Welcome to My Kingdom
"Barry Sanders wins!"
Jaehyuk hadn't won—but Tyrone couldn't stop his hands from trembling even as he blew the whistle.
The excitement was as if he'd been the one out there running. It felt like the heat between Sanders and Jaehyuk had infected him.
And he wasn't the only one. Every member of the team stood frozen, staring out at the field in sheer disbelief.
"Holy shit."
"What did I just see...?"
"What the hell just happened?!"
The winner was obvious. When it started, the ball had been in Jaehyuk's hands—now it was in Sanders'.
Jaehyuk had lost possession.
A mistake born of unrefined ball control. He'd slipped past his opponent, sure, but he'd failed to hold onto the ball, and that was a glaring error by any standard.
But Tyrone and several of the team members had no time to dwell on any of that.
A guy who played his first ever game of football yesterday... just got past Coach Sanders.
He got past him!
That single fact blinded them to everything else. After all, not one person here had expected Jaehyuk to take down Barry Sanders in the first place.
If his tryout numbers had been good, maybe. But unlike the day before, his physical stats had been abysmal. His recorded times were utterly average. Whether it was poor conditioning or some lingering injury, he was clearly not the track team ace they had witnessed just yesterday.
Which was why Tyrone had spent the past day kicking himself—was I under some kind of spell? Why was I so desperate to bring in a kid like that?—right up until the moment Jaehyuk pulled off the impossible.
He wasn't going easy on me. Not for a second.
Granted, the man was pushing fifty and no longer possessed the body of his prime. But still—that was Barry Sanders.
A running back ranked among the most famous legends in NFL history.
With that overwhelming gap in skill and experience, no one could have imagined Jaehyuk slipping past him.
"This is honestly unbelievable."
Jaehyuk clearly had no idea who Sanders was, and so had no grasp of just how great a man he'd gone up against.
The average NFL running back lasted a mere 2.5 seasons.
And in that meat grinder of a league, the monster who churned out ten full seasons and more than 150 games was none other than Barry Sanders.
He could have kept playing, too—he only announced his retirement after bonus negotiations with the team fell through. A legend enshrined in the Hall of Fame, a man with seemingly nothing left to prove.
And Jaehyuk had made a contest of it against that monster.
"That was a spin move, right?"
"Yeah. It was over in a blink, but I'm positive."
"So he lied about this being his first time playing football. How does a track kid just do a spin move?"
Tyrone found himself agreeing with the boys. The spin move—a technique that rotated the body with a split-second shift in center of gravity, bleeding off speed naturally while leaving the defender completely bamboozled.
It demanded perfect timing on the rotation, which made it genuinely difficult to pull off even in live play. And Jaehyuk had used it against Barry Sanders of all people—and succeeded, never mind the fumble?
From a track kid whose entire training had been nothing but running in a straight line?
"What is this kid, seriously."
Worse, even in that brief exchange, his burst speed had looked far faster than it had during the 40-yard dash. Why on earth was he faster in pads with a ball in his hands?
Questions piled on questions—and then, abruptly, the man holding the ball burst out laughing.
"Hahaha!"
The laugh rolled across the entire field. Cowed by that booming voice, everyone who'd been replaying the duel in their heads shrank back.
Before long, Sanders' laughter died down and he turned to look at Jaehyuk. And there was Jaehyuk, staring right back at him with an intrigued expression on his face.
"You're an interesting little brat, you know that?"
Tyrone swallowed dryly at Sanders' words. It was phrased as an insult, but the meaning behind it was as good as an acknowledgment of Jaehyuk.
And Sanders was a man whose bar for recognition was so high that he could count the people he'd ever acknowledged on one hand.
"You're not bad yourself, old man. Figures as much, I guess."
Jaehyuk smiled back at him. Then, still wearing that faintly wolfish grin, he asked:
"But I'm curious about one thing."
"Ask away."
Sanders nodded, and Jaehyuk's eyes dropped to the ball dangling from the man's hand.
"The pros must be absolutely loaded with guys even stronger than you, right? Now that your prime is behind you?"
"Kim Jaehyuk! I distinctly told you to mind your manners—!"
The moment a startled Tyrone moved to intervene, Sanders raised a hand to stop him. Then he nodded, the very same smile settling onto his own lips.
"That's right. A place teeming with monsters who'd make the man standing before you look like nothing. That place is the NFL."
"The NFL. Ooh!"
Jaehyuk turned the words over in his mind.
A term completely foreign to him—a boy who had run his whole life with only the Olympics in his sights.
But from this moment on, it was also the place where his goals would live.
"So what do you think, Mr. Sanders? I'm thinking of testing these two legs out there. Just once."
"Heh heh. You've got ten years to go before you can dream that big, brat."
Fwee—. Thwap.
Sanders tossed the ball over, and Jaehyuk fumbled it awkwardly into his arms. Watching him, Sanders burst out laughing all over again.
"Can't even hang onto a football yet, and already talking about conquering the league."
"That's what practice is for. Anyway, this thing is a pain to hold onto."
"It's a slippery little thing. Kind of like life itself."
And that was the end of the conversation. Apparently both Sanders and Jaehyuk felt they'd said everything worth saying, and each went about his business—Jaehyuk gathering up the field equipment, Sanders making his exit.
At how coolly the two of them parted, Tyrone called out:
"Coach, you're leaving?"
"I am. Something urgent just came up, so I'll head out. Thanks for making time today. Take care!"
Sanders claimed something had come up out of nowhere. The team members watched him go, sending him off with looks of pure admiration.
"Safe travels, Coach!"
"Thank you for visiting, Mr. Sanders!"
"Man, what a boss cool guy! How is he that smooth?!"
"That's an NFL Hall of Fame legend for you!"
Oblivious to all of it, Jaehyuk muttered to himself.
"The ball's all slippery."
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
Sanders vanished, and the real training began.
But the team's focus was shot to pieces.
And how could it not be? The sudden appearance of NFL legend Barry Sanders, followed by his one-on-one with Jaehyuk—not a single one of those talking points came with a filter, and their mouths simply would not stop.
"So why do you think Kim Jaehyuk tanked his tryout like that?"
"Right? The way he moved just now was completely insane."
"Maybe he just coasts along and only goes all-out when he actually wants to win?"
Jaehyuk wasn't an official member yet—he'd gone home after finishing his tryout. And Coach Tyrone was away for the moment, busy seeing Sanders off and handling the paperwork for Jaehyuk's enrollment.
"Train. Properly."
A cold voice rippled quietly across the field. The boys flinched and immediately snapped their attention back to drills, not a single complaint among them.
The man who'd spoken was seated on the bench.
Soft, well-groomed brown hair falling in gentle waves. Lightly tanned skin and strikingly vivid blue eyes.
At a glance, he was a fine-featured young man who looked as though he belonged nowhere near a football field—more like a porcelain doll.
"Pathetic, all of you."
Starting quarterback of Wichita North High School.
Team captain Mark Hamilton.
He was one of those who had watched everything—from yesterday's tryout to today's duel. And yet he still refused to acknowledge Jaehyuk.
The track team's ace? He was a one-sport purist who didn't consider anything outside of football worth respecting. To a man like that, a fragile-looking Asian kid was no more than dust.
Give him a few hits and his body will fall apart. It's obvious.
His current showing was decent enough, he'd grant that. Yesterday's tryout, today's duel. But it was all overhyped.
The way Mark saw it, Jaehyuk had simply been lucky. Not in terms of skill—in terms of circumstance. Of all things, the starting running back Ronnie had gotten injured, and in walks this Asian kid, free to shine while everyone's guard was down.
Today was more of the same. Facing a kid who'd literally just started playing football, of all opponents they drew a Barry Sanders decades past his prime.
"Mark."
As he sorted through his thoughts, Liam approached—the team's second-string running back.
A hulking frame for the position. Running backs came in all shapes, and Liam was the textbook power back: the rare kind who bulldozed straight through the line and won collisions with defenders on raw strength and physique alone.
Which made him good enough to keep seriously competing with Ronnie for the starting job.
"What's up."
"What do you think of that guy? You're the captain. He's a lock to join the team at this point."
"A kid who got a little lucky."
Liam tilted his head at the answer.
"You're saying that after what we just saw?"
"I am. His tryout numbers were garbage to begin with. And look—I'm not denying Barry Sanders was a legendary player. He's still a man past fifty. There's no reason to overrate him."
At Mark's cold assessment, Liam just shrugged and started stretching out.
"But the fundamentals are all there. Elite football players mostly come out of track to protect their bodies, and the kid happens to be a track ace."
"Liam, I hate to say this, but I don't get why you of all people—a guy at his position—is defending him."
At Mark's puzzlement, Liam flashed an easy grin. But there was a single shard of frost buried in it.
"Because he's not a threat to my spot. Not yet. He doesn't even know the rules, and outside of running he's got nothing—he can't be my competition."
"Fair point. Besides, speed means nothing if the body can't hold up."
Few sports were as brutal as American football. Every sport carried risk, but football wore injury danger like a second uniform.
One bad injury meant a lost season as a matter of course—and in some cases, a cold verdict that you'd never come back at all. That was the nature of this place.
"Still, it's good motivation. I hope he joins and scrambles for all he's worth, honestly."
"If you say so."
Mark checked Liam's expression, then nodded. But truthfully, he felt nothing much about it.
To Mark—the team's game maker—the other members had always been nothing more than pieces on a chessboard. More pieces joining the board, sharpening one another through competition—those were welcome developments, even for him.
As he watched Liam, fully stretched out, drift off to join the drills, Mark thought of the boy who would soon be joining them and murmured:
"Welcome. To my kingdom."
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
After school.
Tyrone had suddenly appeared at the track team and was currently clutching someone by the arm, begging with everything he had.
"Derek, come on, I'm begging you. A perfect talent like that belongs in football!"
"No means no. Jaehyuk is the track team's ace. No matter how shameless you are, how could you even think about poaching another club's ace?"
After wrapping up the tryout, Tyrone had gotten to work on securing Jaehyuk's transfer.
Everything had gone smoothly—right up until this point. The only thing standing in his way, that is.
"Jaehyuk himself said he's joining the football team. You can't stop that."
"Bring the boy here and have him say it to my face. Until then, you get nothing. Goodbye."
"Derek!"
Tyrone called out in a mournful voice, but Derek simply turned up his nose and pretended not to hear.
Tyrone couldn't give up here, though. One way or another, he was determined to win Derek over.
Bring Jaehyuk in as the deciding voice? Sure, that would make the conversation easy—but it would shatter the unwritten rules between them. Poaching the track team's ace was already a breach of etiquette as it was, but dragging the boy himself in to settle it would be the equivalent of saying they should never show their faces to each other again.
"Derek, don't be like that. How about a beer after work today? Oh—now that I think of it, didn't I see an old bottling of Macallan 18 at my place recently? How does a glass of that sound?"
"Hm. Hmmmm."
Derek, a man with a singular devotion to fine liquor, rolled his eyes in big circles. His face practically screamed how do I squeeze more booze out of this man.
"I mean—an old bottling of Macallan 18? If you have any conscience at all, you wouldn't dare ask for more than—"
Just as Tyrone was about to drive the wedge home, one of the track coaches came sprinting over, shouting.
"Hey! Hey! HEY! We've got a situation! Oh? Coach Tyrone, you're here too! Perfect timing!"
"What is it, Wilson."
Derek asked, licking his lips. The freshly arrived Wilson caught his breath and blurted out, urgent and breathless:
"Someone just applied for the head coaching job of the football team."
"What?"
Derek and Tyrone froze at the completely unexpected news. For Tyrone especially, who held the football team's head coach and coordinator position himself, this was a direct hit.
Derek glanced sideways at Tyrone, wary of touching a nerve—though the look in his eyes was mostly worry about whether he'd still get his drink.
"What are you talking about, Wilson? Give us details."
"Barry Sanders!"
"...Huh?"
Wilson shouted it again, louder this time.
"Barry Sanders! He applied for the head coaching job of the football team!"