CHAPTER 19
THE GOLDEN BOY GETS HIS FIRST BIG BREAK
“Good practice, all. See you tomorrow.”
Zack Foster went about the court collecting the two dozen loose balls. He didn’t mind that practice was rougher than usual (to say the least), but the rest of the basketball team had plenty to complain about to each other once the coach was out of the room. They grouped together and started to leave.
“That was a good practice? I thought coach was gonna run us ragged.”
“Extra suicide runs because we weren’t giving it our all? Such bull.”
“He’s just bitchy because HRU isn’t known for its ball game.”
“Imagine if we lost our last game. Good thing we got Belmont mid-semester. We probably would’ve finished the season without a single win. Right, Harrison?”
Even while his teammate looked his way, Harrison was already skulking off to the locker room with a sour look on his face. Most of the team followed suit, sauntering off the court and letting their complaints gradually lighten their mood. Meanwhile, Zack picked up the last two stray balls and tossed them into the bin. He picked the bin up—and then heard the familiar swoop sound of someone scoring a basket behind him.
He turned his head towards his lingering teammate. “Ryan, not heading out yet?”
The golden-haired boy fetched his loose ball and began dribbling it left, right, between his legs with focus. “I’ll be here a while longer. No need to wait up; I’ll take this one back to the locker room when I’m done.”
Zack shrugged his shoulders. “All right, dude. Remember to shut off the lights before you leave too. We don’t want coach to dish out extra laps next practice.”
With the sound of footsteps echoing throughout the court, and the clack of the door shutting moments later, Ryan was alone.
Some nights he was okay just ending practice along with the rest of the team; others, like tonight, he felt he could do a little more after hours. Just another twenty minutes of shot practice, ball-handling against imaginary opponents…
He fetched the ball after another free throw. He had lost count of the number of his attempts already, and he was starting to get tired. After resolving to do one more dozen throws from the three-point line just to get the muscle memory in—
The lights flickered.
At first, he thought he had just imagined it. He might’ve just blinked and his mind registered the fleeting lack of vision as—
They did it again. This time, they went out completely and didn’t come back on. Ryan had been a Tour-approved Star for several weeks already. He had confronted his fair share of incidents since he began, so he knew what this was about. There was a Shade at work.
“Belmont….”
Immediately, he went luminescent and scanned the room. He could see the chaotic energy like dark mist around him, slowly spiraling up towards the ceiling. As he trained his glowing eyes upwards, there it was. And it was a sizeable Shade too.
Ryan wasn’t worried. He was tired, but he was going to disperse this menacing mass just like all the others he had in the past. The ease with which he knew he’d be rid of the Shade brought a cocky smirk to his face.
“Guess you’ll be part of my cooldown tonight.” He made a sweep of his hands in a challenging gesture as his luminescence formed like balls of fire in his palms. “But things are about to heat up for you!”
He began hurling his luminescent fireballs at the Shade in quick succession. Each one hit its mark, provoking it and causing it to groan out a wretched Gwoooh as wisps of its energy evaporated from the points of impact. But there was still plenty left in its form, and it dove at its glowing foe. It extended part of itself into a long claw, taking a swipe at him.
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Ryan easily moved out of the way and continued to bombard the shadowy mass with fire-like waves of luminescent energy. He was slowly whittling down its enormous form. Just as he thought. Easy.
His aura flared as he channeled a massive helping of luminescence between his hands to prepare for the finale. Much like the way he ended his duel with Mindie, a sphere of flame-like energy began to swirl and expand within their channeling space—
And then it all but vanished. His aura flickered and faded; the glow in his eyes died out. The clear view of his surroundings disappeared, and Ryan suddenly found himself completely winded. He dropped to his knee, panting heavily. It was as if he just reaching the climax of the most intense basketball game of his life and his adrenaline had abruptly decided to quit on him before he could see it through.
Looking up, he strained to see the rippling form of the Shade he had yet to be rid of. “What the… What just happened to me?”
The haze of exhaustion washed over him, muddling his focus. Before he could clear his head, he felt a solid force shove him to the side. His body barely had time to completely hit the floor before he felt it again—this time hurling him into the air. He ricocheted against the vaguely defined ripples, this way, that way, before finally being dropped. He crashed to the floor with a solid THUMP that echoed hollowly throughout the court.
As Ryan struggled to pull himself into an upright seat, he felt a pressure closing in around him. It lifted him back up, binding his arms to his sides while suspending him in the air. While air still flowed in and out of his lungs normally, he felt as if a noose were beginning to coil around his neck.
Then he started to feel something far worse.
He didn’t know what was happening. He didn’t know how to process this dire situation. But in the basest intuition of his mind, he knew his life was in danger. His inability to see the definition of his body didn’t just feel like his vision was impaired by the dark of the gym. He felt the fabric of the skin on his arms begin to unravel. His mind was sharply aware of the haziness starting to settle in. Indeed, Ryan could feel the fibers of his very existence chafing away—like so many Shades whose chaotic films he’d incinerated before. He wriggled and struggled vainly in the Shade’s firm grasp.
“Belmont…!” Its rumbling voice echoed like faraway thunder.
This wasn’t good. Ryan needed to break free. He needed to fight back! He wasn’t done yet!
Suddenly, a yellow glow soared through the darkened basketball court and collided with the shadowy form. He felt the rippling pressure surrounding him abruptly give way and once again drop him to the floor. Ryan crumpled pathetically on the ground. The grip that had him locked in place faded, and the blurring definition of his body quickly snapped back into focus.
Groaning, he managed to prop himself up by the elbows and survey the new scene that had unfolded. Unable to go luminescent, he was hard-pressed to discern who had intervened in his plight. But whoever it was, they were brimming with energy. They zipped back and forth across the gym, causing minor shockwaves to rumble throughout the court as they struck the Shade again and again.
A final, more significant shock rippled across the venue. Ryan could hear the agonized Gwoooh! of the Shade as it dissipated into harmless wisps of residual chaos. The court lights flickered back on, and his savior landed in front of him, fading out of her glowing aura.
Mindie held a hand out to him with a sympathetic grin. “Late-night practice can be kind of risky on your own, huh.”
Ryan looked at her in a slight daze, then blinked his head clear and took her hand to rise to his feet. “Thanks, TC. I thought I was done for. What’re you doing here?”
“I kind of passed out for a bit in the practice rooms after doing some training. Good thing, right? No one else would’ve heard all the commotion you were making in here otherwise.”
They both looked towards the Shade’s human host. A dazed but slightly irritable Harrison staggered towards them like a drunk.
“Dammit… Belmont…” And he collapsed to the floor, a complete loss of consciousness taking over.
Now that he thought back on it, Ryan could see how his teammate became the Shade. He had been growing noticeably agitated by the day ever since he met him. This just happened to be the culmination of all that salt.
“Guess we’d better get him over to the Department, right?” With Mindie lending a shoulder help, Ryan hoisted Harrison upright. They started making their way out of the gym. “I don’t even know what happened. One moment I was fine; the next, I was seeing the world like normal again. Did he have some kind of ability to cancel my luminescence?”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
He scowled. “I mean, I didn’t realize sometimes Shades have the ability to suddenly shut down your lumi state.”
Mindie snorted, trying to keep her laughter in. She failed. “You mean you don’t know? How have you survived the Tour for this long?!”
“Know what?”
A bright twinkle flashed across those emerald green eyes as she held up a finger in matter-of-fact fashion. “If you’re already kind of tired when you go lumi, you won’t be at one hundred percent either. And even if you don’t get struck, your luminescence is still burning energy. Which means one way or another, it will run low enough to break on you. If anything, it’s actually amazing that you’ve lasted this long without it breaking in the middle of a fight.”
The golden boy blinked as it dawned on him. Of course! It should’ve made sense that luminescent energy was still energy. And any kind of energy had a limit of some kind when in use. This newfound realization had him reflecting on all the chaos-related incidents he had been involved in. Mindie was right. With the amount of energy he often burned to burn away chaos, it was a miracle his luminescence hadn’t broken in the middle of any confrontation until tonight.
“Yeah…”
He considered his journey up to now, completely lacking savvy in the theory behind luminescence and chaos. Suddenly, Lumi 101 didn’t seem like something to dismiss with a wave of his hand as his peers often did.
“Actually, it would be nice to know the basics. I’ve just been fighting on instinct all this time. Tonight makes me realize that’s not gonna cut it in the long run.”
“Let’s fix that.” Mindie beamed and poked a thumb at her collar in gesture. “You and me at High Tower tomorrow. We’ll get you primed on everything you need to know about luminescence, the Tour, and all that other stuff.”