Ficorpio
Chapter 1
May 29, 2027. Madrid.
In the cramped bedroom of a rented apartment, Ethan Cross shoved the last shirt into his suitcase just as his phone lit up.
A push alert from a football news app flashed across the screen:
[Romano: Christian Reeves announces he will retire at the end of the season. Farewell match set for June 7.]
He stared at the line for a long time, thumb hovering over the screen, but in the end he never tapped it open.
Twenty years.
Ever since 2006, when he’d first seen that teenager in Portugal’s number 17 shirt on television, the course of his life had changed completely.
He’d chosen sports management in college, then thrown himself headfirst into the agent world after graduation. He started at the very bottom as a scouting assistant and clawed his way up until he finally became a licensed agent.
But the players under him? If he wanted to be generous, they were “prospects.”
If he wanted to tell the truth, they were just trying to survive in the lower leagues.
Twenty years of chasing. The closest he had ever come to that world was in the summer of 2019, at a Juventus friendly in Nanjing, high in the top tier, looking through a sea of people at the distant outline of Christian Reeves’s back.
That one glimpse had been a few hundred meters away.
And those few hundred meters were a distance he had spent twenty years failing to cross.
Ethan snapped his suitcase shut and reached for his phone to call a car to the airport.
Before he could, it rang.
No caller ID. Just an unfamiliar number with the location marked as Unknown.
He hesitated for two seconds, then answered.
“Hello?”
No one spoke.
There was only a strange wash of static, like a radio trying to find a station.
“Who is this?”
The noise vanished.
Then he heard a voice—not through the receiver, but pouring straight into his head.
[Binding in progress… Bound target: Ethan Cross. Professional identity: football agent. Binding complete.]
His whole body locked up.
“What the hell?”
No one answered.
The world in front of him began to twist. The walls, the suitcase, the sunlight beyond the window—all of it looked as if some giant hand had crumpled reality into a ball and spun it into darkness.
He shut his eyes on instinct.
When he opened them again, he was sitting upright on an unfamiliar bed.
His phone alarm was blaring.
Ethan’s heart slammed against his ribs. He looked down at the screen—and froze.
August 17, 2021. 7:12 a.m.
I actually regressed?
And to a point just days before Christian Reeves returned to Manchester United?
It took him a full ten minutes to convince himself he wasn’t dreaming.
The TV was on, tuned to a morning football news program. A ticker crawled across the bottom of the screen in sharp, undeniable text:
[Breaking: Christian Reeves has offered himself to Manchester City. Adrian Mercer is handling the deal, and his representatives have already flown to England.]
Ethan’s breathing turned ragged.
Everything was exactly as he remembered.
August 17, 2021.
He knew that date far too well. In less than ten days, City’s interest would collapse. Manchester United would swoop in. Then came the official announcement that stunned the football world—
Welcome home.
He could replay the next two years with his eyes closed.
The brace against Newcastle on his return debut. Old Trafford shaking under a roar that felt like it would never end.
And then the mess.
Solskjaer out. Rangnick as caretaker. Cracks spreading through the locker room. Public clashes after Ten Hag took over. Silent shots of Reeves on the bench. The explosive Morgan interview. The termination. The farewell. The move to Saudi Arabia.
That “homecoming” story had started with fire and ended in ruin.
Ding.
A crisp notification sounded inside his skull, making him flinch.
A translucent panel unfolded in front of his eyes, floating in midair.
[Destiny Correction System activated]
[Current mission: Prevent Christian Reeves from returning to Manchester United]
[Mission difficulty: S-rank]
[Time limit: 10 days]
[Mission reward: Unlock entry-level Scout’s Eye (allows precise analysis of any player’s hidden potential and injury risk), plus 100 Destiny Points]
Ethan stared at the words Scout’s Eye, his pupils tightening.
He had spent twenty years in the agent business. He knew exactly what that meant.
The most expensive thing in football wasn’t star power.
It was certainty.
Could you tell whether an eighteen-year-old kid had a knee that was basically a ticking bomb?
Could you tell whether the midfielder lighting up Ligue 1 was three months away from a cliff-drop in form?
No one could.
That was why this business was, at its core, gambling.
But if he really could see those things—
He drew a slow breath and forced himself to calm down.
More lines appeared on the screen.
[Host identified as a Portugal supporter. Hidden bonus triggered: Upon mission completion, you will also unlock one Peak Projection Card, which can reveal a player’s ability curve over the next three years.]
[Note: This card may only be used once. Choose your target carefully.]
Ethan’s eyelid twitched.
Portugal.
Portugal in 2021.
Chapter 2
An aging Franklin Hayes still kept making the same stubborn mistakes. At the Euros, he’d persisted with that holding-midfield pairing whose weakness was obvious to anyone with eyes—they were too slow. Painfully slow.
That setup had barely survived Hungary despite the 3–0 scoreline, then got torn apart 4–2 by Germany in the next match, with Portugal even scoring two own goals in the process.
Even after finally adjusting later, the coach never truly abandoned his conservative instincts, and Portugal went out in the round of sixteen.
If Ethan could see which young midfielders would explode over the next three years—and which ones were destined to become fragile, injury-ridden glass—
He shook his head hard.
No greed. One thing at a time.
Mercer.
He needed to contact Adrian Mercer.
There was no way around him in the summer 2021 Reeves transfer saga.
Juventus wanted to recoup money. Manchester City would pay wages but not a transfer fee. Manchester United would jump in at the final second and hijack the move.
Every card in that game ran through Mercer’s hands.
And what Ethan had to do now was give both Mercer and Reeves a reason they couldn’t ignore before that hijack happened.
What reason?
He sat on the edge of the bed and opened the battered old laptop in the corner of the room.
He didn’t need to invent anything.
He only needed to package the future he already knew into a professional report—
Manchester United’s locker-room structure and squad flaws. The limitations of Solskjaer’s tactics. Rangnick’s coaching history and tactical leanings. The fact that Ten Hag would leave Ajax half a year later. The internal power struggles among United’s senior leadership…
On August 17, 2021, that might all look like prediction.
But he knew every line would hit.
Outside the window, Madrid was already starting to heat up.
Ethan pressed Enter, and a title appeared on the screen:
[Ronaldo Late-Career Risk Assessment and Alternative Path Proposal]
Only after typing it did he realize the real problem.
How exactly was a lower-league agent supposed to get Adrian Mercer’s contact details?
As if the System had heard him, another panel popped up.
[Temporary mission triggered: Build Your Network]
[Mission objective: Use your knowledge of the 2021 transfer market to complete one real player signing today (scale irrelevant), thereby proving the value of your information source. Once the signing is completed, the System will send Mercer an email with recommendation priority, ensuring your report is opened.]
[Mission reward: Unlock Negotiation Affinity Lv.1, lowering the guard of future targets during talks]
Ethan stared for two seconds.
Then he laughed.
Brutal.
The System wasn’t going to let him walk straight up to Reeves or Mercer. It was forcing him to make a real, small-scale move first—to build himself a path with facts instead of fantasy.
He pulled his worn work notebook from the suitcase and flipped to the pages from August 2021.
The notes were messy and scattered. Back then, he’d only had four players under him—one benchwarmer in Portugal’s second division, two rotation players in Spain’s lower tiers, and one seventeen-year-old winger who had just been released by Atlético Madrid’s youth academy.
His finger stopped.
That seventeen-year-old winger.
He remembered that in the fall of 2021, a scout from a mid-table Primeira Liga side had happened to see the kid in a rough local match and immediately asked him to come in for a club trial.
Later, the boy broke into that team, established himself, and three years after that earned a ten-million-euro move to the Premier League.
But that had been the original timeline.
Now the opportunity was in Ethan’s hands.
He picked up his phone and found the number for the kid’s father in his contacts.
Before pressing call, he glanced back at the TV.
Sky Sports was still cycling through the Christian Reeves transfer rumors. One fan comment on the screen read: City should sign him. They need a center forward anyway.
They had no idea that in just a few days, the story would turn somewhere completely different.
Ethan hit dial.
No matter where that road led, this time he was going to sit at the table.
Not spend another lifetime standing a few hundred meters away, staring at someone else’s back.
Ethan crushed out his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray on the windowsill, picked up his phone, and scrolled to a number he’d saved six months ago but never called.
Charles Sterling. Nathan’s dad.
Nathan Sterling, seventeen. Right winger. Left-footed. Loved to cut inside. Last month he’d been politely shown the door by Atlético Madrid’s youth academy.
Put kindly, it was a squad restructure.
Tell the truth, he hadn’t met expectations.
Ethan remembered it clearly. In the original timeline, sometime in early October that year, a scout from a mid-table Primeira Liga side would notice the kid, bring him in for a club trial, and hand him the first professional contract of his life.
Three years later, in the winter transfer window, he’d move to Brentford for twelve million euros and become one of the key pieces in their survival fight.
Before any of that, though, Nathan was just an unemployed teenager hiding out in a rented flat on the southern edge of Madrid, living on whatever his father brought home from construction sites.
Ethan hit dial.
The phone rang seven times. It was picked up on the eighth.
Chapter 3
A tired middle-aged man answered, his voice thick with a northern Portuguese accent. “Hello? Mr. Cross?”
“Mr. Sterling, it’s me.” Ethan kept his voice steady. “How’s Nathan doing lately?”
There was a two-second silence. Then a quiet sigh.
“Same as before. He went to a trial with a club in the Spanish fourth tier last week. They said he was too skinny, not strong enough in contact. He’s been home the last couple days, playing video games, barely going out.”
The Spanish fourth tier. Semi-professional territory.
Even they thought he was too skinny.
Ethan didn’t comment. “Where are you living now? I’ll come by.”
It was an aging housing block on the edge of Getafe, south of Madrid.
Following his map, Ethan turned into a narrow alley with graffiti covering both walls. Empty beer cans and cigarette butts littered the ground. Madrid in August felt like a pressure cooker. He’d barely walked a hundred yards before sweat was soaking through his shirt.
Charles opened the door.
He looked even thinner than Ethan remembered—sharp cheekbones, hair already half white, wearing an old Portugal National Team jersey washed nearly colorless.
The 2016 Euros one. The collar was so worn the threads had started to fray.
Nathan was on a secondhand couch in the living room, headset on, playing FIFA.
Ethan glanced at the screen.
The kid was using Sporting in a UEFA Champions League match against Manchester City, and the score was already 4–1. He controlled a pacey winger and kept driving down the flank over and over, crisp and confident on the sticks.
“Nathan,” Charles called.
The boy pulled off his headset and turned around.
At seventeen, his face was still young, but there was something in his eyes that didn’t belong to a kid his age.
Not arrogance.
The kind of reflexive caution that came from being rejected too many times.
Ethan remembered that look. At Brentford, it was that same pride buried in his bones that had carried him through the hardest seasons.
“Mr. Cross.” Nathan nodded politely, though there wasn’t much warmth in it.
Ethan sat in the plastic chair across from the couch and got straight to it.
“I want to sign you.”
Nathan froze for a second, then smiled.
It was the kind of smile that said, here comes another one.
“Mr. Cross, I should be honest with you.”
He set the controller aside.
“You probably know Atlético let me go already. Last month I had a trial with Getafe B. Ran for three days, and they said my engine wasn’t up to that level. The month before that, I tried Leganés. They didn’t even give me a trial.”
He said it like he was talking about somebody else.
“Right now, if I play one full pickup match, I’m gasping for air afterward. If you sign me, what exactly are you giving me?”
Ethan didn’t answer right away. He opened his briefcase, pulled out a report, and set it on the coffee table.
Nathan glanced down at it—and stopped.
It was a real scouting report.
Not the usual recycled fluff. Not fast, technical, promising, all the empty words people used when they didn’t have anything real to say.
This one was detailed. Data comparisons. Strength and weakness breakdowns. A targeted training plan. Even three specific recommended destinations, each with tactical fit notes attached.
Of course Ethan hadn’t written it today.
He’d simply reconstructed it early from memory—
the report that scout from the Portuguese top flight would spend two full weeks completing in October 2021.
He’d improved it, too. Added details the original scout might have missed: Nathan’s habits in crowded defensive zones, the issue with his weight transfer in one-on-one situations out wide, and the fact that his timing on forward runs and his sense for attacking space were far beyond most players his age.
Nathan finished the last page, looked up, and his eyes had changed.
“How do you know all that stuff I’m bad at?”
“I’m an agent,” Ethan said. “If I can’t tell where a player falls short, I’m not an agent. I’m just a guy selling insurance.”
That got a real laugh out of Nathan.
Not the polite one from before. An actual laugh.
“Okay.” The boy closed the report. “So where are you planning to push me? Spanish fourth tier? Portuguese second division?”
“Primeira Liga.”
The living room went silent for a full second.
Charles cut in from the side. “Mr. Cross… the Primeira Liga…” His voice dropped low, as if he was ashamed to even say it out loud. “To be honest, we don’t have those kinds of connections.”
“I do.” Ethan held his gaze. “But I need one thing from you.”
“What?”
“Time. One week. Within one week, I’ll bring you a trial invitation in exchange for a representation agreement.”
Nathan stared at him for a long moment.
There was scrutiny in that seventeen-year-old stare that should have belonged to someone much older.
“Mr. Cross, can I ask you something?”
“Go ahead.”
“Why me?”
Ethan didn’t make up a story.
This wasn’t the moment for one.
A kid like Nathan had been turned away too many times. People like that could smell fake hope instantly. Feed him a beautiful lie, and he’d catch it before you finished speaking.
So Ethan told the truth.
“I watched your footage from last year with Atlético’s youth side.”
That wasn’t a lie. He’d just watched it in another timeline.
Back then, Nathan had already established himself in Portugal, and Atlético had put out a retrospective video about academy players they’d let slip away over the years.
Nathan had been first on the list.