I stayed exactly where I was, frozen on the threshold, knees half-bent, my right boot jammed against the draught excluder.
Josh kept walking up the cracked concrete path towards me, and the box came with him. It didn’t flicker, it didn’t wobble, and it didn’t drift.
It stayed anchored exactly three inches above his slicked-back bleached tips, moving at the precise speed of his gait, like the tactical display box over a highlighted player when you set the camera angle to 2D Data Visualizer.
Josh Kershaw Age: 26
Position: AM (C) | Attacking Midfielder (Central)
Best Role: Advanced Playmaker ★★★★☆
Standout: Vision 176
I stood there in the cold damp air of the close, staring at the green box while my mind scrambled for something anything sane to cling to.
I gave myself four explanations, and every single one of them was terrifying.
The first was that I had finally cracked.
Seven years in a dark front room on the Moorside estate, pulling pallets in a distribution warehouse for twelve hours a day and talking to no one except the bloke in the chip shop, and my brain had given up the ghost.
I was thirty years old, sitting on a broken ￡12 office chair, having a full-blown psychotic episode because I’d spilled half a can of warm Stella into the motherboard of a second-hand laptop.
The second was a brain tumour. A massive, bloody melon pressing against my optic nerve, making me hallucinate green pixels out of the orange glow of the streetlights.
The third was that I was still lying on the carpet under my desk, unconscious with a bleeding knee, dreaming the whole bloody thing while lager soaked into my jeans.
And the fourth...
I didn’t even want to think about the fourth.
The fourth meant that what had happened on my laptop screen that string of system code, the word MERIDIAN, the mechanical scream of the cooling fan, and that sudden, horrifying HANDSHAKE in the event log was real. It meant seven years of Touchline Manager data had somehow dumped itself straight into my head.
"Matt?" Josh stopped three feet away on the flagged step. He pulled his hands out of his tracksuit pockets and squinted at me. "What are you staring at?"
The box hovered right above his nose. Vision 176.
I knew that number down to the decimal point.
I had looked my brother up on Touchline Manager every single season since he signed his professional contract with Everton at eighteen.
I had watched his Vision stat climb from 142 in the academy reserve squad to 168 in his breakout year, right up to 176 in the last save file I had saved before the laptop bricked. It wasn’t a random guess. It was the exact internal database value from the simulator.
"Matt? You look like you’ve seen a ghost, lad."
"Hold on," I rasped. My throat felt like I’d swallowed a handful of dry gravel. "Don’t move."
"Don’t move? What are you on about?"
I looked past his left shoulder, past his ear, straight down the dark close to see if my eyes were broken across the board or if it was just my brother.
At the far end of the tarmac, outside the rows of brick lock-up garages, nine-year-old Tyler Walsh was still kicking a scuffed plastic football against the corrugated metal shutter. THWACK... clatter. The sound bounced off the brick walls of the estate.
I had lived on Moorside Close for three years. I saw that kid out there every afternoon in his faded Liverpool shirt, but I had never known his name. Not once.
A floating green box snapped into existence right above the lad’s messy fringe.
Tyler Walsh Age: 9 Position: DM (C) | Defensive Midfielder (Central)
Best Role: Ball-Winning Midfielder ?☆☆☆☆
Standout: Aggression 92
Aggression 92. That explained why he kicked the metal shutter until the neighbours threatened to call the council.
Before I could even process that, a scruffy, wire-haired brown terrier came flying out from behind the communal wheelie bins like a rocket.
Yap, yap, yap!
It launched itself at the bouncing plastic ball, locking its jaw around the valve before Tyler could get a boot to it. The dog growled through its teeth, back legs digging furiously into the asphalt as it dragged the ball toward the kerb.
A small, rectangular box popped up over the terrier’s ears.
Name: Unknown
Age: 3
Standout: Determination 199/200
199 out of 200. I stared at the dog.
The animal had its entire snout clamped around a flat, deflated plastic football, eyes wild, refusing to let go even as the kid tried to pull it away by the casing. That was higher Determination than half the centre-backs I’d played against in League One.
"Tyler!" A woman’s harsh voice shrieked from an open first-floor window above the garages. "Get inside! Now! It’s gone ten o’clock!"
"One more shot, Mum!"
"You said one more shot an hour ago! Get your coat in this house before I come down there!"
The kid yanked the ball free from the terrier’s teeth and ran for the communal door. The dog trotted right on his heels, and the two green UI boxes moved smoothly alongside them, vanishing around the brick corner of the garages.
My hands went dead cold.
"What the bloody hell are you stood on the step for?" Josh demanded. He reached out and shoved his iPad into my chest. "You’ve been staring down the street for five minutes without blinking. You look properly weird, our kid."
I took the iPad automatically. The metal backing was cool against my palm.
"Nothing," I muttered, backing into the narrow hallway. "Just... come in a second."
Josh followed me inside, kicking the front door shut behind him with the heel of his trainer. The latch went click.
I backed up against the hallway wall, right under the coat hooks, and forced myself to look directly at the floating box above Josh’s head.
Vision 176.
If this was Touchline Manager, then there had to be more than one stat.
Every player in the game had thirty-five distinct attributes across Technical, Mental, and Physical categories. I knew how the interface worked. If you wanted to see the full scouting spread, you clicked on the player’s name.
I stared at the green text above Josh’s head and willed the box to expand. I tried to click it with my mind, focusing on the letters the same way I used to hover a mouse cursor over a contract tab.
A sharp red line flashed underneath his name.
Attributes: [LOCKED]
Locked?
In Touchline Manager, player attributes were only hidden if you hadn’t assigned a scout or if the player belonged to a team outside your league scouting range.
I felt a sudden, hot surge of frustration in my chest the exact same irritation I used to get when the board refused to expand my scouting budget.
Without thinking, I reached out my right hand and jabbed my index finger directly at the floating green box in the air.
My finger passed straight through thin air, but the text instantly changed.
Attribute Menu unlocks at Level 1.
"What the actual hell is happening?" I breathed out loud.
Josh stopped unzipping his hoodie in the hallway and stared at me. "What?"
"Nothing," I snapped quickly, pulling my hand back. "Just... thinking out loud."
Level 1? Level of what? Touchline Manager didn’t have manager levels. You had a coaching reputation, a tactical familiarity percentage, and a board confidence meter. There were no experience points. There were no character levels.
Then a second box unfolded right in front of my face.
It didn’t hover over Josh’s head. It sat suspended in the air right at eye level, roughly two feet in front of my nose, glowing with a crisp, emerald-green border.
Matt Kershaw Level 0 EXP: 0/10 [Quest Available]
I read my own name three times. My pulse was hammering against my ribs so hard I could hear the thrumming in my ears.
Quest Available.
I didn’t have a mouse. I didn’t have a touchscreen. But I wanted that box open. I wanted it open the way you want a loose ball to drop to your left foot on the edge of the six-yard box when the keeper is stranded. I focused every ounce of my mind on the bold bracketed text.
The window expanded downward with a silent, fluid motion, opening like a drawer sliding out of a filing cabinet.
Quest: Gain a management position at any football team.
Reward: 10 EXP
A management position. At any team.
My stomach did a violent, sickening flip.
I thought about the contact card Josh had sent to my phone an hour ago. Craig Lomax. I thought about the text message attached to it: Ring him first. Don’t be a mug about it.
"Matt."
Josh was standing two feet away in my narrow hallway, tapping the screen of his tablet with his thumb.
He looked up from the screen, squinted at the empty air directly in front of my face where the glowing quest box was hovering, and then looked back at my eyes.
He couldn’t see it. The box was sitting right between us, two feet wide, glowing bright green, and he couldn’t see a single bloody pixel.
"Did you hear what I said?" Josh asked, his voice dropping into that quiet, careful tone he used whenever he thought I was about to shut down.
"Yeah," I swallowed. "Yeah, I heard."
"I gave Lommo your number," Josh said, pointing a finger at me. "I told him you’d call him tonight. First job of a coach is talking to people. You can’t manage a team if you won’t pick up the phone."
"I know that."
"Then do it." He stepped forward and clapped his hand against my shoulder hard, heavy, and solid. "And ring Mum. She’s worrying about you."
"I’ll ring her."
"You say that every week, our kid." Josh unlatched the front door and stepped out onto the concrete path. "I’m off. Got double session at Finch Farm tomorrow at eight. Don’t sit up all night staring at the wall."
"Night, Josh."
I followed him out onto the step. The cool night wind hit my face, smelling of damp grass and diesel exhaust from the main road.
I stood on the flagged path and watched the massive black Range Rover back out from the garages, its heavy subwoofers throbbing dum... dum... dum... before the red tail-lights vanished down the estate road.
Dennis from number fourteen had put his shears away and turned his kitchen light off. Across the close, a fox let out a ragged, screeching cry in the dark woods behind the council park.
The glowing green box was still there, suspended in the night air right above my small front garden.
[Accept Quest?]