Chapter 11: No Grudges
The long-anticipated announcement was made, and Fletch and Kip were called up for their battle. Tyson watched them walk away, firm seriousness in his gaze. Jay, of course, appeared to be sleeping, but was really using his mind-reading powers to see all that was going on around the room.
The two arrived at their holoseum platform, and stood across from each other. They looked at each other for the longest time, smiled at the same time, then as they dove into the holoseum, Fletch said, "If you win, I won't hold anything against you."
He anticipated Kip to use some type of Aerial Beauty model, and he customized accordingly. He needed something that would bring down a quick mover, and didn't even have to deal a lot of damage to be effective. He had nothing that would move as fast as an Aerial Beauty, but his Three-way gun's spread-fire capability would give him the firing area that he would need to just get the hits in. He selected it for his right hand. He also selected a Freeze bomb for his left, just in case he needed to use the freezing strategy again.
For his pod, he chose his Spider pod for its large blast size and mine-like tendencies. His legs, of course, remained standard.
He entered the holoseum in cube form, and was almost immediately bombarded and knocked down by several blasts that he couldn't identify by touch. He got up, but was knocked back again by what he identified at the last second as shots from a Hornet gun. He wasn't knocked down, but he was a bit dizzy from so many consecutive hits. He saw the next wave coming, though, and fired his Three-Way into the swarm, destroying all five shots.
Before the cloud of mini-explosions had cleared, a very fast bomb flew straight through it and violently blew Fletch back and over a wall. He hadn't even gotten a glimpse of Kip's Robo yet. He recovered quickly behind the wall, and hesitated for a moment, thinking over how he was going to do this.
He jumped up from behind the wall, firing his Three-way and sweeping it sideways so as to hit anything within the blast range. None of the shots hit, but as they disappeared, Fletch caught a glimpse of a blue blur moving from behind one wall to the next on the far side of the holoseum. Fletch, as quick as his left hand could react, fired a freeze bomb ahead of the path of the blur so as to cut it off. The bomb hit dead-center of Kip's path, and Kip was already moving too fast to avoid it. She ran into the lingering blast, freezing in her tracks. Only then did Fletch finally get a good look at her Robo. It was an Aerial Beauty, as he had predicted. A Milky Way model whose light blue color matched Kip's short, blue hair in reality.
Fletch took this opportunity to jump as far as he could towards her, firing his Three-way at her, but being a spread-fire gun, only the middle series of blasts hit her, the other two going either to the left or right. He continued his dash toward her, firing his Three-way again, but she unfroze just as the blasts left the gun. She dashed towards him, too, but almost too fast to see, and before he could react, she had crouched and slammed the entirety of her weight into Fletch's knees, not only ducking under his shots, but also knocking him off his feet and sending him careening over her and into the air. While he was still flying, she turned and unleashed five more Hornet shots at him. Needless to say, Kip was whupping him.
Fletch landed heavily with a slight groan of frustration, recovered, and staggered up just in time to see Kip dashing at him again. To counter, Fletch quickly raised a foot towards her to clothesline her in the face. Kip instinctively ducked and pulled into a sliding kick that would knock Fletch's other foot out from under him. Fletch quickly put his raised foot back down, stomping on Kip in doing so, knocking her computers out and pinning her to the ground.
He fired his Three-way at her fallen Robo, and he was close enough that all of the blasts hit her before they could fan out into a wider area. Kip's computers reactivated quickly, and she twisted herself on the ground, knocking Fletch's foot off of her, while sweeping with her own leg to knock Fletch's other foot out from under him again. He landed, his computers knocked out, and with very little energy left.
Kip got up very quickly and gracefully and pointed her gun down at Fletch's nearly defeated Robo. Fletch's low, and barely even existent, energy level prevented him from recovering quickly enough to stop her. There was nothing he could do but wait for it all to end with the simple pull of a trigger. He had lost.