Divine Celebrity 99

I wanted to leave training, but not immediately. I needed to make sure that the training worked perfectly first. 

And, as an added benefit, Kim took several photos showing how hard I was working, triggering a social media fight about our chances — particularly successful since it not only galvanized our fans, but also the fans of the opponent.

The additional Intent was certainly useful. 

I stayed with Coach Juana and the team for two hours, helping the team to practice — particularly the new quarterbacks — while making sure every single player would listen to her words perfectly.

A dose of Intimidation, coupled with the warning that I would be watching from the cameras, was enough to warn them. 

Of course, under normal conditions, the cameras were impossible to watch from outside to prevent other teams from hacking, but handling that was easy even before the Traits increase due to living streaming my car repair session. 

And, just like the traits I received from Chess helped my football career, particularly the Design Trait, Electronics also helped significantly, especially with the hardware part. 

A little play, and I had real-time access to the feed, a brand new security measures installed with several failsafe that I came up with on the spot — which I doubted to be useful, but I implemented more as a practice.

Having permanent control of the stadium was rather useful.

Things had reached a satisfactory degree, and I didn’t have much fear of the upcoming chess match. 

Unfortunately, while each of those two events was disasters that would keep others occupied without anything, for me, they consisted only of the less important portion. 

I still had my guide, shadow assassins that targeted me, and upcoming darkness… As well as several other supernatural that would no doubt rear their heads. 

It was I had a pile of small stones in the driver seat, and I was channeling some of the Intent I was receiving, doing my best to copy the attack I pulled against the shadows, crushing them under the resulting pressure. 

The first stone took over a minute to crack, which didn’t surprise me in the slightest. The shadows had given me a much weaker impression, and damaging them was the magical equivalent of popping a balloon, the slightest attack sufficient. 

In comparison, breaking the stone was a much more challenging affair. I repeated the trick a  few times, putting most of my focus on the intent that was flowing, while trying to rely on Pattern Recognition and Perception to give me a better sense of what was going on.

It worked, but not as I expected. Suddenly, the whole structure of the rock appeared in my mind, like I had used several high-class scientific tools to create the perfect hologram, and spent hours studying it. 

“Fascinating,” I murmured as I thought as I grabbed another stone, flooding it with Intent without focusing on Perception, and, a minute later, it shattered. Another stone while focusing on Intent, and once again, I generated that insight. 

I played with the stones repeatedly as I drove, wasting some of the Intent I gathered, which might have annoyed me if it wasn’t for the flood I was receiving. The upcoming football game already provided a significant portion.

Yet, our dear sports director and dean decided to help me even more by aggressively advertising the upcoming chess tournament very aggressively, to the point of setting up live screens at several points across the school. 

Giving an unprecedented focus to chess. 

People weren’t idiots, and more than one realized that it was about the scandal — but that only made the arguments around it even more intense. Even the people that were trying to defend me only intensified the argument further. 

If I lost after such a spectacle, it would be enough to destroy my popularity. It wouldn’t be fair, of course, but I doubted there was any celebrity in the world that would actually claim that fame had anything to do with fairness. 

It was always a fickle mistress... 

Yet, I cared more about the contribution it was making to my Intent flow rather than the risk it represented. Against the potential that was represented by them, a little risk was nothing. Such a  generous step allowed me to feed the System and Experiment at the same time. 

When I pulled in front of my dorm, I decided to move on to the next stage of my experiments. I grabbed a piece of stone, and flooded with Intent once more. Only this time, I chose to focus on Strength rather than Perception. 

The results were spectacular enough that I was glad that I didn’t do it in my car — or near anyone’s car. 

The stone not only shattered easily, but also it exploded outward, fast enough to sink into the trunk of the nearest tree.  “Nasty,” I murmured as I examined the results, shivering. If the explosion wasn’t directional, I would have been testing the effectiveness of my Recovery as well. 

Maybe I should be more careful while experimenting. 

“I wonder if I can find anything about magic in the net,” I murmured as I climbed the stairs, only to chuckle when I realized the absurdity of my question. Finding something about magic was not a challenge, not with all the new-age witches, cults, seers, not to mention people who took games way too seriously, enough to create real-looking materials just for fun. 

Finding something was not a challenge. Identifying something useful, on the other hand… 

I was wondering whether I could improve my little web crawler enough to actually be useful, when I received an alert on my phone. 

One that warned me about unauthorized access to the computer systems of the Stadium. “I didn’t expect you to come useful that quickly,” I murmured as I turned on my computer, quickly typing a few commands to see which computer was responsible for it. 

Only for that attempt to fail. No computer that was currently connected to the Stadium intranet was currently active, which was suspicious. 

Curious, I turned on my security cameras, only for them to fail to find the culprit. Every single camera was working, but none of them showed anyone near the computers. 

I noticed my first discrepancy when I checked the field itself, only to notice several players missing, and the rest taking a break. A frown appeared on my face as I took note of the missing players, and most of them were new players.

Annoyingly, their disappearance made sense, as they were not used to heavy practice. They would either be in the medical wing, icing their bruises, or in the bathroom, trying to hide just how exhausted they had been. 

Locations that lacked security cameras to protect the privacy of the players. A sensible measure under normal circumstances, but it left me questioning who was responsible. My mind already went to Arthur, whose appearance was suspicious enough, and I started searching for him.

He walked out of the bathroom, lazily dusting his shoulder like nothing was out of the ordinary. He didn’t have the attitude of someone that had been poking around to steal our tactics. However, after the little discrepancy in his reports and his suspicious date of appearance, I decided to poke around a bit more. 

First, I rewound the recording, watching the moment he went into the bathroom, fifteen minutes ago. A long time, especially since he wasn’t showing any kind of discomfort. More importantly, I noticed a small, concealed bag in his hand, one that wasn’t with him when he left.

And, the first breach happened five minutes after he had gone into the bathroom. With the dust on his body, I realized the trick he pulled, and a little digital check confirmed it. 

He had drilled through the walls to create hidden physical access, then a device was connected to the intranet, and it somehow managed to stay invisible and bypass the firewall easily. 

A technology that I didn’t expect to be used against college football. If it wasn’t for my new security measures, it would have gone without notice, and even with them, I was only able to catch their footprints. 

“Am I the one that underestimates the level of competition, or I somehow underestimated just how much money Coach Spencer was willing to sink in.” 

Luckily, I was able to catch which files they accessed, which gave me a chance to determine it. If they were more focused on me and Coach Juana, it was likely Spencer trying to find dirt, and if they were focusing on the tactical archives, it would be our upcoming opponent. 

After five minutes of furious typing, I managed to find what I was searching for, but that left me with more questions. He wasn’t trying to access any camera records or possible dirt on me, nor he was trying to access tactical records. 

He was trying to access the recorded assessment records. Which, under normal circumstances, could be about strategic espionage. 

But every single player report he had targeted didn’t belong to players that had left with Coach Bill. 

Not what I expected.