Marek Osei watched the video for the ninth time that week, alone in the Halcyon training facility's locker room, phone propped against a water bottle, volume low enough that nobody walking past would hear his own humiliation looping on repeat.
"Turn that shit off," his coach said, not even glancing over from the clipboard. Yusuf had been Halcyon's B-Rank development lead for six years and had exactly two moods, unimpressed and furious, and today was leaning hard toward the second one. "You've watched it enough times to have it memorized. Watching it more isn't training. It's masochism."
"I need to understand what he did."
"He didn't do anything, that's the whole damn point. You threw three punches at a kid drinking his own hype and he talked you into sitting down on a sidewalk like a scolded toddler. There's nothing to study. There's no technique. It's a mind game, and you fell for it because you walked in there already halfway to losing before he said a word."
"That's not fair."
"Life's not fair, Osei. Get used to it or get out of my program." Yusuf finally looked up, and something in his face shifted, softened maybe half a degree, which for Yusuf counted as an outpouring of tenderness. "Why do you even want this rematch so bad? Sanctioned or not, you already lost the thing that actually mattered. The internet decided who you are. A win in three weeks doesn't undo that."
Marek didn't answer right away. Picked at the edge of his phone case instead, a nervous habit he'd never fully outgrown from being twelve years old and small for his age, always the last one picked, always the one who had to prove himself twice as hard just to get noticed once.
"My dad watched it," he said finally. "The video. He called me this morning."
"And?"
"He didn't say anything. Just — was quiet for a long time. And then he said, 'Well. At least you tried.'" Marek's jaw tightened. "Fifteen years old, I told him I was going to be somebody. Not just a name in a family full of B-Ranks nobody remembers past the local paper. Somebody people actually talk about. And now I'm a fucking meme, Yusuf. I'm the punchline in a video with anime sound effects."
Yusuf was quiet a moment. Set the clipboard down.
"Then win the rematch clean," he said. "Not for the internet. Not for your dad. For you. And if you can't win it clean—" He hesitated, like the next part cost him something to say out loud. "Then figure out how to lose it with your head held up, because that's a skill too, and it's one this program's never actually taught anyone, myself included."
Marek didn't say anything to that. Just kept watching the video, ninth time, tenth, the sound of his own knuckles connecting with nothing, over and over, until the loop stopped feeling like a wound and started feeling like a countdown.
Cole found out about the video count from Reeve, who found out from a group chat that existed solely to track how badly the internet was treating Marek Osei, which was, Cole had to admit, a genuinely strange hobby for a school full of teenagers to have collectively developed.
"He's watched it like forty times," Reeve said, scrolling. "Someone at Halcyon leaked his search history, or — okay, that's probably not real, but the number's real. Forty views, one account."
"That's not healthy."
"No shit. You broke the guy's whole sense of self with two sentences and now he's stress-watching his own worst moment like it's a horror movie he can't stop rewinding." Reeve looked up, something uneasy in his expression. "Does that bother you? At all?"
Cole thought about it. Actually thought about it, the way he'd started doing more often lately, whether or not he liked the new habit.
"Yeah," he admitted. "A little."
"Good. Because it should. You basically diagnosed a stranger's entire personality out loud in front of a filming crowd. That's a hell of a thing to do to someone, even if you didn't mean it cruelly."
"I didn't mean it cruelly."
"Doesn't matter what you meant. Matters what it did." Reeve pocketed his phone, jaw set. "You're good at reading people, Cole. Scary good. But being right about someone's wound doesn't mean you get to just — poke it, in public, and call it a lesson."
Cole sat with that for a long moment. It landed heavier than he wanted to admit, mostly because Reeve wasn't wrong, and Cole had built an entire personality around never letting things land heavy where anyone could see it happen.
"You think I should apologize?"
"I think you should figure out if you actually give a damn about the guy, or if you just liked being right." Reeve's voice was quieter now, less confrontational, more like he was working through something himself while he said it out loud. "Because there's a difference. And I think you know there's a difference. And I think that's part of why you've been weird all week."
"I'm always weird."
"You know what I mean."
Cole did. He didn't say so.
He found Marek two days later, not by plan, just by the specific bad luck of both of them wanting the same empty basketball court behind the community center at the same unpopular hour. Marek froze when he saw him. Then didn't run, which Cole gave him credit for.
"Came to gloat?" Marek asked, tight, defensive, a kid bracing for a hit that hadn't come yet.
"Came to shoot hoops. Didn't know this was your spot."
"It's not. I don't have a spot. I just needed somewhere nobody was watching."
Cole sat down on the low wall bordering the court instead of leaving, which surprised them both a little. "For what it's worth. I wasn't trying to humiliate you. I was trying to end the fight without hurting anyone. Might've picked a shitty way to do it."
Marek didn't answer right away. Bounced the ball once. Twice. Let the rhythm fill the silence neither of them knew how to fill with words yet.
"My whole family's B-Rank," he said finally, not looking over. "Three generations. Good, solid, unremarkable B-Rank. And I've spent my whole life trying to be the one who breaks that. The one people actually remember." He caught the ball. Held it. "And then some lazy kid who doesn't even train shows up out of nowhere and breaks me in front of two million strangers without trying."
"I train. Just not the way you think."
"Doesn't matter how. Matters that it worked and mine didn't." Marek finally looked at him, something raw and tired behind his eyes. "You said my Conviction wasn't bad. That the why underneath it needed work. What the hell does that even mean?"
Cole considered the question honestly. "Means you built 'mattering' entirely out of other people's opinions. Halcyon's. Mine. The internet's. That's a Conviction with a hole in the middle of it, because other people's opinions change on a random Tuesday for no damn reason at all. You need something underneath it that doesn't depend on any of us."
"Like what?"
"Don't know. That one's yours to figure out. Not mine."
Marek was quiet a long moment, turning the ball over in his hands.
"I'm still fighting you in two weeks," he said. "Sanctioned. For real this time."
"Wouldn't expect anything less."
"I'm going to lose again, aren't I."
Cole didn't answer that one straight. Just stood, brushing off the wall dust, and offered the closest thing to real comfort he had left in him that evening.
"Depends what you're actually fighting for by then," he said. "Fight for the internet, you'll lose worse than last time. Fight for something that's actually yours — doesn't matter what the scoreboard says after. You'll have already won the part that counts."
He left Marek alone on the court with that, ball bouncing steady behind him, and didn't look back to see whether any of it had landed.
Somewhere behind the community center's chain-link fence, unnoticed by either of them, a car that neither Cole nor Marek recognized sat idling in the dark for exactly as long as the conversation lasted.
Then it pulled away. Same as always.
Nobody saw it go.
[End of Chapter 13]