The shriek of Arkady's whistle died, leaving a vacuum of silence.
Frank tapped the ball to Leo.
The world didn't just focus—it ignited.
The system painted the field in a blazing grid of tactical lines. Leo, following the pre-agreed plan, nudged the ball back with his heel to Perez.
The message was clear: Settle. Draw them out.
What followed was three minutes of pure, beautiful possession from the Chaos Committee.
Perez, the CDM, and the two central midfielders passed in a tight, patient triangle. It wasn't attacking; it was a statement. We are not just panicking animals.
They were baiting King's press, drawing Max and a winger, higher up the field.
Max, the human engine, took the bait first. He lunged to close down Perez. At the exact moment of his commitment, Perez slipped the ball to the CAM.
In a fluid, rehearsed motion, the CAM drifted left, and the left-sided midfielder slid into the central holding role.
It was a simple positional swap, but executed mid-press. For a split second, Max was wrong-footed, chasing a ghost.
It opened a lane. The left midfielder looked up and launched a hopeful, looping cross towards the edge of the box, aiming for Frank's run.
Leo saw it developing. The plan: Frank chests it down, Leo makes the overlapping run, a quick one-two to slice through the recovering defense.
Someone else saw it three steps earlier.
King.
He wasn't where the pass was aimed; he was where the pass would be intercepted. He glided in front of the intended recipient, not with a desperate lunge, but with the serene certainty of a man catching a bus he saw three blocks away.
The ball settled at his feet as if it had always belonged there.
He didn't pause. In one motion, he switched play with a raking, forty-yard pass that tore across the pitch and landed perfectly at the feet of Max Freeman, now unmarked on the right wing.
Max's specialty was direct, curving shots. He didn't need a touch to set himself. As the two Chaos Committee center-backs scrambled towards him in a panic, he performed a deceptively simple feint—a tiny shift onto his right, then back onto his left..
The defenders bought the fake for a single, fatal heartbeat.
Boom!
Max's shot was a white streak, a vicious in-swinger that ignored the desperate jump of the centre back and buried itself in the side netting.
GOALLLL! 1-0.
The sound of the net was a physical blow to the Chaos Committee. Less than five minutes in.
King met Max at the halfway line for a crisp, businesslike slap of hands. Max was already sweating, his hustle-mode engaged.
"Good finish," King said, his voice devoid of warmth. A command performance acknowledged.
They kicked off again. Desperation began to itch at the edges of Leo's focus. He passed to Frank, who laid it off to the left midfielder. Frank and the attacking mid made decoy runs, dragging markers.
The real play was Leo, ghosting into the space they'd created. The left midfielder saw him and launched a hopeful, soaring cross over the entire defense.
Leo was free. For one glorious, airborne second, the ball descended towards him, and he saw the path to goal.
Then a shadow fell across him.
King.
He didn't tackle. He ushered.
A gentle, almost paternal foot hooked around the ball as Leo tried to bring it under control, rolling it smoothly from his grasp. It was so clean, so effortless, it felt less like a steal and more like a correction.
King accelerated, a blur of blue and white. Four Chaos players converged on him. He didn't panic.
A faint, contemptuous smile touched his lips as he slipped a no-look pass between two of them, straight to the feet of the other elite striker, Thomas.
Thomas controlled it with the grace of a concert pianist. But the Chaos defense, stung and alert, swarmed.
The right-back and Perez closed him down in a pincer movement. Trapped, Thomas did the only thing he could—he chipped it delicately over their heads, towards the lurking Max.
The Chaos center-back calculated the trajectory. He saw Max winding up for a first-time volley and braced to block.
He never got the chance.
King was there. How? Leo didn't know.
He seemed to materialize from the grass itself.
[ANALYSIS: OPPONENT KING - KINETIC CHAIN EFFICIENCY: 99.8%. TRAJECTORY CALCULATION... ERROR. MOVE DEFIES STANDARD BIOMECHANICAL MODELS.]
In a move of absurd, impossible athleticism, he executed a cartwheel, using the rotational momentum to launch himself into a scissoring mid-air volley. His foot met the dropping ball before Max could even swing.
CRACK.
The shot was a thunderbolt. It screamed past the stunned defenders, kissed the inside of the post with a sound like a bell being rung, and tore into the net.
GOAL. 2-0.
Leo stared at the rippling net. He looked at the digital clock on the far stand.
12:04.
Twelve minutes. It felt like twelve seconds. The game was a blur, and they were drowning in it.
Frank jogged over, his face grim. "This is bad," he growled, planting a foot on the ball for the kickoff. "Max's shot is a laser. King is… something else. And Thomas is faster than gossip. What do we do?"
A slow, hard smile spread across Leo's face, belying the cold dread in his stomach. He repeated their mantra, the only weapon they had left. "Be unpredictable."
The kickoff was a disaster. King's wingers, emboldened, pressed high and won possession. They played a series of sharp, interlocking passes that cut through the demoralized Chaos midfield like a hot knife through butter.
The ball found Max, who proceeded to humiliate two midfielders with a series of tight, mesmerizing turns.
Thomas was already on the move, a arrow pointing at goal. Max looked up and delivered a low, driven cross.
It was a perfect move. Except the Chaos Committee's two center-backs, communicating in a moment of desperate synergy, sprinted up in unison, playing Thomas offside. The line held.
Thomas, his momentum carrying him, couldn't pull back. He saw the trap, but his foot connected, and he slammed the ball into the net out of pure instinct.
The shrill, alien shriek of Arkady's mouth-whistle pierced the air. "Offside. No goal."
A reprieve. A tiny crack in the monolith.
They took the free kick quickly, a long, hopeful punt upfield. A slip, a clumsy collision between two of King's players as they switched off for a second—that was all the opening the Chaos needed.
The ball fell to Frank, thirty yards out, with a sliver of space. He didn't think. He just hit it.
A monstrous, rising drive that carried the fury of their entire humiliation. It arrowed into the top corner before anyone could blink.
GOAL. 2-1.
The roar from the Chaos Committee was pure, undiluted catharsis. But it was brief. The clock showed less than ten minutes.
The kickoff was a declaration of war from Max. He and Thomas became a two-man typhoon, passing around Frank and Leo in a dizzying, fluid motion. They bypassed Perez, driving straight for the heart of a defense still buzzing from the goal.
Leo turned and ran, a desperate prayer forming in his mind. "System... I need it. Now... Grit Protocol."
A prompt flashed, urgent and red.
[GRIT PROTOCOL AVAILABLE. COOLDOWN BYPASS DETECTED.]
[WARNING: POST-USE FATIGUE WILL BE CRITICAL.]
[ACTIVATE? Y/N]
Leo didn't read the condition. He didn't care. "Yes."
A wave of cool numbness washed through him. The ache in his legs vanished. The ringing in his ears from the crowd faded. The world narrowed to a tunnel, at the end of which was the ball at Max's feet.
His speed was no longer human. He was a bolt of blue lightning.
The Chaos CDM, fueled by the equalizer, made a heroic, last-ditch interception, poking the ball away from Max's control.
Before Max could recover, Leo arrived. He didn't tackle the opponent; he tackled the space, arriving a fraction before the CDM could secure it and poking it forward.
The lenses of his glasses flared with a deep, solid, electric blue.
He was gone.
He blew past the stranded wingers, a blur of desperate motion. The only obstacle now was King, who had sprinted back with preternatural awareness.
King lunged. Leo, guided by the system's micro-calibrations, feinted left, nudged the ball right with the outside of his boot, and slipped past.
But King stuck to him like a shadow, matching his Grit-enhanced stride, herding him towards the two recovering center-backs.
A trap. In two steps, he'd be cornered.
So Leo stopped.
He planted his foot and came to a dead halt. King, his momentum carrying him, overshot by two paces before he could react.
In that frozen sliver of time, Leo did something no one expected. He rolled the ball onto the top of his boot, flicked it up, and in the same motion, launched himself into a jumping, sideways scissor-kick.
It was pure, unadulterated chaos. A move from the playground, not the textbook.
The ball rocketed over the shoulder of the leaping, wrong-footed King and streaked into the far top corner.
GOAL. 2-2.
Leo landed in a heap, the glasses flying from his face to skitter on the turf. The cool numbness vanished, replaced by a tidal wave of crippling fatigue that made his bones feel like lead.
He groped for the glasses, shoved them back on. The world was blurry for a second before snapping back into harsh, exhausted focus.
[GRIT PROTOCOL DISABLED. FATIGUE DEBUFF: MAXIMUM.]
[BIOMETRIC CRASH DETECTED.]
[LACTIC ACID LEVELS: CRITICAL. NEURAL SYNCHRONIZATION DROPPING.]
[RECOMMENDATION: IMMEDIATE CESSSATION OF ACTIVITY.]
Across the pitch, King stood motionless, staring at the net. Then he turned, and his gaze wasn't on Leo. It was on Max, on Thomas, on his own defenders.
His face, usually a mask of cool control, was a portrait of stunned, incomprehensible disbelief.
For a fraction of a second, it wasn't anger Leo saw, but a raw, childlike frustration—the look of a genius whose perfect proof has been scribbled over. Then it vanished, swallowed by the icy fury.
With under two minutes left, King yanked Max away from the center circle by his jersey. "My turn," he snarled, his voice low and lethal. He took Max's place up front.
Frank's warning echoed in Leo's head. When King decides to be the finisher, it's over.
The final kickoff was a coronation march. King received the ball and simply began to run. He didn't pass.
He wove through the exhausted Chaos players as if they were training cones, a one-man blitz counting down the clock in his head.
One midfielder bypassed. A second. A third. The entire Chaos defense converged on him in a last, desperate swarm—center-backs from the front, fullbacks and midfielders from the sides and behind.
In the center of it all, King planted his left foot, coiling his body for the championship-winning strike. The shot that would erase the tie, erase Leo's miracle, and re-establish the natural order.
His leg swung.
But the thunderous BOOM of connection never came.
Instead, there was a dull, wet THUMP.
King's foot connected not with the ball, but with Perez's chest.
The midfielder had thrown himself into the line of fire in a final, suicidal act of defiance. He collapsed, the wind blasted from his lungs, but the ball squirted loose, harmless.
The shriek of Arkady's whistle was instantaneous, calling the foul.
King looked down, first at Perez gasping on the ground, then at his own foot, then at the ball rolling away. His face, usually a mask of cool control, was a portrait of stunned, incomprehensible disbelief.
He hadn't been out-skilled.
He had been out-sacrificed.
The beautiful, brutal equation of the slaughterhouse had just been rewritten by the one variable no system could ever fully account for: a body on the line.
The clock hit zero. The game ended with a tie.
Perez lay on the turf, wheezing, a huge red mark already blooming on his sternum. But as Leo stumbled over, he saw the midfielder's face. Through the pain, Perez was grinning—a wild, triumphant, bloody-lipped grin.
He had stopped the sun.