My Ultimate Gacha System-Chapter 331 - 5: The Storm II

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

"Now you can talk," Marco said.

"I can’t think about transfers right now," Demien said. "The England announcement came six hours ago. I haven’t processed that yet."

"I understand that," Marco said, and the patience in it was genuine rather than performed. "But I need you to also understand that the calendar doesn’t care about your processing time. The window opens in seventeen days and clubs with fifty million euros on the table don’t hold their position indefinitely while a nineteen-year-old gets comfortable with the idea."

"I know that," Demien said.

"Good." Marco’s voice settled slightly. "So I’m not asking you to make a decision today. I’m asking you to agree that we sit down properly and go through everything together before the window opens. Face to face. I’ll come to you, or you come to me — wherever is easier."

Demien ran a hand along the back of his neck. "After England duty," he said. "June twenty-first. That’s when I’m back. We sit down then."

A pause. "That’s tight."

"I know it’s tight."

"The window will be open for twelve days by then," Marco said. "We’d be negotiating with clubs who’ve had a month to plan and we’d be starting from scratch."

"Then brief me before I go," Demien said. "Send me everything in writing — the offers, the terms, the positions. I’ll read all of it during the camp. I just won’t make a decision until I’m back. Can we work with that?"

Marco was quiet for a moment, and Demien recognised the particular silence of someone calculating whether the terms were workable rather than deciding whether to accept them.

"I can work with that," Marco said finally. "I’ll have a full briefing document to you by Friday. Everything in writing — figures, contract lengths, wage structures, what each club has communicated about their sporting plans. You read it. You think about it. Then we talk June twenty-first."

"Yes."

"And Demien." Marco’s voice shifted slightly, the professional register dropping one degree. "This is a real decision with real consequences in both directions. I want you to treat it like one. Not something you decide in five minutes on the phone."

"I know what it is," Demien said.

"Good," Marco said. "Enjoy the England camp. And call me if anything changes before then."

The call ended and Demien set the phone on the table again and looked at the window where the morning had moved forward while they’d been talking, and outside the pigeons had relocated from the ledge opposite to somewhere further down the street.

Tuesday — Wednesday Bergamo

Sky Sport Italia ran it for most of Tuesday afternoon — a twenty-minute segment that led their early evening show, two analysts in a studio with a graphic of Demien’s season statistics on one side of the screen and a map of Europe with the interested clubs plotted on the other, and the conversation moved through whether Italian football could hold its best young talent and what it would mean for Serie A if he left before reaching his ceiling.

He watched about four minutes of it before switching channels.

La Gazzetta dello Sport published an opinion piece that he found by accident because someone sent him the link, the headline asking whether he would follow Jude Bellingham’s path out of continental football too early, and the piece made a reasonable argument alongside some less reasonable assumptions and he read it to the end out of stubbornness rather than interest.

Atalanta’s official account posted a congratulations tweet for the England call-up at three PM and the replies section became the specific kind of conversation that supporter accounts have when they’re afraid of something — don’t sell him, please Percassi, he has to stay for the Champions League, and several in Italian that were more pointed — while the retweet count climbed past twenty thousand.

Wednesday started the same way Tuesday had ended, which was with notifications he’d stopped reading and a ringer that stayed off and a coffee that he made automatically each morning because the routine was something to do while the world outside made noise.

The Athletic piece went up at half past nine. Eight thousand words, a byline he recognised from the times Atalanta had been covered in English-language football press, and the headline was straightforward: From Fiorentina’s reject list to England’s senior squad: the making of Demien Walter.

He read the whole thing.

It was thorough and largely accurate, reconstructed from sources he couldn’t identify but who had clearly spoken to people who had been present — at the trial, at Atalanta’s early training sessions, at matches — and the through-line it drew from the Fiorentina rejection to the Coppa Italia hat-trick was the kind of narrative that worked because it was true rather than because it had been constructed. The Fiorentina section he read quickly and without lingering because that part of the story still had texture he didn’t particularly want to visit on a Wednesday morning.

The BBC Sport highlight reel appeared on his timeline at around eleven, and the graphic at the bottom of the video said 2.4 million views before he’d finished watching it, which was a number that required a specific kind of mental distance to look at without it meaning something disruptive.

He closed Twitter at half past two on Wednesday afternoon and did not reopen it.

The transfer aggregators continued running updates regardless, and Romano posted three times across Tuesday and Wednesday — United’s interest confirmed again, Liverpool’s sporting structure flagged as the right fit, a standalone tweet noting that Atalanta had not yet responded formally to either bid — and each one arrived at several hundred thousand engagements within the hour, and none of it required his participation to continue.

The doorbell rang twice more on Wednesday. He didn’t answer either time.

He made dinner at seven, read for an hour before bed, and set his alarm for eight because the train to Florence left at nine-fifteen and he’d told his mother he’d arrive in the evening.