“Wasn’t that a bit too much, Zo?”
Sarah’s brow furrowed. Her voice was quiet and smooth, laced with concern, as she pushed Zoe’s back down, the blonde reaching for her toes. She only managed to respond with a grunt.
After the last qualifying match in Beijing, Zoe was barely able to stand. Her shoulders were stiff as stone, her bones creaked like old doors as she squirmed, her back in excruciating pain. A week later, her body was finally starting to get back into form, just in time for the first qualifying match of Madrid.
The blonde girl thought of her friend’s words. As she prepared to face Haruka for the second time, she had spent countless hours pouring over footage of the girl’s games; her eyes burned and stinged and her brain felt like jelly in an earthquake, but she managed to construct a strategy in time. It was hard to predict what other people would do, especially someone as good as Haruka, so Zoe decided to account for everything. Her bag had weighed about a hundred kilograms as she ran for the building. She was hauling around more than just an arsenal. According to Zoe, the bombs carried by the players were their souls, and on that day she had the soul of an entire army hooked to her back.
In a way, she got lucky. Had anyone aimed at her as she ran or had anyone chased her up the stairs she wouldn’t have had a shot at the win. But her obsession had reached a level she wasn’t quite ready for. Blinded by her overwhelming desire to beat Haruka, she overdid it. When she found herself at the top of the building though, she looked down at the players with the air of a queen, her reign eternal, her victory inevitable. Still, the weight did a number on her back, and if she didn’t finish at least in the top fifty in her first match in Madrid, her victory over Haruka would be nothing but pyrrhic.
“You can’t take all that stuff again. You’re killing yourself girl…”
“Ugh…” Zoe’s body uncurled as Sarah released the pressure on her back. “We’re uh, we’re only facing each other in the second match. You know, the rankings.” Zoe chuckled, causing pain to run down her back. She winced before continuing. “They don’t respect me, so…”
Sarah’s face was coiled into deep thought as she looked at her friend.
“Tonight I’ll take a small bag,” Said Zoe, her voice quiet. “Just a few traps and the cannon, that should be enough. Can you get me the francium and the dynamite?”
Zoe left the practice room before Sarah had a chance to respond.
Back in her room, Zoe was split.
The last match in Beijing was still roaring in her ears and her heart still beat with that frenetic intensity. She didn’t expect Haruka, of all people, to team up with anyone, much less a middle-ranked player like Julio. Zoe knew all about the man in red, his schemes and his tactics, but she was under the illusion that Haruka wouldn’t actually entertain Julio’s antics. She clenched her fist. Having to deal with a team was hard enough, but when someone on the team was as skilled as Sato she couldn’t let her guard down for a second, so her relaxed stay at the top floor had turned into a rushed attempt to reinforce her defences. She was proud of the drone-triggered Z-LOC, but it wasn’t what she had in mind before the match.
For better or for worse, she had won. At one of the highest stages in the world, she’d beat Haruka Sato. She’d been too worn down to give an interview, but all her contact channels were clogged beyond belief with requests for comment. She ignored them, as her coach had suggested. He told her to focus on the games, to continue her research, and to do whatever it took to get the better of her opponents. Really, his words meant very little to Zoe at that point; he was simply stating the obvious. Johnny was in Paris preparing for the finals, waiting for her. That total confidence in her ability was all she needed from him.
Though her mind was still grabbing at the cannon and aiming at the pink foam Haruka was barrelling towards, Zoe’s body cried out in pain and begged her to look forward. Her aching back and her rushing heart told her the next match would be a tough one.
Firstly, she was still hurting. That alone could spell her doom, though in her particular case it might matter less, considering her strategy of relying less on her physical gifts and more on her mental ones.
Secondly, there was Baolie Zhao. Zoe had told Sarah she wouldn’t bring a lot of bombs to the match, but the presence of Baolie made her strongly reconsider. This would be her third encounter with the high-ranker, though the word encounter didn’t properly describe what had happened. Baolie wasn’t like Haruka and Zoe; she didn’t play to win, she played to survive. It was an odd kind of pragmatism, almost anti-competitive in nature, and it bugged Zoe to no end. They’d been on the same arena three times, but on every occasion Baolie had been eliminated by someone else, though she always finished in the top ten. Baolie, the one who never wins, but also the one who never loses. Her average number of eliminations per match was thirty-five, the highest out of everyone in the top one hundred in the world-wide player rankings. She was a monster, no two ways about it. As soon as only ten people were left, however, her interest in the match seemed to fall off a cliff, resulting in a swift elimination for the young woman.
Baolie was only eighteen years old when she first made it to the Beijing qualifiers the year prior, comfortably reaching the finals. Only then did she keep her foot on the gas as the number of remaining players dipped into the single digits. Still, she was eliminated by the reigning champion. At nineteen, she’d only gotten better.
Baolie carried a bag, like Zoe, as well as a mid-range cannon. It was a slower strategy than most of the field, but it was still incredibly fast compared to Zoe’s static approach. Oddest of all was her choice of bombs. Most people used francium and dynamite, occasionally C4, all of which resulted in explosions strong enough to knock out any player hit, but unlikely to cause real damage to anyone nearby. The shockwaves from the blasts may throw some people off balance or send them flying into a wall, but they were seldom enough to take a good player down. Baolie used larger bombs, about the size of a tennis ball, packed with modified azidoazide azide, commonly known as MAZA. This compound resulted in much larger explosions, capable of taking down several people simultaneously. She was like an armoured tank shooting masses of players indiscriminately, barely needing to aim.
Zoe stared at the holographic display screen, a set of brown eyes looking back at her, matching a brown suit. Baolie even looked like a tank. Her jaw was strong and chiselled, her head shaved clean, not even her eyebrows remaining to express emotion. Her body was stout, her muscles like bags of meat strapped to her arms, shoulders, and legs as she towered over the competition. She was a specimen of unadulterated power, a wild beast. She looked as if even a shot straight to the face wouldn’t knock her out.
The skinny blonde girl glanced at the Sayf Explosives sticker on her computer and hoped her technician would do a good job preparing her explosives.
Her mind raced with possibilities and combinations; strategies, counter-strategies; the path to victory. That was Zoe. Her every thought was Demolition, her every movement calculated and her every step pondered. It was a sort of existence dominated by excitement, passion, and fear. Her heart raced as her body remembered the terrible feeling of a bomb exploding on her chest, stealing the air from her lungs. She was painfully aware of her limitations, of her weakness, but she had already decided to walk this path. It wasn’t what she had dreamed of as a child. She could never be like him. Yet, even as her memories made her struggle to breathe, she smiled. She was ready to take another step forward. Even as fear made her hands shake and excitement clouded her mind, she saw a path that would lead her beyond her childish dreams.
Zoe ended up getting ready earlier than usual, there was much less to organise in her bag than usual, so she left the training complex before the sun had even set, three hours before the start of the first Madrid qualifier match.
She took some time to look around the city.
Madrid was nothing like Beijing. The Spanish capital was silvery and grey, every building like a monument to steel and a temple to titanium. The innumerable skyscrapers in the city pierced the heavens like spears aimed at the angels. The streets were littered with garbage, the air drenched in a foul odour, while metal boxes carrying things and people slashed through the air, beeping and honking furiously. Zoe quickly decided against further exploration.
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Her eyes settled on a coffee shop. It was a small thing, tucked into a corner. The windows were dirty and the door didn’t close properly, letting some of the smell and the noise pour in from the outside. She sat in the corner furthest from the door after ordering a glass of hot milk. The barista had given her a weird look as she ordered, maybe on account of her suit, though she suspected it was the milk.
Zoe was thinking over the bombs in her bag when a man sat at her table on a chair opposite her own.
He was wearing a red compression shirt that tightly hugged his slim body and black shorts that rose above his knees as he sat. Zoe wasn’t able to recognize him immediately without the SeeBright glasses he wore in the arena, but after their last encounter Zoe would have a hard time forgetting Julio’s kind smile that had somehow gotten Haruka to join him. They sat in silence for a bit, sipping their respective drinks.
Julio spoke first.
“It hurt, you know, pretty bad actually. When I woke up I thought you broke a rib.” His tone betrayed his beaming face. “Your strategies are just… So creative.”
He spoke bluntly and curtly, the words being slung out of his lips and snapping like a whip at Zoe’s ears. She took another sip before responding.
“We can’t discuss strategy before matches.”
Julio scoffed and rolled his eyes.
“Yeah. Sure. Then I’ll just talk about the first match in Beijing. Did you watch that? You must’ve, you’re a Haruka fangirl, aren’t you?” His eyes were fixed on Zoe’s, his expression inscrutable beyond the smile that he had carefully moulded onto his lips, reaching up to his eyes. Zoe tried to match him, keeping her expression as still as possible before finishing her drink. “Well, I teamed up with this one player, can’t even tell you her name. Haruka took her out. She’s crazy, she just ran towards her, like, she was just running and I think she tricked her with the elevator? You blew the elevator in the building you were in, I noticed that.”
Zoe nodded in response.
“Right, you did. Smart, smart…” Julio continued, unblinkingly. “I like that. But I do wonder, I mean. Two of those cannons? A collapser? Enough bombs to rig a whole building? What else… Oh right, the drones! Two of them? How much can that bag of yours even fit?” He looked away from Zoe, glancing briefly at the smaller bag she had brought with her. He frowned.
“About a hundred and ten kilos, if you’re actually curious. This one only takes fifty.”
“You sure know your stuff, I mean, you didn’t even stutter, huh? That’s the kind of stuff you just have on the tip of your tongue, is it? You get asked that a lot?” Zoe caught herself before she frowned at Julio, slightly clenching her jaw instead in an attempt to control her face. He leaned back in his chair, placing his empty cup of coffee inside Zoe’s empty glass of milk. “A hundred kilos. Sounds tough, sounds tough. Well, good luck in the match, Fern. I hope I get the chance to eliminate you. You know I’ll try.”
He reached for a bag with the SeeBright logo on it, probably holding his suit and bombs, thought Zoe, before walking out of the coffee shop in the direction of the arenas, looking back briefly to wave goodbye at the girl.
Zoe looked at her own hands. They were rough and calloused with burn marks all over her fingers and cuts littering her skin like stars in the night sky. Julio Alario. This was his first year in the qualifiers, like Zoe. Yet, he had a certain confidence about him that the girl lacked entirely. His words were like a spell that grabbed at her mind. He was just a middle-ranked player, players like him were a dime a dozen, but he conducted himself like he ruled the world, like Zoe was dancing in the palm of his hand. The image of Haruka and Julio standing in front of her castle floated up through her mind. Somehow, Haruka looked so small in comparison to the man in the red suit.
Five minutes before the start of the match, Zoe stood inside the ninety-ninth chamber, the thick steel door barely letting any sound in. She counted down the seconds while jumping in place, her fists flying in front of her with unmatched intensity; jabs and uppercuts, she dodged to the right then threw a right hook to the jaw of her invisible opponent, her huge body collapsing to the floor, her bald head slamming on the floor.
The lights shone bright as the first ring sounded, her glasses allowing her eyes to handle the glare. Zoe had only brought three francium bombs to rig with wires, so her choice of buildings was rather limited. She quickly settled on a two-story home with the front door gone. The walls didn’t look to be reinforced, but the house was surrounded by buildings on three sides, providing Zoe with plenty of escape routes if push came to shove. She noticed the player to her right glancing at her confusedly, his eyes lingering on her bag.
The second ring sounded like the first. Zoe prepared to run, her eyes fixed on her target. Her back felt numb and her shoulders felt stiff, but she thought she could handle it at least until she got inside safely.
As the third ring sounded, Zoe bolted. As expected, the hundredth player of the match had his eyes set on her. As soon as she started moving, his arms reached for the bombs on his back. He missed with the first one, hitting the empty space behind Zoe. The second throw was more strategic, aiming in the path she was taking towards the house. She could see him from the corner of her eyes, something her usual goggles never let her take advantage of, so she managed to steer away from the explosion that was about to spark in front of her.
The other player gave chase, but Zoe had a plan. As she reached the building, she threw out a five-second timed stick of dynamite towards her hunter, before using the wall for cover. It would be easy to dodge, but it bought her just enough time. She skillfully dug in her bag for the cannon and a ping-pong sized bomb to load it with. She heard his steps as he rushed through the door, ready to throw his small francium bomb in her face, but he was already too late. She pressed the trigger at the perfect moment, the barrel of the Z-LOC pressed against the chest of her pursuer, causing a terrible explosion that sent the man flying to the ceiling before falling to the concrete floor with a sound like meat being slapped on a marble counter, while Zoe was sent flying back, hitting her back on the wall.
Her vision went white for a second. She breathed deeply, the smell of gunpowder and the ringing in her ears consuming her senses. Her lips curled and her eyes narrowed with no concern for the camera drones that would probably be following her after having beaten Haruka. She was shamelessly displaying her demonic expression. When her vision returned in full, she caught a glimpse of a recovery drone taking the man away.
Painfully, she stood and rigged two wire-traps to the front and back doors on the first floor, before rigging a third at the top of the stairs. Finally, she stuck a stick of dynamite to the ceiling in the middle of the corridor that ran through the centre of the second floor, attaching a detonator to her wrist. Inside her bag, all that was left were nine concentrated C4 spheres for her cannon. She loaded one in. She found a room with a decent view of the street to the west and grimy windows and waited, periodically glancing at the blue letters displayed on her glasses.
Twenty players left, ten minutes until the first Catastrophe. Zoe hadn’t fired a single shot since taking out her pursuer as the fights seemed to have wandered away from her location. She was, however, hearing some explosions that sounded different, like they were being shot by a Catastrophe’s sniper. They were far away at first, but grew progressively closer. A couple minutes ticked by and Zoe’s concern grew as the ferocious sounds crashed onto the street in front of her home base.
She only peeked out of the window, her eyes meeting Julio’s for a split second. She cursed under her breath with the realisation that he’d spotted her, though she also considered his experience dealing with her traps likely meant he would’ve noticed the thin wires she’d spread across the doors sooner or later, an unmistakable marker of her presence in the building. He was not the one shooting. Instead, it was his pursuer, a large woman wearing a brown suit, her head shaved and her jaw chiselled like a greek statue.
Baolie held a metallic weapon, similar to Zoe’s plastic Z-LOC, but with a shorter and wider barrel. Zoe held her own cannon close to her chest, ready to fire at a moment’s notice, finger on the trigger. As the explosions continued outside, Zoe’s worries materialised. One of Baolie’s bombs crashed onto the weak walls of the ground floor, blowing the concrete to pieces as Julio danced and dashed in every direction, avoiding debris and the explosion with careful steps. Due to the large bomb, one of Zoe’s traps was triggered, dealing further structural damage to her little house. She crawled out of her hiding place, hoping to make a run for it in the direction of a nearby building, away from the furious barrage of MAZA.
Something beyond the explosions was bothering Zoe. In fact, it was the lack of explosions that stuck out to her. Sure, Julio was busy dodging, but even so there were plenty of chances to at least throw a bomb in Baolie’s vicinity. Yet, all the noise in the area was caused by the woman’s powerful bullets.
Zoe jumped out of an east facing window on the other side of the floor, her feet painfully hitting the concrete below. As she was beginning her run towards a new building, a flash of red passed by her. Like a devil dressed as Santa, Julio delivered a sticky bomb a couple of metres ahead of Zoe, not even looking back as he ran towards what was Zoe’s target. Her back hurt and her legs still felt weak, sensations exacerbated by her poor landing, so all she managed to do was jump backwards to avoid being blown to pieces.
She clutched her cannon and dashed to her left before another explosion went off where she stood moments prior, this one much more powerful. She was sent flying into the asphalt road, her aching body struggling to move as she commanded. Zoe tried to aim at her target, but from her position, laying with her back to the ground, it was incredibly difficult to keep a steady arm. She shot, hitting a wall close to Baolie’s head. She didn’t even flinch.
Zoe glanced at the numbers displayed on her glasses. Eleven players still left standing. She held her breath and braced herself as Baolie’s barrel locked onto her.
By the time she regained consciousness, she was in the recovery room. A meal was delivered to her soon after by a nurse, a pretty girl about her age with shoulder length red hair. The food was less than great, some mashed potatoes, red beans, and an assortment of seemingly random boiled veggies. Not enough protein, she thought.
She had begun to forget that feeling that had haunted her for so long. It wasn’t the pressure on her chest as the bomb went off or the air being ripped out of her lungs. It wasn’t the aching body or the burning of her skin. It was the frustration. She had failed. How long had it been, she wondered. Thinking back, it was hard to even remember the last time she didn’t get first place.
All players that finished in the top fifty of their matches moved on to the next round, so it wasn’t like this had been some sort of decisive defeat she couldn’t come back from, but it still hurt. Her fear had come true. A player that was stronger than her, faster than her, bigger than her. Baolie came marching into her castle and burned it to the ground, burying Zoe in the rubble. In the heat of battle she failed to notice, but as she played the events of the match back in her head she couldn’t help but chuckle. Julio was there, but he didn’t throw a single bomb towards the other woman. No, he instead placed his bombs where they would push Zoe towards the behemoth. He used her as bait, and he didn’t even need to make her join his team.
She strongly considered never going outside again after that, lest Julio read some other death in her eyes.