Chương 153: Something Sweet

April 2030, New York City Leo waited outside the NYC subway station at Grand Street, scrolling through his phone. He had rewatched the same clip four times without absorbing any of it. His mind kept drifting.

"Hey." Ananya jogged up the station steps, slightly out of breath. Her Columbia warm-up jacket was unzipped over a plain white t-shirt, and her hair was still damp from practice.

"Sorry. Coach ran long." She fell into step beside him.

"He's convinced we can still make regionals if we win out."

"Can you?"

"We'd need four teams ahead of us to lose. And one of them is Yale." She shrugged.

"So no." They walked toward Tofu Tofu, the Korean place downtown. This had become their routine. Lunch first, because Niki didn't know how to cook, and then the train uptown to her penthouse for six hours of film study. They did this twice a week, ever since that Tuesday when Ananya showed up as chaperone and ended up stealing her dress back from her great-grandmother. Leo still wasn't entirely sure how they got here. The original plan was simple. Ananya would keep Niki honest. Leo would get his film sessions.

Everyone would go home with exactly what they wanted. But by the third session, Ananya stopped calling Leo "my friend" and started referring to him as "my boyfriend." The first time she did it, Leo assumed it was another move in her ongoing war with Niki. The Old Matriarch's face tightened in a way that suggested the label was working exactly as intended. The second time, Leo noticed that Ananya held his hand while she said it. The third time, she kissed him on the cheek afterward and whispered, "Just go with it."

So he went with it. And then one night, after a particularly brutal film session, Ananya stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and looked at him with an expression he couldn't read.

"This is stupid," she said. Leo braced himself. Here it came. The conversation where she explained that the joke had run its course, Niki had suffered enough, and Leo could figure out his own film study from here.

"I'm doing ROTC," she continued.

"I ship out two weeks after graduation. Five-year deployment minimum. We have no future."

"I know."

"You're about to start the most demanding training program of your life. You don't have time for a girlfriend."

"Also true."

"And I'm your teammate's great-granddaughter. Dating me is probably some kind of conflict of interest."

"Probably." Ananya stared at him.

"You're not arguing."

"You haven't said anything wrong yet." She punched him in the shoulder.

"You're supposed to argue," she said.

"You're supposed to say 'I don't care about any of that' or 'let's make it work anyway' or something romantic."

"Do you want me to say something romantic?"

"I want you to mean it if you do." Leo considered his options. He rearranged his entire schedule to make these Tuesday and Thursday sessions work. He didn't do that just for the film study.

"I like spending time with you," he said.

"I like the Korean place. I like walking home with you after." He paused.

"I know it won't last. But I don't think that's a good reason not to do it." Ananya was quiet for a long moment. Then she kissed him. Longer than the first time, outside the subway station. Less performative. No great-grandmother to spite.

"Fine," she said when she pulled back.

"But I'm not changing my deployment for you."

"I wouldn't ask you to."

"And you're not changing your career for me."

"Also wouldn't ask."

"Good." She took his hand and started walking again.

"Now let's go get ice cream. You're buying." That was two weeks ago.

Tofu Tofu was crowded for a Tuesday afternoon. They grabbed the last open table near the back, wedged between a group of NYU students and an older couple arguing about real estate. Ananya ordered the seafood soon tofu. Leo got the beef. They did this often enough that the server didn't bother asking if they wanted anything else.

"My mother called last night," Ananya said, stirring her water with a straw.

"She wanted to know how the mentorship sessions were going."

"What did you tell her?"

"That Great-Grandmother has been incredibly generous with her time." Ananya's smile was angelic.

"She was so pleased. She said it was heartwarming to see Niki finally using her talents to help the younger generation instead of..." She trailed off deliberately.

"Instead of what?"

"Her exact words were 'chasing tail.' But she said it in Hindi, so it sounded more dignified." Leo winced. The truth was that Niki never intended to mentor anyone. The dinner invitation, the candlelit apartment, the stolen dress with the embroidered hearts. All of it was exactly what it looked like. And the Sharma family knew it. Five ex-husbands. Countless scandals. A reputation that embarrassed three generations of descendants.

When word reached the family WhatsApp group that Niki invited a nineteen-year-old rookie to her penthouse for a private dinner, they raised hell. Niki's defense was quick and desperate. She wasn't seducing anyone. She was doing a favor for Ananya. Her new boyfriend needed help with film study, and what kind of great-grandmother would she be if she refused? The lie saved her. Barely. And now Leo and Ananya milked it for everything it was worth.

"She can't back out," Ananya said, picking up her spoon.

"If she stops helping you, she has to explain why. And the only explanation is that she was lying about the whole thing." Leo winced.

"Last time that happened, there was a family intervention." Ananya shook her head.

"Three aunts flew in from California. My grandmother cried. There was a PowerPoint presentation."

"A PowerPoint presentation?"

"Eighteen slides. Timeline of incidents going back to 1947." She paused.

"Slide fourteen had eligible bachelors her age."

"How'd she take it?"

"She tried to date one of the bachelors on slide fourteen out of spite. He turned her down. Said he'd heard of her reputation." Leo laughed.

"So she's trapped." This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

"Completely." Ananya's smile widened.

"And every time she thinks about quitting, I remind her how much the family appreciated her generous offer to help. How proud everyone is that she's finally being a positive role model."

"That's cruel."

"She tried to seduce my boyfriend while wearing my dress." Ananya picked up a piece of tofu with her spoon.

"She's lucky I'm not making her do this every night."

The second week of May, Leo finished lifebonding with the slab of spiritual steel. Six months of daily work. He wrapped his divine sense around blank metal until the bond finally locked into place. He woke up the next morning with nothing to do. For the first time in over a year, his schedule had gaps. No lifebonding. No body refining exercises until his next appointment with Lord Ross. Just cultivation and whatever else he wanted to fill the hours with. He called Niki.

"It's done," he said.

"The bond's complete." Silence on the other end. Then a sigh.

"I'll make some calls." Three days later, the Giants' equipment manager transformed the steel into a chain hook. The weapon looked like something a dockworker might carry, a heavy curved hook attached to fifteen feet of reinforced chain. It was designed for one purpose, trapping and disabling enemy flying swords. The day after that, Niki texted him an address. Columbia's practice facility. 6 AM. Leo showed up expecting Ananya.

Instead he found Niki alone on the field, wearing practice gear and holding a training dummy remote.

"Don't look so surprised," she said.

"If you're going to use that thing in my league, you're going to use it correctly." She ran him through chain hook fundamentals for three hours. Release timing. Hip rotation. The angle of his wrist at the moment of impact. Every correction came through clenched teeth, but the corrections kept coming. Ananya arrived around nine, carrying coffee and a bag of pastries from the place near her dorm.

"You're still alive," she said to Leo.

"I'm impressed."

"Your great-grandmother is a good teacher."

"My great-grandmother is a perfectionist who hates losing more than she hates you." Ananya handed Niki a coffee.

"Isn't that right Auntie?" Niki's eye twitched. She took the coffee without comment. They practiced for another two hours. By the end, Leo's arm burned and his divine sense felt stretched thin. But his strikes were cleaner. His grabs were precise. He was starting to feel like he understood the weapon.

After Niki left, Leo and Ananya sat on the bleachers overlooking the empty field.

"You've gotten better," Ananya said.

"A lot better."

"I don't feel better. I feel like I'm constantly behind."

"That's because you're comparing yourself to NFL veterans." She pulled out her phone and scrolled through something.

"Here. I want you to watch this." She handed him the phone. On the screen was a video he recognized immediately. The CFL game against Florida. Two years ago. His first collegiate flying ace match.

"Why are you showing me this?"

"Just watch." Leo watched. For the first three minutes, he wanted to throw the phone across the field. Every movement his past self made was wasteful. Flashy maneuvers that accomplished nothing. Angles that forced recovery instead of setting up the next attack. Speed and maneuverability used as a crutch instead of a tool.

"That's embarrassing," he said.

"That's growth." Ananya took the phone back.

"Two years ago, you won by being faster than everyone else. You didn't need to be efficient because you could just outfly your mistakes."

"And now?"

"Now you actually understand what you're looking at. You can see how much better you could have played." She smiled.

"That's the whole point. The person who watched that film two months ago wouldn't have noticed anything wrong." Leo stared at the empty field. She was right. Two months ago, he would have watched that game and felt proud. Now he could barely stand to look at it.

"Come on," Ananya said, standing up.

"Let's go to Tofu Tofu one last time." Leo's chest tightened. One last time. He knew what those words meant. He knew this was coming since the night she told him about her post-graduation plans. But knowing and hearing were different things.

"Ananya." She stopped. Turned back to look at him.

"What if you didn't go?" Something soft and sad moved behind her eyes.

"Leo."

"I have connections. I'm an Officer. I could go into the Catacombs myself, earn merits, pull some strings. You don't have to enlist. We could figure something out. There has to be another way." For a fraction of a second, Ananya's composure cracked. Her jaw tightened and she looked away, out across the empty field, and Leo saw the version of her that wanted to say yes. Then it was gone. Ananya walked back to the bleachers. She sat down next to him.

"Do you remember what you said to me? That night on the sidewalk, when I told you all the reasons this was stupid?" Leo remembered. He had said he knew it wouldn't last. He had said that wasn't a good reason not to do it.

"You promised me," Ananya said.

"No changing your career for me. No changing my deployment for you. We both knew the end date going in."

"That was before."

"Before what?" Leo didn't have an answer. Before it felt real. Before he started rearranging his schedule to get Korean with her. Before he realized that saying goodbye would hurt more than he expected.

"I don't know how to do this," he said.

"You're my first... this is the first time I've..." He couldn't finish the sentence. Ananya took his hand.

"Then let's end it right," she said.

"Sweet, not sour. Tofu soup and a walk in the park and a goodbye that doesn't make us hate each other."

"I could never hate you."

"You might, if I let you throw away your career trying to save me from something I chose." She squeezed his hand.

"I want to serve, Leo. Not because I have to. Because I want to. And you have a Super Bowl to win." Leo stared at their intertwined fingers. His first girlfriend. His first real relationship. And he was learning, right now, that endings didn't come with instructions.

"Tofu," he said finally.

"And a walk in the park." Ananya smiled. The same mischievous smile she had given him after their first kiss.

"You're buying."

"I'm always buying."

"And that's why this worked." She stood and pulled him up by the hand.

"Come on. I'm starving."

They got soon tofu. They walked through the park. At the subway station, Ananya kissed him goodbye and told him she would watch all his games. Then she was gone, and Leo went home alone. He threw himself into training. Anything to keep his mind off how much he missed her. It didn't always work. Every time he picked up the chain hook, he heard Niki's corrections in his ear, and Niki led to Ananya, and Ananya led to the subway station kiss that he kept replaying like that clip on his phone.

Coach Williams let Leo use the practice facilities at Yale. The old field felt smaller than he remembered. The equipment racks were the same ones he used two years ago, back when beating Mateo was the biggest challenge of his life. The first thing he noticed was the Flyer 7 gear. It was everywhere. Posters on the walls. Jerseys in the team shop. A life-sized cardboard cutout of himself that someone placed in the corner of the lobby, grinning like an idiot. Students ambushed him between drills.

They wanted autographs. Photos. A few words of encouragement they could post to their stories. Two years ago, Leo would have found the attention exhausting. A chore to endure between real training. Now he thought about Ananya. He wondered what she was doing. Whether she cut her hair short. We are all rooting for you. So Leo smiled. He signed jerseys. He told nervous freshmen that if they kept working, anything was possible. He said it even though the words felt hollow in his own mouth.

Because the truth was uglier than any motivational speech. Ananya was gone. Shipped off to the New York Catacombs to join a fight that had been swallowing Foundation Establishment cultivators since before either of them were born. She went because there was no hope for her here. No path forward. No light at the end of the endless grind. Leo was the exception.

Out of thousands of high school players, hundreds of collegiate stars, decades of hopeful young cultivators who dreamed of making it to the big leagues, he was the only one from his generation who broke through. One rookie. In the entire NFL. Everyone else was waiting for the elders to retire.

May 20th. The night before OTAs. The apartment was too quiet. Tomorrow was the first day. His first time facing T4 flak. Time and again, Niki emphasized that no amount of words or film could teach him what facing Gunners actually felt like. Leo spent hundreds of hours watching footage, studying positioning, memorizing the patterns. He thought he understood. But theory and practice were two entirely different things. He remembered a film session from three weeks ago.

A play where the opposing wing had a clean angle on the enemy Center. Open sky. Easy elimination. Instead, the wing pulled back and reset to a neutral position.

"Why didn't he attack?" Leo asked. Niki rewound the footage and pointed at the Gunner in the fortification below.

"Watch the Qi distribution." Leo watched. The Gunner's spiritual energy pooled in a specific pattern, concentrated toward the upper-left quadrant of the sky.

"He's pre-aiming," Niki said.

"That entire corridor is a kill zone. The wing saw it and backed off."

"But the Gunner never fired."

"He didn't have to. The threat was enough." Niki zoomed in on the Gunner's formation array.

"T4 flak isn't about getting hit. It's about the areas you can't enter. A good Gunner denies half the sky without pulling the trigger." Leo nodded like he understood. But sitting in a dark room watching holographic footage was different from flying through contested airspace with real spiritual artillery tracking his every move. That was why man-to-man coverage took over the league. By sticking close to an enemy Flyer, you forced the Gunners into impossible choices.

They couldn't fire without risking their own teammate. Leo understood the theory. He drilled the positioning. He knew where he was supposed to be and why. But tomorrow, for the first time, he would feel what T4 flak actually meant. The pressure of spiritual artillery that could eliminate him in a single shot. The weight of knowing that one wrong step into a kill zone would end his day before it started. Niki's last words to him echoed in his head.

"Film will only take you so far. The rest, you learn by surviving." Leo closed his eyes. Tomorrow, he would find out if he could survive.