BATTLE SCARS | mcc9 blue bats | minecraft championship

18. Better Days are Near

"Not to worry. I downloaded Elybeatmaker's entire playlist."

"Niceee."

A groovy beat started playing. "Do you even bust, bro?" Grian moodily sang, imitating Iskall's voice. Mumbo giggled. "Do you even bust, ma lover?"

For the hours that followed, Grian and Mumbo sang remixes done by Elybeatmaker and songs composed by Jono. ("IT ALL STARTED WITH GRIAN TOUCHED MY REDSTONE, HE PLAYED HIMSELF LIKE A XYLOPHONE SET ON AUTOMATIC—" "Umm, Grian, this a song made to roast you." "Yeah, but it's catchy.")

And so they had a jolly good time. (Except when Grian fell off his seat way too many times.)

-

The Blue Bats were back with their second practice session. This time, they weren't going to stay in the school dorms. Fruit had found a practice arena outside that allowed them to practice PvP with other people, and they were gonna spend the night there. But before any of the PvP stuff, they had a quick run through of the parkour course as a warm up. There were also a few other Championship participants such as Pearl and Kara there. The participants said hello when they passed by each other on the parkour course.

"Ren, you've gotten so much better!" H bellowed as Ren blasted through the first few levels.

"I was gonna say that!" False chimed in, a few paces ahead of Ren.

"Thank you, thank you," Ren chuckled.

H chortled. "I was just walking you through these first ones and I was like, 'do I need to teach this guy anything? He knows everything'."

Ren paused, and looked at his teammates. He raised his chin dramatically. "Listen. I will NOT come ninth ever again. I've had enough of ninth place!"

"Never again," False agreed. "No more ninth place for us."

"Let's goooo," Fruit cheered as he scampered up a ladder. "Wait, did I just find a skip—?"

Fruit occasionally found alternate ways to do the jumps the more the team went through them. They weren't necessarily faster though, but it was still fun to discover something new. ("We should tell Mr. Major and Noxcrew about unintended shortcuts though. I feel that's behaviour that's expected of participants.") Fruit then claimed he didn't really know how to explain the jumps, he relied on his muscle memory, and Ren joked about stealing Fruit's brain. The topic of Ren's brain came up surprisingly often during parkour practice.

Ren's brain once forgot he was supposed to be doing a double jump, and he easily slipped off the parkour platforms. "Aww," he groaned, "my brain just went 404 error back then. Couldn't register it."

As Fruit and H chatted, Ren tried again, but again his legs couldn't reach the platform. He dragged his feet up the ladders and exhaled.

"Stupid idiot brain I hate you," Ren furiously muttered under his breath. Then in a louder voice, he asked, "Can you get a new brain on Amazon these days?"

"Fortunately not," H replied the same time False said, "Probably? Only not human though."

H gave False a look, but decided not to say anything. Maybe it was a hermit thing (H heard they had clones roaming around in the 3-H classroom).

There was another time when the Bats decided to time how much of the course they could complete in ten minutes, but False had gone ahead, so everyone cried out "come back here and do it with us! We're a team!". Ren was still pretty impressed by how quick the 3-A students were, to which they replied they lived on the parkour course. "We've been here for years," H joked.