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There’s the piglins’ growling and the dull clash of their swords on armour; and the ever-present, groaning creak of the Nether she has grown so familiar with over the last week; and the ashy wind howling across her flimsy vantage point, but Couri is in her ear and if she lets herself listen, all the noise will go silent.
“One-eighty, right behind you,” he’s saying. His voice is perfectly level, never raised, as though he’s talking down a spooked horse about to bolt. Jumper feels like it, heart jackrabbitting in her chest. Doesn’t know where she’d be without Couri’s unshakeable calm.
She swallows and scans the endless lava seas another time. The dark shadow of the fortress, to her right. The treasure ramparts she’s perched at the apex of. Netherrack cliffs dropping in a sheer, rocky face ahead, dipping into the molten waves.
A piglin takes a swipe up with its sword, gold flashing against her feet. She inches back from the block’s edge.
“I don’t see it,” she says again, and there’s panic rising in her voice, and oh, god, the ruined portal is probably staring right at her and she’s going to lose any chance of catching up—in the corner of her vision, Jonnaay’s blind notification flashes back at her through the visor like an accusation.
“Don’t worry about that now,” Couri tells her, and something about the way he says it, all soothing, certain, makes the nerves ebb a little. “Okay." He pauses for a heartbeat that feels forever. "This is going to sound crazy but I need you trust me, fully.”
She doesn't like the thought of it. Likes to play it safe, have her next step in reach. Couri doesn't like it either, she knows, because she's unsure and he's never thrown her so in over her head before.
So he wouldn't start now. Just trust him? That—she can do that.
Jumper throws the pearl towards the fortress and another blindly behind her, then drops the render distance right down. Like how Couri is telling her, like she’ll be alright as long as she does what he says—
"Good job," he says, firmly, "let's find the spawner now."
—She holds onto Couri’s reassurances like a lifeline, navigating the fortress draped in swathes of smoke.
It works out, of course. Like he knew it would.
Her world snaps back into place in the endgame, uncertainty lifting with the Nether fog when she portals back from the blind. The line to play emerges sharp and simple in the odd clarity of the aftermath.
Jumper decides, as Couri directs her to coords, that she’ll be able to do that one day; make decisions so fluidly they don’t feel like decisions but the right thing to do. To know it off a glance of her surroundings, or tear a path from them anyway.
“I’ve never done that before,” she says, in a beat of downtime. Awe tinges the memory, as though a barrier, like frosted glass, lies suspended between her and her own body; as though it were another's hands who'd got her out of that situation. Couri's, maybe. He'd been in her ear already. “The pearl hang.”
“I know.” Couri’s words are warm with pride. “I knew you could. Thank you for trusting me.”
She’d never had a moment of doubt that Couri could ever lead her astray. Strange, maybe, her unquestioning trust, when she’s shaped by a place where scepticism could make the difference between walking away unscathed and a sword to your throat.
But she doesn’t think so.
(In a half-hour’s time, she will win the grand finals with breath punched from her lungs and eyes pressed shut, listening to the death shriek of the dragon but not daring to count the seconds, thinking of her first match, thinking of Couri’s quiet, tense tone in her ear warning, advising, “Don’t celebrate yet.”
But when she spots him in the lobby, his face is split in a brilliant grin, running the distance like he can’t bear to wait any longer. And he's there, he's there, he's here, meeting her halfway in a hug, and she wraps her arms tight around his back. Couri is real and warm, grounding like the level tones of his voice, but it's elation, this time, expanding in her chest and threatening to lift her into the clouds.
There's nothing restrained about the way he laughs though, an overjoyed sound he couldn't dampen if he tried, his palm pressed between her shoulder blades to hold her steady even here.
He envelops the two of them beneath a canopy of sunny yellow feathers, a warm, bright cover where the tournament, the interview, the stage they’ll walk together—all fall away. Jumper lets herself breathe, drawing what feels like her first full breath since she stepped into the End portal.
“I’m so proud of you,” Couri says, grinning. “That was amazing, so amazing, I knew you could win this from the first day.”
“What, from the boat eye?” She beams right back. “The measuring was all Rek.”
“He did teach you sheetless, didn’t he.” Couri looks delighted. “Congrats, you’re officially better than half the top hundred.”
Jumper can’t quite contain the laugh that bubbles up again, feeling all too many things all at once.
“Thank you,” she says emphatically, properly; not in a breathless, disbelieving string of them that had been all she'd managed, when the portal opened. “You got me through that.” Her voice wavers, and she didn’t want to cry but his eyes look misty as well beneath his glasses, and—she wants to bottle this moment up, press it close like a promise, stock it safe by her strength and invis pots.
She sort of understands it now, what keeps runners like Couri going. Endless hours of practice for the Playoffs she'd seen snippets of, the thousands of worlds reset for ever faster, better times.
“I wasn’t the one playing the seed,” he insists. “You got yourself through.”
“You’re still the best coach I could’ve asked for.”
“Only because you made my life so easy. Give yourself some credit, Jumper. You’re an absolute beast.” He sounds so sincere—and Jumper believes him so wholly—that she feels the emotion tangle in her throat again.
She doesn't trust her voice to stay steady so she pulls him back into a hug. The rough material of the stupid blazer he's been wearing all weekend digs into her cheek.
She's not sure she wants him to take it off. That feels like calling an end to the week, and the end of something untapped and fresh and electric with potential that she's barely gotten started on. She has to beat a specific fourteen-minute-seventeen-second time and climb the leaderboards and call Couri back to coach her the rest of the way to the top, and maybe she'll be the one in Playoffs next.)
But for now—now, now, thrown through the Nether portal and her feet landing firm on chipped stone brick, the piechart flashing over her visor—there is a portal room to find and a dragon to kill, and, hell, she's good at that part.