Iron Heart (The Gauntlet #2)

Chapter 40 - Bitter

From friends to enemies in less than a day.

The Gauntlet had a way of messing with you, Codi reflected, as she took her place opposite her opponents in the quarter final of the paired bracket. Rokki Thakkar and Targon Fenz had bulldozed their way to this stage of the competition, dispatching a pair from Galactic Force with all the trademark savagery that was expected from their academy. With Rokki out of the singles bracket, they were the last thing for Firequake's formidable travelling support to pin their hopes on.

And all of them had turned up for this match.

For once the Battlecast support seemed to have met their match as huge swathes of seething red generated a feral cacophony of screaming and chanting. Flash-flares popped amongst them in hazy blossoms of wild primary colours. The noise of the two camps felt like it might shake the Arena apart.

Codi focused, letting the thunder of the spectators recede into the back of her mind as she took stock of their next match. She'd watched Rokki and his partner as they ripped their way through the preceding rounds using one tactic: pure, unrivalled aggression. True to form, the Firequake duo only knew how to do one thing. They went forward, and they went forward hard.

There was no question this would be the toughest test so far, and Codi couldn't shake a niggling sense of worry in the back of her mind. Although technically a higher seed thanks to their pre-tournament results, she and Gareth had been fighting as a pair for a lot less time than their opponents.

Between the fighters the arena construct yawned out, a flat disc filled with thick blocks of scaffolding, anti-grav launch pads and low barriers – an obstacle course for the teams to use against each other. Codi's eyes flickered around it, noting the main positions, trying to formulate some uses for the scaffolds. There were plenty of things to swing off and generate momentum, to sweep each other around the arena.

"Let them come," Gareth advised, his eyes appraising the other fighters coldly. "They play wild. We'll have to go reactive."

"You think?" she gave him a dubious look. "You know what they say – fight fire with fire."

Gareth winced. "That saying doesn't even make sense."

"You know what I mean. We should match them. Head to head we should win this in a stand up fight."

But they didn't have more time to discuss the strategy. The arena counter reached five, counting down...

When the klaxon sounded the Firequake team were off their marks with eye-blurring speed, tearing out into the arena, driven on by the screaming of their supporters. Codi found herself moving at a more leisurely pace, inwardly cursing. Regardless of what she'd wanted, Firequake had grabbed the initiative with their explosive start, forcing the Battlecast team to react to them.

That task proved to be more difficult than she would ever have imagined.

Codi slowed, eyes widening as their opponents launched into a series of bizarre manoeuvres. Using parts of the arena as springboards, they leapfrogged each other, the one in the lead dragging the other by their tether forward in great arcs. Each leap increased their speed as they swung from scaffold to scaffold, bouncing off the anti-grav pads and whirling onward like a human cyclone.

"Oh crap!"

She skidded to a halt, frantically waving Gareth backwards. With uncertain steps, she started retreating, seeing that the momentum the Firequake fighters had built up had reached a critical point. They seemed out of control, no longer leapfrogging but simply spinning in mid air, held together by the gravity tether. Rotating with such speed, they became a fast approaching smear of red, and Codi only had a matter of seconds to brace herself for the titanic impact that was to follow. Ramping up the gravity fields of her exoskeleton, she locked her arms in a protective position in front of her face and braced.