The squad gathered at the high-precision short-passing zone, a patch of turf known among the players as the "Moving Target Range."
It was a gauntlet of three tracks set at ten, fifteen, and twenty meters. On each track, a circular hoop one meter in diameter slid back and forth. The objective was simple: thread the needle. Thirty balls, ten for each distance. If the ball passed through the hoop, the sensors chirped.
"Ren, do you need a warm-up?" Montella asked, his hand hovering over the control panel.
"I'm fine, Coach. Let's just start."
Ren stood in the passing arc, his posture relaxed, his eyes tracking the equipment. Montella shrugged and clicked the machine into First Gear. This kid thinks they're going to stay still for him, the coach thought. Even at the lowest setting, the hoops began a slow, rhythmic crawl. For a teenager under the eyes of forty veterans, the pressure usually turned legs to lead.
"Hey, what are we betting?" Cuadrado whispered to the others. "Thirty shots. Does he hit fifteen? Maybe twenty?"
"He hasn't kicked yet," Badelj noted. "Look at him. Is he frozen?"
Montella noticed the hesitation too. "Ren? Is the speed okay? I can slow it down if you're nervous."
"No..." Ren said, finally looking up. "It's too slow. Can we turn it up?"
The group blinked. Montella, slightly annoyed, bumped it to Second Gear. The hoops' speed doubled. This was the team's "standard" pace—the rhythm of a normal match.
"Faster," Ren said, his voice flat.
Now, the murmurs grew louder. "Is he serious? Second gear is the baseline for the first team."
Montella didn't argue. He clicked it into Third Gear. The hoops were now zip-lining across the tracks. In the current squad, only the technical maestros—David Pizarro and Alberto Aquilani—could pass the Third Gear test, and only after a vigorous warm-up.
"Coach," Ren said, and for the first time, his gaze sharpened. "Honestly? Still too slow."
The atmosphere shattered.
"No way," Aquilani muttered. "He wants Fourth Gear? That's ten kilometers per hour. At twenty meters, the window of opportunity is less than a second."
Montella's patience was fraying. He felt like he was being mocked by a child. He slammed the dial into Fourth Gear. The hoops began to blur across the tracks, a mechanical frenzy that made the twenty-meter target look like an impossible dream.
"Badelj," Pizarro whispered, "you couldn't hit that if the hoop was ten meters wide."
"Shut up, David. Nobody can."
Montella turned to Ren, expecting to see the boy's bravado crumble. Instead, he found a terrifying calm. Renzo Uzumaki wasn't looking at the hoops anymore; he was looking through them, as if calculating the wind resistance and the friction of the grass in real-time.
"Coach," Ren began, his voice carrying across the silent field. "I'm the new guy. I want to show you exactly why I'm here. I don't want to hide. I want to show you the extreme limit of what I can do."
He paused, his eyes locking onto Montella's.
"If Fourth Gear is the limit of this machine, I'll start now. But if there's anything higher... I want it."
The air in the training ground turned to lead. With the Platini model integrated into his soul, Ren didn't see moving hoops; he saw a solved equation. He knew that to start for Fiorentina, he couldn't just be good. He had to be undeniable.
"Where does he get the nerve?" a player hissed. "Fourth gear is a graveyard for stats!"
"Wait," Captain Pasqual said, his voice low and raspy. "There is one more."
The veterans turned to their captain.
"Fifth Gear," Pasqual whispered. "It hasn't been touched in years. It's variable speed—it accelerates, it brakes, it even tilts the hoops away from the passer. In the last thirty years, only one legend at this club ever mastered it."
He didn't need to say the name. Everyone knew the ghosts of the Viola—Rui Costa, Baggio, Batistuta.
Click. Click. Click.
Montella, moved by a strange, defiant impulse, bypassed the Fourth Gear lock and engaged the Fifth.
The machine groaned to life with a predatory whir. The hoops didn't just move; they danced. They would sprint, then dead-stop, then jerk into a backward tilt, hiding the opening from the passer's line of sight. It was a chaotic, erratic nightmare.
The Fiorentina players stood frozen, eyes wide.
"That's not a drill," Cuadrado gasped. "That's a glitch. Nobody can hit that. It isn't humanly possible."
Renzo Uzumaki didn't flinch. He stepped up to the first ball, his shadow stretching long across the grass.