MY TEAM WILL NEVER BETRAY ME AGAIN

CHAPTER 2: FRIENDS WHO NEVER TRULY WERE

For three days, James tried to talk to them individually, telling himself each time that this attempt would be the one that made sense of everything, and each time walking away with less certainty than he'd started with.

He caught Marcus outside the gym, waited until the other students filtered out, and asked the only question that mattered: why didn't you say anything. Marcus rubbed the back of his neck, wouldn't hold eye contact for more than a second at a time, and said the decision was for the team's future. James asked whose future. Marcus didn't answer, just shifted his weight and mumbled something about the coaching staff having the final say, as if that absolved him of ever having a voice in the room at all.

Priya was worse, in a way, because she at least tried to sound kind. She told him it wasn't personal, that she'd fought for him in the meeting — a claim James had no way to verify and every reason to doubt, given how quickly she'd looked away when he handed over the badge. She said the Academy ranked squads by offensive output this season, and a support-class ability dragged their score down no matter how well the wins went. She said she was sorry, and this time the word landed even stranger than before, because she said it while checking the clock over his shoulder, already halfway gone before she'd finished speaking, her mind already somewhere else entirely.

The twins didn't bother with excuses at all. They simply avoided him, ducking into different corridors, timing their meals around his schedule as if he were a hazard to route past, a variable to be managed rather than a person to be faced.

James told himself he could accept it. People made decisions. Decisions had consequences. He was an adult, technically, training to be a hero, and heroes were supposed to absorb disappointment without falling apart in front of an audience.

Then he saw them training with his replacement.

It happened by accident — he'd taken a shortcut through the west training yard to avoid the friends who weren't friends anymore, and there they were, running drills he recognized instantly because he had designed them. The formation that funneled enemy mages into Priya's kill zone. The staggered flank timing that let the twins overwhelm a single target before it could call for support. Even the recovery rotation that had saved Marcus's shoulder from three separate injuries, refined over months of careful, unglamorous attention.

All of it, still in use.

None of it, credited to him.

A new student stood where James used to stand — tall, confident, an offensive ability James didn't recognize crackling faintly around his hands like violet static. The others moved around him like he'd always belonged there, like four years of history could be replaced in four days, the seams of the transition already invisible to anyone who hadn't lived through the making of it.

Something in James's chest cracked, quiet and total, the way ice cracks under a weight it was never built to hold — no dramatic sound, just a fracture spreading somewhere deep where no one else could see it.

He walked away before anyone noticed him, and that night, alone in his dorm room with the window open to let in air that did nothing to cool the heat behind his eyes, he finally asked the system about the ability notification that had been sitting untouched in his interface for three days, half-afraid of what answering it might confirm.

POTENTIAL READING, it read, in text too clean and clinical for how much it was about to change his life.

He tried it on himself first. Nothing. A gray, unreadable static where a number should have been, like trying to read his own face in a mirror fogged with steam. He tried it on a photograph of one of his instructors pinned to the corkboard. Nothing again — apparently the ability required a living connection, not memory or image, not a static representation of a person but the person themselves, present and reachable.

Then, almost involuntarily, his mind reached toward Marcus. The Bond Link severance hadn't fully closed that door, it seemed, because information bloomed into his awareness with startling clarity, more detail than he knew what to do with all at once.

POTENTIAL: 61%. CURRENT DEVELOPMENT: 37%. UNSTABLE POTENTIAL: DETECTED.

James sat up straight, heart hammering against his ribs.

He had spent four years believing his teammates were operating near their ceiling. He had built his entire understanding of the team's capability around that assumption — it was why he'd focused so much of his energy on coordination rather than growth, because he'd genuinely believed there wasn't much growth left to unlock, that his role was simply to arrange what already existed as efficiently as possible.

He was wrong. Catastrophically, humiliatingly wrong. Marcus alone had almost a full potential tier still untouched, an entire second act of ability development that no one, apparently, had ever thought to pursue.

James's hands trembled slightly as he pulled up the reading again, half convinced he'd misread it. He hadn't. The numbers sat there, patient and merciless, telling him a truth no one else on that team seemed to know, a truth that made every training session he'd ever designed feel suddenly, retroactively incomplete.

Then he noticed something beneath the percentage, in a smaller font, rendered in a red that didn't belong to any interface color he'd seen before, a red that looked almost like a warning label peeled off something dangerous.

POTENTIAL SUPPRESSED BY EXTERNAL INFLUENCE.

James went very still, the room around him suddenly too quiet, too small.

The words repeated themselves in his mind, refusing to resolve into anything comfortable. Suppressed. Not undeveloped. Not naturally limited. Suppressed — a word that implied hands, intention, someone reaching into another person's growth and holding it down on purpose, deliberately, over time, without anyone else ever noticing the shape of what was being done.

He thought of how strangely stagnant Marcus's ability had felt over the past year, how his damage output plateaued despite the same relentless training regimen that used to yield visible improvement every month like clockwork. He thought of small, dismissible details he'd never questioned before — instructors adjusting Marcus's training schedule without explanation, unusual fatigue after certain evaluation sessions that Marcus always shrugged off, a persistent headache Marcus complained about that never seemed to have a cause anyone bothered to investigate.

Someone had been shaping his former teammate's development. Slowing it. Controlling it, quietly, patiently, for longer than James wanted to imagine.

And James, with his newly cracked-open ability, might be the only person in the entire Academy who could see it happening at all.

He didn't sleep that night. He lay on top of his blankets fully dressed, staring at the ceiling, running through every memory he had of Marcus's training sessions, searching for the exact moment things had started going quietly wrong. He found nothing conclusive, only a slow accumulation of small, forgettable details that meant nothing on their own and everything together. By morning he had made a decision he wasn't proud of and couldn't quite talk himself out of: he was going to keep watching, keep reading, keep pulling on threads that weren't his to pull, because the alternative was pretending he hadn't seen what he'd already seen.