MY TEAM WILL NEVER BETRAY ME AGAIN

CHAPTER 7: THEY BEGAN TO FEAR HIM

Word of James's new team spread slowly at first, the way rumors do among students conditioned not to expect much from anyone the Academy had already written off. Then his team started winning.

Not close wins. Not lucky wins. Decisive, methodical victories against opponents who should have overwhelmed them on paper. They beat a mid-tier squad in their first official simulation, then a squad ranked well above their unofficial standing, and by the third week, they had defeated one of the Academy's top-ranked units — the kind of squad that recruited only students with proven elite-tier abilities, the kind of squad James's old captain had dreamed of building.

James's name started appearing on leaderboards it had never touched before, printed beside names he used to only watch from a distance.

Attention followed, and not all of it felt safe.

An instructor pulled him aside after their fourth consecutive victory, her expression carefully neutral in the way that experienced teachers wore when they suspected something they couldn't yet prove, her eyes lingering a beat too long on the way his teammates moved together without speaking. She asked him, directly, how five students with mediocre evaluation histories had suddenly begun performing like elite candidates within a matter of weeks. She asked whether he was using an unregistered ability enhancement. She asked whether anyone had been coaching them using methods outside Academy protocol.

James answered as honestly as he could without revealing the truth he barely understood himself. He talked about coaching philosophy, about attention and confidence and correcting bad habits nobody else had bothered to notice. Some of it was true. All of it was incomplete. The instructor didn't look satisfied, but she let him go, her eyes lingering on him a moment longer than felt comfortable as he walked away, and he could feel her gaze on his back long after he'd turned the corner.

Meanwhile, across campus, his old team had begun to unravel.

James felt it first through the faint, lingering threads he'd never quite managed to fully sever — a persistent wrongness radiating from his former captain's direction, a dissonance that grew sharper by the day, like a note played slightly off-key in a song he used to know by heart. He learned through campus gossip, delivered secondhand and half-garbled, that the captain's signature ability had begun malfunctioning during matches, an ability that had been rock-solid and reliable for years suddenly failing at critical moments, costing them wins they should have secured easily.

James reached toward the old bond almost without meaning to, curiosity and something uglier than curiosity pulling him forward, and what he felt on the other end made him go cold, his own breath catching in his throat.

Interference. Deliberate, structured interference, radiating through the same kind of bond-thread he now understood intimately, twisting the captain's connection to their own ability in ways that felt engineered rather than natural, a pattern too precise to be coincidence.

Someone was doing to the captain what James had accidentally begun doing to his own team — reaching into the architecture of another person's potential and reshaping it from the outside. Except where James had built growth, this influence built failure, methodical and cruel, aimed with obvious intention, a mirror image of everything he'd been trying to create turned into something poisonous.

James traced the disturbance as carefully as he dared, following the twisted thread back toward its source, expecting — hoping, even — to find some outside enemy, some rival academy's saboteur working in the shadows to destabilize a rival team.

What he found instead made his blood run cold.

The interference wasn't coming from outside the team at all.

It was coming from inside it. From one of his old teammates, someone who had stood beside the captain through years of matches, someone who should have had every reason to want the team to succeed.

James stared at the revelation, unable to fully process what it meant, the ground beneath his understanding of loyalty and betrayal shifting yet again into territory far darker than he'd been prepared for.

He spent the rest of that day moving through his classes like a ghost, barely hearing a word any instructor said, his mind circling the same impossible question over and over. If someone inside his old team had been sabotaging their own captain from within, deliberately, patiently, then the story he'd been telling himself about his own expulsion — that it had simply been a cold, practical decision about offensive output — might not be the whole truth either. What if he hadn't just been discarded. What if he'd been removed, carefully, by someone who understood exactly what Bond Link might one day become and wanted it as far from the team as possible before it could be noticed.