The stadium was already loud before Marcus even touched the ball.
That restless, electric snarl—shoes screaming against hardwood like dying insects, the crowd breathing as one vast, ravenous organism, coiled and waiting for violence dressed in beauty. Landon and Brian were posted at the top of the key like sentinels carved from granite, shoulders squared, knees bent, eyes narrowed to slits.
They had done this dance a thousand tis.
They knew when a play mattered.
Marcus caught the pass anyway.
The noise dipped. Not silence—anticipation so thick it pressed against your spine like cold steel.
He didn’t rush though.
That was the first sin.
The ball drumd low and lazy against the floor, each bounce a deliberate insult, as though the court were his birthright and everyone else was squatting on sacred ground. Landon shifted left. Brian shaded right.
Textbook trap. Clean. Professional. Inescapable.
Marcus smiled.
A small, aristocratic curl of lip that said he had already seen the next three moves and found them boring.
He leaned forward—just enough to sell the drive—then the ball simply ceased to exist.
Not behind his back or between his legs. It vanished, clipped so low it seed to kiss the grain of the wood and disappear into another dinsion, and in the sa heartbeat Marcus was already through Landon’s hip, shoulder brushing fabric like a lover’s sigh, body twisting sideways with the liquid impossibility.
Landon reached.
Grabbed nothing but air and the sudden, sickening realization that physics had just betrayed him.
The crowd gasped—sharp, collective, the sound of twenty thousand lungs forgetting how to work.
Brian stepped up hard, chest-first, sealing the lane like a vault door. Marcus didn’t slow. He launched early—too early—and for half a suspended heartbeat the entire stadium believed he had miscalculated.
Then, in midair, he folded.
Legs scissored with surgical elegance. The ball snapped between his thighs, transferred hand-to-hand while his torso rotated in defiance of every law of torque and balance, and he landed already facing the opposite direction, Brian stumbling past him like a man shoved by a ghost he couldn’t see.
Noise detonated.
People were on their feet, screaming, hands clamped to skulls, laughter spilling out in raw disbelief. Soone howled no way like it was scripture.
Another voice cracked on fuck, just fuck. Marcus was alone.
Open court. Open lane. The rim hanging there like a guillotine already resigned to its work.
He took two long strides, gathered, rose.
This was the mont legends are built on—arm cocked back, wrist cocked to kiss the net, ball cradled with the serene inevitability of divine decree. The leather left his fingertips in a perfect arc, spinning backward with textbook rotation, trajectory so clean it looked preordained.
The net waited, innocent, already surrendering.
The ball kissed the front of the rim—soft, almost loving—then began its gentle descent through the hoop, a finish that makes comntators whisper and-one before the whistle even blows.
And then—
Sothing moved.
Not from the side. Not from behind.
From nowhere.
A shadow slicedacross the lights like judgnt falling from heaven itself.
The ball stopped.
Not even blocked.
But stolen.
Mid-descent—while the net was still quivering in anticipation, while people were already inhaling to scream—the leather simply froze in midair.
A hand closed around it.
Clean. Absolute.
Fingers swallowing the sphere as though gravity had changed its mind and decided to obey soone else entirely.
The ball didn’t rattle, didn’t spin out of control—it simply ceased moving forward, arrested with such surgical finality that the laws of motion visibly rewrote themselves in real ti. Marcus felt the absence before he saw it: the sudden, hollow lightness in his palm where victory had been a heartbeat ago.
The trajectory he had so carefully engineered collapsed into nothing. The net, betrayed, snapped shut on empty air with a soft, mocking pop.
The stadium exploded.
Phei was there.
One heartbeat the lane was empty; the next he was suspended directly beneath the rim—above the descending ball, above Marcus’s outstretched arm, above the entire narrative Marcus had just written for himself.
Eyes calm. Expression almost politely bored.
As though this outco had been etched into the fabric of reality long before either of them drew breath.
They collided on the descent.
Marcus hit the floor like a dropped throne—hard, graceless, the impact rattling teeth and pride in equal asure. The crowd’s roar turned feral—primal, unhinged, the sound of a city discovering it had a new god and the old one had just been dethroned in public, mid-coronation.
Phei landed light.
Silent. The ball never touched the net again.
It never needed to.
He had already decided it never would.
Before Marcus could even plant a palm to push himself up, Phei was already dribbling—slow, deliberate, insulting bounces that echoed like laughter made of leather. He stood directly over the fallen prince for one heartbeat longer than necessary. Not staring him down, neither acknowledging him at all.
Dismissal is crueler than violence.
Marcus scrambled upright, face flushed crimson, crowd roaring his na and laughing in the sa ragged breath—so screaming for him out of habit, others laughing because the sight of a god being humbled was simply too delicious to resist.
Landon and Brian recovered, pride hemorrhaging from every pore.
Phei looked at them.
Just once.
Danton and Kyle surged forward like wolves scenting blood—too late, too angry, too human.
Then he moved.
The first dribble snapped Danton’s ankles so viciously the crack of bone on wood was swallowed by the scream that followed. Phei slid past him, shoulder brushing like an afterthought, a whisper of contempt.
Kyle lunged—wild, furious—and Phei spun, ball riding his fingertips in a lazy orbit, pivot so tight and sudden it felt like he had folded space itself rather than turned a body. Kyle’s montum carried him forward into nothing; he staggered like a man betrayed by his own skeleton.
The crowd was beyond losing it now—stomping, howling, soone pounding the bleachers so hard the entire structure groaned in protest.
Phei slowed near the free-throw line.
Waited.
Let Marcus catch up—let the prince believe, for one pathetic second, that redemption was still on the table.
Then—between the legs, behind the back, hesitation so sharp it seed to cut ti in half—and Marcus bit. Reached. Overcommitted with the desperation of a man who suddenly understood he was no longer the apex.
Phei stepped through him.
Not around.
Through.
A shoulder check so surgically precise it didn’t even look violent—just inevitable. Marcus’s balance shattered like cheap crystal. Phei rose without flourish, without drama, without hurry, and laid the ball against the glass with the gentleness of a man returning a borrowed thing.
The net snapped once—soft, final, obscene in its simplicity.
Silence.
One perfect second of stunned, holy quiet.
Then they detonated again—louder, wilder, a wall of sound so thick it felt like the roof might lift off.
Phei jogged back on defense.
Did not celebrate.
Did not look back.
Marcus remained crouched near the baseline, hands braced on knees, chest heaving, the roar crashing over him like surf over a shipwreck. He had just executed the single greatest highlight of his life—fluid, audacious, godlike.
And it hadn’t mattered at all.
Because gods don’t block shots.
They decide the shot was never going in.
And the boy who used to be nothing had just rewritten the laws of the universe in front of 200,000 witnesses, then walked away like it was Tuesday.
Marcus stayed down a heartbeat longer than pride should have allowed.
When he finally rose, the crowd was still screaming Phei’s na.
And for the first ti in his gilded, untouchable life, Marcus Heavenchild understood what it felt like to be small.
Truly, humiliatingly, irreversibly small.
3-10.
First to fifty.
And the prince was already drowning.
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