France, for half a scene, felt like something.

Garcia sent the profile to two old contacts, and one of them replied faster than he expected. The other asked to see the clip.

For a moment the old network flickered under his hand. Not fully alive. Not dead either. Just enough to make his chest tighten with a hope he had not let himself feel in England.

Then the wall came back, in French this time.

They liked parts of Jay. The isolation. The stillness before the move. But the window was closing on them too, and there was the relocation, the language, the paperwork, and always the same missing thing.

No recent senior proof.

Trop de risque pour maintenant. Too much risk for now.

Garcia read the last message and did not move for a while.

France was supposed to be different. France was where his name had meant something before it all fell apart, and part of him had believed that name would still open a door on its own.

It did not. The door was polite, and it was closed, and his old reputation was not the key he had hoped it was.

He put the phone face-down on the fence rail and watched Jay run, and said nothing to anyone about how much that one had cost him.

He stopped chasing prestige after that.

He stopped asking which club sounded biggest, and started asking a different question entirely.

The second week was where the work started to show.

Garcia was not trying to build a new player. He and Rafi had picked three things and refused to look at anything else. Repeat action quality. The end product out of wide isolation. The final ball when the legs were gone.

Ten focused days, spread across the two weeks, with calls and rest between them.

At first the fourth action held only once in a block, then collapsed again.

Then the fifth action stopped falling apart. Jay started choosing the simple cutback when his legs were dead instead of forcing the shot, and the simple thing kept working.

By the back end of the block, something had changed in his body under fatigue.

He could beat the man, take the contact as the full-back leaned in, ride it, recover his balance, and still put the ball into the same dangerous space he had found on the first fresh rep.

The strongest one came late on the ninth day.

Jay was already bent double, hands on his shorts, breath sawing in and out. Rafi did not give him the ten seconds he wanted.

"Go."

The ball came in.

Jay’s first touch carried him too wide, out toward the line, and the defender leaned into his shoulder to push him further.

THUD.

He took the contact, held his feet, dragged the ball back under control, and whipped the cutback low across the box before he had even squared his body.

Clean. Into the space. After everything.

Rafi did not clap. Rafi never clapped.

"Better," he said. "Now do it with a man on the back post. You made it too easy for yourself."

And he set the next rep up harder.

Norway came last, and it came because Garcia finally started asking the right question.

Not which club was biggest. Which country still had time.

Ben gave him the name of a contact at a Norwegian club, but the name alone was not the thing that worked.

Garcia earned it.

He sat up half a night cutting the clip properly. He threw out the flashy nonsense, the beaten defenders that meant nothing, the moments that looked good and proved nothing.

He left only proof.

The first clean action. The same action repeated. The action done tired. The action done through contact. And the final ball at the end of all of it.

Three minutes. No music. No tricks. Just a winger doing the hard thing over and over.

Then he framed Jay for what he actually was.

Not a panic signing to fix an August hole. A next-season evaluation. A free agent worth a proper look before anyone committed to anything.

The Norwegian contact did not overpromise. Garcia respected him more for it.

Their season ran deep into the autumn, not out in May, and that was the whole point. They could take a look at Jay in October, with the first team, while their own campaign was winding down. Not to register him in a rush. To decide whether he belonged in next season’s planning.

The offer, if it came, was a possible one-month first-team trial. In October. If the final clip, after the readiness block, still looked as real as this one.

It was not a contract. It was not even a yes.

It was a target with a date on it, and after two weeks of closed doors, a date was everything.

The panel came the evening Garcia sent the confirmed clip and got the October window agreed in writing.

[SIDE MISSION COMPLETED]

Mission: Build Jay Cole’s Trial Readiness

Objective Complete: Jay Cole has completed the intensive readiness block, and Garcia has secured a realistic professional trial pathway.

Final Evaluation:

— Repeat Action Quality: Professional trial standard

— Wide-Isolation End Product: Stable

— Final Action Under Fatigue: Improved

— Training Response: High

— Trial Pathway: October first-team evaluation in Norway

Rewards:

— Skill Points +500

— Client Management SP +100

— Reputation +5

[Skill Points: 2,000 → 2,500]

Garcia read it once and closed it.

The mission had stopped being about finding Jay a long time ago. It had become about managing him, cutting the risk off his profile until a club with the right calendar could say maybe.

That was the job now. Not discovery. Management.

He did not smile. There was nothing finished to smile about.

He went back to the pitch for the last rep of the block.

Jay was spent. Ten days were in his legs, and the sweat had gone cold on him in the evening air.

Rafi sent him one more time anyway, because a scout would too.

The ball came in. Jay beat the man, took the contact on his standing side, stumbled half a step, found his balance, and put the same low, dangerous cutback into the same space he had been missing two weeks ago.

The exact thing he could not do at the start.

THWACK.

Rafi stopped the drill.

He did not turn it into a moment. He just picked up the cones and nodded once, which from Rafi was a paragraph.

Jay stood in the middle of it, hands on his head, chest going, and for the first time since the café he looked like a footballer who half believed it again.

Garcia opened his notebook to the page where the October date sat by itself.

Underneath it, he wrote one line.

Make him impossible to ignore.