A/N – and we once again leave the house we've spent three chapters in and go to visit another couple of bladers who are consistently mysterious and refuse to let anyone know what they're getting up to... yes, ladies and gentlemen, we are sneaking into the Hiwatari mansion to visit Kai and Tsubasa.

Chapter 13 – Cross Words

In which Kai can't answer a word puzzle and Tsubasa needs more training

Evenings were always quiet in the Hiwatari household, particularly Fridays. The household staff had the evening off, as their master tended to conduct any business meetings on Saturday mornings, and therefore they were needed especially early on that day. So the only two people in the huge, ancient home were Kai and Tsubasa, neither of whom were fond of large amounts of noise.

In fact, at this moment, the only sound that could be heard was the scratching of Kai's pencil as he worked through the crossword, and his occasional mutters as an answer eluded him. Tsubasa was lying on his back on the other sofa, reading a book, ignoring his host and erstwhile trainer.

"Six down... weapon in Greek rising..."

"Hmm? What's that, Kai?"

Kai sat back with a sigh. "Six down. I've been trying to work it out for ten minutes now. 'Weapon in Greek rising' is the clue. Blank, R, blank, blank." It must have been a particularly frustrating puzzle, because he didn't normally tell Tsubasa he was having a problem.

Tsubasa thought for a moment, then shrugged. "Could be anything. Why don't you leave it for a bit? I bet as soon as you start doing something else you'll think of the answer."

"I guess." Kai put the pencil down. "Did you want me to take a look at Eagle? I know I said I'd do it tomorrow, but as I can't sort out this stupid crossword, I might as well have a go now."

"Here," Tsubasa said, fishing around in one pocket and bringing out his purple and silver blade. "I was wondering if it was the fusion wheel that was putting it off balance, but now I'm not so sure."

Kai place the blade on its side in front of him and set his elbows on the table, cupping his chin between his hands. He stared at the blade for so long that Tsubasa was about to go back to his book and leave him to it when he spoke.

"There's a tiny chip broken off of the edge of the performance tip. Not enough to affect it in a battle yet, but in practice when you're concentrating on perfect balance it would go off to the right after a while."

Tsubasa blinked. "I will never be able to understand how you can do that. You weren't even looking at the tip."

"I was watching you in practice earlier."

"You were?"

"Of course I was." Kai suddenly frowned. "I thought you knew. You badly need to tighten up your awareness training if you couldn't see me right there."

Tsubasa sighed. Kai had been like this ever since he had first arrived, making it clear that though he was proud of what his former pupil had achieved in terms of infiltrating Dark Nebula, the silver-haired blader needed a lot more training to come anywhere close to what Kai considered an acceptable level. It seemed that even though Kai himself was no longer competing, he had been keeping himself in top form, and had easily defeated Tsubasa in their first and so far only battle.

"More training?"

"More training." Kai glanced up at the other young man. "You don't agree?"

Tsubasa hesitated. He knew how much of an honour it was to have Kai Hiwatari training him, and he also knew that the other four special agents for the WBBA were nowhere near as well-trained as he was, but he would have appreciated a break after everything he had been through in the past two months. After all, hadn't it been due to Kai's own training that he had managed to stop L-Drago in its tracks, if only for a moment?

"Don't drop your guard."

"What?" Tsubasa jerked out of his thoughts as Kai's voice snapped across the room.

"Don't drop your guard, ever. That was your first mistake – you assumed that L-Drago was down for the count and got too confident. Never, ever lower your guard, never stop noticing everything around you, and exclude..."

"Exclude nothing, including yourself, in your analysis of the situation." Tsubasa finished. "I know, I know. You've told me enough times."

"But you don't listen." Kai's tone was harsher than Tsubasa had ever heard before. "You don't listen and you don't learn. You couldn't even tell what was wrong with your own bey today. I won't always be around to fix things for you."

This was quite enough. "Look, Kai, I don't know what I'm supposed to have done, but I fought my hardest against Ryuga and he was just stronger than me."

"Even if that is true, you should have been able to beat him." Kai wasn't looking at the silver-haired blader, but at the purple blade lying on the table in front of him. He reached out and brushed a finger almost tenderly along the edge of the fusion wheel, features set in a solemn cast. "You let your guard down at the end, and lost control of yourself. No, I don't mean that you lost control of your blade," he growled as Tsubasa took a breath to protest, "but you stopped thinking clearly once you knew you'd stopped the Bite Strike. You just attacked, thinking to push him out of the arena as fast as possible without considering what else you could do. As soon as you did that, he had you, and there was nothing you could have done. In battle you must always, always keep your mind clear and calm." He looked up. "That's why you need more training. Not your body, but your mind, your perception. With training and control, you can beat almost anyone, no matter how much stronger they are."

"Almost anyone?" Tsubasa had caught the extra word, and fixed Kai with a golden stare. "Almost?"

"There's always going to be one or two exceptions," the other said softly, looking back at the table.

"Tyson," Tsubasa agreed just as quietly. He knew all about Kai's long-standing rivalry with the owner of Dragoon.

"And Gingka," Kai countered. "There's something about him that defies strength and training. It's like... like an extra level of luck that he has – that he and Tyson both have – that no-one else does."

Tsubasa picked up Eagle and turned it over until he spotted the truly minuscule chip that had flaked off the side of the performance tip. "I know what you mean," he sighed. "I couldn't believe it when I heard that he'd made up all of the fifty thousand points he lost to Phoenix in only a month."

Kai frowned. "I'd been meaning to talk to you about that, actually; I don't think the points system has been very well thought out at all."

Tsubasa was puzzled. "It's the method that we've always used in the WBBA, and it's a really clear indicator of how good a blader is – you just look at how many points they have."

"An indicator of how good a blader is... or how much of a bully and a cheat." Kai's voice was solemn. "Yes, it's an easily readable system, but it can be abused far too easily. Look at what happened to Gingka, for example. He lost nearly fifty thousand points in one go because someone broke his counter, and from what you've told me the first time you met him he was surrounded by points hunters. It's a flawed system – it's too easy to cheat."

The owner of Eagle had to agree that his elder had a point. Points hunting had become far more of a problem recently, especially in the months leading up to Battle Bladers, and he knew more stories than he cared to admit about good, young bladers being forced to drop out of a competition because someone had taken their points outside of the dish. Still, it was the system that he knew and understood.

"It does work, though," he defended. "And it's much easier to rank people. Didn't you say that when you met Brooklyn he was at the bottom of the rankings in BEGA because he never entered tournaments? You'd have known straight away how good he was if you'd had the points system, because he'd have had so many."

"Not necessarily," Kai corrected. "You've only met Brooklyn a couple of times, and you've never battled him. You have no idea what he's like. I know him better than most, except maybe Garland and Hiro, and I don't think he'd be concerned with points. He'd probably drop his points counter into the river just so he didn't have to bother with it."

"Even so..."

"It's the system they used at the Abbey," Kai said tightly, interrupting. Tsubasa fell silent instantly. He knew the absolute minimum about Kai's hellish upbringing in the Russian abbey under the care of Boris Balkov, but he knew enough that the very word Abbey could send shivers up his spine, mostly from the horrible, distant expression that Kai wore whenever he thought about it. It was as though half of who Kai was had been swallowed up by that place, and every time it was mentioned he went looking for that missing half of himself.

"In... in the Abbey?"

"Yeah." Kai's voice was as remote as his expression. "Regardless of your level, you always had to wager at least one hundred points in a match. It was meant to make the lower level boys fight harder to keep their points. And as soon as you had none left, you were entered for special training." His eyes were strangely glazed in a way that Tsubasa didn't like one bit. "I never knew anyone come back from the special training alive, except Bryan."

"Did you have points thieves too?" Tsubasa asked, curiosity overcoming his usual shock at the things that had happened in the Abbey.

"Of course we did." Kai's voice was still distant and dreamy. "The more points you had, the longer it would be before you had to go into the special training." Then he shook his head as if trying to wake himself up. "But that was years ago."

Tsubasa realised he was staring and quickly dropped his eyes to the purple blade in his hand.

"So," Kai continued as if the previous conversation hadn't happened. "I think it might be a better idea to go back to the old style of measuring success – by how many battles a blader has won and lost."

"That'll only work for official battles, though," Tsubasa pointed out, glad to be back on safe territory. "Street battles were able to include points, but I don't think it would work to include the rankings system. And what would happen if you just won against the same person time and time again?"

Kai sighed in the way that let Tsubasa know he was beginning to become tired of the conversation. "There's flaws with both methods, of course," he said. "But with the old method at least there wasn't any bullying of the younger ones to advance yourself, not directly. There was destruction of blades, of course, but that's much harder to do now that the metal blades have been made."

Tsubasa nodded, seeing what Kai was saying. "I'll talk to the director about it as soon as they decide who it's going to be."

"Good. Then at least it might be in place in time for the World Championship, and that would make life so much easier."

There was a long moment of silence. Neither blader was looking at the other, both temporarily lost in their own thoughts.

"Kris!" Kai suddenly exclaimed, and Tsubasa nearly jumped out of his skin.

"Who's Chris?"

"Not Chris - kris, it's a knife, a kris knife! You know, the ones with the wavy edges."

"What?"

"The answer to the crossword. It's a weapon, inside the words "Greek rising" - the last letter of Greek and the first three letters of rising. Why didn't I see it before?"

Tsubasa shrugged helplessly. He had trained with Kai for months, and still reported back to him regularly, and had also been living in the Hiwatari's house for nearly three weeks now, so he counted himself among the tiny number of people who could say that they actually knew something about the mysterious, grey-blue haired young man. But sometimes...

Sometimes Tsubasa felt as if he really knew nothing at all about him.

A/N – kris knives are just as I described here – a Malayan or Indonesian knife with a wavy edge. They're quite pretty, actually.

This may be the last update for a while; I have no more completed chapters (normally I write six or seven chapters ahead, but due to a combination of writer's block and exam revision, I've just been using up the extra chapters) so you'll have to wait for me to finish a couple more before I post the next one. Please be patient!