Chapter 88: Underwater Action Football
He signed up for the next match and got sorted onto Team Blue, six strangers who looked him over with open skepticism, a lean white-haired nobody among a squad of solid Legendary-rank frames. Their captain, a broad woman named Hesk with a swimmer’s shoulders and a coach’s glare, jabbed a thumb at the opposing bench.
"That’s Volk’s squad," she said grimly. "Dren Volk. Plays this circuit at every tournament stop. His team’s taken forty straight matches." She looked Aidan up and down once more. "You ever even played?"
"Nope."
"Wonderful." Hesk pinched the bridge of her nose. "Stay wide, don’t drown, pass to me."
[Tom, drifting somewhere above the sphere’s edge: I would like it noted that I was dragged here against my will and that this water smells like ozone and bad decisions.]
[FINN THINKS IT SMELLS GREAT,] Finn shot back immediately.
[Arthur: Finn thinks everything smells great. Finn once told me a puddle had great character.]
Across the water, Dren Volk was easy to spot, a sleek, grey-skinned man built like a torpedo, rolling his shoulders while his teammates warmed up in drilled, synchronized patterns. He caught Aidan looking and smiled the way sharks probably wanted to.
The horn sounded, and fourteen players dove into the sphere.
The water swallowed Aidan, and Aidan fell instantly, completely in love.
Techniques permitted meant this wasn’t football. It was three-dimensional warfare with a ball in it. Sound arrived as pressure, and up and down were suggestions.
Opposing players rode currents like missiles, threw water-pressure body blocks that could crack ribs, and Volk’s left winger was straight up swimming with a whirlpool strapped to each foot.
The ball dropped at center, and Volk’s squad took it with the ease of forty straight wins, snapping it through a passing pattern so drilled it looked choreographed. Three passes, a screen, a rocket of a shot.
[GOAL. Team Gold: 1.]
"WIDE," Hesk bellowed through the water at Aidan, pressure carrying the word. "STAY WIDE."
Aidan stayed wide for exactly one possession, which was how long it took him to solve the game.
’Chill.’ Aidan casually smiled.
He was here to have fun.
Naturally, having fun also means winning.
Electromagnetism found the ball’s enchanted core the moment he focused on it, its position lighting up in his senses like a lighthouse no matter who screened it or which body hid it.
Every player in the sphere moved by pushing water, and that meant every player announced their next move through the current a half-second before they made it.
’They’re all shouting where they’re going,’ he realized, drifting at the sphere’s edge. ’The whole game is written in the water.’
Gold’s next pass left the winger’s hands, and Aidan was simply there, arriving along a line nobody had seen him take, plucking the ball out of the pass lane with two fingers and a nudge of charge.
The sphere went quiet for a quarter second.
Then he moved, and the quiet broke.
Wind wrapped his body into a torpedo, and he crossed half the sphere in the time it took Gold’s defense to turn around. The first defender rose to meet him, arms spread wide across the lane, whirlpool boots churning.
Aidan corkscrewed past him on a spiral of current, flicked the ball through the man’s legs with a thread of electromagnetism, and collected it on the far side without slowing down.
The second defender didn’t try to block. He lunged for Aidan’s body instead, a full water-pressure tackle aimed at his ribs.
Aidan let Gravity answer, cutting his own momentum dead in a quarter meter, and the tackle sailed through the space he no longer occupied while he rolled over the top of it like the ocean had personally decided to carry him.
The goal ring loomed, and its keeper spread a net of hardened water across the whole opening.
Aidan shot anyway, low and screaming, and bent the ball’s core mid-flight with electromagnetism, a curve no keeper alive could have read, threading the ring’s bottom corner hard enough to make the whole sphere flex.
[GOAL. Team Blue: 1.]
The crowd’s roar came through the water as a full-body thrum, and Hesk stared at him from midfield with her mouth open.
"CHANGE OF PLAN," she bellowed. "PASS TO HIM."
[Tom: Acceptable. I suppose.]
[Finn: ACCEPTABLE? He is the greatest athlete alive!]
[Tom: He scored one goal, Finn.]
[Finn: THE FIRST OF MANY.]
Volk’s squad answered like the veterans they were. They stopped playing their pattern and started playing Aidan, two markers shadowing him through every rotation, Volk himself dropping deeper to organize. They worked the ball patiently around Blue’s scrambling defense and scored twice more, clean, drilled finishes both times.
[Team Gold: 3. Team Blue: 1.]
’Okay.’ Aidan shook the water out of his eyes, grinning wider. ’So the champions actually get to play like champions. Good. This is more fun.’
His second goal came off a steal that nobody in the sphere heard.
Silence rolled off him as he closed on Gold’s playmaker, the mute current swallowing his wake, his approach, and the pressure-shout of a teammate’s warning.
The playmaker cradled the ball one moment and cradled empty water the next. By the time she spun around, Aidan was already gone up the sphere with it, laughing bubbles.
The third was pure showmanship, a shot taken from his own defensive half, sixty meters of water between him and the ring, curved around two defenders and the keeper with a spiral of charge that made the referee construct freeze the replay twice to check its own footage.
The fourth and fifth came in the same sixty seconds, one off a give-and-go with Hesk that she would describe to strangers for years, one off a Frost trick, the water ahead of his marker slicking into a frictionless sheet mid-chase, sending the man gliding helplessly past while Aidan walked the ball into the ring at a stroll.
[Team Blue: 5. Team Gold: 4.]
Volk called a formation change with two sharp pressure-clicks, and the real war started.
For ten minutes the match turned into the best fight Aidan had had since the raid, forty straight wins of drilled teamwork against one man rewriting the sport in real time.
Volk was genuinely brilliant, reading Aidan’s currents right back and baiting his steals, scoring twice himself off patterns built mid-possession specifically to exploit Blue’s weak side.
Aidan answered every single time.
A backheel finish off a rebound he had no business reaching. A goal scored while falling out of a failed tackle, ball guided home by charge alone while he tumbled.
A thunderous straight-line drive through three markers came next, where he didn’t dodge anyone at all, just wrapped himself in a compact spiral of current and went through the contact like a drill through cloth.
[Team Blue: 8. Team Gold: 7.]
The eighth goal he scored backward, without looking, ball flicked over his own head and bent into the ring behind him, purely because Finn was watching.
[THAT ONE. THAT ONE WAS FOR ME.]
’That one was for you, buddy.’
[Tom, grudgingly: ...Fine. That one was slightly impressive.]
[Finn: SLIGHTLY?]
[Tom: I have a reputation for restraint. Let me keep it.]
The horn’s final minute arrived with the score 8 to 7 and the whole plaza pressed against the sphere’s edge, and Volk’s squad threw their last drilled everything at Blue’s goal, wave after wave, Aidan dropping back to defend for the first time all match.
He turned away three shots in forty seconds, one with a wall of frost, one with a gravity well that sagged the shot off target, one caught barehanded out of the water with a crack that echoed.
Then, with eleven seconds left, he took the ball off Volk himself, shoulder to shoulder, current against current, and won the duel by a fingertip.
He crossed the entire sphere one last time with the horn’s countdown thrumming through the water, every Gold player converging, and finished it the way the whole match deserved, a full-speed rising shot off the volley that hit the top of the ring and slammed home as the horn sounded.
[FULL TIME. Team Blue: 9. Team Gold: 7.]
[MATCH MVP: GAREN. Goals: 9.]
The sphere spat out fourteen exhausted players and one grinning white-haired menace to a wall of noise from the crowd.
His teammates mobbed him. Total strangers an hour ago, currently attempting to carry him on their shoulders underwater-style, on dry land, with mixed results. Hesk pounded his back hard enough to stagger him, shouting something about recruitment.
Even Dren Volk swam over before leaving, grey face unreadable, and stuck out a webbed hand.
"Forty-one matches," Volk said. "Never seen anybody learn the game inside the game." His shark’s smile came back, wider now. "Next tournament stop, I want a rematch."
"Bring your whole squad," Aidan said, shaking the hand. "I’m bringing a fish."
Beatrix and Solenne met him at the sphere’s edge, Solenne slow-clapping, Beatrix openly cackling.
"Nine goals," Solenne said. "In your first ever match. Against a forty-win team."
"The sport is perfect and I have no notes." Aidan wrung out his sleeve, still grinning. "We’re building one of these in the dimension. That’s not a suggestion, that’s a decree."
[Yes!] Finn was excited.
[Tom: I would like a dry perch installed near this pool. Somewhere with a good view and no risk of drowning.]
"Noted," Aidan said, laughing. "A dry perch for the complainer. Coming right up."