Chương 154: You Are Not Prepared

May 21st, 2030. NY Giants training facility Leo arrived at the Giants facility at six in the morning and found nine other flyers already seated in the film room. He recognized all of them from the roster sheet Vivian had compiled. Practice squad wings, backup strikers, a pair of linebackers who'd spent years waiting for someone ahead of them to retire. Every flyer in the building who hadn't already locked down a starting spot. The five starters weren't here.

Organized Team Activities were voluntary, and players who'd been doing this for decades didn't need refresher courses. Leo took a folding chair near the back. The room smelled like coffee and floor wax. A holographic projector sat on the table at the front, flanked by two role coaches and an assistant coordinator. League rules capped OTAs at six hours per day. Four of those hours were classroom work: film study, combat theory, role-specific coaching sessions. The remaining two hours were in the on-field simulators.

The official reason the league limited training hours was to prevent injuries and give the players time to recover. Unofficially, everyone knew the real reason was that on-field training burned spiritual qi, and spiritual qi cost money the owners didn't want to spend. Which meant Leo had to sit through four hours of classroom instruction before they let him set foot on the practice field.

"Think of it like deriving a formation," the assistant coordinator said. He pulled up a holographic diagram.

"You're looking for the array eye. Where's the power concentrating?" Leo watched the diagram cycle through three pre-fire patterns. Right shoulder load, left shoulder load, bilateral distribution. He already knew all of this. Niki had drilled gunner reads into him across dozens of film sessions. What he needed wasn't the basics. He needed reps. He needed to build the instincts that everyone else had from years of playing.

"The key is patience," the coach continued.

"You're not reacting to the shot. You're reading the setup. Give it two or three years of dedicated practice and this becomes second nature." Two or three years. Leo heard that phrase constantly. From Harbach. From Vince. From every coach and trainer who'd worked with him since the draft. Two or three years and you'll be a monster. Two or three years and the game will slow down. Two or three years and you'll have the instincts of a veteran. He didn't have two or three years.

His window for sponsorships was shrinking. The fake Qi Deviation narrative was hanging over his head. But no one else in this room looked like they were in a hurry. The NFL required thirty thousand Si minimum to lifebond with league-caliber equipment, and the only way to reach that threshold was decades of formation work. By the time any cultivator qualified for the draft, they'd already spent a lifetime learning patience. Leo was the anomaly. The freak who'd hit fifty thousand Si at nineteen.

He was also the only person in this building who felt any urgency. His father's voice surfaced from somewhere in his memory.

"No one is invested in you as much as you are yourself." At the time, Leo had taken it as encouragement. Work harder. Push further. Challenge yourself. Now he understood the other edge of that advice. These coaches weren't going to give him special treatment. They weren't going to squeeze three years of professional development into three months because he was a prodigy.

They had a system that worked for seventy-year-old formation masters transitioning into combat roles, and Leo was expected to fit that system whether it matched his needs or not. Leo pulled up today's practice schedule on his phone. Flak evasion drill. One-on-one format. Each flyer got three reps of sixty seconds each. He had wasted his entire morning so he could have three minutes of flight time against simulated flak. He knew why the NFL was being stingy. Reps were expensive.

Back in the CFL, training had been cheap. T1 and T2 spiritual qi flowed freely through collegiate facilities. Players could drill for hours without worrying about resource allocation. A bad rep didn't matter because there were always more. The NFL operated at T4. Every practice round, every simulated engagement burned high-tier qi that was rationed across the entire nation. Reps were rare. And three was all he was getting today. Leo looked at the schedule again. Three reps today. Three next week.

Three the week after. OTAs ran for four weeks before the team broke for the off-season gap. Twelve total reps of flak evasion before preseason started. Twelve minutes of flight time to close a gap that coaches said took two or three years. No one was going to hand him extra reps. No one was going to accelerate his timeline. The coach was still talking. Something about qi flow patterns in the lower body. Information Leo had learned years ago. He stopped listening.

When the meeting finally ended, Leo walked toward the practice field with a simple resolution. Make the best of the three reps he got today. Focus completely. Extract every possible lesson from every simulated engagement. And hope it was enough.

Vince leaned against the glass of the skybox, watching the rookies shuffle onto the field below. Equipment managers moved between them, checking helmet seals and calibrating the holographic scoring systems built into their jerseys.

"Well, well." Vince turned his head.

"Nikita Sharma at OTAs. What's it been, ten years?" Niki stood three feet away, arms crossed, eyes fixed on the field. She wore slacks and a modest blouse. The same outfit she'd worn to every film session since her great-granddaughter forced her into respectability.

"Eleven," she said.

"Eleven years since you showed up to voluntary practice." Vince whistled.

"And now here you are, bright and early, watching the kids warm up. What's the occasion?"

"What, I can't watch my granddaughter's boyfriend?"

"Great-granddaughter." Niki's jaw tightened. She didn't look at him. Vince grinned and turned back to the glass. Below, a familiar figure emerged from the tunnel. Leo Chen.

"So." Vince scratched his chin.

"Think he can make it?" Niki was quiet for a moment. On the field, Leo waited for his turn. The holographic projectors hummed to life along the perimeter, their targeting arrays sweeping the airspace in lazy arcs.

"Leo himself isn't very special," she said finally.

"His cultivation is average. His physical stats are below the median for this roster. His game sense is years behind anyone he'll compete against."

"But?"

"But he has two things going for him." She paused.

"He works hard. And he's likeable." Vince raised an eyebrow.

"Likeable."

"He makes people believe in him."

Leo stood behind the flak emplacement, watching Brody Hayes stretch on the practice field thirty yards ahead. Hayes rolled his shoulders. Cracked his neck.

"You got this." Hayes hyped himself up.

"You trained all year for this." Hayes was a practice squad wing. The team drafted him two years ago. He was one of the seven other wings competing with Leo for a spot as a starter. The gunner coach stood to Leo's left, tablet in hand.

"Henderson, you ready?" Gage Henderson, a second-string gunner, settled into position behind the flak cannon simulator. His hands moved across the cannon's controls. His qi shifted, pooling in his shoulders and forearms.

"Ready," Henderson said. The gunner coach raised his hand.

"Hayes. Sixty seconds. Ten points of damage and you're out. On my mark." Hayes mounted his flying sword.

"Mark." Hayes's sword screamed upward and the air cracked behind him. He reached the upper boundary in under two seconds, banked hard, and began evasive maneuvers that turned him into a blue blur. Henderson fired. The rubber projectile left the barrel too fast for Leo to register. A small pop, barely audible. Then the holoprojectors painted the explosion. A sphere of light erupted seventy feet from Hayes's position. Simulated shrapnel sprayed outward. Did you know this story is from Royal Road?

Read the official version for free and support the author. Leo's divine sense had caught all of it. The munition leaving the barrel. The trajectory. The detonation. The shrapnel. But by the time everything registered Hayes had already dodged. The gap between the pop and the explosion was less than a heartbeat. His divine sense could track the round, sure. But his brain couldn't do anything with the information. By the time he processed where the shell was, it had already arrived.

In the CFL, you could track the munition and react. Dodging flak was hard, but it was a reflexes game. See it, move. The NFL upgraded everything to T4. Flyers got faster. Flak got stronger. But the upgrades weren't equal. A T4 flyer wasn't dramatically faster than a T3. The theoretical maximum speed increased, sure, but air resistance didn't care about cultivation tiers. The faster you flew, the harder the atmosphere pushed back. T4 flak, on the other hand, was an order of magnitude faster than T3.

Formation masters had spent decades optimizing T4 munitions to cut through air resistance like it barely existed. Aerodynamic casings. Drag-reduction formations. Every design choice aimed at one goal: raw velocity. A flying sword was aerodynamic. The person following it wasn't. Arms caught wind. Legs created drag. The faster you flew, the harder the atmosphere fought you, and at some point raw cultivation stopped mattering. Leo had understood that conceptually. Niki had explained it. He'd seen the numbers.

Watching it happen in real time, watching the pop and the explosion occur in what felt like the same instant, was different. Leo forced his attention away from the sky. Focus on the gunner, not the gun. Niki's voice echoed in his head. She'd drilled this into him across dozens of film sessions. The flak shell traveled too fast to track. By the time you saw it, the hit was already registered. The only way to survive was to read the gunner's intentions before they fired. Leo watched Henderson with his divine sense.

Qi gathered in his right shoulder. His divine sense extended toward the upper-left quadrant of the airspace. His fingers tightened on the targeting controls. Henderson fired. The holoprojectors simulated another explosion. This one bloomed closer to Hayes, maybe fifty feet from his last position. Hayes juked right and the simulated shrapnel missed half an inch. Leo watched Henderson reset. The gunner's breathing was fast. His qi scattered briefly before consolidating again, this time in his left shoulder.

Third shot. Upper-right quadrant. Hayes dove. The holographic explosion nearly caught him. Simulated shrapnel raked across his flight path. His jersey flickered as the scoring system registered damage.

"Four points," the gunner coach called out.

"Forty-two seconds remaining." Hayes had been caught in the dense zone where shrapnel couldn't be dodged individually. Four points of damage meant he'd been deep enough in the blast radius that multiple fragments struck simultaneously. Probably around 25 feet away. Hayes recovered and climbed. His movements were tighter now, more conservative. He stayed near the sidelines, using the boundary to limit Henderson's angles. Henderson tracked him. The gunner's qi pooled again, this time across both shoulders evenly.

Leo tried to read it. Center shot? Left side? He couldn't tell. Henderson fired. The explosion bloomed directly in Hayes's flight path. Hayes twisted, rolled, and caught three simulated fragments on his trailing edge.

"Three points," the coach announced.

"Thirty-one seconds." Seven points total. Even a glancing hit would eliminate Hayes. Hayes dropped altitude. He wove between the holographic targeting reticles, exploiting gaps in Henderson's coverage. For eight seconds he moved without drawing fire, reading something in the gunner's positioning that told him where the safe zones were. Then Henderson fired. Hayes reversed hard and a single fragment grazed his shoulder.

"One point," the coach called.

"Fourteen seconds." Eight points. Hayes was still alive. Hayes flew in tight circles now, conserving energy, minimizing his profile. Henderson tracked him but didn't fire. The gunner's qi pooled and scattered, pooled and scattered. Feints. Ten seconds. Henderson fired. Hayes dove. The explosion bloomed above him. Shrapnel rained down. Hayes barrel-rolled but couldn't avoid the fragments that struck his back in rapid succession.

"Out," the coach announced.

"Fifty-six seconds." Hayes descended slowly. His shoulders slumped as he landed on the platform. Fifty-six seconds. Against a second string gunner. And Hayes had trained for this specific drill for an entire year.

"Chen." The gunner coach was looking at him.

"You're up."

The practice field stretched below him, holographic boundary markers glowing faint blue at the edges. Henderson tracked him from the flak emplacement, the gunner's divine sense probing against his own.

"Sixty seconds," the gunner coach called.

"On my mark." Leo expanded his divine sense. At this distance Henderson was a blur of qi movements, readable but imprecise. He could see energy pooling in the gunner's shoulders. He couldn't tell which shoulder held more. If he wanted to use his Omnidirectional Awareness, he would need to get within three hundred feet. Then he would be able to be close enough to read Henderson's muscle tension, his breathing, the micro-shifts in weight that preceded every shot.

But it would also be close enough for Henderson to hit him point blank.

"Mark." Leo dove. He crossed the three hundred foot threshold in under a second and tightened his Omnidirectional Awareness onto Henderson. Upper-left quadrant. Leo wrenched right. Henderson fired. The holographic explosion bloomed exactly where Leo had been. He was already seventy feet away, cutting hard toward the eastern boundary, and for a fraction of a second he felt like he understood this game. Then Henderson's second shot arrived. Leo hadn't seen it.

He'd been focused on the first explosion, on his own successful dodge, and Henderson had fired again before the first detonation even finished rendering. The blast nearly caught him. Simulated shrapnel raked across his left side. His jersey flickered.

"Three points," the coach announced. Leo's jaw tightened. He'd been too close. Omnidirectional awareness gave him perfect reads, but perfect reads meant nothing when the gunner could put shells on target faster than Leo could process the information. He climbed. Put distance between himself and Henderson. At five hundred feet the gunner's qi movements blurred back into vagueness, but at least Leo had time to think. Henderson tracked him. Shot incoming.

Leo couldn't tell exactly where, but he could feel the pressure building. He cut hard left. Henderson's shot exploded eighty feet behind him. Leo grinned. The G-force bleeding formation gave him an edge on every other flyer on his team. Henderson's targeting couldn't keep up with instantaneous vector changes. He bled momentum again and reversed course. The second explosion bloomed where he'd been. Another clean dodge. This was it. This was the answer.

Zigzag across the field, bleed momentum at every turn, make himself impossible to predict. Henderson could fire all day and never touch him. Leo cut right. And realized he wasn't moving. All the zigzags had slowed him down. He wasn't anywhere near top speed, and Henderson's divine sense locked onto him. Leo could feel the shot coming, but he didn't have the momentum to carry him out of the blast radius. He tried to accelerate. Sunshifter responded instantly, but instant wasn't fast enough.

T4 munitions traveled faster than a flying sword could build speed from a standing start. The explosion caught him forty feet out.

"Two points," the coach called.

"Thirty-eight seconds remaining." Leo still needed to survive thirty-four seconds in order to beat Hayes. He forced himself to breathe. Zigzagging was wrong. Every momentum bleed left him stationary for a fraction of a second, and a fraction of a second was all Henderson needed. Leo had to try something new. What he did in the CFL clearly wouldn't work here. He thought about all the film he watched. He needed sustained speed. Long arcs.

Gradual direction changes that preserved momentum while still making him hard to track. Leo swept toward the western boundary in a wide curve. Henderson fired and the explosion bloomed behind him, close but not close enough. He banked north, then east, building a figure-eight pattern that kept him moving without stopping. Henderson's shots followed him. Each one landed a little closer than the last. Leo pushed faster.

The boundary markers glowed at the edge of his vision, blue lines marking the limits of the practice field. He swept past the northern edge with feet to spare and curved back toward center. Another shot. This one caught him at the very edge of the blast radius. A single fragment grazed his trailing shoulder.

"One point," the coach announced.

"Twenty-one seconds." Six points total. He was still alive. Thirty-five seconds to beat Hayes. Leo passed the eastern boundary. Curved south. Henderson fired and Leo was already banking west, the explosion blooming harmlessly behind him. Fifteen seconds. He could survive this. He was learning. The panic of those first few exchanges had faded. Watch the qi. Read the timing. Trust your gut. Leo curved toward the southern boundary. Henderson didn't fire. The absence of a shot was wrong.

Henderson had been firing every three seconds for the entire drill. Leo had internalized the rhythm. Shot, dodge, reposition. Shot, dodge, reposition. No shot. Leo reached the southern boundary and banked west. The blue markers glowed on his right. He was running parallel to the edge now, maybe thirty feet inside the field limits. Still no shot. He curved north. The western boundary appeared ahead of him, another line of blue markers cutting off his escape route.

He was flying into a corner, the junction of two boundaries, and Henderson still hadn't fired. Leo understood. He tried to reverse course. Sunshifter responded, bleeding momentum, killing his speed, and Henderson fired. The shell wasn't aimed at Leo. It was aimed at the only escape route he had left. The explosion bloomed directly in his flight path. Leo was trapped in the corner of two boundaries, and the blast radius covered everything that wasn't out of bounds. He couldn't go forward. He couldn't go sideways.

He had no speed to outrun the shrapnel. Leo raised his arms and took the hit. Simulated fragments struck him across the chest, the shoulders, the face. His jersey lit up. The holographic damage indicators painted his body in overlapping red markers.

"Out," the coach announced.

"Forty-three seconds." Leo descended slowly. His arms felt heavy. Not from exhaustion. From the weight of understanding exactly how badly he'd been outplayed. Every shot he'd dodged had pushed him toward the corner. Every successful evasion had narrowed his options. Henderson hadn't been trying to hit him. He'd been herding him into a position where he couldn't dodge. Forty-three seconds. Worse than Hayes.

"Next," the gunner coach called, marking something on his tablet without looking up. Leo walked off the field and found an empty spot on the sideline. He'd spent the entire drill reacting. Henderson had spent the entire drill executing a plan. That was the gap. Experience.

The next flyer was Darren Lowe. Second-string wing. Seven years on the roster. Never cracked the starting rotation, but seven years meant seven years of reps against NFL-caliber gunners. Leo locked his divine sense onto Lowe the moment he lifted off. Where Leo and Hayes had flown in reactive bursts of dodging and recovering, Lowe moved like he'd already seen the whole drill play out. His arcs were wide and deliberate.

Every curve set up the next curve, and Henderson's shots landed in spaces Lowe had already vacated. Leo tracked everything. Lowe's qi distribution. His weight shifts. The micro-adjustments in his flight path that preceded each of Henderson's shots by a full second. This was what seven years of experience looked like. How was he supposed to catch up? Where was he going to get the time to develop the instincts? Henderson fired again. The holographic explosion bloomed at the edge of Lowe's flight path. Close.

Maybe fifty feet. This time Lowe flew close enough to Leo that he could track the whole exchange with his Omnidirectional Awareness. He watched the simulated shrapnel spray outward from the detonation point. He followed every fragment. None of them touched Lowe. Not one. Leo was certain. At this range, with his awareness locked on, he could see every fragment's trajectory. Lowe had cleared the blast radius cleanly. But Lowe's jersey flickered.

"One point," the gunner coach called. Leo blinked. He replayed it in his mind. The explosion. The shrapnel. Lowe's position relative to the blast radius. He'd been outside. Clearly outside. Leo's Omnidirectional Awareness didn't make mistakes at this distance. No fragment had touched him. So why did the jersey register a hit?