Leo wasn't the one one early to the match. Scouts were already there. Men with sleek tablets and focused expressions, their gaze locked on the Emerald players warming up. Leo overheard two of them talking, their voices low and professional.
"... it's really crazy. How did high schoolers beat Whales U-18 team?"
"Good thing it was a charity match, so they could pretend to lose on purpose."
Leo adjusted his glasses as the refree flipped a coin to decide which team would kick-off.
Emerald College vs St. Henry High School wasn't just a football match; it was a surgical theater. And for thirty minutes, Leo Reed watched a procedure of such clinical, terrifying precision it made the chaotic triumph over Freddy High look like a playground scrap.
St. Henry's were no pushovers. They were organized, disciplined, playing a decent 4-4-2. Against Apex High, they might have put up a real fight.
Against Emerald College, they weren't much of a challenge. It was like watching a varsity club go against middle school kids.
Emerald moved in a 4-3-3 so fluid it seemed to defy the viscosity of air.
Their passes weren't kicks; they were transmissions along pre-wired neural pathways. Short, low, crisp. No showboating, no unnecessary touches. The ball moved faster than thought.
[SIDELINE PERSPECTIVE: MAXIMUM ANALYSIS.]
[TEAM SYNCHRONIZATION INDEX: 98.7%.]
[SHOT ACCURACY: 100% (5/5 ON TARGET). GOAL CONVERSION: 99%.]
Leo's lenses tracked vectors in a frantic, glowing web. Every run was a trigger. Every pass was a solution.
They didn't dribble past defenders; they passed the defenders out of existence, the ball arriving in space a microsecond before a teammate did.
Their first goal came in the 5th minute. A sequence of seventeen uninterrupted passes, from the kick-off, through every outfielder, ending with a low cross tapped in at the far post. St. Henry hadn't touched the ball once.
Their second was a rehearsed set-piece: a short corner, a disguised lay-off, and a 25-yard rocket into the top corner. 2-0.
Their third, just before the half-hour whistle, was a lesson in predatory patience. They recycled possession for almost two minutes, stretching the exhausted St. Henry defense like taffy, before a disguised through-ball split them open for a simple finish.
3-0. Thirty minutes.
St. Henry had managed exactly zero shots. Zero tackles of consequence. They had become spectators in their own execution.
The halftime whistle was a mercy. Leo sat frozen in the emptying stands, the data from his system still scrolling behind his eyes.
This wasn't a football team. It was a clockwork engine, oiled by countless hours of funded, focused repetition. Northgate's wealth was ostentatious; Emerald's was funneled into creating this silent, perfect machine.
His stomach growled, a rude intrusion from the mortal world. He spotted a vendor pushing a trolley piled high with wrapped sandwiches through the thinning crowd. He bought one, a generic ham and cheese and fumbled in his pocket for change.
As he turned, his eyes landed on the young man sitting directly behind the vendor's path.
A mop of dark, curly hair. A sharp, intelligent face currently fixed on the Emerald players warming up. A posture of relaxed, proprietary focus.
The park. The given boots.
Macready.
Recognition was a jolt of electricity. Before Leo could process it, the Macready's gaze flicked up and locked onto his. A spark of surprise, then a slow, intrigued smile.
"Hey," Macready called, his voice cutting through the murmur of the crowd. He gestured with his chin. "Kid from the park. Come over."
Every instinct screamed to melt away. This was Julius O'Connor's teammate, a creature from the rarefied air of Crossfield United's U21s. But curiosity overruled caution. Leo shuffled over and sat in the empty seat beside him.
Macready offered a hand. His grip was firm, dry, calloused in the specific ways of a professional's hands. "Didn't catch your name last time."
"Leo."
"Leo," Macready repeated, as if filing it. "I'm Mac. So, what brings you here? Do you attend Emerald College? Or do you go to this place?" He nodded toward the Northgate College banners.
"I'm here to study my competition," Leo said, the truth coming out more bluntly than he intended. "My team plays them next."
Macready's eyebrows lifted. He let out a short, sharp laugh and clapped Leo on the back—a gesture that was both friendly and somehow patronizing.
"Nice one. Gotta respect the homework." He took a sip from a bottle of premium electrolyte water. "But let's be real, Leo. I don't know your team, but you guys don't stand a chance. You see this?"
He pointed his bottle at the pristine pitch where the Emerald players were now doing synchronized stretching. "This is a system that's been running since those lads were in nappies. You can't learn that in months. You inherit it."
The words were a cold splash of reality, but Leo's mind was snagged on something else. The easy authority. The deep understanding of the game's architecture. The way he'd moved in the park—not just as a player, but as a conduit for a higher level of play.
"Is your dad a coach, by chance?" Leo asked, his voice quiet.
Macready's smirk softened into something more genuine, tinged with a distant pride. "Yeah. One of the best according to him. Retired now." He looked at Leo, his eyes sharp. "Why?"
Before Leo could press—Who? What's his connection with my dad?—a large man in a Emerald College scarf lumbered up, glaring at the seat Leo occupied.
"That's my spot, son."
The second half was about to begin. The crowd was returning, a wall of bodies forming between him and Macready.
"I have to—" Leo began, standing.
"Go watch," Macready said, his attention already drifting back to the pitch, a general dismissing a junior officer. "Watch #7. My little brother. He's the engine's spark plug."
Leo fought his way back to his own seat as the whistle blew. His sandwich lay forgotten in his lap. His entire focus was now laser-locked on Emerald's #7.
The center-forward. Macready's brother.
He was… beautiful. And terrifying.
He wasn't a powerhouse like King. He was a ghost in the machine. His movement was constant, elliptical, pulling defenders into orbits that left fatal gaps.
His first touch didn't control the ball; it redirected it, always into the path of a runner or onto his own foot for a shot.
He played with Rin Tanaka's icy economy, but none of Rin's visible contempt. This was pure, unemotional function. In the 51st minute, he received a ball with his back to goal, flicked it over a defender's head with his heel without looking, turned, and volleyed it into the net in one seamless motion.
4-0.
[ANALYSIS: SUBJECT #7 - MOVEMENT PATTERN 'PERPETUAL MOTION'. DECISION-MAKING LATENCY: NEAR-ZERO. TECHNICAL PROFICIENCY: ELITE.]
The goals kept coming. 5-0. 6-0. A penalty in the 88th minute made it 7-0.
The final whistle blew on a historic, humiliating domination. St. Henry had finished with zero shots on target. They had been erased.
As the stands erupted in polite, appreciative applause, Leo shoved his way through the departing crowd, his eyes searching for the mop of dark curls.
"Macready!"
But the space where he'd sat was empty, just a discarded water bottle rolling under the seats. Leo pushed against the tide of people, a salmon of desperate curiosity, and burst out into the concourse.
He saw him. Fifty yards away, slipping into the passenger seat of a sleek, understated grey car. Not a flashy sports car, but a vehicle that whispered of quiet, serious money.
The door closed. The car pulled smoothly into the evening traffic and was gone.
Leo slowed to a halt, chest heaving. The cool air bit at the sweat on his temples. No answers. Only a deeper mystery, and a warning that still echoed in his ears.
Your team doesn't stand a chance.
He didn't wait for the bus. He needed to move, to burn off the frantic energy of dread and inspiration.
He broke into a jog, then a steady run, the rhythm of his feet on pavement a counterpoint to the silent, gliding horror of Emerald's play he couldn't scrub from his mind.
[NAVIGATION PROTOCOL ENGAGED. DESTINATION: HOME. DISTANCE: 4.7 KM. ESTIMATED DURATION: 28 MINUTES.]
He ran. Not from something, but towards a decision.
Arkady needed to see this data. But data alone wouldn't be enough. The machine they faced couldn't be beaten by a better machine.
Apex High's machine was built from grit and trauma; Emerald's was forged in a lab.
To break a perfect system, you needed an anomaly it couldn't compute. A variable it hadn't been programmed to handle.
You needed chaos. You needed unpredictability.
You needed him.
By the time his house came into view, his lungs were fire and his legs were lead, but his mind was crystalline, cold, and resolved.
He didn't need to just be in the starting eleven. He needed to be the catalyst. The rogue element. The question for which Emerald College had no answer.
Macready thought they didn't stand a chance.
Leo Reed, the architect still clutching his uneaten sandwich at the bottom of his bag, was already drafting a blueprint for an upset. It was a faint, desperate sketch on the back of a nightmare.
But it was a start.