The Manchester rain didn't stop for three days after the City match. It matched the mood inside the Blackburn Rovers training facility perfectly.
The locker room was a morgue. The 4-0 thrashing by Manchester City had completely broken the team's illusion that they belonged in the Premier League. Davies, the giant center-back, was staring blankly at the floor. Briggs, the veteran, was wrapping his knees in silence. They had looked into the eyes of gods, and they had blinked.
Rio didn't sit with them. He was already out on the freezing, waterlogged training pitch, alone.
He set up ten balls in a semi-circle around the edge of the penalty box.
"You broadcast your intentions too loudly, kid. We don't play with emotion here. We play with execution." Silas's cold, bored voice echoed in Rio's head.
Rio looked at his own legs. The massive, iron-dense muscles. The Apex Predator aura that relied on explosive, aggressive power. Silas was right. To generate that much power, Rio had to drop his shoulder, plant his foot, and wind up. In the Championship, defenders were too slow to react. In the Premier League, that microsecond wind-up was a massive neon sign pointing exactly to what he was about to do.
If he wanted to beat the monsters, he had to stop roaring before he bit.
Rio stepped up to the first ball. He closed his eyes. He didn't summon the abyssal black smoke. He actively suppressed it. He forced his heart rate to slow down. He emptied his mind of rage, of arrogance, of the desperate need to prove himself.
He created a vacuum.
He opened his eyes. They were completely devoid of emotion.
He didn't run at the ball. He walked. And without breaking his stride, without planting his left foot heavily, without dropping his shoulder or pulling his right arm back for balance... he simply snapped his right knee forward.
It was a biomechanical nightmare. Generating power without leverage is supposed to be impossible.
Thud. The ball flew, but it was weak. It rolled softly into the hands of the empty net.
"Trash," Rio whispered.
He moved to the second ball.
Walk. Suppress. Snap.
Thud. A little faster, but still too weak. The Premier League goalkeepers would catch it with one hand.
He moved to the third, the fourth, the fifth. He stayed out there for three hours in the freezing rain. His right knee was screaming in agony from the unnatural snapping motion. He was trying to forge a strike that had zero telegraph, zero emotion, and zero warning.
A ghost strike.
Saturday arrived. Blackburn Rovers vs. Aston Villa. Ewood Park.
The atmosphere was tense. The fans were already nervous. Aston Villa was a top-half team, fast and utterly ruthless.
Within thirty minutes, Villa had completely dismantled Blackburn's midfield. The speed of the Premier League was simply too much for the newly promoted side. The score was 2-0 to Villa before the halftime whistle even blew.
In the dressing room, the Blackburn manager was shouting until his voice gave out. "Where is the fight?! We are getting bullied in our own stadium!"
Rio sat in the corner, staring at the mud on his boots. He felt completely detached from the panic in the room. His Will wasn't flaring. It was utterly silent.
The second half began.
In the 65th minute, Rio received the ball with his back to the goal, thirty-five yards out. Two Aston Villa defenders instantly swarmed his back, shoving their forearms into his neck, trying to force him to pass backward.
Rio didn't fight their pressure. He didn't try to bulldoze them like he had against Leeds.
He went completely limp.
The two defenders, expecting heavy resistance from the muscular striker, suddenly found themselves pushing against dead weight. They stumbled forward, their balance broken.
Rio spun around them in a terrifyingly silent, fluid motion. He was facing the goal.
The Aston Villa center-back, a veteran international player, stepped up. He kept his eyes locked firmly on Rio's hips and shoulders, waiting for the telltale drop that signaled a shot.
Rio dribbled toward him at a slow, almost lazy pace.
Empty the mind. No rage. No intent.
The center-back waited for the wind-up.
It never came.
While still in a light jog, Rio's right leg snapped like a whip. His torso didn't twist. His left arm didn't swing. To the naked eye, his body mechanics looked like he was just taking another step.
But his boot connected with the ball with a terrifying, hollow CRACK.
Because there was no spin applied from a traditional wind-up, the ball didn't curve. It became a knuckleball. It ripped through the air, completely devoid of rotation, violently dipping and swerving in three different directions at once.
The Aston Villa goalkeeper didn't even dive. His brain couldn't process that a shot had been taken until the ball was already past him.
It smashed into the top corner, the net bulging violently.
2-1.
The stadium went dead silent for a second before erupting. They had never seen a strike like that. It looked like magic.
Rio didn't celebrate. He turned around, his face a mask of absolute, chilling apathy. The new weapon had been forged. The Zero-State Strike. But as Rio jogged back to the center circle, the reality of the Premier League came crashing back down.
Ten minutes later, Blackburn's exhausted defense made a simple positional error. Aston Villa's winger slipped past Davies, cut inside, and slotted the ball cleanly into the bottom corner.
3-1.
Then, in the 88th minute, a bad pass from the Blackburn midfield led to a counter-attack.
4-1.
The final whistle blew.
Rio stood in the center of the pitch. He had unlocked a weapon capable of killing giants. He had just scored a goal that would be played on highlight reels across the world.
But as he looked around at his teammates—Davies lying on his back in despair, Briggs staring blankly into the stands, the manager rubbing his temples on the touchline—Rio realized the horrifying truth.
He had evolved. But his team had not. The ship was taking on water, and no matter how many cannons Rio fired, they were starting to sink.