Chapter 161: round 2

Atlas started wondering whether he should run to call the others or try once more to collect the ball from Tongan. But after what had just happened, it was obvious he wouldn’t be able to take the ball from him.

Even if I wanted to go call the others, would he allow me? he thought.

Just as he was still contemplating what to do, Jelo showed up. Because of his enhanced dragon senses, Jelo had felt Tongen’s power from afar and rushed over as fast as he could. When he arrived, he saw Atlas standing a short distance away from Tongen.

He was surprised.

The original plan was simple: if they spotted Tongen, they were supposed to call the others. Seeing Atlas alone made him wonder what had happened.

“Atlas, are you okay?” Jelo asked as he hurried toward him.

“I’m good.”

“What are you doing?” Jelo continued.

“Well, I was trying to collect the ball.”

“But that wasn’t our plan.”

“Yeah, it wasn’t. But I didn’t see him first — he saw me. There was nothing I could do after that.”

Jelo nodded immediately. He understood.

If they had spotted Tongen without being noticed, they could have easily called Mira and the others to corner him. But since Tongen had seen Atlas first, even if Atlas tried to leave and call for help, Tongen would have simply changed locations.

Atlas really hadn’t had much of a choice.

“So what do we do?” Atlas asked.

“There are two things we can do,” Jelo replied. “First, we go call Mira. But if we do that, Tongen will just hide again, and we probably won’t find him here. The second option is for the two of us to work together and try to collect the ball ourselves. I think that’s our best move.”

“Yeah,” Atlas said. “That’s what I was thinking too.”

The two of them took a stance and got ready to try once more to collect the ball from Tongen.

—–

Jelo went first.

He exhaled once, slow and controlled, and let his dragon senses push outward — reading the air, the ground, the slight shift in Tongen’s weight as he watched them approach. Their master hadn’t moved an inch since Atlas had stopped engaging him. He just stood there with the red ball resting in one hand, patient in the way that only someone completely unbothered by the situation could manage.

Jelo thrust his hand forward and Dragon Claw tore out from his palm — a blade of claw-shaped energy cutting through the air at an angle, fast and deliberate. He wasn’t aiming to hurt Tongen. He was aiming to make him move, to force a reaction, to push him toward Atlas’s side of the field where the ground was already cracked and uneven from the earlier attempt. If Tongen stepped left to avoid it, Atlas would be waiting.

Tongen turned his shoulder slightly.

The energy slowed. Not stopped by anything physical — it simply lost the force behind it, like a wave rolling onto sand and dissolving before it ever reached the shore. It faded three feet short of Tongen and vanished without a sound.

Atlas was already moving. The moment Jelo fired, he pressed his palms toward the earth and drove a long, thin fissure forward along the ground, fast and low, angled to snake directly beneath Tongen’s feet from the right while his focus was split. Two angles at once. That was the idea.

Tongen glanced down without turning his body.

The fissure ground to a halt less than a step away from him. The momentum behind it simply stopped existing, the cracked earth frozen mid-surge like something had reached into the moment and switched it off.

Jelo didn’t wait to see the result. He pushed off hard, and Wing Burst carried him forward — the ground dropping away for a fraction of a second as he crossed the distance in one explosive burst of speed. His hand reached out for the red ball.

Tongen’s free hand moved.

The momentum behind Jelo’s lunge reversed. He felt it in his whole body — that half-second of wrongness, of his own forward force being turned back on him — and then he was airborne sideways, skidding hard across the dirt before catching himself on one knee. He stayed down for a moment, breathing through it, and looked at his empty hand.

Nothing.

He stood.

Atlas had already tried again during the half-second Jelo was in the air. A wide, flat shelf of earth erupted from the ground at a low angle, fast and sweeping, aimed at the back of Tongen’s legs rather than a direct frontal attack. Harder to read, less telegraphed. Tongen took one step back — unhurried, deliberate — and the shelf crumbled as the force that had been driving it folded inward and collapsed, leaving nothing but loose rubble settling into the dirt.

The field went quiet.

Jelo brushed the dust from his forearm and looked across at Tongen, who had not shifted meaningfully from the spot he’d been standing in since before either of them had shown up. The red ball sat in his hand, completely undisturbed.

Atlas stood a few feet to Jelo’s left, arms loose at his sides, staring at their master with the expression of someone who had just finished counting all their options and found the total came up short.

Tongen let the silence sit for a moment. Then, in the same even tone he used for corrections during drills, he spoke.

“You’re doing the same thing twice and expecting something different to happen.”

Jelo didn’t answer immediately. He knew the man was right, and that made it harder to hear. Every move they’d made had followed the same logic — hit fast, come from two directions, hope the split attention was enough. Tongen had read it the first time and dealt with every version of it after. They hadn’t changed the approach. They’d just repeated it with slightly different shapes.

“He’s not wrong,” Atlas said quietly.

“No,” Jelo agreed. “He’s not.”

Across the training grounds, somewhere in the distance, Mira was still searching.

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