Practice was tough.
Zoe had never been the athletic type, though she had wanted to be.
Growing up and watching her idol, Hazeko Sato, dominate the competition with his unmatched speed and strength made her want to become just like him. She started working out at six years old, doing push-ups until she couldn't feel her arms, squats until she couldn't stand, crunches until she couldn't breathe. When she was younger, she had always been the strongest in her class, faster than all the boys. But as puberty hit, things started to change.
Both her parents were short, her mother especially so.
Mary was a chemistry professor at New Republic City University, and that's where she met her father, Sky Fern, a researcher at the university’s hyper-speed lab. Academics.
Zoe inherited their smarts, which helped her progress through school at the top of her class. She was praised by her parents, her teachers, and her peers. As far as anyone was concerned, she had a bright future in some university, maybe as a researcher like her father, but whatever the case her brain would be her calling card.
She never wanted that. Zoe had been cursed with a fate that pulled her from her dream.
She kept working, but she didn't grow as tall as she hoped. Though she had worked out since a young age, at some point her progress started to slow. It was like there was a barrier that kept her from the stage.
At seventeen, she was ready to give up. Thanks to her parents' finances, she managed to participate in a few under-eighteen Demolition tournaments, nothing major, but she would always be outrun and outmuscled by her competition. With sticky bombs hooked to her back, she couldn't beat the more talented kids; she didn't have what it took.
In her last year of high-school, she was despondently sitting at her desk, her back to the wall, the window to her left. Zoe looked at the shiny metal of the buildings around the school, contrasting with the vibrant green of the school grounds.
Sarah Sayf, the girl that sat in front of her, looked at Zoe with warm eyes.
Sarah was like Zoe in a lot of ways. Her parents were professional explosive researchers at the prestigious Sayf Explosives firm and she was always number two in the class. Her pink-rimmed glasses framed her dark eyes. Her curly hair, black as a lake, was put up in a tight ponytail that evoked the image of a hard working woman.
“Come on Zo, you can make it, you're smart!” she said, her voice clear and calm, confident in her words. “You just need a better strategy. Maybe drop the stickys, go for more of a... Planned out approach! Play to your strengths!”
The girl wanted to help her friend, but that honest feeling laced her words with a toxin so kind that it crushed the blonde's heart. Zoe grunted, grabbing at her head and ruffling her hair.
That's what she'd been hearing for years. That she couldn't make it like Sato, that she didn't have what it took to dominate like he did.
She had placed in the bottom fifty in the last three tournaments she participated in. Running out with all her might, she would take out a few players. Her throws were precise and powerful, her positioning was impeccable in every match, but the open space was her doom. The moment someone faster than her set their sights on her blue suit, she was done for.
Her most recent outing had been particularly damaging to her ego. She'd invited Sarah to watch it live as a birthday present, since she was always begging Zoe to take her along. The tickets were a bit more expensive than she was expecting, but for her friend, Zoe bought one. She might as well have been eliminated before the third bell rang.
The players next to her were one another’s long-time rivals, two middle-schoolers from the other side of town–though they were built more like professional wrestlers.
As soon as the match started, they grabbed at the bombs tacked on their backs and started throwing explosions at each other. Caught in between the squabble, Zoe tried to run away, but was inadvertently hit by a short-timer bomb that one of them deflected, which knocked her out.
She watched the rest of the match from the stands with Sarah, after going through extensive concussion procedures. At least Sarah was happy. She wore a beautiful red dress that complimented her dark skin perfectly. Looking at her friend, Zoe gave thanks that there was at least one thing to be happy about.
Still, it had been a great, embarrassing disappointment. Enough for her, she thought. There was nothing in Demolition for her, she couldn't cut it.
She had been ready to give up, if not for her parents. They had always been supportive of her. They wanted her to do what she wanted, that had always been their approach to parenting. Though they did tell her several times they thought her talents lie somewhere else, they always gave it all they had to help her participate and improve. They bought her her first gym membership, her first suit, her bombs. She had felt ready to give it all up, but they convinced her to give it one last try, one last match. Even just as a goodbye.
“I don't know, Sarah... I don't really feel like I got it in me.” Said Zoe, her voice rough and quiet, barely a whisper. Her eyes didn't meet her friend’s, instead staring at a passing high-speed transport board outside, clearly going over the speed limit in the school zone. “It's one last match for me... That's all I have left.”
Sarah wasn't ready to let her go down just yet. They weren't alone in the classroom; a few other students were also loitering around after school, talking and laughing, but there were no teachers in sight.
Sarah stealthily grabbed her backpack, a black thing that had seen too much use already and was littered with pins and stickers (mostly of bombs). She reached inside, and grabbed a small hexagonal piece of plaster with a blue tint. Her mouth contorted into a wicked smile as she carefully placed it on Zoe's desk.
“What is this?” Asked the blonde. Confusion overflowed from her expression.
“OK, don't freak out. I may or may not have stolen this from the lab.” Answered Sarah, rolling her eyes and shrugging her shoulders mockingly. “And it may or may not be a new development in Demolition bombs. Francium!” Sarah jumped in her seat, clanking her chair, making a noise that briefly attracted the attention of a few other students in the near-empty classroom. A few of them mumbled the word “maniac” as they looked away.
“So, listen, it doesn't explode on contact. There's this wire they use, I'm pretty sure it's just steel, they attach it to the plaster,” she continued, using her fingers to demonstrate by pointing at the palm-sized hexagon, “and when the wire is ripped out it leaves a small hole in the francium plaster. That small increase in surface area leads to just a little bit more francium to be exposed to the water vapour in the atmosphere, which starts off the chain reaction that leads to the explosion. Pretty neat huh?!”
Zoe's eyes were wide with shock and she leaned back as far as she could in her chair without falling. Her friend had just brought an extremely dangerous and experimental explosive device into the school grounds. One that reacted with... Air?!
“OK, so, I can get a few more of these. And I can get you some wires too.” The excitement was overflowing from her voice. Her hands were shaking with little beads of sweat forming on her skin. Her breathing was fast and erratic, her face pink with a rabid blush.
She was going completely off the rails. Zoe tried to lean back a bit more, using her hands to balance herself against the wall and the window, as she noticed Sarah was breathing right on top of the water-reactive bomb.
“It's not very throwable, and it's not easy to transport, but holy crap! Isn't this exciting? It's a huge explosion! Barely anyone even uses wire-traps in this day and age, you'll totally blow them up! Just, try it, yeah?!”
In an attempt to de-escalate the bombastic situation, Zoe nodded violently, almost falling off her chair. She could feel her hands start to slip as sweat built up on her skin.
“Really?! OK, you promise you'll use them in your next match?!” Sarah's smile beamed as she took one hand to straighten her glasses. Zoe nodded again, her face contorted in terror.
“Yeah Sarah, friend, I-I'll use them! Yeah whatever you want I'll use it! Just take that away!” Stumbling over her words, her eyes stuck to the francium bomb the insane girl had brought to school. Sarah's eyes also moved to the plaster. Shrugging her shoulders, she returned it to her backpack, placing it in a small hexagonal container with the Sayf Explosives logo on the lid.
The two weeks until Zoe's match went by in a flash. She continued her workout and research routines, learning as much as possible about as many competitors as she could. She felt as ready as ever, sitting on the bullet train to the arena, but the feeling in her heart remained the same as before. That feeling of her chest caving in, her guts spinning, like a bomb had gone off.
She had put her suit on at home. It was the traditional approach, though she noticed some of the other players arrived at the arena in casual clothing. She thought the arena's locker rooms were a bit stuffy and disgusting, but apparently some people were less than bothered by it.
She had her admission slip in her hand. Because of her training regiment, Zoe had asked Sarah to go pick it up for her the day prior. It had the number seventy-five on it, a reminder of her low rank amongst her peers.
She walked at a slow pace to her room, the quiet noise of the titanium holders on her back clanking against each other and against the zipper of her bag, packed with small sticky bombs and rapid-fire explosives, echoing in the long and empty corridor.
As she opened the door, Zoe was greeted by a violent burst of light and a terrible noise. She peeked inside.
At the other end of the room was a small metal table, still big enough to take up half the packed room, with little metallic spheres, pieces of plaster, cables, and assorted pieces of plastic strewn around. Stuck to the wall behind it were about ten pieces of an hexagonal plaster with a blue tint. Sitting at the table was a tiny girl with dark skin and curly hair wearing a light blue dress. She held a soldering wand and was wearing a full-head soldering mask that she lifted to reveal her face, clad in pink-rimmed glasses.
“Oh, Zo, you're finally here!” Said Sarah, her excitement clear in her tone and even in the way she moved.
“Sarah? What are you doing here?” Retorted Zoe, walking in the room and carefully placing her bag on the floor next to a chair Sarah had displaced.
“Isn't it obvious?” She said, rolling her eyes, “I'm your technician!” Sarah flicked a little card she had hung around her neck, the words “Sarah Sayf, Technician, Room 75” in black lettering clearly inscribed on it. She continued.
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“I've been working on your bombs! You said you would use whatever I said, so be a girl of your word!” She mockingly pointed her finger at the blonde girl before turning around to face the desk, explaining the bombs she'd been developing for Zoe.
“So, of course you already know of the francium wire-traps, I've made them more stable by including some lithium in the mixture before plasterisation. There's less than a two percent chance of them exploding due to high humidity, by my estimates. Oh, and I got your wires too.” She said, picking up a long coil of thin metallic wire and a wire-cutter from under the table and throwing it behind her back towards Zoe. It was lighter than she expected.
“I also built some motion-detectors. They're a bit finicky, so they do sometimes trigger for no reason. Well, I'm really not sure if it's for no reason at all, there might be a reason, I just haven't figured it out...” Her voice trailed off as thought overtook her stream of consciousness, before continuing.
“Oh, and of course just trapping is cowardly behaviour, so I've built you THIS!”
From a bag she had on the floor, Sarah retrieved a long device. It was made of a dull grey plastic bent in the shape of a long tube with an opening about the size of a ping-pong ball. On the bottom was a handle and a trigger, as well as a bunch of differently sized buttons, and on the top sat a tiny contraption of wire and metal. Sarah proudly showed off her invention to Zoe like it was a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.
“I call it the Zoe Long-range Obliterator Cannon, or the Z-LOC, for short. This thing on top is Sayf tech, you know?! It's a targeting system, if you look through the hole,” said Sarah, putting the gun to the side of her head and lining her eye up with a small circular hole on the targeting system, “you can aim with a little red square.
If you click the buttons on the bottom you can adjust what it's aiming at, it can detect players and Catastrophes. The button on the top disables automatic aim so you can shoot freehand! Oh, and that's the trigger.” She said, pressing the C-shaped trigger connected to the handle, resulting in a weird whirring noise being emitted by the Z-LOC.
Zoe was speechless.
The girl in front of her was absolutely beaming, the room was a bomb-riddled mess, and she had little more than ten minutes to get to her platform.
The worst part, Sarah was right, Zoe had made a promise. She had only intended for it to apply to the francium bombs, but faced with her friend's excitement, she felt she had no choice but to face her last battle with Sarah's contraptions in hand, whether they ended up blowing up in her face or not.
She smiled kindly to Sarah and laughed, causing Sarah to laugh as well. Zoe sighed, and packed her bag with the equipment her friend gave her. Without a word, she left the room and walked to the platform.
The bag wasn't meant to carry so many things, and it wasn't even meant to hook into the titanium pieces on the back of her suit, so she just left them empty and put the bag on her back, holding the handle with one hand. She was strong enough to carry it, but it would clearly hinder her movements in-game. It would be almost impossible for her to run, and trying to find what she's looking for inside that jumbled mess would be about as difficult. Still, she felt relaxed, at that moment.
There wasn't much of a crowd that night. It was a random under-eighteen tournament, no notable prospects were participating, and it was a weeknight, so it was only a few parents and probably a couple of bored scouts. The match wasn't televised, so there were no announcers either.
Zoe stood silently behind the thick metal door, only the sound of her heartbeat and the light clinking of the bag's zipper against the titanium could be heard.
The gate opened and the light flooded in, the bright illumination in the arena almost blinding if not for her specialised glasses. There were no introductions, and everyone was lowered at the same time to the ground floor.
The first ring sounded deep. Zoe had no chance of winning, by her accounts. She was ranked seventy-fifth out of everyone participating, and the twenty-five players ranked lower than her were only so because they were not ranked at all.
She looked at the buildings and calculated the best path forward. The layout seemed favourable to her; the arena was a high-density residential area, buildings aplenty.
She located a small detached two-story house. The windows were caked with grime, which would make it hard for her to be spotted inside, and the two floors allowed her to rig explosives at the doors and at the stairs, which would make it rather safe. Also, judging by the pieces of titanium jutting out from the roof, it was likely the building was bomb-reinforced, making it almost impossible for it to be blown up from the inside or the outside. A safe place to get the bag off her back.
The second ring sounded like the first. Instinctively, her right hand reached behind her back to check her bombs, but she was greeted with the cold metallic sensation of titanium. In a moment of shock, she fell to her knees, before remembering her situation. She laughed and shook her head violently.
The third ring sounded sharp, and she started running for her life.
As usual, the other players were immediately throwing bombs in every direction. Some were even thrown her way, maybe because of her encumbered movements, or maybe she was targeted by complete chance. Thankfully, no one gave chase for long, allowing her to reach the building safely.
She opened the intact door, a rarity in the arena, and closed it behind her softly. She felt a deep fear in her heart, but it was different from the other times. She wasn't afraid of the bombs, of the people stronger than her or of the people faster than her. She was afraid of the little hexagons of death she had in her bag.
Leaning against a wall, she reached for them. They were individually packed into perfect-fit plastic containers with the Sayf Explosives logo on them. She opened one of them and picked up the bomb. It was very lightweight and soft. It felt malleable, but she didn't try to deform it.
Zoe carefully placed one on the wall close to the door handle. It was stuck firmly onto the concrete and maintained its hexagonal shape. Then, she took out the coil of wire from her bag and used the wire-cutter to cut a small piece, which she tied around the handle, easily deforming the wire and locking it in place. She stuck the other end onto the francium bomb, which shifted in colour to grey and hardened slightly as if grabbing onto the wire.
Zoe was impressed by her friend's quality work, and continued to the other side of the hall, where there was a hole in the wall where another door should've been, and repeated the process. This time stretching the wire across the door's width and attaching the free end to a crack in the wall.
As she went up the stairs, she did something similar, using the remaining three hexagonal bombs to rig trip-wires and a motion-detector door-trap on the way to the room she had selected as her base of operations.
The room was a baby bedroom crammed in a corner of the second floor, with windows to the north and west sides, which gave her decent visibility over the fighting going on outside, but that had enough grime on the glass that it would be difficult for anyone outside to spot her.
Her inexperience with the materials had cost her some valuable time, and by the time she got to the room, almost half an hour had gone by. As fast as she could, she took out the weird thing Sarah had called the Z-LOC and placed one of her explode-on-contact bombs in the barrel. It fit perfectly, and she could hear a sharp metallic sound as the ping-pong ball sized explosive locked into the release mechanism of the cannon.
She looked outside through the small hole in the targeting system and saw the Catastrophe begin. Tall humanoid robots appeared from thin air in a flash of light, armoured tanks hooked with laser guns and grenade launchers were dropped from the sky onto the streets, and the few surviving players were starting to get picked off by the environment.
Then, she heard that odd sound, like a gust of wind, coming from behind her, before a flash of light suddenly filled the tiny room she had cocooned herself into. Her head snapped back in time to see three wiry legs holding up a gun with a thick barrel. Zoe immediately recognized the Catastrophe as a sniper, auto-targeting sharp-shooters that spawned inside buildings, picking off hordes of players at a time from a distance by shooting powerful bombs. It was aiming outside, looking away from her position, so Zoe did nothing, keeping as quiet as possible, hurled up in a corner hiding behind the rotting wood of the baby crib, staring at the moving weapon.
She aimed the Z-LOC at the thing, finger on the trigger, but didn't shoot. The bomb she had loaded onto the cannon wasn't particularly powerful; it was enough to knock out a player with a direct hit, but not so strong it would hurt her even at such close range, if she shot at the sniper. Instead of taking out the sniper, she decided to turn it into an ally. Her mouth curled up like the tail of a demon and her eyes narrowed behind her glasses.
All Catastrophe weapons had weaknesses; they weren't made to be unbeatable, only to generate some interesting chaos in the match and take out the weakest among the remaining players. Basically, it was a way to make things interesting while increasing the pace of play.
The weakness of the sniper was that it couldn't move from its spawn point. As a result, the best way to counter a sniper was to enter the building it was inside of. With that in mind, Zoe grabbed her mouth with her hand to stop her from laughing.
Anyone that spotted the sniper from outside would want to enter the building and trigger the francium bombs. An excitement she had always dreamed she would feel finally arrived for the young girl as she hid away.
Before long, the ground shook from beneath her, causing the sniper to wobble in place. Not long after, another explosion, this time from the other side of the building. Zoe felt like she was living her dream, the feeling of the explosion rumbling through her body, the sound of the ceiling shattering and cracking as pieces of paint and concrete fell down on her. The smell of destruction in the air.
The sniper shot for the first time, shattering the window. It was a powerful shot, almost deafening in its volume, and a spherical bomb flew from the barrel at an incredible speed. Soon after, an explosion was heard outside.
The thrill of the moment took over the girl's body, making her crawl slowly to behind the Catastrophe-spawned weapon looking out through the hole in the wall where a window once was. She stood behind the three-legged machine and held up her friend's cannon to her cheek, looking out like the sniper, her eyes guided by a red square in the targeting system.
The square locked into a player running as fast as they could in the distance, trying to reach a tall building before they got found out by the sniper. Zoe held her breath and steadied her arm before pressing the trigger. As her finger collapsed the little piece of metal, the Z-LOC made that same whirring noise, but this time, a small spherical bomb shot from the barrel so fast the knock-back threw Zoe into the wall behind her, pushing all the air out of her lungs. She grunted, the pain shooting up and down her back, but she managed to stand up in time to witness the beauty Sarah had made possible.
In the distance, Zoe saw a gorgeous painting of red, yellow, and orange. It was like an all-consuming fire that would burn inside her forever. It was so bright it burned itself permanently into her retinas even through her glasses. That girl that smiles in such a creepy way, holding a plastic cannon inside a bomb-riddled house, was happier than she'd ever been as she looked at the slack body of the player she'd hit being picked up by the recovery drones.
She giggled and jumped in place, dancing and cheering for herself, until she heard the turning noise of the sniper. Zoe crouched immediately and silence filled the small room as the sniper looked around, before turning back to look outside.
It only took a few more minutes and a couple of shots from the Z-LOC. The sniper was teleported away and a recovery drone appeared in front of Zoe, floating in mid air, its little wings fluttering like a butterfly. She'd won her first match.
In the exit tunnel, a photo drone took her picture and floated away. She was congratulated by the event organiser, who looked at her with a concerned look and avoided her eyes.
She slowly made her way back to room seventy-five, her legs feeling exhausted, like she was walking on a cloud, each step taking itself without her command. She opened the door and was pushed down to the floor by a brutal force.
“You did it, Zo! Congratulations! You were amazing out there, I didn't expect the Z-LOC to work so well, you really showed them! Oh and did you see the francium bombs!? Maybe I should make them weaker, don't you think? I mean, those guys were sent flying off when they exploded, or did you use two on each door?! You're crazy, girl, that's too much!”
Sarah couldn't stop talking, congratulating her friend, kissing her on the cheek, and squeezing the life out of her. Zoe couldn't even get a word in, but she also couldn't stop smiling.
When she got home, her parents were waiting for her, wielding calm smiles, watching some documentary on a holographic display. As they heard the front door unlock, they stood to greet their daughter. Her mum already had her mouth open, ready to console Zoe as was usual, but she didn't get a word in. She saw the wicked smile of her little girl and held her breath. Later that night, the three of them looked online for the next tournament she could enter.
Zoe continued working out as usual for the next five years, and it all culminated in gathering enough points over the regular Demolition season to enter the qualifier stages of the Obliteration Cup. She could hear Sarah's music blasting through her headphones behind her while Zoe dodged virtual bombs and dashed behind walls to avoid the targeting system of the snipers.
In Beijing, she would face Haruka again, as well as many of the top Demolition players in the world. Even as she got hit by a virtual sticky bomb, her practice chest-plate vibrating violently, the corners of her mouth couldn't help but curl up.