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

Luc was stationed just outside his own penalty area, tasked with defending the edge of the box. His chest heaved, his breaths coming in ragged, visible clouds.

The mud had seeped into his socks, adding pounds of dead weight to his every stride. His lower back was screaming, a sharp pain radiating down his left every time he decelerated.

The corner was whipped in, punched away by Blažek, and hacked up the field by Zack Florez.

The clearance was terrible. It lacked height and distance, falling to the Dijon holding midfielder just ten yards beyond the center circle. The midfielder took a touch and prepared to launch another wave of attack.

Luc forced his legs to move. He sprinted at the midfielder, pressing him entirely on his own. It was a futile, desperate run, but the aggression of it forced the Dijon player into a rushed, inaccurate pass out of bounds... maybe not so futile in the end.

Luc stopped, his hands dropping to his knees. He stared at the torn grass between his boots. The exhaustion buildup in his thighs was reaching a critical, paralyzing threshold. The stadium clock flickered in the corner of his vision.

60:12.

He had hit the window. He could not physically sustain this level of isolated trench warfare for another half-hour without tearing a muscle or completely collapsing.

"TES," Luc thought, his mental voice sharp and desperate. "Activate Endurance Surge."

He was so lucky to have gotten this consumable.

[System Notification]

[Consumable: Endurance Surge — Activated.]

[0 uses remaining.]

[Effect: In-match muscle fatigue eliminated for 30 minutes.]

The transition was not subtle. It did not feel like a second wind or the gradual return of energy.

A wave of icy sensation radiated outward from the base of his spine, sweeping down his hamstrings and up across his chest. The agonizing burn was instantly neutralized, wiped clean from his muscle fibers as if it had never existed. His heart rate, which had been hammering against his ribs at an unsustainable tempo, stabilized. The crushing weight of his waterlogged boots suddenly felt negligible.

He stood up straight, rolling his neck. He took a deep breath, his lungs expanding fully without the restricting tightness of exhaustion.

He was fresh. He was operating on minute-one stamina in the sixty-first minute.

A Dijon center-back, jogged past him to reset for the throw-in. The defender was breathing heavily, his face pale with fatigue. He glanced at Luc, fully expecting to see the American hunched over, broken by the isolation.

Instead, Luc looked back at him with stillness. The exhaustion was gone from his eyes.

The center-back blinked, a flicker of unease crossing his face, and quickly looked away.

The dynamic of the pitch fundamentally shifted. Dijon continued to press, searching for the equalizer against the ten men of Valois, but their backline suddenly found themselves dealing with an anomaly.

---

Minute sixty-eight.

Klaus headed a clearance forward. The ball dropped near the halfway line. The Dijon center-back stepped up aggressively to win the header, confident he could outmuscle the isolated, theoretically exhausted striker.

Luc didn’t brace for the impact. Powered by the Endurance Surge, he leaped over with new energy, winning the header cleanly and flicking the ball into the vast expanse of empty space behind the Dijon defensive line.

Luc landed, his cleats finding immediate traction in the mud, and accelerated.

The burst of speed was terrifying. The Dijon defenders, their own legs heavy with an hour of wet-pitch football, looked like they were running in slow motion. Luc blew past the center-back, bearing down on the penalty area completely alone.

He had no support. Hugo and Baini were pinned sixty yards away, defending their own box. It was just Luc, the ball, and the goalkeeper.

The keeper stayed on his line, staring desperately at Luc’s feet.

With his leg muscles firing at absolute peak capacity, he chopped the ball sharply to his right. The momentum carried him wide, tightening the angle, but he still believed he had a good shot on goal after selling the keeper.

He drove his right boot through the ball, slotting it cleanly into the net.

Goal.

2-0.

The Stade Gaston Gérard only sound was the howling wind and the jubilant, exhausted screams of the SC Valois players from the opposite end of the pitch.

Luc jogged toward the touchline, entirely unbothered by the effort. He stood, waiting for Klaus and Baini, who were slowly jogging up the pitch, gasping for air, their faces displaying a mixture of disbelief and utter relief.

"How are you... running like that?" Baini panted, leaning heavily against Luc’s shoulder.

"Fighting spirit," Luc replied smoothly, clapping the Moroccan on the back. "The match is dead. Let them pass it around the back. We just sit deep and watch the clock."

The second goal was the definitive executioner’s blow. Dijon’s spirit, artificially inflated by the red card, was instantly shattered by the realization that their opponent’s striker was somehow immune to the physical degradation of the match.

They had thrown every tactical and physical weapon they possessed at the ten men of Valois, and they had been dismantled by a single, stamina-defying counter-attack.

For the final twenty minutes, SC Valois entrenched themselves in a flawless, impenetrable 4-5-0 block. Luc operated as a solitary disruptive force, casually jogging across the defensive line, shutting down passing lanes without breaking a sweat, fueled entirely by the lingering effects of the system’s consumable.

Dijon managed a few desperate, long-range efforts, but Blažek dealt with them comfortably. The mud, the freezing rain, and the demoralization of the 2-0 deficit bled the remaining time off the clock.

When the referee finally signaled the end of the match with three sharp blasts of his whistle, the Valois players collapsed onto the wet turf, their bodies entirely spent from the defensive war.

Luc remained standing.

He walked over to Klaus, offering a hand to haul the exhausted German veteran out of the sludge.

[System Notification]

[Endurance Surge effect concluding in 3... 2... 1...]

The moment the countdown hit zero, the biological debt of the ninety-minute war slammed into Luc like a physical wall. The icy sensation vanished, instantly replaced by the agonizing bone-deep fatigue, and the throbbing bruise on his lower back. His knees buckled slightly, his vision swimming for a fraction of a second as his organic limits reasserted themselves.

Klaus, sensing the sudden shift in his captain’s posture, gripped Luc’s shoulder, steadying him.

"You carried us today," Klaus murmured, his voice hoarse. "You earned your rest."

He draped an arm over Klaus’s massive shoulder, and together, the exhausted conquerors limped down the tunnel, leaving Dijon behind them.

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