The screen of the phone illuminated the dark interior of the Castellón team bus.
Leo stared at the picture Rio had sent. Wembley Stadium. The massive Premier League logo shining on the jumbotron. The message below it was simple, arrogant, and undeniably earned: The Machine is in the Premier League. See you at the top.
Mateo leaned over the seat from behind, whistling as he looked at the screen.
"Your crazy friend actually did it," Mateo said, shaking his head. "He's playing in the best league in the world. He beat us to the top flight."
"He kicked the door down," Leo corrected smoothly, locking his phone and looking out the window as the bus pulled into the stadium of their next Segunda División opponent. "We are meticulously dismantling the walls. It takes longer, but when we arrive, they won't just let us in. They will surrender the keys."
It wasn't an empty threat.
In the Spanish Segunda División, CD Castellón was no longer the underdog story of the lower leagues; they had become a terrifying, tyrannical force.
Ninety minutes later on the pitch, Leo proved it.
The Architect's Domain didn't even need to cover the whole field anymore. It was hyper-focused. Leo walked through the midfield, completely untouched. The opposition tried to press him, but the second they stepped into his zone, Mateo's River aura surged, pulling them away.
Leo didn't look. He just tapped the ball through a microscopic gap.
Thirty yards away, Lukas, the emotionless German, took exactly one step backward into the blind spot of the center-back, received the pass, and buried it into the bottom corner.
Thwack. 3-0.
At the other end of the pitch, Giovanni was leaning casually against his goalpost, yawning. He hadn't touched the ball with his hands in forty minutes. The Castellón defense, terrified of Giovanni's psychotic screaming, intercepted everything before it even reached the box.
The pieces were flawless. The dictator's blueprint was working perfectly.
Leo jogged back to the center circle, his breathing calm and controlled. The Segunda División was tough, but his mind was already a thousand miles away, calculating the mathematics of La Liga. He was hunting Real Madrid and Barcelona.
"Keep climbing, Machine," Leo whispered to himself. "I'll be there soon."
Two days later. Manchester, England.
Welcome to the Etihad Stadium. Welcome to the absolute pinnacle of world football.
The sky was a bruised, heavy gray, and the iconic Manchester rain was falling in cold, stinging sheets. Rio stood in the tunnel, wearing the blue and white of Blackburn Rovers, waiting to walk out against the defending Premier League Champions: Manchester City.
He had spent the summer forging his body into an unbreakable weapon. He had conquered the Championship. He was the Machine.
But as the City players lined up next to him in the tunnel, Rio felt something he hadn't felt since he was a sixteen-year-old kid in Kolkata.
He felt small.
He looked at the City players. They weren't just big or fast. They radiated an overwhelming, suffocating pressure. Their collective Will didn't leak into the air; it was utterly contained, vibrating with the terrifying, effortless confidence of gods who knew they could not be killed.
"Don't look at them," Briggs muttered, standing next to Rio. The veteran striker looked genuinely sick to his stomach. "If you stare at them too long, you've already lost."
The referee blew the whistle, and they walked out into the roaring stadium.
The match kicked off, and within exactly four minutes, Rio realized the horrifying reality of the Premier League.
The ball didn't just move fast; it moved with absolute, telepathic intent. Manchester City didn't play football. They executed a rolling, suffocating strangulation.
By the 15th minute, Blackburn had touched the ball exactly three times. City was up 1-0.
In the 20th minute, Rio finally got a chance.
Davies managed a desperate interception and booted the ball into the Manchester City half. Rio was entirely alone, forty yards from the goal.
Standing between him and the goalkeeper was City's star center-back, a ninety-million-pound titan named Silas.
Silas was 6-foot-3, built like a Greek statue, and his eyes were completely dead of any emotion. To Rio's vision, Silas's Will manifested as a towering, jagged glacier of pure blue ice. It wasn't aggressive. It was just immovable.
Finally, Rio thought, his blood igniting. A real target.
Rio activated his Apex Predator aura. The abyssal black armor wrapped tightly around his muscles. He lowered his center of gravity and accelerated like a freight train on wet tracks. He was going to bulldoze the titan.
He closed the distance in seconds. Silas didn't back off. He didn't drop his stance. He just watched Rio approach with dull, bored eyes.
La Croqueta! Rio initiated his signature, violent skill move—shifting the ball rapidly from right to left while throwing his shoulder in to absorb the hit. It was the move that had shattered the Leeds defense at Wembley.
But the impact never came.
Silas didn't lunge. At the exact millisecond Rio shifted the ball, Silas smoothly took a single half-step backward, completely neutralizing Rio's momentum, and casually extended a long leg.
Tap.
Silas didn't tackle Rio. He just cleanly, elegantly picked the ball right off Rio's toes.
Rio's momentum carried him forward, stumbling awkwardly over his own feet. He crashed chest-first into the wet Manchester grass.
The stadium didn't even cheer. It was such a routine, effortless dispossession that the City fans expected it.
Silas looked down at Rio, who was pushing himself up from the mud.
"You broadcast your intentions too loudly, kid," Silas said, his voice smooth and entirely unbothered. "This is the Premier League. We don't play with emotion here. We play with execution."
Silas turned and pinged a perfect sixty-yard diagonal pass to start another Manchester City attack.
Rio stayed on his knees in the freezing rain. The abyssal black armor of his Will flickered and died, completely neutralized by the glacial perfection of the defender.
His lungs were burning. His knees were covered in mud. He had just been humiliated on global television, swatted away like a bothersome fly by a man who hadn't even broken a sweat.
Rio slowly looked up at the towering stands of the Etihad. The rain washed the mud from his face.
He should have been terrified. He should have been demoralized.
Instead, a slow, terrifying, unhinged grin spread across his face. He started to laugh—a dark, echoing sound that was lost in the roar of the crowd.
He had spent a year as the biggest monster in the room. He had forgotten what it felt like to be the underdog. He had forgotten the thrill of looking up at an impossible wall and knowing he had to break it.
Rio stood up, his eyes burning with a brilliant, psychotic light. The black smoke of his Will didn't return. It was completely gone, wiped clean.
I need a new weapon, Rio thought, his eyes locking onto the back of Silas's jersey. The Machine is obsolete. It's time to build a God.