The alarm went off at four-thirty.
Mateo lay still for exactly two seconds, long enough to confirm he was awake and not going back to sleep - then sat up, dressed in the dark, and went outside.
The Gelsenkirchen morning was cold in the flat, colourless way of industrial cities before dawn. No wind. The grass stiff underfoot. The training ground empty, the floodlights off, the only light coming from the building windows and from the first grey suggestion of sky in the east.
He set up the cones from mory and started.
Four hours to go. Six on the bar from last night. Ten was the threshold. The maths was straightforward, if he put in four hours before the team session, he'd hit it clean, without needing to rely on the session itself.
He worked through the drill sequence thodically. Ball control shuttles first , the touch corridor, absorbing pace rather than deflecting it. Then outside-of-foot repetitions against the wall, building the muscle mory of the ankle position and the follow-through. Then shooting at the empty net, which remained the most honest part of any session because it gave him nothing - no overlay, no success rate, just his boot and the ball and the fra and the gap between what he intended and what happened.
Three out of ten. Four. Three again.
He noted the variance and kept going.
At seven o'clock, Daniel arrived at the club.
He nodded to Gerhard at the gate, lit his cigar at the side entrance, and walked to his office. The morning routine: cigar on the way across the car park, coffee from the machine inside, match preparation file open on the desk.
Then he heard it.
A repetitive sound from the direction of the training ground, the dry crack of a ball struck against the practice wall, steady and rhythmic. He paused with his coffee halfway to his mouth.
He went to the window.
The kid was already soaked through at seven in the morning in September. Shooting at the empty net - or trying to. He watched him miss wide left, reset imdiately, take another. Miss again, slightly high. Reset. Hit the inside of the post, the ball bounced back without going in, and he reset again with the sa interval as the misses.
Daniel stood at the window for a while.
He'd seen the kid at eleven last night running drills in the dark. Now here he was at seven in the morning, having clearly been out here since well before Daniel arrived. His technique was raw, the standing foot slightly wrong, the hips not fully committed through the ball. But the reset ti between attempts was shortening, which ant he was processing what was wrong and going again rather than repeating the sa error without adjustnt.
He's going to pull sothing before the season starts, Daniel thought, with the specific exasperation of a man identifying a problem he will have to manage. He made a ntal note to tell Wickliff to have a word about load.
He went back to his desk and did not entirely stop glancing at the window.
At nine o'clock, sothing shifted in the corner of Mateo's vision.
He was mid-drill, receiving a wall rebound, when the notification appeared clean and quiet:
[Training threshold reached: 10 hours.]
[Free Attribute Point × 1 available.]
He stopped.
He stood there for a mont on the empty pitch with the ball at his feet, looking at nothing in particular. Four hours this morning. Six from last night. Ten total. It had worked exactly as the system said it would, which was both obvious and sohow still satisfying to confirm.
He sat down on the grass, opened the system, and found the training bar full. At its right edge, a small indicator pulsed - a plus sign, waiting.
He tapped it.
[Free Attribute Point × 1 awarded.]
The green plus signs appeared beside every attribute on the panel. He looked down the list without hesitation and tapped Ball Control.
The sensation ca through clean, the sa quiet internal click as the La Croqueta binding, less dramatic than he'd imagined it would feel for sothing he'd worked ten hours to earn. His body, which had been carrying the layered weight of two hard days, every joint, the soles of both feet, the small muscles along the outside of his ankles - simply reset. Not to freshness. To neutral. The specific fatigue lifted like a dial returning to zero.
He sat on the grass in the September morning and felt, for a mont, completely fine.
"Does spending the point clear fatigue?"
[Correct. Point allocation triggers a full system reset, clearing all negative physical status effects.]
[Note: System reset can only be triggered once per 24-hour period.]
He'd already anticipated the counter. The obvious exploit - reset, train another ten hours on fresh stamina, bank a second point in the sa day, was too clean not to have been closed off. He felt the brief instinct to look for another angle, then let it go without much feeling. One point per day was the deal. That was fine.
He pulled up the updated panel.
ATTRIATEO SILVA
Age - 17
Attribute - Score
Offence - 69
Ball Control - 65
Passing - 100
Shooting - 65
Heading - 68
Set Piece - 66
Curve - 66
Speed - 80
Kicking Power - 75
Jumping - 74
Physical Contact - 72
Stamina - 88
Defence - 58
Tackling - 65
Overall - 67
One point moved. Overall unchanged, the system rounded and the movent was too small to shift it. He looked at the grey columns and the red bar of Passing and thought about the distance between 67 and wherever he needed to be.
Large. It was a large distance.
But he had a rate now. Ten hours, one point. His stamina attribute was 88, which was the reason the schedule was physically viable where it wouldn't be for most players his age. He ran the arithtic: four hours before team training, five or six hours during the session, whatever afternoon ti remained. Twelve hours maximum on a full day. One point per day if he held the line.
Six points in five days before the weekend.
He looked at the panel again - at Ball Control sitting at 65 now instead of 64, at the eleven other attributes still grey and unimpressive and felt the particular, clean kind of ambition that ca not from imagining the destination but from understanding the chanism for getting there.
He closed the system, stood up, and went to get changed for the team session.
Farfán checked the forum thread over breakfast.
He'd posted the clip last night without much expectation, a mid-size board, a short video, a title that relied entirely on people actually watching it past the first five seconds. He hadn't checked before going to sleep.
There were four hundred and sixty-two replies.
He scrolled through them with his coffee, unhurried.
[That La Croqueta - watch his hips before the first touch. Already committed to the direction before the defender can read it.]
[The pass at 0:23 changes direction at the apex. You can see the backspin from the cara angle. Whoever hit that knew exactly where it was going to land.]
[Who is this? Schalke U18? Their U18 is in the Third Division.]
[Definitely Schalke U18 - badge is on the bib. Question is where they found him.]
[Seventeen, apparently. Soone in the thread said Old Jes brought him in.]
[Old Jes is still finding players? That man.]
[The press escape is almost identical to Iniesta's chanics. Not just similar - the hip drop timing is identical. Either this kid has studied that footage obsessively or soone has coached it into him specifically.]
[Could be both. Result's the sa.]
[Outside-of-foot pass like that at seventeen in a training session. Give this two years.]
Farfán put the phone down and finished his breakfast.
People who watched football carefully were watching it carefully and saying what they saw. The La Croqueta chanics. The backspin on the pass. The landing point. No noise about anything else.
That was exactly what he'd hoped for.
Plz Drop So Power Stones
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