POV: Khyle
Two practice sessions and three games later, and Khyle couldn't stand him.
He was the most volatile player on the team, hands down.
Khyle had known going in that Gunner Jäger was not exactly a gentleman on the ice. He'd seen it on television. He'd seen it in the live games he'd attended the previous year, sitting up in the stands with a beer and the comfortable distance of someone who didn't have to deal with it personally. He'd watched Gunner work and thought, well, it's effective, and left it at that.
He had not anticipated what it would feel like at ice level.
There was a difference between watching a force of nature from a safe distance and being in the same enclosed space as one. Khyle understood that now in a way he hadn't three weeks ago. He understood it in his ribs, mostly, and in the specific quality of his own adrenaline response every time Gunner lined someone up.
He sat on the bench during his rest shift and watched.
Gunner was out there in the middle of the third period, and the Hollows were playing the kind of game they always played, which was to say dirty, calculated, and just inside the boundary of what the refs would call. They were physical in ways that didn't always make the rulebook and fast enough to make it look accidental. The Soul Reapers had been absorbing hits for two periods and the frustration on the bench was building the way it always did when the officials seemed to be watching a different game.
Then a Hollow forward ran one of the Reapers' defensemen into the boards from behind. Late and hard, the kind of hit that had no purpose beyond sending a message. The crack of it was audible from the bench. The defenseman went down and came back up slowly, shaking his head, and the refs looked at each other and let the play continue.
On the bench, several people swore. Khyle's jaw tightened.
On the ice, Gunner did not react at all.
That was the part that got Khyle's attention. He'd expected an immediate explosion, gloves dropping, the whole production. Instead Gunner just turned his head and looked at the Hollow forward who'd thrown the hit. That was it. Nothing else. No gesture, no word, no movement toward him.
Just looked.
Long enough for the Hollow to notice. Long enough for the Hollow's expression to shift through several stages of awareness before landing somewhere in the vicinity of genuine unease. The message required no translation and no volume.
I saw that. I know your number. I will find you before this period is over.
The Hollow spent the next two shifts skating with his head on a swivel, checking his blind side every time the play came near him, disrupted and distracted in a way that cost his team two positioning errors in the neutral zone. Gunner hadn't touched him. Hadn't needed to. The threat alone had done the work.
Khyle watched this and did not know exactly what to do with the grudging respect that moved through him. He set it aside and went back to being irritated, which was easier and more familiar.
He leaned forward on the bench and continued his study of the man.
Gunner wasn't like the other players out there. His eyes moved differently. He wasn't tracking the puck the way a scorer did, calculating angles and looking for the open lane. He was tracking people. Watching for infractions against his teammates, cataloguing them, filing them away with a patience that didn't fit the explosive reputation. There was method underneath the chaos. Gunner was building a list, and when the time came he would work through it with the focused efficiency of someone who had done this many times and found it satisfying.
It was the most deliberate thing Khyle had ever seen disguised as pure aggression.
He watched a particularly large Hollow forward crowd Kensei behind the net, using his body weight to hold the captain against the boards well after the puck had moved. Gunner's head turned. He filed it. He moved on.
There was another side to all of this that Khyle couldn't stop noticing, no matter how hard he tried.
Gunner never came out of it clean.
You couldn't throw your body around the way he did, couldn't put that much force into every contact and absorb what came back, without paying for it somewhere. Khyle had seen the bruises in the locker room. Not the ones from fights, those were obvious and Gunner wore them like they were decorative, but the other ones. The deep ones along his arms and shoulders from the repeated impact of throwing himself into players. The dark crescents under his eyes after a hard game. The way he rotated his right shoulder when he thought no one was paying attention, testing the joint, checking that everything still worked.
The crowds never saw that part. They saw the hits and the fights and the punishment Gunner delivered, and they loved him for it, and they went home. They didn't see what it cost.
Khyle shouldn't care about that. He knew he shouldn't. Gunner Jäger was a grown man who had made his choices and clearly had no interest in making different ones. But the concern sat in his chest anyway, uninvited and annoying, like a splinter he couldn't find the edge of.
Because the thing was, underneath all of it, Khyle could see what Gunner could be. He'd seen it in moments. Flashes of genuine skill buried under the aggression, instincts that went beyond what pure intimidation required, a read on the ice that most players would work years to develop. If he could channel even half of what drove him into the technical side of his game, he would be extraordinary. Not just effective. Extraordinary.
Cooper Daniel would have had a field day with him.
Khyle snorted quietly to himself and reached for his water bottle.
He was in the ring with a lunatic. He knew that. But he was also, against every sensible instinct he possessed, beginning to wonder if the lunatic knew how much he was throwing away.
It wasn't his problem.
He repeated that to himself twice and almost believed it.
He watched Gunner take a hit along the boards, absorb it without going down, and immediately redirect the puck up the ice with a precision that had no business existing in a man who had just taken that much force through his shoulder. The Reaper bench reacted. Someone two seats down from Khyle slapped the boards in appreciation.
Khyle said nothing. But he watched.
He was still watching when the coach called the line change that put the two of them on the ice together.