The squad screen loaded, and I had to stroke my face several times to get used to how far this team had fallen. A few names still rang a bell, like old ghosts wandering the pitch: Tommy ‘The Tank’ Ridley in midfield, a big lad with more heart than skill, and Marcus Kane up front, still fast but prone to disappearing when things got rough. A few names from the development squad back then were still familiar. Beyond that, most of the squad had changed completely. The rest of the team might as well have been from another planet.

  I scrolled through the lineup. The balance was a joke. Centre-backs liked running forward like wingers and the pair of central midfielders thought defending was optional. They had a striker up top with 63 finishing, out of 200.

  No traditional formation would survive ten minutes against a decent side. Forget 4-4-2, 3-5-2, even a 4-3-3 would be torn apart in the first minute. The only shape that made the slightest sense was a narrow, flat back three, two wing-backs, two grudgingly defensive midfielders, a central playmaker to pick out passes, and a lone target man up front who was good in the air, whose job wasn’t to score but to win headers and knock the ball back to the attacking midfielder, the only lad on the pitch who could actually shoot. The wing-backs would have to be mobile, though, which meant I would need better options than the ones I currently had.

  I opened the transfer screen. If this were a proper team, I’d be eyeing wing-backs who could actually run and didn’t treat defending like optional homework, and maybe a proper box-to-box midfielder.

  I pulled up the finances tab. The bank balance looked like it had been scraped clean with a teaspoon: maybe fifteen grand in the whole account, enough to cover a few weeks of travel and a half-hearted kit order. Wages were about ￡150–￡200 a week for most lads, enough to stop them disappearing mid-season, but not enough to tempt anyone from leaving the day a semi-decent club came sniffing. This was the kind of money where you spent your transfer budget on petrol and a new set of cones for training.

  Still, I knew a thing or two from my old saves. There was a lad, free to pick up, who could do the box-to-box legwork we desperately needed. Thirty-three years old, not a spring chicken, but still full of fight and scrappy determination.

  Clark Hargreaves, central midfielder, ￡180 a week. Not the best passer in the world; that was Fenvale’s job, our actual distributor. Stats were hidden on the screen, but I didn’t need to look. I’d brought this guy in on a free a couple times in previous saves. His tackling should be 107, decent enough to annoy anyone in a hurry, his stamina of 148 would get him moving end-to-end all game, and he had the aggression and work rate to make a nuisance of himself. Passing? Not his strong suit—that was Fenvale’s job, our proper distributor—but his defensive sense was sharp, heading and pace middling, just enough to cover the gaps when our midfielders inevitably forgot what marking was.

  I didn’t exactly wave a wad of cash and hope for the best. There’s a greasy way to do things, a way I’d perfected over years of saves and knowing the right sort of desperation. Clark bought in without a fuss. He knew he’d be running himself into the ground anyway, and I made sure he got a little bump for loyalty. Not much, just enough to keep him breathing through the season.

  Then there were the full-backs. Proper, pacey lads from the development squad, young enough to still think tackling is fun rather than a chore. Not as polished as the couple of first-team full-backs we’d lost, but hungry and willing to learn. One of them, Jamie Linton, had the right tags: ‘Professional’ and ‘Willing to Learn’. Not polished yet, but give him a season and he’d be a proper full-back, sharper and smarter than most of the so-called pros in the squad.

  By the time I’d slogged through pre-season transfers, my brain felt like it had done three full seasons of Football Management in one go. Just getting a squad vaguely balanced had taken everything I had. Two free transfers, three promotions from the development squad, and I’d even managed to offload one useless forward for a few grand.

  I didn’t notice the time until I looked up and saw the window. It was dark; nine o’clock kind of dark. I glanced at the clock; sure enough, it was nine. I’d been that absorbed in combing through every player in the squad and the available market, and figuring out how to try and get rid of that idiotic ‘Lazy’ trait from Fenvale, but even the slightest direct chat about it had him bristling like I’d insulted his mother. It drove me insane. Watching him loaf through training, doing barely a damn thing, and knowing he could do so much more if he chose to, and not being able to do a damn thing about it without starting a war in the dressing room was maddening.

  That was when I gave up for the day.

  I picked up my phone, planning to doom scroll until fatigue took me. Sure enough, a message from Callum: Mitch’s number, short and simple, like it had been waiting for me all along. I stared at digits for a good few seconds like they might rearrange themselves into some clever joke.

  Managing a real team, with actual stubborn lads who’d give me the exact same grief Fenvale did but a hundred times worse because they’d have mouths and teeth and opinions?

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  I leaned back in my swivel chair, rubbing my face. I chuckled, low and dry. Could I even do it properly even if I wanted to? Callum really thought that highly of me now, didn’t he?

  I leaned back further until the chair creaked. Truth was, I was never that talented. I could read the game, sure, and I had a decent engine, but at Championship level, you needed more than ‘decent.’

  That’s what stung the most: I’d known it even then. When the contracts didn’t come, I chalked it down to the ‘stupid mistakes’ I made because I was match-fixing. But deep down, I knew it was just a way to make the failure sting less. If I couldn’t make it because I wasn’t good enough, then at least I could pretend it was by choice.

  I leaned back even further. That was the next messing up of my life: you don’t test your chair thrice.

  The chair betrayed me. It tipped with that slow, humiliating inevitability, and in a second of panic, I threw my hands forward to steady myself. The sudden jolt sent my laptop skidding off the desk with all the spite of an inanimate object sensing weakness. I tried to grab it, but only managed to bat it sideways. It ricocheted off the corner of the coffee table, sloshed the last of my beer across the floor, and landed on my thigh with a sick thud. The screen stuttered through a smear of light then went black.

  For a beat I just sat there feeling stupid, damp and bleeding a little from the corner of my knee where the case had caught me. Then I fumbled at the keyboard. The machine took too long to reboot and made a sound that it was definitely not supposed to make. Then the Football Management Sim banner flashed before my eyes.

  The title screen dissolved into an error box I’d never seen before: “CORE DATA CORRUPTION — PACKAGE REMOVED.” There was a hex string, a timestamp that matched tonight, and a second line that said, absurdly, “UNREGISTERED ENTITY: AETHER” before the window closed and the desktop stared back at me.

  What in the donkey’s arse?

  I ran through the usual: reinstall, restore from backup, search forums. The installer failed halfway through with the same nonsense code; the backup showed the game file but it wouldn’t open, and the forum returned nothing. The beer had shorted out a couple of keys, sure, but that didn’t explain the corrupted checksum or the weird log entry I found buried in the system diagnostics: a single line with the same timestamp, the same hex string, and the word “HANDSHAKE.” I didn’t know what a handshake with an aether was, but it looked like someone had politely taken the program’s hand and led it out the door.

  Then the laptop died for real.

  I let the thing sit for an hour, lid cracked open like a gutted fish, hoping the beer would evaporate and the gods of silicon would take pity. No dice. When I finally pressed the power button again, the fan gave one pathetic cough, the screen lit up a sickly cobalt, and there it was: the Blue Screen of Death, frozen solid, alongside a single line of white text that read, in perfect monospace:

  STOP: 0xAETHER — UNREGISTERED ENTITY DETACHED

  For a fraction of a second, my thoughts stuttered, like a lag spike inside my own skull. A brief sensation of something indexing through my memory, flicking through it the way the game skimmed a database. Then it was gone.

  What the hell just happened?

  The cursor jumped once, twice, then the whole display flickered like a dying bulb and went dark for good. I mashed every key combination I knew: Ctrl-Alt-Del, the old Fn+F8 trick, even yanking the battery and holding the power button for a full minute. Nothing. The laptop was a brick now, its final act a cryptic middle finger from whatever had hijacked my save.

  My mind hiccuped again in one clean, sterile flash, like a folder tree unfolding behind my eyes and slotting itself somewhere I couldn’t reach.

  I should’ve been furious or cursing my luck. Instead, I felt an odd, electric prick of possibility, like the exact moment before a match kicks off. If the game had vanished because of a glitch, then fine. If it hadn’t—if whatever that log meant was anything more than coincidence—then maybe losing the screen tonight was the cost of something else starting to happen. I didn’t know how, or when, or what it would look like.

  I picked up my phone again, just as it started buzzing insistently on the desk. Callum’s name flashed across the screen. I swiped to answer, still rubbing at my knee where the laptop had caught me.

  “Oi,” I said.

  “Mate, I forgot my tablet. Got my training notes in there,” Callum said, the grin audible even over the phone. “I’ll grab it. Just round the corner.”

  “Of course,” I muttered. “Never give me a heads-up, just bolt out the door like it’s normal.”

  I hung up and stepped toward the door. Callum had parked his SUV just around the corner and was walking back toward me with hands in his pockets.

  I was already formulating a tirade of complaints in my head when I saw . . . words floating above Callum’s head.

  What in the donkey’s arse is this?

  A tiny click sounded somewhere behind my left ear—real or imagined, I couldn’t tell—and then another barrage of text arrived.