Open Play: Ladies, Goals, The Everything System in-between

Chapter 78: [78] "Two more needed"

Minute seventy-four.

Henri made a substitution.

Lacombe came on for Bastien, who had covered more ground than his frame could maintain for minutes. Bastien walked off with his hands on his hips, his head tilted back, staring at the cold sky above the floodlights.

He had done everything right. He had a great game yet again.

Henri grabbed him at the touchline, gripped him by the shoulder of his jersey.

"You were magnificent." Henri said, he meant it completely. "Head up."

Bastien nodded. He sat down on the bench and immediately leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, watching the pitch.

He was going to watch every remaining second.

---

The substitution shifted Nord’s shape.

Their destroyer midfielder had been tracking Bastien’s movements in the left channel, man-marking territory rather than the ball. Lacombe’s arrival, more central and fluid, disrupted the tracking assignment.

Lacombe was naturally a second striker, meaning Valois now had 3 strikers on the pitch.

The destroyer didn’t receive new instructions.

His eyes followed Bastien all the way to the bench, trying to figure out his instructions on his on from now on.

Hugo saw it immediately.

He moved into the gap the destroyer’s lapsed attention had created. The play restarted and he received the ball from Mateo in a pocket of space that hadn’t existed thirty seconds ago.

He turned.

His first touch set the ball slightly forward off his feet, angled toward the right side of the Valois attack.

Both of Luc’s double markers stepped across on the left.

So Hugo didn’t play it to Luc.

He played it over the top of both of them, a lofted ball into the right channel behind the Nord defensive line. The weight was exactly right. Too much and it ran to the keeper. Too little and the right center-back recovered.

Hugo had calibrated it to neither outcome.

Idriss was onto it before anyone else.

He drove toward the byline at full pace. Their left back, who had been pushing forward all match and finally gotten back to his position, turned to chase.

He was three steps behind.

Idriss cut the ball back from the byline, low, hard, exactly the same delivery that had produced the first goal.

The keeper came off his line. The same habit.

Luc arrived at the penalty spot from a diagonal run that had started on the left side, crossing through to the box to arrive exactly where the cutback was aimed.

One touch with his right foot. Straight down the middle.

The keeper threw himself backward trying to recover his lines.

Too late.

The ball went through his legs as he fell.

GOAL!!!

3-0 in the match. 15-16 in the wager.

Stade Valois did not produce a regular roar this time.

It produced a sound that had no clean category. Something between a scream and an exhale. The sound of thirty thousand people who had been doing arithmetic in real time.

Luc stood still for two full seconds in the center of the penalty area.

"One goal remaining."

[System Notification]

[Wager Tally updated: Open Play Goals — Beaumont 15 | Fontaine 16]

[One goal required. 12 minutes remaining plus stoppage time.]

[The 100% Guaranteed Goal is not yet active. TES recommends you consider deployment.]

[This is the moment it was designed for.]

"Tell me something I don’t know."

[Hugo’s ankle is starting to feel the Guinean’s challenge from earlier. He won’t tell Juliette. But he’s been adjusting his stride]

Luc looked across at Hugo immediately.

TES was right. A near-imperceptible shift in Hugo’s weight distribution on the left side. The kind of thing that only appeared when fatigue and a slightly aggravated joint started negotiating with each other.

"He’s got some more minutes in him," Luc thought.

He needed to be efficient, "for Hugo’s sake."

Deluding himself yet again that it was for Hugo’s sake.

---

Minute seventy-eight.

Nord’s manager, made two substitutions simultaneously. He threw caution away completely, pulling both center-backs and sending on two attack-minded replacements. He had nothing to protect. Three goals down with twelve minutes left. He was playing for a goal to take back to a squad that needed proof someone still believed they could score.

The defensive structure collapsed.

Their new personnel didn’t know the shape. They pressed high immediately, the aggression of fresh legs and no tactical briefing time.

Space opened behind them almost instantly.

Hugo saw it and played Luc in immediately. A driven ball through the gap before the substitutes had found their positions.

Luc was through. One-on-one with the keeper.

This was it. This was the moment to deploy the guaranteed goal.

He shaped to shoot.

The keeper spread himself wide. Thirty-eight years old and still trying.

[System Notification]

[100% Guaranteed Goal — Deploy? Y/N]

"Y."

[Activated. This goal goes in regardless of placement, power, or direction]

Luc pulled his left foot back.

He drove it low to the keeper’s right. Which was Luc’s left.

The keeper went the right way.

But this ball bent at the last moment, the physics of the strike conspiring with something beyond physics, and squeezed through the gap between the keeper’s arm and the inside of the post.

The keeper lay on the turf, his gloves pressed flat against the grass, looking at the ball resting in the net behind him.

He had gone the right way.

He had definitely gone the right way.

And the ball had gone in.

GOAL!!!!!!!!!!!

4-0 in the match. Wager level.

The noise was unlike anything Stade Valois had produced all season.

It was louder than any goal ever scored in this stadium. Louder than any of the comebacks. Louder than the cup win. It was the compressed noise of four months of a city watching a man who had arrived from nothing make good on a promise that everyone except him had believed was insane.

Luc walked.

He walked to the corner arc, turned, and faced the main stand.

He raised his left arm. He tapped his right index finger against his bare left wrist. One time.

Tick.

No tock.

The crowd understood. Luc did it again.

Tick.

The Valois fans erupted.

Tock!!!!!

Thirty thousand people roared it back at him.

---

Hugo arrived first. He threw both arms around Luc’s neck, and the contact made him wince slightly on the left ankle but he didn’t care. He gripped harder.

"Hat-trick you magnificent bastard," Hugo said into his shoulder.

"Hat-trick," Luc confirmed.

Idriss arrived next. He grabbed the back of Luc’s jersey and held it without saying anything. The grip alone said everything.

Mateo arrived last.

He didn’t grab Luc. He stood in front of him and looked at him properly.

"I told you," Mateo said.

Luc met his eyes. "You did."

Lacombe had his hands on his hips and watched on without getting close.

Henri on the touchline had both fists raised. His cheap, rumpled suit had come partially undone during the last sixteen minutes of the match. His eyes had water in them... from the cold, obviously.

He pressed his face into his hands.

Then straightened up and started organizing the defensive shape for the final eight minutes.

Because that was the only version of Henri that needed to exist at the moment.

---

Valérie’s box, high above the far stand.

She stood with one hand on the glass, her slim cigarette unlit between two fingers, watching the celebration below.

Hugo down there. Mateo. Idriss. Bastien on his feet at the bench.

And Luc at the center of all of it, raising one wrist, completing a gesture he had stolen in the early days of his season in front of a camera in the rain.

She pressed the cigarette between her lips and finally lit it.

Took a long, slow drag.

Exhaled.

"You magnificent bastard," she said to the glass.

[System Notification]

[Open Play Wager Tally: Beaumont 16 | Fontaine 16]

[TIED.]

[The wager will likely end in a draw. Nobody leaves. Nobody loses their contract. The rivalry evolves.]

[SC Valois: 4 – 0 AC Nord. 8 minutes remaining.]

[TES has one more thing to say when the final whistle blows.]

"Lo--fucking-L, Save it," Luc said.

He turned back toward the center circle.

Eight minutes left.

He was going to play every single second of them with the same intensity. A last goal was not impossible.

---

The final eight minutes played out under a sky that had turned almost completely dark

The cold had deepened since halftime. The frost on the touchlines had spread toward the center of the pitch and the grass crunched faintly underfoot in the quieter moments between plays.

AC Nord’s new substitutes pressed with energy for three minutes, found nothing, and then dissolved into the acceptance that settled over teams who had spent a full season in that particular state of managed loss.

Their keeper, still hail and hearty at his age, still making saves, made two more in the final eight minutes.

A Mateo drive from twenty-eight yards, placed well to the right post.

He got both hands behind it.

A Lacombe cutback that found Luc arriving late at the near post, his fourth goal chance of the night.

He caught it clean with his instep.

To the keeper’s left wrist.

Off the bar.

Still out.

The crowd groaned and then immediately roared, because the scoreline existed and the wager tally existed and four goals including and a Luc hat-trick had already answered every question the evening had posed.