"Huh... me?" Rain choked out, his voice squeaking slightly as he stumbled back a step.
The guy in the green canvas jacket laughed. It was an easy, rolling sound, entirely out of place against the backdrop of shattered glass and scorched asphalt. He stepped off the curb, sliding his hands into his jacket pockets while holding a half-empty plastic water bottle between his thumb and index finger.
"Yeah, you," the guy said, tossing the bottle up and catching it behind his back with his other hand. "I mean, who else? The guy who got blasted into the truck, or the one who set his own jersey on fire?" He gestured with his chin toward the metal frame of the wrecked bus shelter. "That iron plate popped off the structural housing at an awkward angle. Most guys would have tried to block it or dive flat on their stomachs. You just... vanished sideways. Didn’t even drop your head. That was purely instinct."
Rain pulled his hoodie tighter around his collar, his thumb catching on a loose thread near the hem. His brain was working overtime, trying to stitch together a lie that didn’t sound completely pathetic. "I... no, man. That wasn’t a technique or anything. I just panicked. My foot slipped on some gravel, honestly. Total accident."
"Right. Gravel." The guy gave him a look, his mouth twisting into a lopsided grin. He shifted his weight, his eyes lingering on Rain’s ankles for a brief second before drifting back up to his face. "Adrenaline makes people trip over their own shoes, man. It doesn’t give you a clean, zero-delay lateral burst. I’ve watched enough draft film to know what a panic dodge looks like, and that wasn’t it. You’ve got actual burst velocity."
He reached up, tapping a thick blue cloth band tied around his left bicep.
"Eren Toma," he said. "Third-year. Captain of the Blue Wave squad."
Rain blinked. "Blue Wave?"
"Powerball," Eren said, as if that single word explained everything from the ruined street to the entire global economy. "You play?"
"No," Rain said immediately. "I don’t... I don’t really watch sports."
Eren looked genuinely shocked, his eyebrows jumping up toward his messy brown fringe. "You live on campus and you don’t watch Powerball? Man, what do you even do on weekend nights?"
Rain didn’t answer. He had spent his last couple of nights calculating debt and trying to figure out how to buy synthetic protein paste without maxing out his baseline student grant, but he wasn’t about to volunteer that to a third-year wearing a forty-credit canvas jacket.
The concept of Powerball wasn’t completely alien to him, of course.
Anyone who had taken a basic post-Fracture history module knew how traditional athletics had collapsed seventy years ago. When the first rift surges hit and human bodies started waking up with altered core densities, physical capabilities split down the middle. Put an unranked baseline human on a court with a C-rank physical augmentee, and a standard leather basketball ends up driven straight through someone’s sternum at two hundred miles an hour.
Old-world basketball didn’t die; it mutated. The courts were expanded to three times their original size, reinforced with heavy alloy plating, and enclosed in kinetic nullification fields. The ball was swapped for a dense core-forged sphere that could take direct elemental impacts without bursting, and the rules were rewritten to permit full-contact skill deployments. It was less a game of perimeter passing and more a regulated, high-velocity war fought over a twenty-foot hoop.
Rain had seen posters around the student commons, but he had always dismissed it as high-rank entertainment for kids who didn’t have to worry about where their next meal was coming from.
Looking at the wrecked avenue around him, the reality hit him with a strange, dry weight. Those two guys who had just blown a hole in the road weren’t trying to murder each other over a real street vendetta. They were off-duty athletes throwing real fire and real lightning over a petty disagreement about a pickup match.
The academy lived in a world where teenagers could level a city block during an argument over a free throw, and the administration’s only real response was to bill their student accounts and clear the road for evening traffic.
’A multi-million credit industry built around people throwing each other into concrete walls for points,’ Rain thought, his eyes tracking a lingering wisp of black smoke drifting up toward the lower clouds. ’And I’m broke because I can’t afford a twenty five thousand credit fee for a baseline skill.’
"Look, no pressure," Eren said, snapping Rain out of his head. He pulled a small, glossy white card out of his jacket pocket and flicked it through the air.
Rain caught it out of habit, his fingers wrapping around the thick plastic.
"We’re running open tryouts for the varsity reserve roster tomorrow afternoon," Eren said, stepping past him toward the crosswalk. "We lost our starter to a knee tearing during the summer rift campaign, and we need someone who can cover ground without dragging their feet. If you can move like that without even sweating, you’d fit right in on the wing. Think about it. We pay stipend credits for reserve slots, too."
He didn’t wait for Rain to reply. He just raised a hand, gave a short wave without turning around, and jogged off toward the stadium gates down the avenue, his blue armband fluttering in the light evening breeze.
Rain stood alone on the curb, staring down at the card.
[Blue Wave Powerball Club – Varsity Reserve Tryouts]
[Field 4 – Saturday, 14:00]
He let out a short, quiet puff of air, his mouth twisting into a grimace.
’A stipend,’ he thought, slipping the plastic card into his back pocket alongside his student ID. ’Right. An F-rank baseline kid on a varsity squad. The second I step onto an alloy court, someone with a D-rank core strength stat would bounce me off the backboard like a rubber ball.’
He turned and started walking down the cracked sidewalk, heading back toward the main ring road.
Yet, as he walked, his mind kept circling back to the way Eren had looked at him. It wasn’t just the offer; it was the fact that Eren had perceived the movement at all.
Rain picked up his pace, his eyes fixed on the gray asphalt ahead. He had spent the last two days testing Flash Step in small, isolated bursts, assuming the movement was fundamentally invisible. When he activated it, the world simply snapped from point A to point B. There was no sensation of running, no transition, just an instantaneous shift in location. He had assumed that to an outside observer, he was simply vanishing and reappearing.
But Eren had seen it. He hadn’t just seen a blur; he had tracked the vector. He had identified it as a lateral burst.
Rain chewed on his lower lip, running through the logic slowly as he navigated around a pile of loose rubble near a closed bus stop.
’If Eren could track it, that means Flash Step isn’t a teleport,’ Rain reasoned internally. ’It’s high-speed linear propulsion. It compresses the physical motion into a fraction of a second, but the physical path still exists. If your eyes are fast enough, or if your perception stat is high enough, you can read where the body is going before it lands.’
He stopped at a pedestrian crossing, waiting for a heavy utility truck to rumble past.
If his working theory about the world held true, everyone had underlying baseline attributes, even if they couldn’t see a floating blue square sitting in front of their eyes like he could.
If his own Agility stat was sitting at a low baseline, his physical control over the skill was raw. He was moving fast, but he wasn’t masking the trajectory. Eren was a third-year Powerball captain, which meant his visual processing and reaction stats were almost certainly sitting at a level far higher than anything an average student possessed. He hadn’t just gotten lucky; his eyes were simply fast enough to register a high-velocity physical burst that Rain thought was hidden.
’I’m not invisible,’ Rain thought, a cold sweat breaking out across his lower back as the walk signal turned green. ’I’m just moving fast to people who are as slow as I am.’
It was a sobering thought. It meant he couldn’t rely on his new skill as an absolute escape button. If he ran into someone with high perception, like a seasoned guild hunter or an upper-tier student, using Flash Step without a plan would just land him straight into an incoming strike.
He looked down at his watch.
6:45 PM.
"Damn it," he muttered, breaking into a light jog.