MY TEAM WILL NEVER BETRAY ME AGAIN

CHAPTER 4: THE FIRST PERSON WHO BELIEVED IN HIM

Mia noticed him the next day — not through Bond Link, which she couldn't perceive at all, but simply because James kept showing up at the same isolated training yard where nobody else bothered to watch her fail.

She was suspicious at first, arms crossed, voice edged with the particular defensiveness of someone who had been mocked enough times to expect it from everyone, her chin lifted in a way that dared him to say something cruel just so she could be right about him. "If you're here to laugh, there's a line," she said, not quite looking at him, already bracing for the joke she assumed was coming.

James didn't laugh. He told her, carefully, that he thought her control problem wasn't about weakness. He didn't mention Bond Link, didn't mention the number burned into his awareness — he simply said he'd watched enough matches to recognize a talent fighting bad habits rather than a talent that didn't exist. It wasn't exactly a lie. It also wasn't the whole truth. But it was enough to make her pause, her arms loosening a fraction, suspicion softening into something more like reluctant curiosity.

She let him stay. Barely. A grudging, arms-still-crossed kind of permission that felt, to James, like the first honest thing anyone had offered him in weeks.

Over the following days, James did something he hadn't expected from himself: he coached without controlling. He didn't use Bond Link to force her development, chastened by the warning still glowing faintly in the back of his mind every time he closed his eyes. Instead he simply watched, the way he used to watch his old team, translating what he saw into words she could use. Her ability, Vector Shift, let her redirect the trajectory of moving objects — devastating in theory, nearly useless in practice, because her redirection window activated a half-second too early or too late almost every single time, a timing flaw so consistent it had almost become a kind of signature failure.

"You're anticipating the object," James told her one evening, after her fortieth failed attempt, the sky already gone violet above the training yard's high walls. "Vector Shift wants you to react to it, not predict it. Stop trying to be fast. Try to be exact."

Something in that framing clicked, visible in the sudden stillness that came over her shoulders. Her fortieth attempt failed. Her forty-first didn't.

The dummy's trajectory bent at an angle that shouldn't have been physically possible, and Mia stood there staring at her own hands like they belonged to someone else, her breath catching audibly in the quiet yard.

"Do that again," James said quietly, and she did, and then again, and by the end of the week she was redirecting attacks that would have flattened most third-years, her control sharpening night after night until even the instructors who passed by the yard began slowing down to watch.

James checked her potential reading privately, alone in his dorm, almost afraid of what he'd find, his thumb hovering over the interface for a long moment before he let himself look.

POTENTIAL: 83%.

He sat with that number for a long time. Eighty-three percent — higher than Marcus, higher than Priya, higher than anyone on his old team except possibly the captain herself. A girl the entire Academy had quietly written off as a lost cause had been sitting on potential most students would kill for, buried under nothing more than bad coaching and worse confidence, a whole unclaimed future gathering dust in the margins of everyone else's attention.

It made him wonder, with a slow and uncomfortable dread, how many other students walked these halls carrying the same kind of buried greatness. How many "failures" were simply talent nobody had bothered to look at twice, how many quiet corners of the Academy held someone exactly like Mia, training alone against a wall that didn't have to be a ceiling at all.

He offered Mia something he hadn't planned to offer anyone again — a place on a team, if she wanted one. Not a real team yet. Just an idea, fragile and unofficial, built from two people who'd both been discarded by systems that measured worth in the wrong units.

Mia studied him for a long moment, the wariness in her eyes slowly giving way to something more complicated — not quite trust, but the willingness to try trusting, a door left open rather than fully unlocked.

"Fine," she said. "But if you're using me for something, I want to know now."

James hesitated, thinking of the invisible thread connecting them, the number climbing quietly in the background of his awareness even as they spoke, and chose honesty, or the closest version of it he could manage without unraveling everything at once.

"I think my ability can help people grow faster than they think is possible," he said. "I don't fully understand it yet. But I'm not using you. I'm trying to build something with you."

Mia held his gaze, weighing the answer with the same careful attention she'd once reserved for judging a thrown weight's trajectory, then extended her hand — a small, deliberate gesture that felt heavier than it should have, like she was placing something fragile into his palm on purpose.

The moment their hands met, James felt Bond Link surge without his conscious command, sealing something between them that hadn't been there a second before, warm and immediate in a way none of his experiments had prepared him for.

A notification bloomed across his vision, and this one made his chest tighten with an emotion he hadn't expected to feel again so soon.

BOND LINK SUCCESSFUL.

POTENTIAL SYNCHRONIZATION: 7%.

NEW EFFECT UNLOCKED.

SHARED GROWTH.

James stared at the last line, uncomprehending for a moment, until the meaning settled into place with the weight of a small quiet miracle, something he hadn't dared hope for since the badge left his hand on that cold desk.

Mia's growth was now feeding back into his own ability.

He didn't tell her that part. He wasn't sure yet how to explain it without sounding like he'd been using her all along, even though the truth felt more complicated than that, more like two people leaning on the same wall and discovering, almost by accident, that it held both their weights better than it had held either of them alone. That night, walking back to his dorm under a sky gone fully dark, James allowed himself to feel something he hadn't let himself feel since the badge left his hand — not triumph, exactly, but the quiet, cautious warmth of having something worth protecting again.