The data wasn't a presentation. It was a crime scene photo, and Leo was the detective laying out the grisly evidence for a stone-faced jury of one.
He'd spent the night not sleeping, but compiling. The system in his glasses had recorded every vector, every passing lane, every synchronized run of Emerald College's 7-0 dissection.
He'd synced it to the school's tactical projector in the otherwise empty strategy room.
Arkady sat in a metal folding chair, a mug of black coffee steaming in his hand, as a silent, horrifying ballet of green jerseys played out on the screen.
No music. No commentary. Just the soft thwip-thwip-thwip of perfect passes and the eventual, inevitable ripple of the net.
Leo stood to the side, his voice calm but edged with the metallic taste of adrenaline. He wasn't explaining plays; he was performing an autopsy.
"They don't have a weak player," Leo said, freezing the footage on #7 receiving a pass with three defenders nominally around him.
"They have a weak concept. The concept of individual defense. You mark #7, he lays it off and spins into the space you just vacated. The entire system is built on punishing commitment. They don't beat you. They wait for you to beat yourself."
Arkady took a slow sip of coffee, his pale eyes reflecting the glowing green lines of the tactical overlay Leo had drawn. "Your conclusion?"
"We can't out-system them. Their system is older, richer, and has more processing power. If we try to match their structure, they'll parse it in ten minutes and pick us apart. Frank and Perez will be chasing ghosts. King will be neutralized by coordinated pressing—they won't double-mark him; they'll suffocate the space around him with three players rotating."
He changed the clip. It showed the seventeen-pass goal. "This isn't talent. It's drilled memory. Muscle algorithm. They're not thinking; they're executing."
Arkady set his mug down with a soft click. "Get to the point. What are you proposing?"
"I propose we introduce a bug." Leo met his coach's gaze, the glasses making his own eyes look eerily sharp. "Their code is flawless for handling predictable football. It calculates passing lanes, pressing triggers, defensive shapes. It can't calculate… chaos. It can't calculate a decision that makes no logical sense."
A ghost of something—not a smile, but a flicker of intense interest—passed over Arkady's granite features. "Define 'no logical sense.'"
Leo took a deep breath. This was the pitch. "They close down space. So I don't play in space. I play in the crowd. I receive the ball in traffic, where their system says a pass is the only option. And then I dribble. Not to beat a man, but to draw two, even three. I make them commit in areas they're programmed to stay disciplined. I become a tactical black hole."
He pulled up a new simulation on the projector, one he'd built in the system overnight. It showed a simple 2v3 scenario. "See? Their logic says the outside defender presses, the inside one covers the pass. But if I spin into the press instead of away, if I take the touch that invites the tackle instead of avoiding it, their logic tree short-circuits. For two seconds, they have to think. And that's when Thomas or Max gets a through-ball into a space that shouldn't exist."
The room was silent. Arkady stared at the simulation, the glowing lines painting his face in shades of blue and green.
"You are describing a role with a high probability of injury," Arkady stated. "And a certainty of turnovers."
"I know."
"You are asking me to start you and remove Vance, not because you are the best striker, but because you are the most willing crash-test dummy."
Leo didn't flinch. "I'm asking you to start me because I'm the only one who can see the fractures in the wall. And because I'm the only one whose body you can afford to break and rebuild."
Arkady stood up. He walked to the window, looking out at the empty, grey pitch. "Vance will not like it."
"King likes winning," Leo said, the name leaving a cold taste. "But he needs to learn to feel the joy from the bench like I did."
A low, almost inaudible sound came from Arkady. It might have been a laugh. It might have been a sigh. He turned.
"Your jersey is in your locker. #19. Do not make me regret the cost of the thread."
It wasn't praise. It was a deployment order. Leo felt a surge of something fierce and cold. "Yes, sir."
────────────
The announcement in the locker room before training wasn't met with silence. It was met with a stunned, then fractious, buzz.
"Him?" The word burst from Frank, not with malice, but with pure, defensive disbelief. He pointed a thick finger at Leo. "Coach, he's a genius on a whiteboard, I get it. But Emerald's gonna eat him alive! They'll snap him in half!"
Tyler Walter, who had been lacing his boots with quiet focus, looked up. His expression was unreadable, but his knuckles were white on his laces. He said nothing.
King stood in front of his locker, staring at the #9 jersey hanging there. He didn't turn around. His voice, when it came, was quiet and lethally calm. "Explain the tactical benefit, Coach. In terms of winning the match, not rehabilitating a project because Leo could never replace me."
Arkady's reply was a glacier. "Your function is to finish. Reed's function, in this match, is to create the conditions for a finish where none should exist. You do not need to understand the wrench. You only need to be ready when it breaks the lock."
Max let out a sharp whistle, cutting through the tension. "Hey. The 'professor' called my number last match and I got a brace. If he says he can muck up their gears, I'm listening." He clapped Leo on the shoulder, a solid, supportive thump. "Just try not to get actually murdered, yeah?"
Perez, the silent monolith, was staring at the floor. Suddenly, he spoke, his voice a dry rasp from disuse. "They pass through the middle. If he draws them… it creates space on the wings." He looked up, his eyes bloodshot but clear. "It could work."
It was the first tactical input Perez had offered in weeks. The room quieted, surprised.
Steve, sitting in the corner, had gone very still. The news of the starting lineup seemed to have frozen him. He was staring at his Emerald College transfer papers, which he'd been using as a bookmark, now visible in his playbook.
"They hate unpredictability," he mumbled, almost to himself. "Their coach calls it 'undisciplined entropy.'" All heads turned to him. He flinched, realizing he'd spoken aloud. "I just mean… Leo's right. It's their only real flaw. They never learned to play against a street game."
King finally turned. He looked at Steve, then at Leo, then at Arkady. A complex calculation was happening behind his grey eyes. The risk to his service. The potential reward. The insult of the strategy being built around someone else's chaos.
"Fine," he said, the word slicing the air. He pulled his jersey off the hanger. "But if your 'anomaly' costs us this Cup. Let's just say it won't be nice for either of us."
The threat hung in the air, real and physical.
Leo met his gaze, adjusting his glasses. His eyes weren't on King, they were on the speedster among them. "You sure you're okay, Thomas?"
Thomas stretched his legs. "Yeah, I've been cleared. I love what you're offering, it could impress scouts."
The training that followed was brutal, surreal, and focused. While the team ran shape drills, Arkady pulled Leo aside with Frank and Perez.
"Show me," Arkady commanded.
Leo, with Frank simulating the first press and Perez as the covering defender, demonstrated. He didn't try to turn Frank. He took the pass, let Frank commit, then used a frantic, almost ugly drag-back that put him closer to Frank, disrupting the big midfielder's balance, before poking the ball through the gap between Frank's legs to an imaginary runner.
It wasn't pretty. It was desperate, physical, and effective.
"Again," Arkady said. "Slower. You're thinking. Don't think. Be the irritant."
By the end of the session, Leo's calves were screaming, his kit was stained with turf burns from Frank's legitimate, bruising tackles, and his mind was a focused blur of angles and pressures.
As they trudged off, Max fell into step beside him, uncharacteristically serious.
"Look, genius," Max said, wiping sweat from his brow. "This 'chaos' thing. It's a hell of a idea. But you gotta know… in that first ten minutes, they're gonna test you. They're gonna come at you hard, see if the anomaly breaks. You can't flinch. You gotta lean into the first tackle. Make it hurt them."
Leo nodded, his breath coming in short gasps. He thought of Macready's brother, the ghost in the machine. He thought of the seamless, emotionless system.
"I'm not going to flinch," Leo said, his voice low. "I'm going to be the grain of sand in their perfect engine."
Max grinned, that fierce, hustler's light back in his eyes. "Alright then. Let's jam some gears."
Later, in the quiet of his room, Leo didn't review more footage. He opened his father's notebook to a fresh page. He didn't write about tactics.
He wrote a single line, in clear, deliberate letters:
"The best way to break a perfect system is to remind it that it's made of people, not machines."
He put on his glasses. The system hummed to life, but he ignored the training prompts.
[CREATE ADVERSARY HOLOGRAM. SUBJECT: EMERALD COLLEGE #7. PARAMETERS: PERPETUAL MOTION, ZERO-LATENCY DECISION.]
The ghost of the perfect forward materialized, moving with silent, gliding purpose.
Leo didn't try to defend. He just watched.
He studied the rhythm. The timing. The predictable unpredictability of a machine.
And he began to plan where, exactly, a single, stubborn grain of sand would cause the most catastrophic friction.
He was no longer the architect of a victory.
He was the architect of a collision. And in a day he would be sitting in the driver's seat.