Infinite Rebate: I Get Richer Every Time I Spend

Lucas didn’t hesitate.

"I want to learn street ball. The real version. Not what they teach in school."

Dead silence.

Then the whole crowd erupted into laughter, loud enough to echo off the surrounding buildings.

A wiry guy near the front, motormouth running before anyone else could even react, pointed straight at Lucas.

"Bro’s too soft for street ball!"

That was Bones. Nobody remembered his real name anymore. He’d talked so much trash for so many years that the nickname had just replaced it.

"Look at his shoes, man, he gon’ cry after one possession."

Lucas just stood there, waiting for it to pass.

It took a while.

But eventually Ghost raised a hand, and the laughter died down enough for him to speak again.

"You serious?"

"Dead serious."

He studied Lucas for a long moment, glancing at the empty crates, the crowd still buzzing around them, then back at Lucas’s face.

"...Aight. Let’s see what you got."

---

At first, they went easy on him.

Ghost walked him through basic footwork himself, showed him how to shield the ball with his body, how to use his hip to create space. Nothing that would actually hurt. Nothing that would actually teach him anything real.

Lucas caught on fast.

"This isn’t it," he said, cutting off a demonstration halfway through. "I need the real thing. However you actually play out here."

Ghost frowned.

"Bro, you don’t want that."

"I do."

"You really don’t."

"I need it," Lucas said, voice flat, no hesitation in it at all. "Whatever you’d do to someone you didn’t like. Whatever you’d do to close a game out dirty. That’s what I need."

Silence again.

But this time it wasn’t laughter.

It was the kind of silence that came from people realizing someone actually meant what they said.

Ghost exhaled, studying Lucas like he was reevaluating something.

"You sure? Won’t be pretty."

"I’m sure."

He shrugged.

"Your funeral."

---

Old Man Reed had been sitting on the same bench the entire time, cigarette between two fingers, watching everything with the tired patience of someone who’d seen a hundred kids like Lucas come through and leave in worse shape than they arrived.

He didn’t say a word as Ghost picked the teams.

He just kept watching.

---

The first few minutes told him everything.

The ball touched Lucas’s hands for less than a second before a wall hit him from the side.

Tank.

Two hundred and forty pounds of pure force, the kind of build that didn’t need skill because nobody survived the collision long enough to punish him for it. He didn’t strip the ball so much as remove Lucas from the equation entirely, sending him stumbling two full steps before he caught his balance.

The ball was already gone.

Old Man Reed, without looking up from his cigarette, muttered just loud enough for Lucas to hear.

"You flinched."

Lucas frowned. He didn’t understand what that meant yet.

The next play, he caught the ball again and braced before contact hit, legs set, shoulders squared.

It didn’t matter.

A hand snaked in from his blind side and the ball vanished before he even registered it was gone.

Spider.

Nobody in the neighborhood had faster hands. He didn’t need to see the ball to take it, he just needed a fraction of a second of hesitation, and Lucas had given him exactly that.

"Too slow," Spider said, already dribbling away, not even looking back.

Bones wouldn’t shut up the whole time.

"Man can’t even hold a rock for two seconds! Ya’ll seeing this?"

Lucas ignored him. A few plays later, instead of waiting for Tank’s hit to land, he stepped into it first, driving his own shoulder forward a half beat before contact.

It wasn’t much.

But Tank actually stumbled, just slightly, just enough to buy Lucas an extra half second before the ball was gone again.

Ghost, watching from the sideline, said nothing.

But he nodded once.

Not long after, Lucas remembered what Ghost had taught him before the real game started. Shield the ball. Use the body as a wall.

He caught the next pass, immediately turned his back to Spider, cupping the ball low and tight against his hip.

Spider reached.

And reached again.

And came up empty both times.

"...Aight," Spider muttered, more surprised than annoyed. "Aight, I see you."

The next stretch of plays blurred together in a wave of shoving, cursing, and stolen balls, but something had started to shift. Lucas wasn’t losing the ball instantly anymore. He was losing it after two seconds, then three, then five, each possession stretching a little longer than the last as his body started catching up to what his mind already understood.

He still got hit.

He still hit the ground twice, ribs screaming, Bones cackling from the sideline every time.

But he got back up faster each time too.

By the end of the first hour, Ghost switched onto him personally.

No warning. No announcement. He just stepped into the lane and locked eyes with Lucas like the rest of the game had stopped existing.

"Let’s see it," Ghost said.

Lucas caught the ball.

Ghost stripped him clean, no contact at all, just pure timing, the ball gone before Lucas even finished his first dribble.

"That’s the gap between soft and real," Ghost said, walking away with the ball spinning on one finger. "You still got soft in you."

Lucas caught the ball again on the next play.

This time, instead of trying to protect it the way he’d been taught, he attacked first, driving hard into the space Ghost was guarding, using his shoulder like Tank had used his earlier.

Ghost didn’t budge.

But he also didn’t strip the ball clean this time.

It took him two full seconds longer than before.

Another game started not long after, this one rougher than the first, and Tank came at him again, full force, clearly annoyed that Lucas had adjusted to him earlier.

Lucas met the hit instead of absorbing it, planting his feet and driving back, and for the first time all afternoon, Tank was the one who had to reset his footing.

Bones stopped laughing for a second.

Just a second.

Then he found something else to yell about, but it wasn’t about Lucas anymore.

Spider tried the same steal that had worked three times already.

It didn’t work a fourth time.

Lucas turned his hip a half second before the reach came, and Spider’s hand closed on nothing but air.

"...Okay," Spider said quietly, mostly to himself. "Okay."

By the second hour, something in the rhythm of the game had changed completely.

Lucas wasn’t dominating. He wasn’t close to it.

But he wasn’t the easiest target on the court anymore either, and out here, that difference mattered more than any highlight reel move ever could.

Three hours in, deep into the last game of the day, Lucas caught the ball, absorbed a hit from Tank without losing his footing, spun away from a reach by Spider, and put up a rough, ugly shot from twelve feet out.

It rattled in.

For half a second, the whole court went quiet.

Then Bones, of all people, let out a short laugh, not mocking this time, just genuine disbelief.

"Aight. Aight, that’s something."

---

By the time the game finally broke apart, sweat-soaked bodies scattering toward shade and water, Old Man Reed was the only one still watching Lucas with any real attention, cigarette burned down to nothing between his fingers.

He wasn’t shaking his head anymore.

---

He waved Lucas over once the crowd thinned out.

"Sit."

Lucas sat, breathing hard, ribs aching from at least four separate collisions.

Old Man Reed studied him for a long moment through a haze of smoke.

"You got skills. Strength too. More than I expected from somebody who looks like you."

"Thanks."

"Wasn’t a compliment. Was an observation."

He reached beside the bench and pulled out a shoebox, worn at the corners, taped shut in two places.

"I can help you. Got something special. The OG shoe. Real one. Not the fake stuff they sell downtown."

He opened the box just enough to show a glimpse of leather inside.

"Every real player out here knows about these. Been saving them for the right person. Ten thousand, and they’re yours."

Lucas looked at the shoes.

Then at Old Man Reed.

He wasn’t buying the story for a second. The pitch was too smooth, too rehearsed, the kind of thing you said to a dozen different marks until one of them actually believed it.

But he also didn’t feel like arguing.

He didn’t come here to fight over shoes with an old man running a con on a street corner. He came here to learn, and he’d already gotten more than he expected out of the day.

"I’ll take them."

Old Man Reed’s eyebrows lifted, clearly surprised it had been that easy.

Then he smiled, slow and satisfied, like a fisherman who’d finally landed something after years of waiting.

"Knew it. Knew a real one would come through eventually."

Lucas sent the payment without another word.

He had no plans of ever wearing them.

He just didn’t have the time, or the interest, in making an enemy out of an old man over ten thousand dollars he could make back in an afternoon.

By the time he stood up to leave, the sky over 24 Mob District had bled into a deep orange, the sun sinking fast behind the rooftops like it was retreating from the neighborhood too.

Behind him, Ghost, Tank, Spider, and Bones were already arguing about something else entirely, voices rising over the cracked concrete, like the last three hours had never happened.

Like they hadn’t just handed a stranger something most people spent years trying to earn out here.

Lucas didn’t look back.

He walked toward the main road, every breath sending pain through his ribs, sweat soaking his shirt, dried blood clinging above his eyebrow.

It hurt.

Good.

That meant today had been worth it.

Tomorrow...

Northlake was going to find out exactly what three hours on the streets had created.

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