Before Beasts, There Was Fire--Book 2

Ghost Blade

One by one, Hillary called out the teams in her 'show voice'. In order to save money, no one had hired any professional techies on the spot lights, so each team just had to walk through the darkness to where the light was being shined at the edges of the stadium. Tyson did his regular tom foolery waving to his adoring fans and blabbering back love as though they could hear him above their own roars. Kai just kept his eyes ahead. He didn't like the spotlight.

Through the light, in the reserved lines of seats for the waiting teams, Kai thought he could make out Ayah hovering over Kenny, or rather, his laptop. She had fallen in love with Dizzy on sight and had been quite reluctant to give her back up to him. It was the first time any of them had seen Ayah attempt to use her looks to her advantage, and the only reason Kenny had ever seen Dizzy again was because Kai had snatched it out of her grip in disgust and thrown it back to the Chief with a sharp command to her to stop causing trouble for the team. Max and Ray had almost turned to laptop-stealing putty when she pouted at this, but since she appeared to be more guilty than disappointed, the trouble ended there.

Nevertheless, he doubted Kenny would get as much footage of the matches as he'd like.

Once all the teams were lined up, Hillary, standing in the referee's booth, garnered the crowd's attention.

"Alright, since we have a short amount of time and loads of teams, this tournament is going to be a little different. First off, each team will get one match each. Secondly, all four members of each team will be playing at once—you heard me, people, that's eight beyblades in one dish! Just for the occasion, our amazing sponsors have provided us this extra large beydish!" She waited, arm raised towards the mechanical doors in the center of the stadium. When nothing happened, her excited façade fell. She sighed. "Danny, the doors. You said you could do this." The electric motors kicked into gear and the crowd gave an approving roar as the split opened in the middle. "And here we have it!"

Hillary hadn't been kidding. The beydish was huge, though not as big as Kai had been expecting. Most of the size went into the eight players' platforms around the dish, one half blue and the other half red.

"So our selection would be completely random," continued Hillary, all sweetness now, "I wrote down all the names of the teams on pieces of paper and had an assistant pick them out of a hat blindfolded. Oh! But that reminds me, there's one more rule that's different from the usual BBA standards." She smiled down at the ten teams assembled. "Since today is Tyson's birthday, whoever kicks him out of the dish—and I mean completely outside of the dish—automatically moves his team on to the next round."

"What!" shrieked Tyson, eliciting a low rumble of laughter from the audience. He seemed to find himself again, however, as he gathered himself up in his usual confident stance. "Bring it on, then, I can take on all of you."

"Some birthday present," muttered Max with a good natured smiled, giving Tyson a playful shoved.

"No kidding," echoed Ray, the only one looking appropriately chagrin. "That makes our game all the harder. We're going to have to spend our entire time protecting Tyson rather than beating the other team out. She's automatically put us on the defense."

"Or on the chase," said Kai, who wanted to throw something at her. Like Tyson would just stay put and let them protect him. He'd be all over the dish getting himself into trouble, and given he often was the fastest player of the team, poor Max, their real shield, would be hard pressed to do any shielding.

"Alright, Danny, if you could bring down the screen thingy so we can see who's up first!"

From the ceiling rolled out the white projector screen. The projector at first was overpowered by the spotlights, and Hillary had to do some grumbling into the microphone at Danny to dim the spotlights so everyone could see the print out chart that had the teams' names written into the slots.