My Ultimate Gacha System-Chapter 330 - 4: The Storm I

Tuesday, May 23, 2023 Demien’s Apartment, Bergamo 6:47 AM

The phone had been vibrating for long enough that the sound had worked its way into his sleep before he was properly awake, and when he opened his eyes the room was bright with early morning light and the screen on the nightstand was lit with a column of notifications that had stacked so high the display had stopped showing individual names and was counting in batches.

He picked it up.

Two hundred and forty-seven notifications in the last hour.

He unlocked it and opened Twitter first because that was always where the shape of something appeared before the detail did, and the England Football official account had posted at six AM.

@England: 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 Gareth Southgate names his squad for our UEFA EURO 2024 qualifying matches against Malta and North Macedonia. First senior call-ups for: Demien Walter (Atalanta)...

The tweet had 890K likes. He read the number twice.

He scrolled down and his name was in the top three trending topics for the UK and seventh worldwide, and beneath that the replies were running too fast to read individually — screenshots, reaction videos, clips of the Coppa Italia hat-trick spliced together with the announcement graphic, a rolling conversation that had been going for forty-seven minutes and showed no sign of slowing.

The phone rang in his hand. Unknown UK number. He declined it.

It rang again thirty seconds later. Different number, same area code. He declined it and turned the ringer off, and the phone continued vibrating silently in his palm while the notifications moved too quickly to clear.

He set it face-down on the bed and looked at the ceiling.

Outside the window Bergamo was doing what it did at six-forty-seven on a Tuesday morning, which was nothing particularly different from any other Tuesday morning, and the pigeons on the ledge opposite were sitting in the same positions they always sat in while the first tram of the day ran through the street below with its familiar clatter.

He got up and made coffee.

By nine-thirty he had declined eleven calls and read approximately a third of the messages that had come through on WhatsApp before giving up on that too, and the apartment had the specific atmosphere of a place that the outside world was pressing against without being able to get inside.

He put on his running shoes just before ten because the apartment had started to feel smaller than it was, and the route he normally took through the park and back along the canal was twenty-five minutes at a comfortable pace and he’d run it enough times that it required no planning.

He made it four minutes from his front door.

The first person who stopped him was a man in his forties coming the other way with a dog, and the recognition happened at about three yards and the man’s face went through the whole sequence — uncertainty, confirmation, decision — before he stopped and extended his hand and said something in Italian about the England call-up that Demien caught despite the man speaking quickly, and Demien shook his hand and thanked him and kept moving.

The second was a pair of university-age women outside the café on the corner who had their phones out before they’d finished saying his name, and he stopped for the photograph and thanked them and kept moving.

The third was a man on a bicycle who slowed to a stop beside him and began talking at a pace that made even Demien’s Italian struggle to keep up, and the conversation lasted two minutes before the man cycled away satisfied, and by that point Demien had covered perhaps six hundred metres from his front door.

He turned around and walked home.

The doorbell rang at eleven-oh-four while he was sitting on the couch with the phone still face-down on the coffee table.

He went to the intercom. The small screen showed a man in his thirties with a press lanyard around his neck standing on the step, and beside him a second person was holding a camera with a directional microphone attached.

He watched the screen for a moment.

The journalist pressed the bell again.

Demien stepped back from the intercom and went to the kitchen to refill his coffee, and the bell rang twice more before they gave up, and five minutes later the street below was quiet again.

He sat back on the couch and the phone buzzed once — a call, not a message — and when he turned it over the screen read Marco Benetti.

11:30 AM

"Marco."

"Before I say anything else," Marco said, and his tone was the brisk professional one rather than the warmer version, "congratulations on the England call-up. That’s a significant step and it’s deserved."

"Thank you," Demien said.

"Right." A beat. "Now. I need to brief you on what’s happened since yesterday and you need to listen without interrupting until I’m finished."

"Go ahead."

"Manchester United submitted a formal bid yesterday evening," Marco said, "fifty-five million euros. Received by Atalanta’s sporting director before close of business. Liverpool followed this morning with a formal approach worth fifty million pounds — that came through at approximately nine AM Italian time. Bayern Munich’s sporting director called me directly yesterday afternoon, which tells you where they are in the process. And Arsenal are preparing an offer — I expect that in writing by the end of the week." He paused. "That’s four top-tier clubs with concrete approaches in less than forty-eight hours."

Demien was quiet.

"There’s more," Marco continued. "The England announcement this morning has accelerated everything. Two of those clubs have already called back to say they’re revising their figures upward in light of the international call-up. The window opens June ninth. That’s seventeen days. These clubs are not going to wait indefinitely."

"Marco—"

"I’m not finished." Not harsh, just direct. "Atalanta’s position is also moving. D’Amico called me yesterday — exploratory conversation, nothing formal — asking whether you have any appetite for a contract extension. So the club is simultaneously receiving bids and asking whether you want to stay. Which means they haven’t decided either, and that’s important information."

Demien absorbed this in silence while the apartment stayed quiet around him.