Oops... sorry, forgot to upload last night. Next one will be tomorrow, as usual.

Chapter 7 – Of Wolves

"Ow! Drat these sand-flies!"

"You okay there, Nile?"

"Ow. Yeah, I'm fine. These bites itch horribly, though."

Kyouya heard Demure rummaging in his bag. "Here you go," he said. "This should stop it itching so badly."

"Thanks... yeah, that does help! That's amazing."

They had left the poolside cavern early in the morning, and after a long day of walking had finally arrived in the town they were supposed to be in for their semi-final match to become Africa's representatives. Naturally, they had found themselves once again in a bunk room, though this time there were two bunk beds. Demure had suggested that Kyouya might like to take the other top bunk, but Kyouya had just ignored it and settled down on the lower bunk to Nile's. It just felt right by now, like a habit that couldn't be broken.

"Kyouya? Did you get any bites?"

"No." Alright, he was being abrupt, but he had an excuse. Something really rather worrying was bothering him. He'd gone through a couple of warm-up battles with Nile and Demure before their qualifying match that day, and at one point Nile and Demure had teamed up against him. It wasn't that Kyouya had low expectations of his team-mates, who he knew had their own special strengths, but he hadn't expected to struggle so much to defeat them when Demure's pin-point accuracy and blade-reading was combined with Nile's Mystic Zone. This was very bad. He'd seen every qualifying match of Gingka's, and knew that with the new Pegasus the red-head was stronger than ever before. If Kyouya couldn't easily defeat Nile and Demure working together, there was no way that he could hope to challenge Gingka for the World title.

He needed more training, and fast. Wolf Canyon just wasn't enough any more.

"Huh? What was that, Kyouya?"

Oops. He hadn't realised he'd said the last bit out loud. "Nothing, Nile."

"It was something about that place again." Nile leaned over the edge of the top bunk to look at him. "That Wolf Canyon. You've talked about it before."

"I said, it's nothing," Kyouya growled, turning on his side and trying to ignore Nile. But unfortunately for him, the Egyptian boy was far too persistent for his own good.

"You always get a really weird look on your face when you mention that place," he said. "What happened there? And what's it got to do with training?"

He clearly wasn't going to let this one go. "It's just a canyon for training. Nothing more."

Nile didn't look convinced – then again, that wasn't really surprising. He wasn't a fool in any sense of the word. "Oh really? Kyouya, I thought we were team-mates now; can't you at least pretend to not have any deep dark secrets?"

"It's a really long story," Kyouya warned.

"Good," Nile said immediately. "I can't sleep; this might help."

Kyouya groaned to himself. He really needed to work out when he was talking out loud. "Fine. But if you fall asleep in the middle of it I am not going to repeat it."

"Fair enough." Nile settled down into his covers with a creaking of bed-slats. "So... what sort of training do you do in this Wolf Canyon?"

"Endurance training, mostly. Toughness. That sort of thing."

"How'd you find it?"

Kyouya hesitated for a moment. Now was the moment. Either he could tell the whole truth, or he could edit it a little.

But Nile had been honest in telling him the story of Horuseus the previous day, at least as far as Kyouya knew. And... they were team-mates. Lying to a team-mate was equal to betraying them in Kyouya's book.

"I didn't find it," he said at last. "I was taken there. How much do you know about Battle Bladers?"

"Not much," Nile admitted. "It was just in Japan, so I didn't take much notice. The winner was that Gingka Hagane, wasn't he?"

So Kyouya told him the story of Battle Bladers, and of the orchestrator of the whole event, Doji, including how the two of them had met just after Kyouya's first defeat at the hands of Gingka.

"And you went with him?" Nile asked, aghast. "But..."

"I didn't know," Kyouya sighed. "It was the first time I'd ever seen him, and it was months and months before Battle Bladers. Trust me, if I'd known what he intended I would never have gone with him." Then he stopped and thought, because that wasn't exactly true. Hindsight was a wonderful thing to have, but now that he remembered how desperate he had been to defeat Gingka – and how desperate he was to beat the red-head now – even if he'd known what Doji had intended to do with him when he lost, he would still have taken the training. After all, it had been very good training, world-class in terms of how much stronger it had made him. And, of course, it had led him to Wolf Canyon.

"So...how did he persuade you? You're not exactly the sort of guy who'd go looking for help."

"Hah! As if." Kyouya spat. "I got overconfident and cocky. He took me and my gang up into the mountains and... I ended up challenging him. I should have realised that he had something up his sleeve, because he'd picked a place that gave me a huge advantage over him. I knew he was no fool, and I knew he'd been watching me for a while, so I should have been able to see that he was toying with me. He let me bounce attacks off his blade for a while, and then just wiped the floor with me. It was..."

"Humiliating? Embarrassing?"

"Painful." Kyouya's voice was quiet. "His constellation was one of the Dark constellations; Dark Wolf. It had no sense of... of restraint. It used everything it had even if it didn't have to.

"So I had to go with him. My gang went back to town, and I ended up in the Dark Nebula training facility. I... I don't really know how long I was there, exactly; everything sort of blurred."

"I did a desert endurance course once," Nile commented suddenly. "One week of training in the desert with bladers from all across Africa. By the end it felt like a month had passed. It's just so..."

"So much work all at once," Kyouya agreed, staring at the slats above his head. "That's exactly it. Precision, endurance, strength-training, concentration, aggression... I was doing all of it, and I just threw myself into it, because I had to defeat Gingka. I remember one of the scientists saying that I was completing things in two-thirds of the time they were expecting."

"Hah. That definitely sounds like you. I'm surprised that it wasn't half the time, but I guess you weren't as strong then as you are now."

That made Kyouya stop for a moment. Although he was still slightly wary of trusting someone else's judgement entirely, time and time again over the past few days Nile had proved to be remarkably perceptive. When they had been warming up that morning, Nile had spotted a weak place in Demure's defence and was exploiting it almost before Kyouya had realised it was there. And now it seemed that he was capable of analysing Kyouya's behaviour from a year ago, simply on what he had been told.

Kyouya rolled onto his side to hide the smile he could feel creeping onto his face (not that anyone could see it in the dark anyway) and continued "The very last thing I had to do was face Wolf Canyon. It's a deep ravine miles outside of the town I lived in, and there's only one way in or out – plane or helicopter. Doji took me there and parachuted me in, then my task was to climb out of it. He said it... it would give me fangs of the heart."

"What're those when they're around?"

"It's... it's about proving yourself against a seemingly impossible challenge. Becoming a true warrior. No-one had ever climbed out of that ravine before, and it was pretty possible that I was going to die there."

"Nah. Not you. You're too fierce."

"So were the wolves."

"Oh. Right." For once, Kyouya thought he might have actually managed to shock Nile. "So... that's why it's called Wolf Canyon, then?"

"Yeah. Not as if Doji decided to tell me that before he dropped me in there, though."

"Fun," Nile remarked. "You managed to get out, though."

"Yeah... it took a long time, and a lot of falls, but I did it."

For a long time, there was silence in the room, broken only by snores from the room next door. Finally, after what seemed like hours, Nile said "And that was it?"

Once again, Kyouya was caught between telling the truth or a half-truth. "Sort of," he said heavily. "I know that Kyouya went in... but I'm not sure Kyouya came out."

"Meaning? Come on, Kyouya, I'm too tired for riddles."

"I changed, in that valley." Kyouya's voice was soft, and he couldn't help letting a hint of regret slide into it. "At first, it wasn't for the better... and then perhaps it was... and then Leone came through, and it really was alright. Wolf Canyon doesn't just test your muscles and your stamina – it tests your mind and your heart as well. If you don't have complete control, it'll break you – but once you've got control, it's easy. Before I left to come here, I climbed it again, this time with weights strapped to my arms, and though it wasn't a walk in the park it wasn't anywhere near what I needed it to be."

"Which is why you need another place to train?"

"Yeah..." Kyouya fell silent, and after a long moment heard Nile snuggle further into his blankets.

"Well, I can't think of anywhere at the moment, but we can ask Demure tomorrow. I'm sure that between us we'll think of something. After all, we are a team. Good night, Kyouya."

"Good night, Nile," Kyouya answered automatically. But he didn't sleep.

In the end, he hadn't been able to tell Nile the whole story. He couldn't tell him about the way every muscle in his body had burned at the halfway mark, or about the bruises that covered him from head to foot for days afterwards from the falls. He couldn't tell him about the moment three quarters of the way up when he had lost hope, when nothing seemed worthwhile except letting go of the cliff – and how he would have done so if he hadn't remembered why he was climbing the cliff. He hadn't told him about the fall that could have killed him if he hadn't used his ripcord to tangle round the rocks above him. He hadn't told him about the wolves.

Most of all, he couldn't tell Nile about the moment when something deep inside him had cracked, releasing an icy flood that swamped his blader spirit until he either couldn't or wouldn't listen to Leone even when his constellation was screaming at him to stop what he was doing. It had numbed him to every joy that blading had ever brought to him, all except the delight in destruction which he had never allowed before. Wolf Canyon had torn him apart, and all that he had been able to think of was tearing the rest of the world apart to match.

The canyon still held an edge of terror for him, if only because he knew he could never climb it the same way as he had the first time. If he ever lost control of himself like that again, he wasn't fit to call himself a blader.

There was so much of himself that he kept hidden, like a lion keeping its claws sheathed in its paws. Some secrets were his alone, and there they would stay.

After all, Nile didn't really need to know about Kyouya's failures. He and Nile weren't friends. They were just team-mates; nothing more.