Chương 176: Kickoff

Seven minutes remained in the quarter. The Giants' fort bristled with activity. Soldiers held their positions along the ramparts while both gunners tracked the Bills' flyers circling overhead. The defensive formation was textbook. The Bills had pulled back after their failed blitz, regrouping in the upper airspace where gravity would favor their next dive. Leo hovered thirty feet above his team's fort, and his skin crawled. Seven divine sense signatures locked on him.

Two gunners triangulating from the Bills' fort in the opposite end zone. Five flyers circling overhead. Seven different players catalogued every breath he took, every shift in his weight, every flicker of qi through his meridians. The crowd had found a new rhythm.

"DE-FENSE!" Stomp stomp.

"DE-FENSE!" Stomp stomp. The chant had a pulse to it, confident and steady. The fans saw the Bills positioning overhead. They saw the Giants defending the fort. They thought they understood what was happening. They didn't know about Harbach's order. Chen. Coach wants you to bench yourself. Get eliminated. Now. Vince's voice came through the spiritual nexus. Leo felt something cold settle in his chest.

"You're joking." I'm relaying. Harbach says the micrododging is exposed. Every scout in the building has footage. The longer you stay up, the more they learn. Harbach wanted Leo to charge. Fly into the Bills' formation, take hits, get eliminated. Make it look like he'd tried his best and failed. While two hundred thousand people watched. While the announcers shook their heads and wondered if the first overall pick was already cracking under pressure. The commentators would have a field day.

Rookie couldn't handle the heat. Draft bust. Told you so. Leo had heard them before. They were there after he got eliminated by Mateo in his first game against Harvard. After they cheated. He remembered lying in his room afterward, refreshing threads he knew he shouldn't read, watching strangers tell him to go back to high school. He'd deleted the apps eventually. But he remembered the feeling. And Harbach was asking him to feel that again. The chant continued below. DE-FENSE. Stomp stomp. DE-FENSE.

"Can I refuse?" You can. But I wouldn't.

"Why not?" Because Harbach will make your life miserable. A coach who wants to bury you has a hundred ways to do it. Vince paused. And he's doing this for your own good. The micrododging is your edge. Once it's exposed, it's gone. Leo watched the Bills' formation tighten overhead. Preparing for another run. He was running out of time to make this choice himself.

"Vince. You got to help me out here. You know what I want." Vince was quiet for a moment. Alright. Here's the thing. Harbach isn't the real boss. Lord Mara owns this team. Mara signs the checks. Mara makes the final calls. Lord Mara. The billionaire owner of the Giants. And Mara cares about one thing. Money. Vince laughed, a short, sharp sound. Look at the stands, pal. Two hundred thousand seats. Fifty bucks a pop. That's ten million in gate revenue for a preseason game. You know why? Leo knew why. Because of you.

Flyer Seven. The kid who makes the NFL exciting again. You think Harbach's opinion matters more than that? You think Lord Mara is going to bench his cash cow because Harbach's feelings got hurt?

"You're saying if I prove I can make Lord Mara money..." I'm saying it's a business decision. Everything in this league is a business decision. Vince's voice hardened. But here's the other thing. If you disobey Harbach and you fail, nobody will protect you. Not me. Not Lord Mara. Not anyone. Around him, the crowd kept chanting. DE-FENSE. Stomp stomp. They wanted to see Flyer Seven. They'd shown up for a preseason game like it was the Super Bowl. They were wearing his number on their chests.

And Harbach wanted him to disappoint them. The Harvard game had taught Leo something he'd never forgotten. You couldn't control what people said about you. You couldn't stop the forums, the hot takes, the strangers with opinions. The only thing you could control was what you did on the field. If he was going to be judged, he was going to be judged for trying. Not for quitting. Leo made a business decision.

"We're attacking." Chen.

"Full assault. Bills' fort. I'm going for the gunners." There's no taking it back.

"I know." When Vince spoke again, he sounded like a different person. The Captain was calling plays. Flyers, build momentum. Standard rotation. The Giants' flyers began to move. They formed a circle above the fort, five swords carving parallel arcs through the air. Slow at first. Then faster. The circle widened as their velocity climbed, each orbit building momentum. The Bills responded. All five flyers and climbed toward the stadium ceiling.

They leveled out just below the boundary formation and began circling, each orbit faster than the last. The defensive chant died. A new energy rippled through the stands. Something was happening. Something was about to happen.

"Are they...?" Someone in the front row.

"It's a kickoff." A father pulling his son onto his shoulders.

"Watch. Watch." In a kickoff, both teams circled until they hit top speed, then broke and launched a full assault simultaneously. Whatever T4 qi reserves they'd been managing, whatever plays they'd held in reserve, all of it committed into one decisive push. Stomping started somewhere. Uneven at first, scattered boots on bleachers, then it caught. Spread. Section by section, the rhythm locked in, two hundred thousand feet hitting metal in unison. The clapping layered over it. Faster now.

The stadium was a drum and the crowd was playing it. Standard overload, Vince said. Chen and Kowalski pressure right. Rest of us hit the left flank. Force their defense to choose.

"No." What?

"I go alone." That's insane.

"If I'm going to do this, I'm not holding back. No hiding anything." Leo paused.

"Kowalski can't follow me through the flak. Nobody can. He might as well help you guys." Three seconds of silence. Alright. Chen breaks right, solo. Everyone else on me, left flank. On hut. Leo dropped low, pressing himself flat against Sunshifter. The chain hook stayed in his dantian. He would need maximum speed for the initial burst. The stadium found its voice. A rising "OHHHHH" that built and built and refused to break, the whole stadium holding one breath together. Blue thirty-two. Blue thirty-two. Hut!

In the broadcast booth, Jim Nantz rose from his chair.

"And it's... kickoff!" Five streaks of crimson fire launched from the Giants' end zone. The crowd exploded. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site. T4 qi flared along every blade as the flyers surged forward. Leo's vision grayed at the edges. Blood fled his skull, rushed downward, pooled in his feet like lead weights. The Bills dove. All five flyers plunged from the sky, their swords trailing red light as they screamed toward Leo's position.

The Giants' gunners fired. Two bursts bloomed in the Bills' path, black smoke and shrapnel expanding to break their formation. The Bills scattered and regrouped almost instantly, five flyers converging onto the same target. Leo. The Bills' gunners were already firing, arcing shells overhead to blanket his approach in shrapnel. If he broke left or right, he'd lose momentum. The Bills' flyers would catch him. The only option was forward. Through the flak. The shells detonated.

Two black blasts erupted thirty feet ahead, overlapping cones of smoke and fire. A wall of metal fragments designed to shred anything that tried to pass through. Leo didn't slow down.

Tom Wheeler couldn't breathe. The entire stadium had gone quiet. Two hundred thousand people stood in silence, watching Leo fly straight into a curtain of flak He had seventy-six percent shield. Eight hits to elimination. The twin detonations expanded toward each other, black smoke swallowing the space where Leo's trajectory would carry him. For a heartbeat, Tom couldn't see anything. Just fire and metal and the certainty that something terrible was about to happen. Then Leo punched through.

A blue and red streak burst from the smoke in a twisting barrel roll. Crimson qi flared along Sunshifter's edge as Leo ignited more T4 qi and accelerated toward the Bills' fort without breaking stride. The crowd erupted. Tom was screaming, grabbing Matt's shoulders, shaking him hard enough to rattle teeth.

"HE MADE IT! HE MADE IT!" Matt wasn't moving. Tom stopped shaking. He looked at his friend's face. He was staring at the scoreboard, frozen, one arm extended like a statue pointing toward the display. Around them, the celebration was dying. Scattered fans were going quiet, following Matt's gesture, looking where he was looking. Tom looked. Leo's shield display: 76%. Unchanged. Tom's brain refused to process it. He looked at the field.

Leo was still accelerating, still driving toward the Bills' fort, still flying like nothing had happened. Point blank. Two shells. Overlapping cones of shrapnel. Tom watched Leo punch through another flak burst. Then another. The Bills' gunners were firing desperately now, shells detonating closer and closer, and Leo just kept twisting through them like the shrapnel wasn't there. No red flashes. No shield drain. Nothing. The cheering died completely.

The silence that replaced it was so total Tom could hear his own racing heart.

In the ESPN broadcast booth, nobody was doing their job. Jim Pasch stood behind his desk, microphone forgotten. Dave Nantz had one hand pressed against the monitor, leaning forward like he could get closer to the replay by sheer force of will. The production staff had stopped calling shots. The graphics team had stopped updating overlays. Every person in the booth was watching the same thing. The replay showed Leo's approach. The twin detonations. The overlapping shrapnel fields. Three frames.

That was all the high-speed camera had captured of his transit through the kill zone. Frame one: Leo entering the shrapnel cloud, Sunshifter tilted thirty degrees left, slipping between two fragments converging from the right. Frame two: the sword had rotated completely, now angled fifteen degrees right and climbing, threading a vertical gap that hadn't existed a millisecond before.

Frame three: exiting flat, gold qi already flaring along Sunshifter's edge, not a single spark on his armor where shrapnel should have impacted it. Three frames. Ten milliseconds. Three completely different flight angles, each one finding the only survivable path through a wall of shrapnel. Jim found his voice first. It came out as a whisper.

"How..." Nobody answered.

Leo burst through the smoke. The Bills' flyers were scattered behind him, their coordinated dive disrupted by his race through the flak. He had seconds before they regrouped. Seconds to make something happen. Vince and the rest of the Giants were engaging the Bill's soldiers. The gunners were the key. If Leo could eliminate even one gunner, the Bills' defensive coverage would collapse. Leo drove toward the fort.

Both gunners abandoned their positions, their spiritual pressure flaring as they began casting barrier arts. Formation barriers bloomed in Leo's path, walls of golden light materializing between him and the fort. Leo zagged. Sunshifter screamed through a hard right break, the G-Force Bleeding Formation flaring as Leo dodged the first barrier. Another zigzag. He dodged another barrier. He used the chaos to pull his chain hook from his dantian.

The weapon extended as he threw it, the chain unspooling in a rising arc that carried the hook overhead and behind him. The gunners were focused on him. They weren't tracking the secondary threat climbing above their position. Leo fought the urge to ignite more T4. Ten seconds remaining in his reserve. He couldn't afford to burn it on positioning. Instead, he juked left and right, building speed through momentum transfers, buying time for the chain hook to reach the optimal angle.

The gunners retreated into the fort. Smart. Take away the airspace, take away everything that made a flyer dangerous. On the fort's roof, Vince's group slammed into the Bills' defensive line. A soldier's shield shattered under combined attacks and he disappeared in a flash of white light. Eliminated. The remaining four pulled tight, abandoning aggressive positioning, shields overlapping into a turtle formation. He had a choice. The proper play was to join the assault. Add his sword to the melee.

Help Vince and the team crack the turtle formation for points. But the Bills' flyers were reforming behind him. Five signatures converging on his position. In twenty seconds, they would catch him. In thirty, they would overwhelm him. Leo checked his T4 reserve. 10. 2 seconds. He'd spent eight minutes saving as much as he could. If Harbach was going to bench him after this quarter, Leo was going to make sure he used every last second before it ended. He grinned.

The chain hook completed its arc overhead and came spinning back toward him, the weighted end whistling through the air. Leo's hand shot out and caught it mid-rotation, fingers closing around the grip as the chain snapped taut. He dove into the fort alone.

The classroom at Yale had been quiet for eleven minutes. Every student was hunched over a device. Tablets, phones, laptops. One kid in the third row had a holographic array projecting a three-dimensional model of the field directly onto his desk, tiny figures streaking through the air above his notebook. Half the row had abandoned their chairs to crowd around him. The professor stood at his shoulder, lecture notes forgotten. They'd watched Leo charge. They'd watched him survive.

Now they watched the Giants' assault in silence. The broadcast showed the battle from above. Four Giants flyers engaging soldiers on the Bills' fort roof. Spell arts flashing. Barriers forming and shattering. The kind of close combat that usually lasted minutes, grinding exchanges that accumulated points through attrition. The camera cut to Leo's position. He was diving into the fort. Into the covered structure where the gunners had retreated. Into territory no attacking flyer should enter alone.

The broadcast switched to the fort's interior cameras. Useless. The feed showed chaos. Spell arts flashing against barriers. Smoke filling the corridors. A blur of movement, blue and red cutting through the haze, something spinning on a chain. One second. Two. The professor grabbed the back of a chair. Through the smoke, a shape flew sideways. Not Leo. Larger. Flailing.

The chain hook had wrapped around something, and that something swung in a wide arc, crashing through a barrier formation and slamming into a second figure mid-cast. Three. Light flared. White. Elimination white. Then again. Then Leo Chen exploded from the western exit, trailing gold qi, and the announcers' voices cracked trying to keep up with the scoreboard. The classroom lost its mind. Desks went over. Bodies collided.

The holographic projector hit the ground and kept playing, tiny Leo Chen circling in the wreckage. Someone was sobbing. Someone else was trying to rip a mounted whiteboard off the wall. The professor seized a chair, swung it like a baseball bat, and put it through the window. Eighteen years without a single disciplinary note in his file. Gone in one swing. He looked through the broken window. Below, the Dean of Immortal Arts sprinted shirtless across the quad, his tie knotted around his forehead.

The chase had been going on for two minutes and nobody was gaining ground. Leo watched the Bills' flyers scatter across the upper airspace, five signatures weaving evasive patterns. The Giants pursued in a close formation, Vince at the center calling adjustments through the nexus.

"Vince. Why aren't our gunners shooting?" Orders from Harbach. No flak while you're in the air. The Bills' Center was already exploiting it. Their formation had tightened. They knew the shells weren't coming. Chen. Vince's tone shifted. Bench yourself.

"What?" You heard me. Soon as you're gone, our gunners can fire again. The backup striker and wing haven't seen real minutes since last year. Give them a chance. The scoreboard showed 4-0 Giants, four minutes remaining. Nothing left to prove.

"Yeah. Alright." Leo banked toward the Giants' fort.

"What do I do about Harbach?" What do you mean?

"He's going to be apocalyptic." Here's the thing, pal. I try to be on everyone's good side. Coaches, players, the guy who refills the Gatorade. It's good business.

"That doesn't answer my question." Talk to him. Man to man. Sit down, look him in the eye, explain your reasoning. Harbach respects directness. Probably. Leo considered it for half a second.

"Kowalski. What do you do when Harbach is pissed at you?" I've never pissed off Harbach.

"Do you want me to tell the coach what's under your helmet?" Kowalski went quiet. His hand drift upward. Gauntleted fingers touched the side of his helmet. Pressed against the metal. Felt the distinct crinkle of aluminum foil beneath the padding. I call my agent. That's what I pay him for. A pause. But hey. I'm just a linebacker. Leo grinned.

"Thanks, Kowalski."

Vivian's apartment in Atlanta was dark except for the glow of her TV. The ESPN broadcast showed Leo's figure shrinking as he descended toward the Giants' end zone. She watched him touch down inside the fort. Watched him step off Sunshifter. Watched him wave off the Soldiers who came to congratulate him. The camera focused on Leo. He bent down and worked at the straps beneath his thigh plate, prying loose a section of armor. He tucked the piece under his armpit and pulled his phone from underneath.

"Dave, I'm not sure what we're seeing here... is he... is he taking a selfie?"

"I don't... Jim, I think he's making a call." The camera zoomed in on Leo's phone. He was scrolling through his contacts with his thumb, squinting at the screen.

"This is... unprecedented. In all my years of broadcasting, I have never seen a player make a phone call during live play." Leo found the contact he was looking for. He pressed the call button and raised the phone to his ear. Vivian's phone rang.