Chương 159: I'm Just Here so I Won't Get Fined

June 2030, Giants Training Facility The first day of mandatory minicamp. Leo walked into the Giants training facility at 8: 57 AM, cutting it closer than he should have. The corridor was busier than during OTAs. Full roster meant full staff: equipment managers hauling gear, position coaches clustered around tablets, the kind of controlled chaos that voluntary practices never generated. At the end of the hallway, a floor-to-ceiling mural dominated the entrance to the practice wing. Elia Manning.

The woman who had smiled at him three weeks ago and locked him into a force feedback suit. Leo's jaw tightened.

"Chen." Coach Harbach materialized from a side office, tablet in hand. He looked annoyed.

"Coach."

"Let me be clear about something." Harbach fell into step beside him.

"This isn't high school. You can't skip practice for a month and stroll in like nothing happened. OTAs are voluntary the way breathing is optional. You can technically survive without it, but everyone's going to notice."

"I understand."

"Do you?" Harbach stopped walking.

"Four weeks. Eleven practice sessions. Every single one of your teammates was here grinding while you were somewhere else." His eyes narrowed.

"Where were you?" Leo pointed at the mural.

"Training with her." Harbach studied Leo for a long moment, trying to figure out if the kid was lying, delusional, or telling the truth.

"Elia Manning," Harbach said slowly, "retired from public life ten years ago. The last time anyone in this organization heard from her was a letter declining her jersey retirement ceremony." He raised an eyebrow.

"And you're telling me she spent three weeks personally training you."

"I spent a day in Aruba recovering." Harbach's mouth opened. Closed. He looked at the mural. Then back at Leo.

"We'll talk about this later." He checked his tablet.

"Flak evasion drills start in twenty minutes. Full team. Don't be late." He walked away without waiting for a response. Leo continued toward the practice field. The PA system crackled to life overhead, announcing drill rotations, equipment checks, the standard pre-practice logistics that he'd missed for an entire month. When his name came through the speakers, a ripple went through the flyer group already assembled on the sideline.

"Holy shit." Someone's voice carried across the field.

"He actually showed up." Leo kept walking. Vince intercepted him before he reached the bench. The captain looked like he couldn't decide whether to hug him or hit him.

"Pal." Vince grabbed his shoulder.

"I've been calling you for three days. Three days. You know how worried I was? I thought you were dead. I thought you were in jail. I thought you were in jail and dead."

"I wish." Vince blinked.

"You wish you were in jail and dead?"

"It would have been more relaxing than the last three weeks."

"Really? Because it sounded like you were in Aruba drinking lemonade." Vince's grip tightened.

"And now Harbach's asking me if you really trained with Elia Manning." Leo said nothing.

"I played under her for six years, pal. I watched her retire and disappear." Vince searched his face.

"So either you're lying to our head coach, or you actually met her. Both options are insane." Leo shrugged.

"Guess you'll find out." Vince stared at him. Then he released his shoulder.

"Okay, chief. Let's see what you've got."

Leo watched Hayes step up to the starting position. Third-string wing. Three weeks ago, Hayes had been better than him. Hayes had lasted the full sixty seconds while Leo got herded into a corner and eliminated at forty-three. That was before Elia Manning. Hayes was solid. Professional. But solid and professional didn't matter when your opponent could thread shrapnel. The same logic applied to every other wing on the roster. He wasn't better than them yet.

Not in positioning, not in game sense, not in the thousand small decisions that separated veterans from rookies. But he had a technique none of them could match. The gunner coach called for the drill to begin. Gage Henderson, their second-string gunner, settled into position behind the flak cannon simulator. Hayes mounted his flying sword.

"Mark." Hayes launched, and immediately began evasive maneuvers. Henderson fired. The holographic explosion bloomed seventy feet from Hayes's position. Hayes banked hard, putting another twenty feet between himself and the blast radius. Leo tracked the fragments with his Omnidirectional Awareness without thinking about it. Habit. Three weeks of having every trajectory burned into his nervous system. The shrapnel spread outward in a cone.

Hundreds of individual fragments, each one traveling at speeds that made conscious dodging impossible. He could feel it. The paths through the shrapnel. Henderson fired again. A second explosion bloomed. This one was closer to the sideline, fifty feet from Leo's position. He flinched. His whole body jerked, muscles tensing against impact that never came. The force feedback suit's ghost lived in his nervous system now. Three weeks of having his pain receptors ignited had created a reflex he couldn't suppress.

Wonderful. Elia Manning's gift that kept giving. A nearby player glanced at him. Leo forced his shoulders to relax. Hayes finished his rep. Sixty seconds. Minimal damage. A solid performance that drew congratulations from the other flyers on the sideline.

"That's how it's done," someone said.

"Consistent. Controlled. No panic." Hayes landed and pulled off his helmet. His eyes found Leo. Leo gave him a small nod. Solid rep. Now it was his turn.

"Chen. You're up." Leo walked toward the starting position, rolling his shoulders, trying to shake the grogginess from the red-eye out of Aruba. He'd slept maybe three hours on the flight. His neck was stiff. His legs felt like they belonged to someone else. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation. He passed Hayes on the sideline. The other wing was talking to a backup Leo didn't recognize, their voices low but not low enough.

"... heard he was in Aruba the whole time. Just sitting on a beach while we were grinding."

"Probably couldn't handle the pressure. Did you see his OTA reps? The kid looked lost."

"Front office reached on that pick and everyone knows it. I give him till August before they release him." Leo kept walking. He reached the gunner coach.

"Before we start," Leo said.

"I want to switch the scoring." The coach looked up from his tablet.

"Switch it how?"

"Individual fragment tracking. Instead of distance-based area damage." Silence. The gunner coach stared at him.

"Individual fragment tracking," he repeated slowly.

"You hoping the randomness works in your favor?"

"Something like that." The gunner coach shrugged.

"Good luck, kid. You're going to need lots of it." He made the adjustment. The holographic projectors switched from scoring based on distance to individual fragment tracking. Henderson got ready behind the flak cannon simulator. He gave the coach a thumbs up.

"Sixty seconds," the gunner coach called.

"Individual fragment scoring. On my mark." Leo pulled out Sunshifter from his dantian.

"Mark." Leo launched into the air and started circling three hundred feet above Henderson, locking onto the gunner with Omnidirectional Awareness. Henderson's qi concentrated in his right shoulder. Upper-left quadrant. Leo calculated the trajectory. Thirty feet from his current position if he held course. He didn't bother dodging. Instead he angled his body and built momentum, getting ready to fly through gaps he knew he could find. Henderson fired. The explosion bloomed exactly where he predicted.

Thirty feet away. Under the old distance-based system, that would register six or seven points. Shrapnel screamed outward. No thought. No calculation. Just reflex. His body shifted inches. A fragment passed where his shoulder had been. Another sliced through the space his torso had just vacated. Micrododging. Three weeks of force feedback training had burned the instincts into his nervous system. His body knew what to do before his mind caught up. The scoring system registered zero points.

Leo didn't have time to appreciate it. Henderson was already firing again. The second explosion bloomed. Leo was closer this time, having cut toward the blast rather than away. Twenty-five feet from the detonation center. Dense shrapnel zone. The kind of distance that should register seven or eight points under the old system. His body moved on instinct. He threaded gaps between fragments that existed for milliseconds, his torso rotating, his legs adjusting. Henderson fired again. Leo was already reading the setup.

Qi distribution favoring the left shoulder. Lower trajectory angle. Henderson was trying to catch him in a climbing dodge. Leo dove instead. The explosion bloomed above him. He flew up through the descending shrapnel, threading fragments, his body weaving through the debris field like a lightning bolt. Zero points.

Vince had stopped talking mid-sentence. He stood at the observation booth window watching Leo dance through the flak.

"That's not possible," Vince said. Niki stood three feet away. She wasn't watching Leo. She was watching the scoring readout.

"His distance from detonation center is averaging twenty-eight feet. Under area damage scoring, he'd be taking six to eight points per exchange. Under individual tracking, he's taking zero."

"That's not possible," Vince repeated. Niki's jaw tightened.

"If he can survive inside the blast radius, zone coverage becomes meaningless. The entire defensive structure of the game assumes flak creates no-fly zones."

"And man-to-man's even worse." Vince started grinning.

"We just have Howard shoot Leo directly while he's dogfighting. Can't have friendly fire if the kid dodges the fire." He laughed.

"The Eagles are gonna lose their minds. Lose their minds." He turned back to the window. Below, Leo was diving toward Henderson's emplacement. Attacking.

"Do you really think Manning trained him?" Niki asked. Vince gave her a look.

Leo cut toward the flak cannon. Henderson fired. The explosion bloomed directly in his flight path, the gunner trying to catch him in a head-on collision with the blast radius. Leo flew through it. His body threaded fragments at eighteen feet from detonation. Closer than he'd ever gone during training. Close enough that individual pieces of shrapnel passed within inches of his face, his arms, his chest. Zero points. He cleared the debris field and continued his dive.

Henderson was reloading, the brief window between shots that Leo had learned to exploit during three weeks of force feedback hell. He reached the emplacement. Close enough to touch the cannon's housing. Close enough that Henderson's eyes went wide behind his targeting visor. Leo mimed a sword strike. The blade of Sunshifter passed six inches from Henderson's helmet. Not a real attack. Not even close. Just a demonstration of what could happen if this were a real game. Henderson flinched.

Leo rocketed away as the next shot arrived. The explosion bloomed behind him and he threaded the gaps without looking back. On the observation booth, Vince stopped talking. Niki lowered her water bottle. Leo was soloing the gunner. This should not have been possible. A wing could not solo a gunner. This was basic strategy. The gunner controlled the kill zone, and without teammates splitting the gunner's attention there were no gaps to exploit. Every coach in the NFL taught this as fact.

It was the first thing every flyer learned about how to approach flak emplacements. Yet Leo was doing the impossible. He used his G-force bleeding formation to zigzag through Henderson's kill zones. Each direction change carried him closer to the emplacement, each momentum bleed perfectly calibrated to end before Henderson could take advantage. Henderson fired three times during Leo's next attack run. Leo weaved through all of them, his body relying on reflexes acquired after three weeks of pain.

He mimed another strike on the emplacement. Henderson's hands jerked on the controls. Then another. Henderson's qi scattered in panic. The drill timer hit zero.

The field was quiet. Leo landed on the platform and dismounted. The gunner coach checked his tablet. Checked it again. His fingers swiped through data displays, scrolling past numbers that told a story distance-based scoring would have hidden.

"Zero points." His voice was flat.

"Across twenty-three exchanges. Average distance from detonation center: twenty-four feet." He looked up from the tablet. On the sideline, Hayes hadn't moved. The backup next to him was saying something, but Hayes wasn't listening.

"Howard." Coach Harbach's voice carried across the field.

"Get on the cannon." Elijah Howard, the Giants' gunner captain, looked up from the bench. He crossed his arms.

"Nah."

"Excuse me?"

"I'm good, Coach." Howard didn't move.

"I seen what I needed to see."

"I want to see if that holds against our best." Howard laughed.

"You see what he just did to Henderson? Henderson out there looking like he need to call his mama." He shook his head.

"That ain't got nothing to do with me. I'm chilling."

"Howard, get on the cannon."

"Coach, I got twelve years in this league. Twelve. I ain't about to be on nobody's Instagram getting cooked by a rookie." He leaned back.

"Besides, that's my flyer now. I'm supposed to be protecting him, not shooting at him." Harbach's jaw tightened. But he didn't push.

The chaos took twenty minutes to settle. Coaches pulled Leo aside for questions he didn't answer. Equipment managers wanted to inspect his flight suit. The gunner coach spent ten minutes reviewing the fragment tracking data, convinced there had to be a calibration error. There wasn't. Leo found an empty spot on the sideline and sat down.

"That's crazy." Leo turned. Damari Russ settled onto the bench beside him like he'd always been there. Leo had seen him on the roster sheet a dozen times, watched hours of his film during the sessions at Niki's penthouse. Damari was their starting striker.

"Chen, right?" Damari leaned against the wall.

"The Flyer Seven kid."

"That's me." Damari nodded slowly. His eyes drifted toward the mural at the end of the corridor, visible through the facility's glass walls.

"How's Elia doing?" The question was casual. Like asking about the weather. Like asking if traffic had been bad on the way in. Leo's jaw tightened.

"She's doing great," he said.

"Really enjoying herself. Having the time of her life torturing rookies."

"Yeah, that sound like her." Leo gave him a surprised look.

"Yeah, Manning different." Damari leaned back on the bench.

"First time I trained with her, she cracked three of my ribs. Said I was leaving my core exposed on the inside cut." Leo winced.

"But it worked. Now you out here threading shrapnel like it's nothing." He laughed.

"Worth it, right?" Leo stared at him.

"Was it worth it when she broke your ribs?" Damari considered the question.

"She retired a year later. We never got that ring." He stood up, stretched, and walked away without another word. Leo watched him go.

"Russ doesn't talk to rookies." Harbach stood behind the bench. Leo hadn't heard him approach.

"In all my years of coaching, I've seen maybe three players do something that made me rethink how this game works." He paused.

"I think I might have to put you on the list twice now." His hand landed on Leo's shoulder.

"Come on. We've got plans to change."