Chapter 69
Olympian didn’t use the front door to exit Team 3’s home base. Instead, she dashed to the top of the tower and jumped off of the roof. In mid-air, blue flame-like energy flowed from her feet, forming a pair of ice skates. She fell for a few yards, and then, arms outstretched before her, began to pour flame-like blue energy from her hands, forming real ice beneath her new blades, creating a floating “ice track.” She maintained focus on the slippery path, extending it out, past her skates, ensuring that there was always ice to skate on.
Athena thought she could only conjure exploding balls when she was younger: Baseball, football, and soccer; it didn’t matter. She could use her cobalt flames to create and explode them all. She expanded the breadth of her ability by training, and by studying the rules of different sports and games. The more she understood each sport, the better the items she conjured became. Eventually, she was able to materialize virtually anything related to most sports and was able to dematerialize them without the combustion… if she felt like it.
It didn’t take long for Olympian to catch up to Samurai Tortoise. Skating through the air using the conjured bobsled track outpaced even the samurai’s enhanced foot speed. She decided not to sneak up on him when she arrived at his location. Instead, while maintaining focus on her skates and the icy track, Athena pumped more meta-energy from her hands to create a hockey stick and puck. She released a slapshot straight at the running tortoise man, which struck him dead center in his torso and exploded. BAM! Samurai Tortoise slammed against the tree to his right and buckled, collapsing to the ground.
Olympian landed on the grass, dematerialized her skates and ice track, but kept the hockey stick in hand. She approached her downed adversary, all the while trying to get a bead on her real objective: Team 3’s Orange flag.
Athena had grown up with Lizzy, which meant she also grew up with Ken. She had teased, trained with, and even fought Ken and his Samurai alter ego on many occasions. But they had never scrapped with the stakes this high. Battling for a spot on the legendary Council of Heralds was next level, so it was hard to predict what Samurai Tortoise might do to protect his team’s lead in this challenge. She knew he was strong. Very strong. She knew that his tortoise form belied his agility. She knew not to get hit by any of his weapons, that his fighting style was unpredictable, and that he had probably been training for a lot longer than Ken had even been alive. But she also knew that he sometimes lacked focus and discipline and that he underestimated those of the mammalian persuasion. So, she waited. He was fine, maybe stunned, but definitely not down for the count. She shifted into a defensive stance and waited.
Samurai Tortoise rose from the ground beside the tree and brushed himself off. “Olympian.” His grin was genuine and off-putting. “Didn’t expect you. Where’s Sleep Kid?”
“Zzzs and I are working on building some trust. So, lucky you, you get to fight me instead,” Athena answered, cocking her head a bit while she spoke.
“Lucky me! Dude. This is so rad! What’s it been? Like, three years?”
“Seven.” Athena raised her hockey stick like a broadsword.
“Seven? Dang, Greeca dude! Where does the time go?” He spun his Katana and got into an attacking position.
“From what I’ve heard, you don’t get out much. Maybe you should be working on building trust with someone as well,” she goaded tauntingly.
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“What’s not to trust?” Samurai Tortoise smirked and then charged. Olympian braced herself for the impact of his strike. She focused on flowing energy outward from her core, through her hands, and into her weapon to fortify its durability. Her weapon began to glow blue. Tortoise closed the distance startlingly fast and swung down at her head, so she broadened her grip on the shaft of her stick and held it over her head. His katana met her improvised weapon full force and stopped dead. A bit of ultramarine energy in her formerly wooden stick mixed with white sparks from the blade of Kawa Bun Gah… but her hockey stick held.
The normally verbose jokester was shocked into blubbering bewilderment. “...How…” Nothing had ever stopped a slashing attack from his mythical sword. But this woman’s stick had! “..Wha…” Athena took particular glee in his stunned reaction to her defense but said nothing. It took all of her focus and energy just to maintain her weapon’s form. Only immense control over her shaping ability had stopped the conjured wood from splitting apart in an explosive blast.
She pushed away with enough force to send Tortoise back a few steps. He dug his feet into the soft dirt and grass to hold his melee position. He would not allow Olympian to recover, returning with another dangerous strike. This time, his Katana sliced right through her faux stick. BOOOOOOM! The explosion blew them both back and away from each other.
The blast wasn’t so great as to knock the two combatants out, but it definitely stung, which was why it seemed odd when Samurai Tortoise began to laugh.
“Hah Hah Hah Hah. You’re waaaay better than the last time we fought, Athena.” Athena was thankful for the name-changing feature in The Show’s broadcast technology. They both just paused, squatting on the ground before standing simultaneously. The wear and tear of the month was catching up to Athena, while Tortoise simply wanted to soak in the joy of finally getting to battle a well-trained opponent.
“Yeah, well, you still suck, Samurai. Hey, maybe that should be your Herald name: Samurai Suck!” It wasn’t her best shit talk, but hey, a month-long war game has a dulling effect on the witticisms.
“I'm like Rubber, and you’re like gl-” Before he could finish the childish comeback, a hockey puck hit him in the face and exploded.
“Nope. Not rubbery at all.” Athena joked. The playful banter wasn’t just for the fun of it. Athena needed to rest and regroup for a few moments, and this was giving her the chance to do so. It was at this moment that she noticed the ground darkening. She looked up to see whether a cloud was passing overhead, but the skies were clear. Gamo! The sun was setting on both the afternoon and the entire challenge. It had been a month-long strategic slugfest. Her team was well out of the running on this one, but if she could retrieve Team 3’s flag, it would go a long way toward earning Joel’s trust, thereby making positive progress on her long-term goals.
“Any chance I can convince you to hand over that flag so we can call it a day? I mean, Ken is friends with everyone on Team 3. I’m sure he’d be more than happy with a tie. You know, share the points with all his little Challenger buddies?” She was pretty sure that Samurai Tortoise’s pride would stop him from simply handing over the flag. But that wasn’t her ultimate goal. What she really wanted was for him to reveal the damn thing. And reveal it, he did.
“What, this old thing?” he said as he pulled the flag out of the space in between his body and his breastplate shell.
“Gross,” Athena stuck out her tongue. “I really don’t want to know what else is down there.”
“Well, I also keep this.” Without any more delay, Samurai Tortoise tossed the flag on the ground before he threw a mystically conjured samurai dart straight in her direction. Luckily, Athena had been prepared for just such a gambit and dodged the throwing star by ducking to her right. What she didn’t expect was for Samurai Tortoise to sprint to her new position so fast that all she could see was a blur. She dodged his whirling weapon and, in one fluid motion, stalled her opponent’s advance, forced as much blue flame from her hands as possible to form a pair of hockey mitts, and prepared for impact.
The impact would have come in the form of another katana strike aimed at her torso. Athena assumed that Samurai Tortoise abstained from a potentially lethal blow due to her apparent lack of a weapon to repel his blade. But she didn’t need a weapon. She reached out with her newly gloved hands and caught the katana mid-strike.
Tortoise gasped. If he had been surprised at her hockey stick’s ability to impede his katana attacks, the fact that she was able to do so with a couple of magical gloves simply flabbergasted him. Athena used his shock against him. She somersaulted back, extracting her hands from the gloves, which now hovered in mid-air, sustaining resistance to any change in Tortoise’s position. She then exploded the gloves one at a time. Right. BOOOOM. The blade was blown from his hand. Left. BAAAAM. He was thrown backward into a tree once again. And it didn’t stop there: Olympian punched out with her hands toward her fallen foe– Left, right, left, right. Each time she jabbed, she formed another glove on the opposite hand. It looked a bit like a cartoon, where rocket gloves were shooting out from her, pummeling a giant upright tortoise as he struggled to gain his footing. She sensed victory within her grasp as she glanced toward the flag on the ground a few yards away. But it was getting darker. Time was not on her side. Just as she had that thought, an odd feeling overcame her: that of extreme exhaustion. She was just so tired. Her eyelids fluttered as she fell to the ground unconscious. Zzz had finally caught up to the action.