Chapter 32: Battle Bladers Begins
Madoka's seat is three rows back from the rail, center, and the noise hits her before she's even finished sitting down.
DJ's platform drops from the ceiling on cables thick as a man's torso.
"I HAVE BEEN DOING THIS FOR FIFTEEN YEARS," he screams into hundreds of screens at once, "AND I HAVE NEVER — NOT ONCE — SEEN A LINEUP LIKE WHAT WALKED INTO THIS BUILDING TODAY!"
The bass shudders the glass barrier hard enough that condensation streaks down it in rivers.
"TWENTY-FOUR BLADERS!" His arm sweeps wide. "ONE THRONE! Take a look at who's standing in this building tonight!"
The massive central Jumbotron flickers to life, displaying a sleek digital card matrix. Twenty-four individual blader profiles cascade down the screen, flipping over one by one with sharp, mechanical sound effects. Each card renders a high-resolution portrait of a blader against a metallic gold-and-black backdrop, their current Beypoint totals burning into the display like neon branding:
GINGKA HAGANE — Storm Pegasus — 58,200 PTS
KYOYA TATEGAMI — Earth Leone — 51,340 PTS
BENKEI HANAWA — Dark Bull — 51,600 PTS
KENTA YUMIYA — Flame Sagittario — 50,900 PTS
HIKARU HASAMA — Storm Aquario — 62,400 PTS
HYOMA — Aquila — 55,700 PTS
TERU SAOTOME — Earth Virgo — 53,100 PTS
TOBIO OIKE — Storm Capricorn — 50,300 PTS
MASAMUNE KADOYA — Ray Striker — 67,800 PTS
STEVE ASH — Lancelot — 59,500 PTS
KUJAKU HIBANA — Crushing Orca — 71,200 PTS
KAI HIWATARI — Black Dranzer — 169,800 PTS
RYUGA — Lightning L-Drago — 0 PTS
PHOENIX — Fireblaze — 0 PTS
YU TENDO — Flame Libra — 0 PTS
REIJI MIZUCHI — Poison Serpent — 0 PTS
RYUTARO FUKAMI — Thermal Pisces — 0 PTS
TETSUYA WATARIGANI — Dark Cancer — 0 PTS
DOAN OSHIMA — Rock Orso — 0 PTS
BUSUJIMA — Rock Scorpio — 0 PTS
DAN SANO — Dark Gasher — 0 PTS
TETSUO — Crimson Gorgon — 51,247 PTS
ZURAFA — Heat Camelopardalis — 53,000 PTS
CHRIS — Phantom Orion — 0 PTS
The stadium crowd reads the screen instantly, eyes scanning the high-definition cards. The roar that follows isn't for a single favorite — it's a collective gasp at the sheer concentration of destructive power gathered under one roof.
In the front row, a boy no older than ten grabs his older brother's sleeve and points — not at Gingka, not at Kyoya — at a name three rows down the wall he's clearly been waiting all night to see. "That's him," he says, too loud, vibrating with it. "That's the one you told me about." His brother doesn't answer right away. His brother is looking at the same name with an expression that isn't excitement at all.
"Your hometown hero is in there." DJ points straight at the H's. "So's the Lion of the Underground." A beat. "So is a kid who showed up out of absolutely nowhere with more beypoints than anybody else on this list."
He doesn't say which one yet. He lets the crowd find the name themselves, scanning the wall, and watches the reaction ripple outward when enough of them do — a confused little eddy of wait, who's that spreading through a hundred thousand people at once.
Three sections over, Madoka watches the same wall.
They don't know, she thinks, eyes moving down past the Dark Nebula names — Reiji, Ryutaro, Tetsuya, Doan, Busujima, Dan, Yu, Chris — sponsor logos stamped quietly beside each one on the smaller broadcast graphic, the kind of detail that reads as corporate branding to ninety-nine thousand people and reads as something else entirely to the few who know better.
"And for our Dark Horse—" DJ's voice drops, finally landing where the crowd's confusion has been building toward. "Folks, I gotta be straight with you. We got nothing on this one. No footage. No highlight reel. Every camera that's ever pointed at this kid in a real fight has come back wiped — static, dead batteries, full system failures. We don't know how. We just know it happens." He shakes his head slowly, and for one stretch of three full seconds he doesn't say anything at all, like the showman in him has hit something even he doesn't know how to sell. "One tournament on record.One. And somehow he's sitting on more beypoints than anyone else in this entire bracket."
On the Jumbotron, twenty-three cards slide outward to the margins of the screen, leaving a single profile card to expand into the center, rotating sharply before locking into place with a heavy digital thud.
KAI HIWATARI — 169,800 PTS
The front rows actually go quiet.
"They're calling him the Dark Horse," DJ says, and the performance has thinned out of his voice entirely now, leaving something close to genuine unease underneath. "But if you've heard the whispers — they got another name for him. Blade Breaker."
A murmur runs through the crowd, uneasy, half-thrilled.
Three sections over, Madoka watches Kenta's face go pale, his hands shaking as he stares up at the digital card.
She doesn't blame him. She's heard the same whispers — secondhand, fragmented, the way all knowledge about Kai seems to travel. While other bladers were crossing the country winning matches for fifty or a hundred points at a time, Kai had taken his by force — shattering the beys of his opponents and using an unauthorized modification to siphon every last point directly from their broken face bolts.
She didn't know which version of Kai was going to step onto the stadium floor tonight. She wanted to believe that the boy who understood the heart of a bey was still in there somewhere under the cold gaze.
But looking at the digital monstrosity on the screen, she wasn't certain at all.
---
"ALRIGHT!" DJ's voice snaps back to full performance volume. "Here's how tonight works, for anyone just joining us from another planet!"
He runs through it fast, practiced, a man who's said these words enough times that they've worn smooth: random bracket, single elimination, launch on his count, win by spin-out, knock-out, or — his voice catches very slightly on the word — *destruction.* No touching the stadium. No interference. Officials watching every angle, every match, no exceptions for anyone, sponsor or not.
"Bladers — to your rooms! You'll get the call when your match is up!"
The bladers start filing toward the tunnel mouths, a slow scattering procession, and it's there, in the last thirty feet before the dark swallows them, that Gingka's head turns.
He doesn't search for it. It just happens — like something reaches into his chest and physically redirects his attention before he's decided to give it.
Kai is looking at him.
Neither of them stops walking. Neither breaks stride. But for the four or five steps it takes to reach the tunnel, their eyes hold, the temperature seems to change, and nothing in the stadium moves except them.
Pegasus goes very still in Gingka's hand.
Kai's expression doesn't shift at all. He lets Gingka look. Lets him find exactly as much as there is to find in it, which is nothing — nothing that resembles the bonds Gingka has built his entire life around.
Gingka doesn't look away, afraid that the moment he looks away he will lose.
It's the tunnel that takes the choice from both of them — the dark swallowing Kai's side, then Gingka's, severing the eye contact at the exact same instant.
Kenta's voice arrives at Gingka's elbow. "You okay?"
"Yeah." Gingka's hand tightens around Pegasus. "Yeah, I'm fine."
He isn't sure that's true. He follows Kenta into the tunnel.
---
The stadium doesn't go quiet in the gap. A troupe in WBBA colors rappels down from the rafters doing something with light-up beys on wires that's either incredibly impressive or completely unhinged, and the Jumbotron runs a highlight reel of legendary battles from tournaments past, and somewhere a marching band Madoka didn't know existed plays something with too many horns in it.
She watches it for longer than she means to before she sets the tablet face-down in her lap.
*Stay safe, guys,* she'd said. She still doesn't know if that was a request or a prayer.
---
Behind that door, Kai sits against the far wall. Arms loose now, the bey cupped in one hand. Eyes shut.
His eyelids are thin enough that the bey's light straight through them — red, rhythmic, pulsing like something alive on the other side of the bone. And underneath the red, buried in it, a single arc of purple lightning jumps and dies and jumps again.
He thinks of a kitten curled on a windowsill, boarded at a pet day care, warm and entirely unaware of tonight.
A knock at the door. "Hiwatari. Ten minutes."
Kai opens his eyes.
He stands, slotting Black Dranzer into the holster at his hip with a clean, practiced motion, the bey going quiet against his side like something settling in to wait.
He walks through the door.
---
The tunnel out to the stage was just poured concrete and harsh fluorescent strips. To Chloe, a temporary WBBA logistics coordinator, it usually smelled like damp dust and floor wax. She was just standing there, clipboard pressed to her chest, waiting for the cues on her headset to clear the corridor for the next broadcast segment.
Kai Hiwatari's boots made the only sound in the corridor. Click. Click. Click.
Chloe shrank back slightly against the concrete. She had seen the broadcasts, but up close, Hiwatari felt less like a teenage blader and more like an oncoming weather event. He didn't look at her. He didn't look at anything.
Then the air changed.
The temperature didn't just drop — it plummeted so fast the moisture on the back of Chloe's neck turned into a cold sweat. What is wrong with the AC? she thought, her breath suddenly blooming into a white cloud in front of her face.
To her left, a terrifying, crystalline lattice of thick frost detonated across the steel support beam with a sound like a fracturing bone. Before she could gasp, three fluorescent tubes overhead burst simultaneously. Glass rained down in a sharp, glittering shower, leaving the middle section of the tunnel bathed in a sickly, shadowed twilight.
From a dark side passage, Ryuga stepped out.
Chloe's heart slammed into her ribs. The Dragon Emperor. She felt a primitive instinct scream at her to drop her clipboard, run back to the loading docks, and never come back.
Ryuga's white hair caught the dim light, and even from twenty feet away, she could hear the faint, high-pitched hum of static electricity radiating off him.
Neither boy stopped walking. Neither slowed.
But four steps before they drew level, something invisible turned over in the atmosphere. Chloe felt a sudden, crushing weight press directly against her sternum. It felt exactly as if the concrete building had taken one massive, panicked breath and refused to let it back out. She couldn't draw oxygen into her lungs.
Move, her brain panicked. Please, just move your legs.But she was pinned to the wall by sheer gravity.
Kai's pace didn't change. His shoulders remained perfectly square. His face was a mask of absolute, chilling stillness. But Chloe, watching with wide, terrified eyes, realized his stillness wasn't peace — it was the coiled tension of a guillotine blade waiting to drop.
Ryuga's trademark, arrogant smirk vanished by his second step. What replaced it made Chloe's blood run cold. It wasn't anger or competitive drive. It was a hunger so raw and unhinged that it looked entirely inhuman. He looked like an apex predator that had spent its entire life eating insects, suddenly realizing a true beast had just walked into its territory.
They're going to kill each other right here, Chloe thought, her fingers white where they gripped her clipboard.
They were level for one single step.
The tunnel exploded without a sound.
A suffocating, pitch-black fire rolled off Kai's shoulders, clashing violently with a torrent of crackling, violet lightning that erupted from Ryuga. The collision didn't create a shockwave — it created a vacuum. The silent flash threw their shadows fifteen feet up the concrete wall.
Chloe looked at the shadows and felt a cold dread sink into her stomach.
Those weren't the silhouettes of two teenagers. One shadow was bloated, multi-winged, and monstrous; the other was sharp, jagged, and snaking. They looked like two starving demons trying to tear each other's throats out on the wall.
Please don't look at me, Chloe prayed silently, closing her eyes tightly, her teeth chattering from the unnatural frost. Please just keep walking.
The flash died. The remaining light fixtures flickered violently, and three more died completely, plunging the center of the tunnel into near-total darkness.
Neither of them had muttered a single syllable.
They passed each other.
Kai continued his steady, unhurried march toward the blinding floodlights of the stadium. Ryuga disappeared into the shadows of the opposite end, his heavy white cape swishing behind him.
Chloe slumped against the concrete wall, finally able to draw a ragged, shaking breath. Her hands were trembling so badly she dropped her pen. She looked down at the floor. The frost on the support beam was still crawling outward, biting into the concrete like living winter, refusing to melt.
She gripped her headset, her voice cracking as she finally spoke into the comms line. "L-Logistics to control room... we have a structural anomaly in Tunnel B. Send... send someone else. I can't be down here anymore."
---
In a room three corridors over, Kujaku sits with the wall screen casting pale light across her face.
She'd known Zurafa would be in this bracket. Known Tetsuo would too — they had the talent and the drive for it.
Three months of watching him almost become something else, she thinks now, "and I still don't know if what I learned is going to save Takeshi or just teach me exactly how he's dying."
She sets Crushing Orca down on the bench beside her. Doesn't pick the tablet up at all. For once, she just watches, and lets it be exactly as heavy as it actually is.
---
"BLADERS — ARE — YOU — READY?!"
The Battle Bladers stadium answers Blader DJ in a single continuous roar, a wall of sound that makes the massive floodlights vibrate.
"Introducing our FIRST MATCH OF THE NIGHT!"
The tunnel mouth at the north end of the dish goes pitch-black. The stadium lights overhead flicker and dim, sending a collective gasp through the crowd. Out of the shadows, unhurried, arms crossed over his chest, his long white scarf trailing behind him, walks a blader who completely ignores the hundred thousand people screaming his name.
"HE CAME OUT OF NOWHERE — CRUSHING EVERY OPPONENT IN THE PRELIMINARIES — THE APEX PREDATOR HIMSELF, KAI HIWATARIIIII!"
The crowd's cheer dips fractionally. A heavy, suffocating purple-black dark power rolls off Kai's shoulders, pooling around his ankles like spilled ink. Unlike Ryuga's chaotic, lightning-streaked dark aura, Kai's power is a freezing, absolute void. He doesn't look at the cameras. He simply walks to his mark and waits with the chilling patience of a hunter.
"AND HIS OPPONENT—"
The south rafters explode in a brilliant shower of gold and crimson sparks.
"DROPPING IN WITH STYLE — THE BLAZING WING OF JUSTICE — IT'S PHOENIIIIIX!"
Phoenix free-falls forty feet from the stadium roof, landing in a perfect, athletic crouch. The sheer impact sends a shockwave across the reinforced stadium floor.
He rises, throwing his arms wide, a brilliant fire-red aura blazing up around him. He grins beneath his mask, soaking in the adulation like he invented the very concept of being looked at.
His fire... it's completely different from L-Drago's, Kai notes inwardly, his sharp crimson eyes narrowing.
Where Ryuga's dark flames feel like a malicious sickness, Phoenix's aura radiates pure, overwhelming physical heat and spirit. Yet Kai's instincts — honed by the dark power of Black Dranzer — pick up a strange hesitation in the flame. It rises with visual violence, but for a fraction of a second, it lacks a true competitive heartbeat. It is the flame of a man holding back. A man playing a character.
Then the aura surges, roaring to life, and the crowd goes wild.
"Sorry to keep you waiting, everybody!" Phoenix laughs, effortlessly spinning his launcher on his finger. "A true hero always makes a grand entrance to show the crowd who they really came to see!"
Kai's gaze finds him, unblinking and deadpan. "Theatrics," he says. His voice is flat and cold, but the stadium microphones pick it up, broadcasting his icy tone to the entire arena. "You hide behind a mask because you are too weak to face reality."
Phoenix laughs — genuine, hearty, taking absolutely no offense. He steps confidently up to his mark, his golden scarf swaying. "You can play the ice king all you want, Hiwatari. But fire melts ice every single time!" His grin sharpens under his mask. "The question is, can your dark blade handle the heat of a burning Blader Spirit?"
"Don't waste your breath on fairy tales," Kai says, his arm snapping out as he locks Black Dranzer onto his launcher. The dark bey hums with a terrifying, corruptive energy. "You should worry less about your performance, Ryu... and more about what your failure will do to your son."
The stadium doesn't catch the name, but Phoenix freezes.
For just a single, fleeting second, the theatrical showman completely vanishes. Behind the eye-slits of the mask, Ryo Hagane's eyes turn dead serious, sharp as steel. The playful aura around him snaps into a protective, fiercely intense blaze. It is the first time since Battle Bladers began that the mask of Phoenix has cracked.
Kai smiles — a small, cruel, mocking crescent. Black Dranzer glints in the stadium lights, ready to consume the flame.
---
In the VIP lounge, behind triple-glazed glass, Doji swirls his orange juice glass in a slow clockwise circle.
The resonance monitor in front of him blinks with a cold green glow, its sensors all set to collect data from the match below. He watches the digital line with the particular stillness of a man who arranged something a long time ago and is finally, finally getting to watch it begin.
His hand tightens, very slightly, around the cold glass of his tumbler.
The spike pattern currently climbing the monitor isn't registering a standard beyblade spin rate. It has a jagged, erratic shape to it — a shape he has seen exactly once before, months ago, in a forbidden dataset from the Dark Nebula's deepest archives. A dataset he had quietly hidden away and told no one about. It is the exact signature of a corrupted dark power, but it isn't coming from L-Drago. It is coming from Kai Hiwatari's Black Dranzer.
"Magnificent," Doji murmurs to the empty room.
---
"BLADERS — TAKE YOUR MARKS!"
Kai raises his launcher. Black Dranzer clicks into place with a sharp, heavy snap, like a held breath finally released.
Across the dish, Phoenix's doesn't waver. The fire climbs brighter up both his arms, Burn Fireblaze settling into his launcher with a low, building hum the crowd can feel in their teeth. But underneath the mask, his gaze remains locked on the boy opposite him, the sharp reality of Kai's threat lingering in the space between them.
"THREE—"
The stadium countdown begins, a hundred thousand voices chanting in a synchronized, deafening roar.
"TWO—"
Kai's crimson eyes narrow, locking onto the center of the stadium dish. The purple-black aura around his boots flares, the concrete beneath his feet frosting over as the dark power of his beyblade hungrily demands release.
"ONE—"
Phoenix draws his arm back, his golden scarf whipping through the air as his fiery aura reaches a blinding crescendo, turning the stadium into a furnace.
"LET IT RIIIIIP!"
[END CHAPTER 32]