The crowd had not fully settled.
People were still talking, still replaying Superfly Jones' lines to each other, still shaking their heads the way you do when something sits with you longer than expected. A few people near the front were doing impressions of the taller kid's delivery, pointing fingers and mimicking the cadence. The energy in the room was still riding high from the first verse and it had nowhere to go yet.
Then the shorter kid stepped in, ready for the kill.
The crowd noise dropped maybe thirty percent. Not silent, just lower. The way a room gets when people are still excited but something tells them to pay attention now.
On the small monitor in the waiting room Ty watched the shorter kid's shoulders drop slightly. Not from defeat, more like release. Like he had been holding something tight in his chest the whole time and had just decided to let it out.
"Here we go," Yara said quietly.
Pete had both hands clasped together now, forearms on his knees, fully locked in.
Ty said nothing.
Cloak n' Daggers began with a rather husky voice...
"Yo, I pass all tests with no rest
I gotta get some things off my chest (yunno)
You said you rang my bell? Couldn't even afford the rope to pull it
You talk about my daddy but yours stayed and still wasn't about it..."
The reaction from the crowd was immediate but different from the first verse. Where Jones' opening had pulled shocked laughter, this one pulled something rawer. A low rumble moved through the crowd. The kind of sound that means the audience recognizes a counter punch landing clean.
"...At least my old man leaving was a choice that made some sense
Yours stayed in the house and still left you spiritually and emotionally wrecked
He goes around the hood, begging just to provide you with food
He made you think that fucking your own mama was something good..."
A girl near the middle let out a sound that was half scream half laughter. Two people behind her started grabbing at each other. After then, it was like a chain reaction started. The howling and screaming moved all the way to the end of the hall, and it was chaos after that.
"He said he fucking his mamaaaa!!!" Someone from the audience yelled above everyone else, making the last bar obvious to whoever might have missed it. Nobody seemed to have missed it though.
In the waiting room Pete made a sound low in his throat. "Good God, such evil thing to say."
"Told you. These kids are too dirty for my liking," Yara said. "Cloaks absorbed the first wave and came back with an even crazier energy."
Ty didn't respond. He was watching the shorter kid's feet. He was barely moving. Just standing there planted, delivering each line like it cost him nothing, like he had written them twenty years ago and had simply been waiting for the right occasion to spend them.
"...You bringing up my grades like you graduated something real
I heard you got a diploma from a school nobody feel
pffft, you're too slow
I get it
You degrade it
I'll swing machetes
And get you beheaded..."
Light laughter scattered through the crowd at that one but it wasn't the main event. People were waiting. Ty could feel it even through the monitor. The crowd had sensed something building.
"...Your girl still texts me, yeah I got the receipts right here
She said you kiss with your eyes open and it fills her with fear
She said when she calls you a man, it fills you with dread
She said you stink, and only one underwear is all you wear..."
The room detonated.
There was no other word for it. The sound that came out of that crowd in the two seconds after that line was the kind of sound that made the walls feel temporary. People were standing on their toes. Someone knocked over a cup near the side barrier and didn't even look down. The taller kid on stage took a small step back that he probably didn't mean to take and the crowd caught it and the noise went up another level because of it.
"OH," Pete said out loud, forgetting entirely that he was in a waiting room. He stood up halfway then caught himself and sat back down. "Oh he did not."
Even Yara uncrossed her arms.
Ty felt something shift in his chest. Not nervousness exactly. More like the feeling of watching something real happen and understanding in the moment that it was real. He had heard a lot of battles before. Watched them on his phone, listened to recordings, studied timing and delivery the way some people studied film. But there was something different about being close enough to feel the crowd react even through a wall and a small monitor with average picture quality.
This was what it actually felt like.
Cloak n' Daggers was far from done though.
"...I heard you dry snitched on your brother when the pressure got hot
Now you standing on a stage acting like that story's not
Your whole persona was built on what you seen in a film
Every bar you spit sounds like a second hand steal..."
The laughter that came from the crowd at that line had an edge to it. Uncomfortable and loud at the same time. A few people went quiet in pockets. Others filled the silence immediately. The taller kid on stage had stopped trying to manage his expression. He was just standing there now, arms slightly out from his body, waiting for it to be over the way you wait out rain without an umbrella. Nothing to do but endure it.
"He's been watching him," Yara said. "This whole time he was studying him."
"What?" Pete looked at her.
"He didn't panic when the first verse hit. He was listening. Now he's using everything he clocked." She nodded at the screen. "That's not just battle rap. That's strategy."
Ty thought about that. He filed it away without meaning to.
"...I don't need a crowd reaction to know I'm killing you slow
You rehearsed this in the mirror I just came here and flow
You rang my bell but forgot that I don't answer the door
Keep knocking little man, I live on a different floor."
Half the crowd made a sound that wasn't quite a word. More like a collective exhale that turned into noise at the end of it. A group near the back started stomping. The floor vibrated faintly. The monitor on the wall buzzed slightly from the sound waves carrying through.
Cloak n' Daggers stepped back, signalling the end of his verse.
The crowd took a breath.
Then it came, the explosion. This one was steadier and deeper. People were nodding while they screamed. That specific combination of body language that means the audience has made a decision.
Jones was still standing across from him. His jaw was set. His eyes had gone somewhere behind them that was hard to read. He was nodding slowly, the way people nod when they are deciding whether what just happened actually happened.
In the waiting room none of the three of them spoke for a moment.
Pete sat back in his chair slowly and looked at the ceiling. "I genuinely cannot tell who won that."
"I don't think they'll decide just yet," Yara said. "There should be another round."
Ty looked at her. "Another round?"
She looked back at him with the flat expression she used when she thought a question answered itself. "That's only fair. They are at each other's throat as is. Might as well give them a deciding round. A lot of rappers don't come prepared for second rounds, but it really is what shows how quick you could come up with wrecking bars. It shows your creativity, and that is a deciding factor."
'Mm, Yara sure knows a lot about this game. She sounds like a judge herself.'
Ty turned back to the monitor. On the screen the host was stepping forward between the two of them, arms spread wide, working the crowd up further which did not seem possible but was apparently happening anyway. Both kids were standing in their corners of the stage. Superfly Jones had his head down slightly, but not in defeat. The shorter one was looking directly out at the crowd without blinking.
Ty noticed something in that moment that he had not noticed before.
The shorter kid was not looking at the crowd the way someone looks when they are feeding off energy or enjoying the reaction. He was looking at them the way someone looks when they are counting. Like the crowd was information and he was still working out what to do with it.
'He's was not done, this Cloaks.'
Ty looked down at his own hands resting flat on his knees. He thought about his own set. The lines he had, the order, the timing. He had felt reasonably confident about them this morning sitting in his bedroom running them quietly under his breath while the house was still asleep.
But he found himself less confident now.
Not because they were bad lines. But because he had just watched two people stand twenty feet apart and carve pieces out of each other in front of a crowd that wanted blood, and something about seeing it up close and real made the version he had rehearsed in his head feel smaller than it had before.
He pressed his thumbnail into the side of his index finger again.
From the monitor, the host's voice came through the small speaker thin and slightly distorted.
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking people?" the host said, a wide grin plastered on her face.
The crowd screamed, repeating some words, going up in a cacophony. It was hard at the moment to quickly understand what the noise was about.
The judges were ready to give their takes about the contest, but no matter how hard they tried to be heard, the crowd wouldn't resort to silence. Their noise kept disrupting their train of thoughts, and thus their sense of judgement.
Future finally stood up from the judge's seat, and some little silence was finally restored. But he didn't get up to judge.
"Do you really want this, folks?" Future said into the microphone.
The crowd screamed, this time in unison, making it easy to understand the yells.
"Round two! Round two! Round two!"
"Alright then," Future said, "let's begin."