The crowd—the digital crowd, the screaming, paying, remote crowd—didn’t hear this. The microphones were tuned to filter out weakness.
But he also knew that a week of feeling nothing was better than a lifetime of being a weapon for people who had never bled. overdeveloped amateurs
Three years ago, they had been normal kids. Leo had liked drawing spaceships. Priya had played the viola. Then the Leagues had found them—the global hyper-sport that had replaced the Olympics, the World Cup, all of it. There were no natural athletes left. Nature was too slow. Instead, mega-corporations bought zygotes, or recruited toddlers, and poured billions into “developmental overdrive.” They didn’t train amateurs. They manufactured them. The crowd—the digital crowd, the screaming, paying, remote
Then, slowly, Leo did something that was not in his fight protocol. He reached out and took Priya’s hand. Her grip was strong enough to crush steel. But she held him gently. Three years ago, they had been normal kids
He thought of his drawing of a spaceship. He couldn’t remember how to hold a pencil anymore. His fingers, thickened by bone-density treatments, could only close into fists.
“What if we just… stop?” he said.
Leo, callsign Chimera, wiped a film of nano-sweat from his brow. He was seventeen. His body was a cartographer’s nightmare of hyper-developed musculature—deltoids that looked like cannonballs, a trapezius ridge that sloped into his neck like a mountain range, and quads so vast he couldn’t bring his knees together. He had never climbed a real staircase. He had never lifted a bag of groceries. But he could generate a 4,000-newton roundhouse kick, verified by LIDAR.