Extra Basket

Ethan felt it first, a pressure like hands pressing against his shoulders from both sides. His breath stalled. Without realizing, his fingers curled into the railing of the bleacher seating. Evan, seated beside him, leaned forward, his eyes locked on the court but even he had gone quiet. The noise, the lights, the chants… it all blurred around the two of them, as if the world had chosen to mute itself in respect or fear.

Down on the Chicago Raptors' bench, something was cracking.

It wasn't loud. It wasn't dramatic. No one screamed. No one threw a chair. It was quieter than that… more unsettling than any outburst could ever be.

One by one, the Raptors' players supposedly the strongest middle school team in the region began to lose their posture. A shooting guard with a shaved head could be seen massaging his wrist, not because it hurt, but because it was trembling and he was trying to hide it. Another, eyes bloodshot, kept glancing at the scoreboard and then at the Gods team… then back at the scoreboard… then back at the Gods.

They weren't playing basketball anymore. They were checking reality.

A bead of sweat rolled down Coach Jenkins' jawline. His clipboard was still clutched in his hand, but his fingers were pale from how hard he gripped it. The plastic groaned quietly, bending. His breath escaped in short bursts, but his focus wasn't on the numbers on the board… It was fixed on the boy standing at the top of the key.

Jalen "Flash" Carter. Hands loose. Jersey barely clinging to his frame. Head slightly tilted down… eyes half-lidded like someone who wasn't even warmed up yet.

As the scoreboard glowed: GODS: 33 | RAPTORS: 15. First quarter, 1:42 left. The digits hung like a verdict in the air and the arena answered with a low, animal hum that crawled under ribs and into the teeth. The players weren't gasping from exertion — their bodies still had fuel but their minds were fraying at the edges, unraveling thread by thread until instinct felt foreign.

Tyrese stood on the wing, jersey glued to his back, breathing sharp and tight. Two shots so far, but each felt like an hour. He felt the weight first as a pressure in his sternum, as if the air itself had become thicker; his chest moved against a resistance that wasn't there a minute ago. Poseidon was facing him, Kai's shoulders unmoved, eyes like deep water: still, endless, no surface to catch even the light. Kai didn't twitch, he didn't close his stance, he simply looked.

Tyrese caught the pass, rose, muscles rehearsed and honest, everything he'd practiced a hundred times. He lifted. Poseidon did not leap, did not gesture, did not make contact. He only tilted his head and watched. The second Tyrese let go, something invisible crushed his lungs like a hand closing where air should be. His fingertips tightened wrong, the ball left with tremor, the arc collapsed, and the rim spat it back with a hollow clang. Sound blurred; vision swam; the miss landed with the finality of a door slamming. Poseidon turned away before Tyrese's heartbeat settled. No celebration, just the quiet certainty: You were never going to hit it.

Inside, Kobe squared under the rim, feet rooted as if waiting for the planet to tilt. Chronos stood a breath away, palm lifted like a judge showing calm. A lob floated up and Kobe exploded early, too early, his legs burning with kinetic memory. He hung, the world in slow suspension. Chronos did not need to force himself; he waited with the patience of something that measured time differently, and at the exact instant Kobe reached peak, Chronos rose. Not a violent assault but a surgical correction: fingertips against ball, redirecting its path with the economy of inevitability. The swat made no theater, only a quiet correction of misaligned expectation. Kobe's chest dropped as if gravity had remembered him. I waited… and I wasted it, his mind registered, hollow and small.

Malik, the lock, moved into help like clockwork his role was to close gaps, to be the margin of safety. But Hades didn't meet him in movement. Hades occupied the idea of the lane before Malik even decided to step into it. Every time Malik predicted an angle, a shadow had already stepped a half-foot ahead. Shoes scraped. Balance wavered by a hair. A tiny misplacement: an inch of wrong that multiplied into a cascade. On the next cut, Hades walked past him not sprinting, not crushing but with the confidence of a consequence. He leaned near Malik's ear and spoke, voice small as a breath: "You're already dead. Stop moving." Malik's knees folded in surprise; he stumbled exactly as the sentence demanded.

Zion scanned the court, mind a spider-web of options passes, counters, feints, improbable constructions he'd seen work a thousand times. But everywhere he reached, Zeus' presence had already thinned the possibilities. It wasn't a physical blockade; it was an erasure in the ledger of outcomes. Each thought Zion pushed forward met a flicker of blue static and collapsed like a house of cards. No path leads to a score, his mind tried to argue, then felt the whisper of something colder: No move leads to a score. His breaths shortened. The strategist who prided himself on future-proofing plays found the future already penciled in by someone else's pen.

And Jalen. Jalen who unstitched time with his feet, who had once folded distance like paper. He stood at the top with the ball like a man cupping a flare. For a beat, his eyes slid to Zeus and the look that returned was not fear but a deeper cut: rejection. Zeus did not barrel, did not brandish superiority; he merely continued to exist in a way that made Jalen's tricks feel like whispers in a cathedral. You are not on the stage, the silence told Jalen. His fingers contracted on the ball. Veins stood out on his jaw. Then I'll burn the whole damn stage alive. The intent was a coal in his chest; it flared, bright and dangerous, but even that flame felt small against the room's chill.

From the bleachers Ethan gripped the cold railing until his knuckles blanched. Evan sat beside him, shoulders hunched, both of them small against the cathedral of noise. Lucas leaning a little back in shadow smiled in a way that didn't reach his eyes: an excited, hungry thing. They were not participants; they were witnesses, and even witnesses bled emotion into the air. Ethan's pupils flicked, betraying a panic he wouldn't voice. This isn't basketball anymore, his whisper cut between breaths. Evan's voice came low, edged with a reverence that made the words sound like prayer and warning at once: A throne war.

The crowd's roar had not turned to silence; it had been refined into a single, continuous exhale. Spectators watched but their watching shifted curiosity hybridized with dread. Shouts became patterns; the rhythm of clapping slowed like a heartbeat dropping in tempo.

The Gods weren't straining. They were polished and minimal, movement pared down to the essential. They hadn't even scraped half of what they could do. Their power was not punching; it was an arm of inevitability extended into the present. To watch them was to feel reality lace itself differently: shots curving into yawns of inevitability, drives losing the right to be attempted, eyes reflexively lowering in the presence of a magnitude they could not contend with.

The Raptors still had legs, still had breath, still had muscle fiber and fight. They had not been bested by speed or strength; they had been bested by a recalibration of belief. Each failed attempt was a small erasure: a shot that the scoreboard swallowed, a cut that met a void where a defender had already decided to be. The team's inner chorus, the voice that says we can come back stuttered and thinned until only a tentative whisper remained.

On the court, a single movement could tilt the balance. Jalen tightened his grip, closed his eyes for a second, and the world around him bristled as if acknowledging his intent. He launched, a streak meant to split fate. Zeus watched, and by the time the ball connected the net, it felt like it had always been a thought already cogitated and achieved. The net accepted it not with drama but with confirmation.

In the span of a few breaths, a fracture had formed not in bodies but in the bedrock beneath belief. The Gods had not reached for full force; they were still in the early chapters of their power. Yet the Raptors' certainty, that most fragile yet crucial asset, was being rewritten: choices folded, confidence suppressed, instinct rerouted into caution. Ethan pressed his forehead to the cool metal of the railing, tasting iron on his tongue as if the arena had become a confessional for the defeated.

The clock blinked. 1:25. The crowd leaned in as one organism. The gods moved like architects of inevitability, minimal and precise. The Raptors moved like hearts trying to remember how to beat.

Above everything, Zeus's gaze slid across the court and found the bleachers, slow and almost patient, like a god noticing an ant. Ethan felt that gaze as a physical thing—a cool wind across skin. He did not look away. He could not. In that moment the arena was not a place of sport; it was a throne room where young kings and pawns alike were tested for the shape of their souls.

The first crack had been struck. The Gods had barely warmed to their tools. The Raptors had not been broken by force alone; they had been asked the oldest question: are you the author of what happens next? And one by one, their hands trembled as they tried to sign for a future someone else was already drafting.

The game continued, the clock ate seconds, but the air had changed. The court no longer felt like wood and paint and numbered lines. It felt like a ground under new law, where choices were taxed and the price was belief itself.

To be continue