I floated for an indeterminate amount of time.
Someone gasped as they were impacted by an entire planet. No, that was me hitting the ground after falling off... what had I been on? I searched through my most recent memories. Oh, I'd been on the back of the raidsuit, which had in turn been on the back of... um... the big scary thing with the claws.
Something buzzed in my ear. Words. "Charity, I mean Drift! Are you alright?" That was Skids, I realised. I couldn't interpret specifically how sa sounded.
"Uhhhh..." My mouth seemed to work. "Did anyone get the number of the train that hit me?"
"Ah, you're functioning," Swipe said before Skids could answer. "That ball got you good! Do you need a timeout?"
Ball, timeout... Right, chroma! I was playing chroma. Not just playing, this was a particularly important game! The large clawed thing stood uselessly near me. I was supposed to make it useful for us. For Cheesy Goodness. "I'm goodness, no worry."
"What was that, Drift? We need the dropbeast pressuring the left side, yesterday."
I realised I'd spoken too softly given the sheer amount of noise from everything that was happening around me. There was a lot of everything happening. People in bulky clothing were chasing and tackling each other, some were struggling to escape nets, some were aiming menacing weapons at even more menacing demons, a bunch were trying to bash open the side of a massive coiled thing and a few were wrestling on the ground. "Left side... got it. I just need to... hex! Just a moment."
"Hex faster!"
That time I could tell that Swipe sounded frantic. I tried not to let that affect me. Deciding it would be quicker if I could see what I was doing, and since the dropbeast was so close by, I jumped back up and perched atop it so I could see my scryer inside the raidsuit. I realised that I should have positioned it so it was readable from the ground. That would have required longer cabling, but it should have still worked and would have saved me the trouble of hanging by one arm while I found my footing. If there was a way I could operate the grip of my replacement hand with specific finger movements of the right hand...
Somewhere above me, the commentators announced that both Blue Lightning and the History Makers had scored against Dreaming Eye. Swipe followed that up with orders to protect our goal against a DemDom push.
"Stage two complete," I reported as I dropped back to the ground. Stage one had been to make the link between my scryer and the enemy mascot and disrupt all motion. The now complete second stage involved hexing its hardbrain to accept instructions from my scryer and my scryer only. The partially simultaneous stage three was still being carried out by a rather complicated hex that figured out how to usefully control it.
"Dead Drop is pushing around the right side," Scaff reported. "Snaps Dro and Crick Sa. I'm up and trying to block. Deploying magichaff." That was a fragile canister of iron dust, which might cause problems for magical actuators and spinner coils. It was best thrown well away from any teammates. "Looks like Hexen is sneaking in behind."
"I'm in place," I said as I rejoined Broth. "Trying for host movement." A finger wiggle sent a command to my scryer and one of the dropbeast's legs moved. I tried a few more commands and noted the response. It was enough to work with and I could streamline it over time. "Host one is headed your way." The raidsuit detached but the dropbeast was still under my indirect control. It began awkwardly moving away just in time, as Hexen was approaching to investigate. I quickly put the raidsuit between it and heem. Hexen held up a device with prongs on the front, wires attached to the side, and enough room in the handle for a sizable aetherbottle. I responded with greater haste by having the raidsuit sidestep and back away.
"What's the plan?" I asked, having lost track of the overall flow of forces on the field.
"We need to disrupt Blue Lightning's speed while keeping Dreaming Eye focused on anyone but us. Try to keep anyone else from scoring on Dreaming. Also avoid making Dead Drop any madder at us," Swipe replied. That made sense. Dreaming Eye were an unpredictable threat due to the strange psychological tactics thall preferred, and Dead Drop were dangerous even with thall's dropbeast on our side. Trying to score against either team would be asking for unnecessary trouble.
"Incoming ball on goal from left," Scaff warned, drawing my attention to where it was needed. Someone had lobbed DemDom's ball out of the middle of a major scuffle, and Hexen was in place to catch it. He chose to make a solid kick for our goal, which surprised me. Broth was ready to intercept, which left Hexen free to sprint directly at me. I barely had time for a final command to the mascots under my control before my legs were tackled out from under me.
I'd spent hours practicing passing, receiving and intercepting the ball. I had become a decent shot with the ball-launching aetherrailer, though I was much better with a crossbow. I was good at running in my magically-assisted armour and was great at falling and getting up again. But as ready as I was for all those aspects of chroma, I was woefully unprepared to grapple with Hexen. My limited strength was augmented by aether-powered magical actuators in my armour, but that was of no use after Hexen rolled me onto my front and stood with one foot in the middle of my back and the other on the fingers of my right hand. The armour on my fingers was protective only, and was weaker than my body armour. Attempting to pull my hand away was likely to tear the finger joints loose, exposing my remaining flesh fingers.
"Now you can't control anyone's mascots. Not yours; not mine," Hexen hissed from within he's armoured skeletal armour. It had a similar look to the outfits Dead Drop wore on arrival, but was much bulkier. It was also far heavier than mine could lift. Most of the other members of Cheesy Goodness could probably get out of this, but I was the weakest and the armour's strength was proportional. "Not gonna say anything?"
"I don't need to," I said through gritted teeth. It was very tempting to try to throw Hexen off me, but I knew it would fail, and that failure would hurt immensely.
"Without the strength of my dropbeast, your team will fail. And you're not even using it to its full potential!"
I considered pointing out that it wasn't really he's dropbeast, as Crick Sa and Gnash Ju were primarily responsible for design and construction, but I decided that keeping my reply simple would be more frustrating. My younger siblings had demonstrated that tactic all too many times. "I don't need to."
"And your tiny fuzzy thing is completely vulnerable without you to tell it where to go. The others will rip it from its shell and tear it apart!" Hexen was trying to be menacing, and it was almost working.
"I don't need to," I said, just loud enough to hear over the tumult of striving players.
"With you pinned there's no way it could do more than rudimentary—"
"Ha! How about you actually look before you argue about what my hexes can achieve. I made it into the dropbeast's hardbrain, despite your projections."
"Hm?" I felt Hexen pivoting to scan the action on the field around us. I hoped he saw the dropbeast and raidsuit doing reasonably well in advancing my team's strategy. I knew it couldn't be nearly as effective as it might be if I had some control, but expected it was doing well enough to help us hold our ground.
While Hexen was thus distracted, Broth surprised heem with a shoulder bash that sent heem tumbling off me. Suddenly free, I was caught between trying to distance myself from Hexen and frantically examining the field to see what the mascots under my guidance were doing. I already had more understanding of their status than Hexen would have expected, due to the constant diagnostic beeps fed to my helmet. The raidsuit had drawn some attention from but had admirably evaded damage while leading critical players out of position. The dropbeast however had run into the wall and my rudimentary control hex couldn't handle that situation.
Opposing players weren't the only ones out of position, however. Before Broth could get back into place for optimal goalkeeping, two enemy balls arced across the field at very high speed. Ra tried blocking both and stopped neither. That was a point to Dead Drop and a third to Blue Lightning. It was a disheartening outcome, but no one had been hurt so I wasn't too upset. My mind was already elsewhere. Hexen had given me the seed of an idea, which had germinated when I saw the dropbeast lodged against the wall. A few changes to the control hex... Some retargeting... A brief plan relayed through Swipe to the team... An extra alteration... No that's not quite right... Got it!
Broth had stopped both balls on the rebound. Ra held one and kicked the other to Scaff. The black and white pattern signified that it was Dead Drop's ball. Scaff and Skids tossed it back and forth for a couple of minutes, while Broth and Swipe did the same with Blue Lightning's ball. Punnt was occupied elsewhere. Most other players were too, but no one really cared what we did with two inactive balls since we were tying up most of our players, keeping them out of the way of thall's plans. Soon those teams would want to return their balls to their goals in order to activate them for scoring the next point, but currently thall were mostly focused on keeping other teams from scoring. Hexen was an exception. He was trying to get between Scaff and Skids, who were playing a very effective game of keep-away.
"Deal me in," I said when the time was right, and Skids passed Dead Drop's ball back to me. I was close beside Hexen, which was by design. After briefly admiring the high-contrast pattern of bones, I held the coveted black and white ball over my head and waved it around, watching Hexen's head track the movements. He tensed up to spring at me, so I aimed just over he's head and threw as hard as I could. He caught it in mid-leap and almost fell backwards on landing. While he struggled for balance, I jumped away.
"Wha?"
The dropbeast smashed down right behind heem and toppled forward. Everyone on the field stopped and stared. I imagined the audience had collectively gasped, though I couldn't hear thall at that moment.
"Gotcha!" I knew my voice would be lost under the echoing sound of the impact, but I couldn't hold back my glee. It felt earned after Hexen's taunts.
I felt a little bad about taking joy in someone getting pinned under a rather massive demon, but I knew Hexen's armour would protect heem. It should, unless Dead Drop had exceeded the weight limits for mascots. That would require bribing an official, which wasn't extremely rare but I felt Dead Drop were above that. On the other hand, I was pretty sure Ginnn had slipped a copy of my latest assignment work to Dead Drop. He might have claimed to be the author of the counter to my strategy, but it was still a breach of competitive etiquette for a team to accept something like that from a competing hive. We were all expected to do our own work. A bit of light espionage was expected but not an entire ready-made solution. Regardless, I didn't think the dropbeast was too heavy for Hexen's armour to handle.
The dropbeast had fallen from the underside of the dome, where it had climbed by grabbing in inner structural beams. If it had landed on Hexen directly that might have been lethal, but I took some care to avoid that. The entire maneuver might seem like an excessive amount of effort for such a minor result, but Hexen wasn't the primary target.
"Cheesy Goodness scores in the History Makers' goal!"
The crowd erupted.
"Nice work everyone," Swipe told us. My distraction had bought us a few seconds, which Punnt and Skids had put to excellent use. I felt a triumphant happiness infusing my muscles and bones. We were still unlikely to win this, but we'd made a good first step.
The other teams regrouped into stable formations. Dreaming Eye had lost track of thall's ball, but soon spotted it in the hands of the History Makers' Didug Dro. Blue Lightning had also lost thall's, because Broth had fed it to the ultradangerope. Spout Dro and Klash Ra sped around in search of it, but that stopped when the raidsuit managed to trip Spout. Klash zoomed over to chase the fleeing raidsuit and Skids was forced to intervene before ra could put it out of commission with a handheld aethershock weapon. Rather than endanger sa's own self, Skids fired our ball at ra's legs. The shot was perfectly aimed to arc the ball into my arms, and I quickly passed it back to Broth. The next move was for Broth to reactivate our ball and then kick it forward to Punnt, but before dro could receive it, Dead Drop's coach Narsh She called a timeout.
At some point in all that activity, Dreaming Eye's Arcan Jur scored against DemDom. Everything was happening so fast that I didn't really note when it happened relative to everything else, though it was obviously after some member of the team regained control of the team's blue and green ball. The colours were separated in a pattern of swirls, each decorated with many small stylised eyes in the opposite colour. Our ball was yellow with small red circles and a thick brown equatorial line, naturally.
"Mind on the game, Drift," Swiped buzzed in my ear. "You need to let Hexen up."
"Oh, right. Do I need to give back control of the dropbeast too?" I couldn't remember the exact wording of the rules for timeouts.
"No but you do have to return it to Dead Drop's sector of the field. It's up to Hexen to do something with it."
I couldn't hide my grin as I made the gestures to order the mascot to step off Hexen and walk into position. "Do your worst."
Hexen answered with a very violent gesture.
Cheesy Goodness formed into a loose cluster of six players of varying but decent athleticism. Broth passed around drink pouches which we all immediately sucked dry. It was a bit sour but served as an effective restorative. I was ready to run, jump, throw or concentrate on hexes as needed.
"Status?" Swipe asked.
In turn, from Skids to me, we each reported that we and our armour were in good shape. The exception was Scaff, who was still in some pain and had incurred minor armour damage. Jur was already performing minor repairs to fix a sluggish arm joint.
"You're all doing well," Swipe said. "Keep doing what yall have been doing. Drift, do you have a next target?"
"The target cow has been suspiciously docile compared to what I expected, so I think DemDom are holding back a big surprise. I'd keep well away if possible. The red bounder isn't staying on the ground long enough to grab with the raidsuit, and Bolt the frillneck is too risky until I'm surer of its movement pattern. I say take the ultradangerope next." I didn't think it was being used to its full potential. The hex governing its movement was too simplistic.
"Do you still have control of the dropbeast?"
"Ye... Er... Sorry, no. Looks like Hexen completely wiped it and restored he's original hexes from a backup he had with him. But if I reconnect I can subvert it in seconds next time." I was disappointed but the possibility of surprising Hexen a second time was tantalising.
"I'll keep that in mind, but go for the 'rope first."
"Got it. Oh, there's some good news. It was moving slower and a little off balance after I dropped it from the dome ceiling. It's designed to survive the landing but only if it is made to land in the correct pose. Which I did not do."
"Good work. Alright, looks like Tesle Jur is done fixing what we did to Crick and Snaps' armour and is doing some final touch-ups before the timeout expires. Everyone else looks about ready too. Scaff, are you good to go?"
"Yeah I'll be fine," Scaff said, still sounding shaken from the encounter with the dropbeast. "That was really close to putting me out of the game."
"Sorry, I was much slower than planned," I said. "I had to get around extra defences... which I created for an assignment Ginnn set and encouraged me to turn in early."
The timeout ended with the release of the six balls and some words of meaningless excitement from the commentators. The time for conversation was over. I put Ginnn out of my mind and focused fully on positioning the raidsuit. And on helping Broth with the goalkeeping.
"I'm seeing some oddly defensive plays from the DD teams," Swipe reported. "Be cautious."
The ultradangerope's gas supply had either been exhausted or disabled, as a pair of players were successfully holding it in place. Oddly it was Didig Dro and Spout Dro of the History Makers and Blue Lightning respectively. The rest of the offensive parts of those teams were overwhelming Dreaming Eye's defence, and the other teams weren't doing much to help hold back the onslaught. I took the presented opportunity and sent the raidsuit after its prey. "I think I've got this, no need for backup," I ventrilled to Swipe.
As I guided the raidsuit to the mouth of the immobile coiling demon, Skids and Punnt joined the fight for Dreaming Eye's goal. We didn't want the History Makers or Blue Lightning to score any more than Dreaming Eye did. Meanwhile, Scaff and Swipe took our ball in the direction of Blue Lightning's goal.
"It's a—" Skids started to yell.
"Skids down! Everyone's turned—" Punnt tried to report.
"Drift, look out!" Swipe was quick to guess the ultimate target of our enemies' plan, but I was already as prepared as I could be.
Someone kicked Blue Lighning's ball right at our goal and Broth expertly stopped it. The History Makers' ball followed close behind. It was a high lob and I had to jump to stop it. I was not expecting the third ball, launched at extreme speed from Skids' aetherrailer. It impacted the side of my outstretched living wrist. I heard the armour joints sheer. I felt the wrist snap. Pain bloomed and I landed in a screaming heap.
The last things I heard before I blacked out were Swipe calling a timeout and a cruel, victorious taunt from Hexen.