Chapter 9: Chapter 9: The Skill Shop II
If it’s a cheat, I’ll use it.
He confirmed the purchase.
[Purchase Confirmed]
Skill Purchased: Golden Eye: Prospect Appraisal
Cost: 100 Skill Points Remaining
Skill Points Balance: 0
A soft chime sounded in his head, and his balance dropped to zero.
He had spent everything he owned on a single skill, and it did not worry him the way it should have, because for the first time the spending felt like an investment rather than a loss.
The shop closed, and a detailed window took its place.
[Skill Acquired]
Golden Eye: Prospect Appraisal
Rank: E
Skill Progress: 0 / 30 Valid Uses
Effect: Allows the host to scan active football prospects within range and view a basic appraisal.
Range: 30 meters
Weekly Uses: 3 / 3
E-Rank Report Includes:
— Name
— Age
— Position
— Current Star Rating
— Potential Star Rating
— Key Strength
— Key Weakness
— One Recommended Training Focus
Restrictions: Target must be an active footballer or registered football prospect. Target must be within 30 meters. Scan cannot be used through photos, videos, livestreams, or recorded matches.
Report accuracy is limited at E-Rank.
Garcia studied the limits more carefully than he studied the benefits, because the limits were what told him how to actually use the thing.
Three scans a week. That stopped him from spraying it at every player on a pitch and forced him to choose, and he could already feel how much weight each of those three choices would carry.
Thirty metres, and no scanning through a screen. That meant the skill was useless from his bedroom. To use it at all, he had to be there in person, at a trial, a training ground, or a match, close enough to stand among the families and the coaches.
The report only gave him the outline of a player, not the whole picture. A name, an age, a position, two star ratings, one strength, one weakness, and a single training focus. It was enough to point him at the right boy, but it was not enough to tell him whether that boy could handle a dressing room, a hostile crowd, or a bad run of form.
That last part settled him rather than disappointing him. The system had not made his six years of experience worthless. It had handed him a tool that only worked properly in the hands of someone who already knew what he was looking at.
Then the growth condition appeared beneath it.
[Growth Condition] Complete 30 valid scans to upgrade Golden Eye toward D-Rank.
Garcia did the arithmetic without meaning to. Three valid scans a week, thirty needed, which was ten weeks at the fastest before the skill improved at all.
The tool would grow, but slowly, and only if he kept putting himself in the right rooms week after week. That suited him, because a skill that levelled itself up would have made him lazy, and this one would only move if he worked.
He turned back to the laptop and started searching in earnest, the keys tapping under his fingers.
It was mid-July, and the calendar was working in his favour. Pre-season was underway, academy release lists were out, and open trials and showcases were running across the city for players trying to land somewhere before the season started.
He set one rule for himself straight away. He stayed away from the youngest age groups, because an unknown agent approaching children at a youth pitch was the fastest way to get reported, remembered, and finished before he had even started. He had enough working against his name already.
So he filtered for the U18 environments instead, the trials where sixteen to eighteen-year-olds played in front of parents, coaches, and the occasional scout. Those were public enough that he could stand at the side without raising questions, and old enough that a serious conversation, when the time came, would be with a player and his family rather than a child on his own.
Most of what he found was no use. Some trials were too far for a day trip. Some needed club registration he could not get. Some were closed, invitation-only sessions with no way in.
Then one notice fit.
South London U18 Open Trial Showcase Date: Saturday, 20 July 2075
Location: Croydon Athletic Training
Ground Entry: Public viewing permitted
Age Group: 16–18 Participants: Released academy players, non-league youth prospects, and invited school-level players
He read it twice.
It was exactly the kind of place he needed. Released academy players meant boys with real training who had just been told they were not good enough, which was precisely where overlooked talent collected. Non-league youth and school invitees meant raw, hungry players nobody important was tracking. Families would be on the touchline, coaches would be running it, and scouts might be there or might not.
The entry line was the part that mattered most. Public viewing permitted. He did not need an invitation or a club behind him. He could walk in, stand at the edge, and watch.
He could not sign anyone tomorrow just by showing up. But he could scan, he could watch, and he could decide whether a single one of them was worth approaching properly.
Garcia sat back and looked at the trial notice on the screen, then at the Golden Eye window still hanging beside it.
For the first time, the agency felt like more than paperwork.
He had a registered company. He had a system skill that nobody else in football had ever heard of, and tomorrow he had a field full of unknown players, the exact kind the rest of the industry had already written off.
Every agent he had ever competed against bragged about having an eye for talent. Most of them were guessing and calling it instinct, and he had done the same for years, better than most, but it had still been guessing.
Now he had something past instinct. The catch was that he could only use it three times a week, which meant he still had to decide who, out of a whole pitch of boys, deserved one of those three scans. He could not afford to waste them.
That limit did not frustrate him. It did the opposite, because a tool that rewarded judgement was exactly the kind of tool he could use.
He had been blacklisted, stripped of his clients, and buried under Holt’s word. For three months he had been a man with nothing.
Tomorrow he would walk into that showcase with something nobody else had.
For the first time since Vantage threw him out, Garcia smiled like a man who had found a knife in the dark.
Then the smile faded, because a simple problem occurred to him.
Croydon was across the city. He pulled up the route to the training ground, traced it through, and ran straight into the obvious gap in his plan.
He had no car.
The finance company had taken it months ago, and he had not replaced it, because he had nothing to replace it with. He had a legal agency and a skill that could read a player’s ceiling at thirty paces, and he could not get himself to the first trial that actually mattered.
He looked toward the hallway. His father usually left the car keys on the small table near the door.
Asking was embarrassing. But it was a smaller embarrassment than the one he had already swallowed at the kitchen table a week and a half ago, when he had asked the same man for the money to exist as an agent at all. He had crossed that line already, and a car for a single Saturday was nothing next to it.
He stood, the trial notice still open on the laptop, and walked out toward the kitchen, where he could hear his father moving around.
"Dad," Garcia called, still looking at the trial notice. "Can I borrow your car tomorrow?"
