"Drake," the award host said.
The crowd erupted. Five Bal'o Glories. The fifth one, which everyone had quietly agreed he wouldn't win another after an eight month gap from an injury was rightfully earned. His name in the air again.
He watched from the sofa in his parents' living room, the same sofa he'd watched the ceremony from as a kid when he was nobody and a player he worshiped collected the same award. His mother had her hand over her mouth. His father was clapping like the result was a surprise, which it wasn't, but he clapped the same way at every result, which Drake had decided a long time ago was one of his father's best qualities.
Five times now and it still felt like narrowly surviving something rather than definitively winning it.
Beside him, Abigail kept her posture loose on the arm of the sofa, close enough to hear him, far enough to leave without making a scene. She had managed him since he was nineteen and unknown, when nobody else would take her calls.
"You know your contract expires in two months," Abigail said.
"I'm not concerned about where I play," Drake said. "Only if I can play."
Abigail folded one leg over the other. "Name a club and they've called. All of them. Big clubs, medium clubs, desperate clubs pretending not to be desperate. Pick one and they'll build the pitch around you."
Drake looked past her, across the room. His mother had finally lowered her hands. She was still staring at him like she expected someone to walk in and tell her the ceremony had made a mistake.
His father caught Drake looking and grinned back.
Drake had spent a long time trying to make that expression disappear from both of their faces. He never had. Somewhere along the way, he had decided that was one of the few good things in the world. Parents were supposed to look at their children like that. Proud and in half disbelief. Still waiting to see whether the luck would hold.
Abigail tapped the side of the sofa with one finger. "Pick a club. There's absolutely no wrong answers."
Drake watched the award presentation roll on without hearing it.
Then he said, "What about owning one?"
"Okay." Abigail collected herself. "Maybe there is a wrong answer."
She said it lightly, but her eyes expressed a different opinion.
"Enjoy the night," she said. "We'll have this conversation again tomorrow." And then she was gone, absorbed into the house party.
Drake turned the thought over.
He hadn't planned to say it. But it came out the way good first touches come out. Not from thinking, but from somewhere more reliable than thought.
His own club. Not just playing. Building. Not just being the best player in a team but the reason the team existed at all.
He thought about all the managers he'd worked under. The ones who'd seen him. The ones who'd used him. The few, rare ones who had somehow made him better than he believed he could be.
I could do that, he thought. I could be that for someone else.
---
The celebration bled into the early hours. At some point the room thinned and the music died down. Drake stepped out onto the building's back terrace for air, looking out over the city that had grown up around him the same way he had grown up inside it.
Five Bal'o Glories.
He had a habit of keeping score even when it didn't matter. Everyone who worked closely with him eventually noticed it.
He set the glass down in his hand onto the terrace railing.
And then the railing wasn't there.
---
There wasn't a void of darkness, a tunnel, stairway to something greater.
Just a complete and total absence as though someone had reached into the film of his life and cut out a frame.
And then, he felt the ground.
Hard, uneven ground. Grass that smelled too clean and sharp.
Drake lay still for a moment.
He felt his heart beat like normal. He took that as a promising sign.
He sat up and looked at his hands. Both there. He looked at his feet still in the dress shoes from the party. He checked his jacket pockets out of habit. Invitation card, pen, a receipt from the bar they'd been at before the ceremony.
He looked at the sky.
It was the right colour. Blue, shading toward early morning gold at one edge. But there were two moons visible, pale and overlapping in the west, and neither of them was the moon he knew. One was larger than it should be. The other was off-angle.
Right, Drake thought, and stood up, and dusted himself off.
The landscape around him was a wide valley interrupted by a distant treeline and, further beyond that, the angular shapes of buildings. Not modern. Not anything he recognised.
A dirt road ran along the base of the valley, worn flat by use, heading toward the buildings.
He turned toward the buildings and started walking.
---
He had been walking for roughly ten minutes when he heard it.
Rhythmic, repetitive, coming from the other side of a low rise to his left. He crested it and saw them.
A training pitch. Rudimentary chalk lines, timber goals, the kind of facility that in any league he'd ever played in would have been condemned. But unmistakably a pitch. And on it, eleven people running drills.
Drake stopped.
He had watched football his entire life. He had played it at the highest level the world could produce. He knew what training looked like, and he knew the difference between a player working hard and a player doing something beyond the limits of what he had ever seen.
These people were doing the latter.
A young man who looked no older than seventeen received a pass from the far side and accelerated like a supercar does when someone who doesn't knows what they're doing floors it. He covered forty metres in a time Drake could not rationally account for and struck the ball with his left foot.
The sound was a thunderclap.
The ball tore through the air trailing a luminous gold-orange, fading as it moved, and buried itself in the net six inches into the wooden post. The post cracked. The boy jogged back to his starting position like he'd done this ten thousand times and was already bored of it.
Drake looked at the rest of the pitch. The second slowest player moved like an Olympic sprinter with nine lunges. A goalkeeper in the far goal was warming up by catching shots one-handed, and the impacts weren't moving her at all.
Something activated at the edge of his vision. A cold clinical blue, settling into his sight like a second pair of eyes.
[ SKILL: TACTICAL READ Lv1: ACTIVE ]
Scanning active session...
FORMATION DETECTED: NONE
• Players in session: 11
• Identifiable shape: NONE
• Defensive structure: NONE
• Press coordination: NONE
• Tactical intent: UNDETECTABLE
Note: Individual physical output: exceptional.
Collective tactical framework: absent.
He read it for a moment.
Eleven people who could individually dismantle anything he'd ever managed, arranged in no formation, cancelling each other out. The system had looked at the most physically gifted group of athletes he'd ever watched and returned a blank where a formation should be.
That, Drake thought, is what I'm here for.
He climbed down the rise toward the pitch.
They noticed him when he was close enough that pretending not to would have required effort. A few stopped. The young boy that drilled the shot jogged over and looked at Drake with curiosity.
He was tall. Dark hair, sharp features, and had that look confident young athletes had. Something more settled than arrogance. A person who had never needed to prove his ability to anyone and therefore hadn't developed the habit of wondering whether he should.
"You look lost," he said. "You're not from this part of town?"
"No," Drake said. "I'm definitely not from here."
"Where are you from?"
Drake considered this for a moment. "Far away. What is this place?"
"Training fields outside Springdew." The boy seemed to decide something. "I'm Renn. You were watching like someone who knows what they're looking at."
"You could say that I guess."
"What's your rank?"
"Rank?" Drake opened his mouth when the same pale light appeared in his peripheral vision.
[ CONCORDANCE SYSTEM — NEW ENTITY DETECTED ]
Name: Drake
Origin: External (Non-Concordance)
• Physical Rank: F
• Mana Capacity: F
• Football Intelligence: [UNRATED. INSUFFICIENT DATA]
Class Detected: MANAGER [UNIQUE / UNREGISTERED]
Active Skills:
— Transfer Eye Lv1
— Tactical Read Lv1
— Dead Ball Master Lv1
Several skills available to be unlocked
Drake read it twice. Then he looked back at Renn.
"F," Drake said. "It seems."
Renn blinked. Whatever answer he'd been preparing for, it wasn't that one.
"F," Renn repeated.
"That seems to be what I've been given."
Something passed between Renn and the players who had drifted closer. Drake had seen the same thing on defenders' faces in the 89th minute when they thought the game was won.
Pity. Dismissal.
Renn, at least, had the decency to look mildly uncomfortable about it.
"There's no shame in being Rank F," he said, in the tone of someone who believed the exact opposite. "But there's no place for a Rank F on a football pitch. Not in any serious game." He raised his hand and pointed away "You could try the town. They always need labourers at the foundry."
He jogged back toward the pitch.
Drake watched him go.
He looked at his hands. The same hands that had delivered the assist for a World Cup final goal. The same hands that had lifted five trophies.
Something shifted in his chest. Not despair. He knew what despair felt like. Lying in hospital after the injury, wondering if he would ever play again. He'd made his peace with despair.
This was something else. Something with teeth in it.
I built myself from nothing once, Drake thought. On a proper pitch, against proper players, before anyone believed I was worth watching.
I can do it again. Just differently.
He looked at the pitch. At what the players were doing.
Pure individual talent burning without direction, like a fire built with excellent wood and no thought for where the smoke was going.
Drake had spent twenty years watching another persons fire burn. It was time to start his own.