Buster, Caleb Huett [great novels .TXT] 📗

explained. I hopped up. On the chairs, Tonio and I were about the same height, which was funny. I sniffed at his ear with my wet nose, and he shoved me away with a tickled giggle before he remembered to be nervous.

“AND NOW,” Skyler announced, “for the FINAL MATCH! SuperPhil versus Malbrain and Combuster!”

A few adults let out small woos for us.

“Oh, great,” Phil grumbled. “So now if I win, I’m the jerk who beat the kid and his dog.”

“Lose and it won’t matter!” Mia suggested loudly.

Tonio grabbed the box holding his cards and wiggled them out into his other hand. He shuffled systematically, laying cards down neatly across six different stacks and shuffling those gradually together. (Bridge shuffling would be faster, but this was easier for Tonio’s smallish hands.)

After three of these moves, the weight of Phil’s impatient stare made it clear they were as shuffled as they were going to be. Tonio placed his deck next to Phil’s, and their hands crossed over each other’s decks to cut them: each placing the top half to the side, then the bottom half back on top. An honorable gesture, that ensured neither was cheating with their shuffle.

Phil flipped a coin. “Call it,” he said. Tonio wasn’t expecting this, so he stumbled over an answer.

“Tail—or, he— I—” He didn’t answer before it clattered to the table. Heads. “Sorry.”

Phil sighed, exasperated, and tried again.

“Heads!” Tonio called out.

The coin landed. It was tails. Seven cards for each of them; Phil played first.

And, listen, no one would love to go into the minute details of this match more than me, but I don’t want to waste everyone’s time. I would love to tell you about the first back-and-forth of this match, because it was really important to the next five turns, and basically Tonio and Phil froze each other’s first Manabytes with stasis, which would seem like it equaled out, but Phil’s turn advantage plus two turns of Tonio drawing no new Manabytes meant Phil got ahead pretty fast in terms of resources—but then he kept playing Manabytes, so it seemed like maybe he was overcharged, which is what Blademasters say when they draw too many Manabytes and not enough heroes, spells, or tech. I thought this might ruin the game for him, but then he drew a black hole and wiped the board, which—

… I guess I did end up telling you about most of it, but for the Court’s purposes, the card-by-card details don’t really matter. Mia was right; Phil’s deck was like Tonio’s, but where Tonio’s deck stalled, stabilized, and balanced, Phil’s deck destroyed. Over and over. Phil removed any cards Tonio placed on the field, even at the expense of his own. Black hole, black hole, black hole. No movement.

He was stalling very effectively, and Tonio was starting to get frustrated. They played in total silence save for brief descriptions of what they were doing and Mia’s opinions on the sidelines.

At the moment everything started to go bad, Phil was actually down one Spirit Battery (Tonio’d gotten an early hit in, like Mia suggested) and was sitting on a couple of good backup heroes (like Devon wanted him to).

And then he played Om, the Martian Dragon.

The monster’s foil face, which I thought seemed beautiful before, was suddenly a lot more intimidating. Tonio froze when he saw it. Phil just smirked.

“Did you get this from a booster pack?” Tonio asked.

“No,” Phil said, “I bought it here.”

“At Roll the Ice?”

“Yeah.”

“Was it the only one?”

Phil shrugged. “I think so.”

Tonio frowned. Dang. In all the commotion about Mia and Devon, I forgot that Tonio wanted something, too. The only card he couldn’t draw himself. But Phil had gotten there first.

“His power lets me pull black holes back from the AfterFile once per turn, and—”

“He’s got Grav immunity,” Tonio realized. “So he won’t be affected by them. Or my stasis fields.”

“Right.”

Tonio tried to play Cordurboy, but he was sucked into a black hole immediately, and then the next turn Om took out one of Tonio’s Spirit Batteries like it was nothing.

Devon gave a little wail. “It’s not over,” Mia assured him. “There’s still two more!”

In the time it took her to say that, Tonio had lost another one. His heart was pounding and sweat was trickling from his armpits as he stared, tunnel vision, at the battlefield, racking his brain for anything he could do.

I wasn’t in his head, as much as I sometimes wanted to be, and this wasn’t his room. He wouldn’t feel comfortable talking to me in front of all these people, and I wasn’t supposed to talk back to a human, anyway. But I could guess how he was feeling, and that guess told me he was giving up.

I could imagine Tonio thinking there was nothing on the field, nothing useful in his hand, and no plan he could think of to win. If he lost, he couldn’t split the money with Mia—and wasn’t that why she was still there? When that was gone, one of his only friends would be gone. And then she’d stop talking to Devon, and Tonio would move, and Devon would be alone and bullied. And Devon mostly talked to Tonio about Beamblade, anyway, right? What if Devon didn’t want to be friends with a loser like Tonio once he saw that Tonio really was a loser?

“Tonio? Are you okay?” Skyler asked.

And it wasn’t just those two. Everyone in Roll was watching him, and at least one of the adults was rooting for him. And everyone he’d beaten that day, and even me, Buster. He’d feel he was letting us all down if he didn’t do exactly the right thing, in that moment, to win the match. And he didn’t know the right thing, so he’d believe he already ruined everything, wouldn’t he?

I hope by now you can understand what it must have been like to be in his head.

All the lies he was telling himself.

All the pressure he was putting on himself.

“Do you need to