The Boy Who Chased the Ball Too Far
The holographic scoreboard above Gantry Field buzzed and stuttered, throwing fractured blue light across the rooftop pitch like a dying star refusing to surrender its last breath. It had been broken for as long as anyone could remember—flickering between a scrambled FC NEW MERIDIAN logo and static, occasionally spelling out ghost-fragments of scores from matches that no one living had watched. Nobody bothered fixing it. The kids who played here didn't need numbers to know who was winning.
Goten knew. He always knew.
He cut left on instinct, boots scuffing against the cracked synth-concrete, and sent the ball skating between Marcus's ankles with a flick so clean it drew a whoop from the handful of spectators perched on the pitch's chain-link borders. Behind him, tenement towers rose into the smog-dusted dark, their windows glowing amber and gold, laundry lines strung between balconies like veins connecting one tired body to another. Thirty stories below, the real city murmured and honked and lived its enormous, indifferent life. Up here, on this forgotten slab of rooftop wedged between two apartment blocks, the only thing that mattered was the ball.
"Goten, man, that's not…