Iron Heart (The Gauntlet #2)

Chapter 27 - Something Wicked

Codi dug her heels into the floor plating as hard as she could, straining with her teeth clamped tightly together as she swung Gareth in an arc. He flowed with the motion, lashing out one foot and cracking their intended target hard across the jaw with a ferocious kick. The unfortunate boy on the receiving end went bowling backwards, stopped only by the violent yank on his tether by his team-mate.

Then it was her turn. As Gareth landed they switched their exoskeleton gravity fields around with precision timing and Codi let herself be dragged forward like a ball and chain. She arrived like one too. Her fist hammered into the other fighter's jaw with such force and momentum that he spun in a full three-sixty before he hit the ground. He scrambled desperately away from her, trying to link back up with his team mate before the assault could continue.

He didn't have long to wait.

Coming back together with her partner, Codi led him in a wild charge as the two orange-clad fighters readied themselves again. She accelerated, legs pumping at an unnatural speed with the assistance of the exoskeleton's servos. The bulkier of the two competitors from Kar-Matala Academy stepped to meet her, sitting low and heavy in his stance.

Just before they crashed together, however, Codi changed her angle.

"Switch!" she hissed, suddenly jinking to the left and hurling herself into a sliding tackle towards the other boy. Gareth crossed behind her and lowered his shoulder. While the boy might have withstood a charge from her, Gareth was bigger and heavier, and he slammed into the first fighter in line with stunning force. The boy from Kar-Matala was fired backwards as though he'd been shot out of a cannon, and as he went, Codi's sliding tackle hacked the legs out from under his team-mate.

For a brief instant he seemed to hang in the air, then the gravity tether snapped taut and the fighter was hauled bodily through the air by his companion's inertia. Completely out of control they both went flying in a long, low arc before smashing into the arena wall and tumbling to the ground in a heap.

When the klaxon sounded Codi barely felt winded. She turned to Gareth, a thin smile on her face as they cracked their vambraces together in the Gauntlet equivalent of a high-five. He gave her a nod but neither of them overdid the celebration. Against an un-seeded pairing from a minnow academy like Kar-Matala, no one expected them to lose. She hadn't entered the bout expecting a walk-over – Codi knew how dangerous that thinking could become – but the dominant display they'd just put on served to underline that sometimes the Gauntlet analysts knew what they were talking about.

As the other fighters picked themselves up and the announcer confirmed their victory, she turned to the crowd, waving as the Battlecast roar swelled around them. One round down. Only five more to go to.

Unlike the individual and flag disciplines, there was no group stage for the pairs, just two enormous brackets of thirty-two duos each – one hundred and twenty-eight fighters competing in a straight knockout contest. That meant no second chances; no room for mistakes.

The opening brackets of the paired bouts followed the Mayhems less than twenty-four hours after the final melee concluded. Ripple had breezed through her opening heat, sending five other fighters out of the contest as she went. With her more than half of Battlecast's competitors had made it into the next round of the competition, impressive by anyone's standards, but Bronagh Llewellyn had been quick to remind them that they still had a gruelling task ahead of them. Now all the months of brutal training would be put fully to the test as Battlecast Academy attempted a clean sweep of every single podium – a feat that had only happened twice before in the entire history of the contest.