Ultraball #2

by Jeff Chen

  “Huh,” Strike said. “You really think so?”

  “Yeah,” Fusion said. “And don’t forget who you’re playing this week—Torch’s old team. Talk about motivation. Play up the fact that Nitro has a chance to get revenge on the team who blamed so much, so unfairly, on her brother. The Flamethrowers ruined both of their lives.” Fusion stood up and headed toward the stairs. “I should go. I’m eating away at your practice time. Good luck against the Flamethrowers. Nitro will shred Afterburner if you turn her loose.”

  “Wait,” Strike said. “Stay. I could use an extra pair of eyes. Especially when they belong to one of the best Ultraball quarterbacks in league history.”

  Fusion slowed and then stopped. He took a sidelong glance at Strike. “You mean that?”

  “I do,” Strike said. “If you’re okay taking the risk of sneaking in and out of Taiko Arena for our practices, it’d be awesome to have you on our side.” He hesitated. “You probably keep in touch with other Neutrons, yeah?”

  “A little. Why?”

  “You think . . .” Strike took a deep breath, holding it for a long time before letting it out. “Zuna is up to something big. You think you could dig up anything about what he’s doing?”

  Fusion’s face melted into raw fear. His eyes bugged clear out of his head.

  Strike swore at himself for going too far. “Never mind,” he said. “Way too much to ask. Sorry.”

  But after a long pause, Fusion solemnly nodded. “I’ll never get over being cut so suddenly,” he said. “After everything I’ve done for the Neutrons, Mr. Zuna at least owed me an explanation. So I’m going to find out why. And if I help out his archrivals in the process, that’s just a bonus.”

  Fusion clenched his jaw, grinding his teeth. “Let’s get you guys prepared for the Flamethrowers.”

  9

  Loose Cannons

  TWENTY SECONDS LEFT before halftime. The Miners were up, but only 21–14 against a team that they should have been steamrolling. As he walked into the huddle, deep in their own territory, Strike glanced at the scoreboard to check the other games. The Neutrons had already won their matchup today, running up ninety-one points against the Yangju Venom. The Miners not only had to win this game to keep up with their rivals in wins and losses, but they had to score a whole lot more touchdowns to keep up in total points scored over the season.

  Gotta keep my head in the game, Strike thought, knocking his gloved hands against his helmet. With a wince, he immediately regretted it, his shoulders twinging. If he was careful, he could keep the panic and pain under control and still play at his usual level. He couldn’t afford to be stupid.

  “Strike,” Rock said. He motioned to the scoreboard. “Look. The dots and dashes at the bottom.”

  Strike swiveled around. “Another message. From Boom?”

  “Yes, it has to be,” Rock said. “Let’s see. Dash dot—”

  “The play clock is running,” Strike said. He pointed at the head ref, who was signaling for play to begin. “Later, Rock.”

  “But what if this is an urgent message about what the Flamethrowers are doing right now?” He stared at the board, squinting. “I can do this in my head. It starts like the other one, dash dot dot dot—”

  “Later!” Strike whacked Rock’s chest plate hard enough to knock him back a step. “Focus. And don’t stare straight at the scoreboard. Someone’s going to notice.”

  “Oh yeah.” Rock slapped his helmet. “Sorry.”

  “I don’t want a repeat of last week,” Strike said. “Promise?”

  Rock nodded. But he stole another glance at the scoreboard.

  With the play clock ticking down, Strike didn’t have time to punch Rock again. After studying the Flamethrowers’ defense, he touched the weapon strapped to his left arm. The arm cannons were Farajah Arena’s new field feature this year, magnetic rail guns able to shoot the Ultraball at record speeds. The Flamethrowers, with all their home field practice, had learned to use them effectively. The other teams in the league had not. But needing a long pass here, and not trusting his ability to throw deep with any accuracy, Strike was going to fire the Ultraball and hope for the best. “Blast fly deadbolt forty-three!” he yelled. “Blast fly deadbolt forty-three!”

  Poised over the ball in a three-point stance, Nugget swiveled backward to look at Strike. He flipped his helmet visor to clear, and his eyebrows went up.

  “Do it,” Strike said over helmet comm, his visor still set to reflective. “Turn around and do it.”

  Nugget did as he was told, but the look of concern never left his face.

  “Hut,” Strike barked. “Hut!” The ball came smacking into his hands, and he backpedaled quickly, loading the Ultraball into his arm cannon. He swiveled away from an oncoming defender, planted his feet, and charged forward. Raising his arm toward Rock, who was streaking up the middle of the field, he pulled the trigger.

  Strike lurched backward, the weapon’s recoil throwing him off his feet toward his own end zone. At the same time, the ball exploded out of the arm cannon, nothing but a silver blur.

  A Flamethrower stuck an arm up, trying to block the pass. He got the fingertips of his glove on it, but it hit him with such force that it whipped his arm back, throwing him into an uncontrollable head-over-heels spin.

  Rock’s defender kept tight to him as they raced downfield, barely a step behind. The pass streaked in like a meteor, and the defender leapt at the same time as Rock. The Ultraball slammed into them with such power that it blasted both of them into a wild cyclone, their limbs flailing like they were rag dolls. The ball ricocheted off Rock’s shoulder, straight upward, flying high.

  Out of nowhere, Nitro came soaring in toward the Ultraball with a defender hot on her heels. She roared as she stretched to full extension, her back arched, outleaping her defender by mere centimeters. The ball clanged into her glove electromagnets.

  As she fell to the turf, the defender lashed out with a roundhouse kick. The Ultraball knocked loose. All throughout the stadium, a frenzied cry went up: “Fumble!” The ball took a wild bounce, and another Flamethrower dove on it. He got to his feet and high-stepped past a diving tackle, and looked like he was off to the races. But Nitro somehow chased him down, launching herself at his legs, tripping him up. More Miners piled on to smash the Flamethrower to the ground. A buzzer sounded, signaling halftime.

  The scrum slowly detangled, and Strike reached in to give Nitro a hand up. The crowd, mostly in the yellow jumpsuits of Farajah Colony, jeered and booed, chanting Nitro’s name in two long, derisive syllables.

  “I’m so sorry I fumbled,” she said. “I’m so stupid. That should have been a touchdown for us. I’m cursed. Just like my brother.”

  “No such thing as a curse,” Strike said. “You had an amazing grab off the deflection. And your tackle at the end saved the touchdown going back the other way. Just try to hold on to the ball, okay? Turnovers will kill us.”

  “We’re lucky you got into position after I couldn’t reel in that pass,” Rock said. He shook his head. “I can barely keep the Ultraball targeted on my sensors when it’s traveling that fast, much less catch it.”

  Pickaxe got right up in Strike’s face. “What the frak are we doing? The arm cannon is awesome, but it’s too hard to control. Why aren’t you just tossing up long bombs to Rock?”

  Strike kept his helmet visor set to reflective. “Without TNT in the lineup, long bombs are too risky.” He looked over to TNT, sitting glumly up in the Miners’ coach’s box.

  “Yeah, but—”

  “We’re wasting time,” Strike said, waving his teammates off the field.

  “I hope we’re going to make some adjustments,” Rock said, jogging to try to catch up with Strike. “Big ones. The game is not going well.”

  The Miners headed back toward their locker room. They still had the lead, but the Flamethrowers had momentum and a big home field advantage on their side. Strike kept his eyes trained forward, struggling to come up with a solution
. He thought back to Fusion’s suggestion. Without any other ideas, it was their best shot at turning things around.

  Strike unlatched the arm cannon from his left arm and hurled it toward an impactanium barrier, the weapon crashing into the wall with a metallic crack. He might have broken it, but he didn’t care. “We’re going to shake things up,” he said over helmet comm. He slapped Nitro on the back. “We’re turning her loose for the second half.”

  Nitro stopped suddenly. She flipped her visor to clear, her wide eyes full of worry. “Are you sure?” she asked. “Practicing all those plays with me as the feature rocketback is one thing. Using them in a real game? Against my brother’s old team?” She lowered her voice. “The Torch’s Curse was real, Strike.”

  “You’re not cursed, and you’ll be great,” Strike said. “Let’s get into the locker room. We need to lay out the new plan. We’re going to run the entire offense through Nitro. This is your chance to make the Flamethrowers pay. Don’t you want to get back at everyone who destroyed your and Torch’s lives?”

  “Of course I do. But do you really think I can do this?”

  “Yeah. You’re going to burn them, bad.” Strike gave her a confident smile, trying to disguise how badly his insides were churning. Nitro was untested. Raw. And she was playing against a team whose fans had been booing her mercilessly, with signs all over the stands reading “THE CURSE, PART II.”

  But the Miners had no other choice.

  Strike wasn’t sure his halftime pep talk would do anything, but right from the second half kickoff return, Nitro played like a girl on fire. She was electric. Instead of waiting for the steel ball to arc down, she raced into a full sprint and catapulted off Rock’s back, hurtling high to snatch the ball right out of the air. Nugget followed a second afterward, but took a lower trajectory to block for her.

  Nitro and Nugget timed everything perfectly. Nugget smashed into the first defender, knocking the guy out of the play. Still in midair, he reached out to grab Nitro’s hand. With a giant heave, he whipped her toward the end zone. The astonished Flamethrower defenders struggled to follow in pursuit.

  Nitro landed twenty meters in front of the end zone and took off running. The closest defender made a desperate dive to stop her, swatting her ankle to send her into a roll. But she somehow popped to her feet and stumbled toward the goal line.

  Two other defenders raced to stop her. She juked and faked. One of them locked a magnetized glove onto her shoulder plate and yanked her down. But Nitro twisted and sent a vicious kick at the defender’s chest, blasting him away.

  The other defender threw a chokehold around her neck. She lurched forward and threw him over her head, tossing him into the impactanium barrier separating the field from the stands. She waltzed into the end zone and spiked the ball. As it rebounded high off the turf, she jumped up after it and booted it midair toward the ceiling of Farajah Stadium. The ball shot up and cracked into the roof with a metallic ping. Nitro caught the ball as it ricocheted back. She held it victoriously over her head as she fell back to the field.

  The pockets of Miners fans in the crowd went insane, people in blue jumpsuits on their feet, high-fiving each other, screaming for Nitro. A chant went up, repeating her name over and over and over. Meanwhile, the Farajah fans in yellow were stunned into silence.

  No such thing as a curse, Strike thought. Fusion is a frakkin’ genius.

  After a four-and-out stop on defense, the Miners continued to roll on their next possession, capping off the drive with a surprise option pass from Nitro to a streaking Rock, her seventy-five-meter pass lasered in with perfect precision. It was a stunner of a throw—hardly any quarterbacks had such pinpoint accuracy on their long bombs, much less any rocketbacks.

  As exciting as Nitro’s astounding display of skill had been, it triggered a melancholy sense of loss in Strike. He used to be one of the few quarterbacks who could thread a full-field needle like that.

  But then things started to go wrong. For every two highlight reel plays Nitro made, she cost the Miners with a fumble. Slowly, the Miners lost their lead and then fell behind. They tried to claw their way back, but they kept on losing momentum every time someone knocked the ball out of Nitro’s hands.

  Even after Strike spent the team’s lone time-out in order to emphasize the importance of ball control, Nitro’s fumbling problems continued. One fumble was understandable. Two was bad. Three was unforgivable. And four, in a single game? Now with just a minute to go, Strike’s stomach churned, trying his best not to let the stress and pressure drown him. The Miners had just scored. But the Flamethrowers were up by seven, and they would be receiving the kickoff with very little time left.

  It would take a miracle to pull out a win here.

  The Miners would be kicking a dead drop—a desperation play that rarely resulted in recovering the ball—but Strike had managed a couple of successful dead drops over the years. He yelled out words of encouragement to his players. “We got this, guys. Nitro’s on lead. She’ll get it.”

  Nitro flipped her visor to clear. Her lips were pinched tight and trembling as she tried to keep it together under the immense pressure, but it looked like she might crack at any moment.

  The Miners set up for the kickoff. They all charged ahead, accelerating across the line of scrimmage as Strike booted the ball high. With the huge amount of backspin he’d put on the ball, it arced sharply up toward the roof, hung for a long moment, and then plummeted like a rock, straight down toward the fifty-meter line.

  As it dropped, a mass of players from both teams soared up in a clanging mass of yellow and blue Ultrabot suits, fighting and kicking for position. Afterburner, the Flamethrowers’ rocketback 1, clawed his way up the midair scrum, kicking off his rocketback 2’s helmet, leaping high to edge out Rock for the ball. It locked into Afterburner’s electromagnetic gloves.

  But as the mass of players fell back to the turf, Nitro shot in, slamming a devastating punch into Afterburner. The Ultraball popped out of his hands. Everyone snatched at it as it bounced crazily through people’s grasps.

  The Ultraball hit the turf, and Nitro dove for it. She scooped it up after just one bounce and barely broke stride as she took off. Two Flamethrowers stood between her and a game-tying touchdown.

  “Do the smart thing!” Strike yelled over helmet comm. Going down safely and letting yourself get smothered would give the Miners the chance to strategize, to call a killer play that would tie up the score, with only thirty meters to go.

  Nitro slowed, sliding to the ground, taking the safe route. Afterburner and Firestorm sprinted at her, ready to start a pileup. But as they jumped in to spear her, she rolled away and popped back to her feet, racing toward the end zone. She gave the last defender, Supernova, a hard jab-step and then spun around in an attempt to cut back the other way.

  The Flamethrowers’ quarterback bit on the fake, but he recovered quickly, racing at her, catching up. Nitro turned up the speed. She leapt for the goal line, stretching out her gloved hand, ready to slam the Ultraball down into the end zone for the touchdown. A split second later, a blur of silver came thwacking into Nitro: Supernova’s arm cannon, which he had swung with all his might. It landed with a devastating crack, sending Nitro flying off her feet. She crashed to the turf, the Ultraball popping out of her glove.

  Another player in Flamethrower yellow flew in, soaring through the air to pounce on the ball. Nugget slammed into him, the two of them careening toward the goal line. They wrestled to the turf, fighting and kicking. Everyone jumped on top of the scrum, throwing punches as they tried to worm their way to the bottom of the pile. Supernova picked up his arm cannon and swung wildly at anyone in blue. The mass of writhing impactanium Ultrabots shoved backward and forward, momentum shifting every second, until everyone collapsed near the end zone as time ran out.

  Fans in the stands held their breath as the refs rushed in to figure out what had happened. What with every player still trying to kick and punch out the Ultraball, it took
the refs a full two minutes to disentangle the mass of flailing limbs.

  The refs huddled together. Finally, the head ref stood up, facing the crowd. He pointed away from the end zone and blew his whistle.

  The Flamethrowers had recovered Nitro’s fumble. The game was over.

  Strike collapsed to his knees. He banged his helmet into the turf, moaning in agony.

  LunarSports Reports around the League

  THE CURSE, PART II

  By Aziz Chang, Grand Executive Reporter

  In a true embarrassment, the Miners lost to the Farajah Flamethrowers this Sunday, 56–49, muffing what should have been an easy romp. Coming into the game, the Farajah Flamethrowers were in fifth place, their only prior win against the pitiful Saladin Shock in week one. But the Flamethrowers more than held their own against the hapless Miners, pulling off a huge upset.

  The Miners were in a state of disarray all game long, the Flamethrowers taking full advantage of their team’s arm cannon to blast the Miners in the face. The Miners could not respond.

  The second half brought the unleashing of the Miners’ new rocketback 1, Nitro, to astronomically negative results. While she did score five touchdowns, she also fumbled five times. Just like her brother, Torch—the quarterback whose last-second blunder cost the Flamethrowers the Ultrabowl VI title—Nitro also appears to be cursed.

  The Miners’ day was filled with problems. Strike underthrew Nitro three times, and got stopped twice on quarterback sneaks he should have broken for touchdowns. Strike played like a timid rookie all game long, only using his arm cannon a handful of times before ditching it in the second half.

  With a 2–2 record, the Miners are in danger of falling out of playoff contention. So many questions surround them: TNT’s continuing injury, Nitro’s serious fumble issues, and Strike’s cowardly play at quarterback. Can such critical matters be addressed?