentum.
Glitch spun to snap at it and closed his jaws on empty air a full body-length below its rising talons.
Points to Mira. A clean withdrawal.
The exchange made the limitation painfully clear. Glitch was fast at stopping and turning, but none of that gave him a single inch of height. The Kite hit and left, and by the time Glitch could answer, there was nothing at the bottom of the swing except empty air.
Mira’s next sequence nearly ended it.
She opened with another approach on Glitch. When Jin shifted him to avoid the talons, the Razorwing changed line mid-approach and dove for Jin’s marker instead. Mira had prepared the angle so that Glitch and the marker sat along paths the Kite could thread between, and Jin caught the change half a second late.
His stomach dropped.
"Stop—back, the marker, go!"
Glitch’s response was the only thing that saved it. He reversed on a claw and tore back across the ground, reaching the marker’s defensive space a breath before the Razorwing arrived, close enough that the Kite climbed rather than crash into his low, braced body.
Mira almost had it.
It wasn’t a scare. It was a genuine near-loss, and Jin knew it. She had started turning Glitch’s own defensive reflexes into a weapon: bait the save, then use the save to open the real target.
But the same sequence handed Jin his first real read of the Kite, and he took it. The Razorwing was fast, but it could not hover; it had to keep moving. Once it dropped into a low dive, it needed room to pass through or climb back out, and its turns, while smooth, were not instant. To do anything—to touch a marker or rake Glitch with those talons—it had to come down into physical reach.
It was built to cut and leave, not to stop the forward drive of a low, braced ground beast with raw mass.
The problem had narrowed. Mira’s advantage wasn’t simply that the enemy could fly; it was that she controlled when the Razorwing came down.
Jin couldn’t keep reacting on her clock. The Kite needed a reason to give up the safety overhead, and the one thing on this floor Mira absolutely had to protect sat on her own side of the arena.
Jin started walking Glitch away from their marker and toward Mira’s.
She read the obvious trap immediately and did not scramble the Kite down after him. Instead she kept it high, measuring the distances—Glitch to her marker, Kite to Jin’s marker—running the same calculation Jin was running.
The low blocks did not cover Glitch, but keeping one beside him cut down the directions from which the Razorwing could make a clean dive. It also gave him something solid to stop and turn against when the Kite forced him to change lanes.
The Razorwing kept working him on the way across, making passing strikes, forcing those lane changes, and trying to stall his advance until Jin’s exposed marker became the better target. Jin let the pressure come and watched its orbit tighten and widen with every approach.
He waited until the Razorwing had just finished a low feint and was riding a line that would require a genuine banking turn before it could reach Jin’s marker. At that moment, Glitch had the shorter, straighter path to Mira’s.
He wasn’t faster than the Kite. He didn’t need to be. The distance, the Razorwing’s current heading, and the time it needed to turn were enough.
Mira looked between the lines and reached the same result. If she sent the Razorwing racing for Jin’s marker now, she would lose hers first.
She made the correct call.
She recalled the Kite to defend.