Chapter 165: Hummels
Mats Hummels was twenty-two years old and already one of the best defenders in Germany, largely because he anticipated the picture a half-second before it unfolded.
He had tracked enough of the tape to understand the threat. The kid possessed blistering footwork and absurd touch, but he was still a teenager, and teenagers who beat you did it with pace, straight past you, backing their legs against yours. So when Mateo dropped his shoulder and pushed the ball to the right, going for the outside, Hummels kept his composure. He extended his left leg smoothly into the channel to close the angle, the textbook recovery challenge he had pulled off hundreds of times, inviting the attacker to run directly into his frame.
The gap snapped shut. Any sensible young playmaker would have crashed straight into the challenge or pulled up short to shield possession.
Instead, Mateo altered the physics of the run entirely.
It happened so fast that Hummels's mind barely had time to register the twitch. With his balance already committed to the right, Mateo snapped his studs over the leather, dragging it back across his standing leg with a venomous elastico motion. Before Hummels could pull his trailing foot back to safety, the ball slipped cleanly through the open gap between his knees.
A dead-sprint nutmeg. A sharp, violent redirection executed at top speed from a posture that should have thrown the Mateo off balance.
Hummels twisted to recover and his legs went out from under him. He landed on the grass, and by the time he looked up, the number 38 was past him with the ball, and there was nothing left between Mateo and the goal except the goalkeeper.
Weidenfeller came out.
The veteran keeper was already fuming. He had conceded twice in ten minutes, once off a blind set-piece knockdown and once on an unstoppable far-post finish. He rushed forward aggressively, widening his arms, throwing his chest broad, and dropping his center of gravity to make the target look as small as possible, doing everything the coaching manuals told a goalkeeper to do one-on-one.
Mateo felt almost bad about it.
Mateo did not rush his shot.
He waited for the exact fraction of a second when Weidenfeller committed his weight onto his front heel, then cushioned a delicate, side-footed stroke with his right instep. It was a simple, clinical pass into the vacant bottom corner from eight yards out. Weidenfeller could only pivot his head as the ball bounced softly past his gloves.
Fweet—!
3-0.
The Westfalenstadion plunged into an eerie, suffocating silence.
Eighty thousand people were making almost no sound at all, and the silence was worse than any noise they could have produced, a vast collective disbelief settling over the bowl of the stadium. Three goals down at home. The best young team in Europe, taken apart on their own turf by a Schalke team they had treated as an inferior neighbor all week.
Mateo turned toward the South Stand.
His legs carried him there on pure adrenaline. He stopped a few yards shy of the hoardings, raised both hands, and turned his back slightly to point his thumbs straight at the letters printed across his jersey. Twenty-five thousand Dortmund ultras glared down from the yellow bank, staring directly at his name.
He remembered the roaring hostility that had greeted the team bus outside the gates. He remembered the arrogant crown banner hanging proudly above the terraces.
A smattering of angry whistles and scattered boos echoed down from the middle tiers, but the reaction felt tired and disorganized, the mechanical response of supporters making noise simply because standing in silence felt unbearable. Mateo held his thumbs up for another beat, letting the reality sink in, then lowered his arms and jogged back toward his teammates.
He was not interested in mocking them. He had realized over the past several months that these moments were not about rubbing salt into an opponent's wound. The point was simply to prove that their hostility could not rattle his focus. It was cold, certainly, but it was professional. There was a clear line between showing poise and acting out of spite, and he knew exactly where to stand.
Farfán caught up with him near the halfway line, his eyes wide with amusement.
"Three goals in thirty minutes," Farfán said, shaking his head with a broad grin. "You have two of them, and we basically carved them open on all three. Seriously, what did they feed you this morning?"
"Honestly, I couldn't tell you," Mateo said, wiping a streak of sweat from his forehead with his sleeve.
"Come on, man. A month ago you passed up a clear shooting lane just to feed Jamie against Leverkusen, and you looked half-guilty when you took a shot yourself," Farfán said, jogging beside him with a bewildered laugh. "Now you are dropping your shoulder, nutmegging Mats Hummels on a sprint, and passing it into the net like you own the ground.
Mateo pictured the interface overlay hovering in his vision, recalling how the golden shooting lane had opened up alongside the usual passing options, granting him permission to play on his own terms.
"I just realized I don't always have to give the ball away," Mateo replied with a quiet smile. "Sometimes finishing it myself is the right play."
Farfán studied his face for a second, then broke into a loud laugh and gave him a hearty cuff across the back of the neck. "Fair enough, kid. Just make sure you keep doing it."
The remainder of the first half unfolded with Dortmund operating in a daze.
They held more possession through the middle third, primarily because Schalke stepped off the gas, settling into the disciplined defensive shell Magath had rehearsed all week in Bitburg. Mario Götze tried to weave past challenges. Nuri Şahin attempted to thread balls between the lines. Yet the swagger had completely vanished from the yellow jerseys, and every time their moves stalled, Schalke's midfield countered with aggressive, hungry runs that kept the home backline on edge.
When the referee finally sounded the halftime whistle, the Dortmund players trudged toward the tunnel beneath an uncomfortable, muted murmur from their home crowd, the kind of heavy quiet that arrives when supporters have no answers for what they are witnessing.
3-0. at the Westfalenstadion. It was a scoreline nobody in the arena would have entertained sixty minutes ago.
In the tunnel, Mateo felt the SSS mission sitting at the back of his mind, still unresolved, still promising a golden skill for a win that now looked all but certain. Three goals up. Forty-five minutes to hold.
Yet something felt noticeably off.
The system had classified this task as an SSS-rank trial, the steepest mountain it had ever asked him to climb.
Strolling into the break with a three-goal lead did not feel like an impossible challenge. It felt like a comfortable afternoon.
Deep down, he knew the match had not shown its true teeth yet. Somewhere in that second half, the hidden trap that justified the triple-S rating was waiting to strike.
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