Chapter 1261 (1/2)

Kiersty frowned over at her idiot brother, who was hurrying down the stairs toward their seats at such a pace that she hadn’t even been able to look around at the vast crowds swarming around the stadium. “All I’m saying is that we don’t need to be this early to this thing! Let’s go play some of the carnival games they set up outside.”

“I just want to check out how good our view will be,” Nathan insisted as he took the stairs down two at a time. Behind Kiersty, Tykes and Dinesh smiled while they strolled to follow, but they had been largely content to let Nathan drag them along like cans after the car of newly-weds.

And if compared him and Mariah to newly-weds, Nathan’s head would be full of nonsense for a week… Kiersty could only purse her lips and refrain from commenting on this aggressive switch in her brother’s behavior.

If she hadn’t used her Sphere of Detection Skill multiple times over the course of their journey to the heart of Zone 1, Kiersty would have just assumed that Mariah had cast some sort of spell on her twin brother. He was positively chipper, even in the mornings. And Nathan had always hated mornings.

As it was, Kiersty could only conclude that his brain had gone on vacation and left the wheel in the sweaty hands of hormones.

With Nathan setting the pace, the group quickly found their seats and Kiersty was at least pleased to see that their seats were quite close to the field. They walked down the tiered stairs past several other chatting groups of people that had arrived two hours early, as they had, and arrived at the bottom-most section. And from there, they continued downward until they arrived at the literal bottom of the stands.

“We are in the front row?” Kiersty asked in surprise. No wonder the tickets had been about as expensive as paying a contractor to clear a field for planting coffee beans. Kiersty supposed that these sorts of seats were probably worth the money.

“Actually, those are our seats, miss.” Just as Kiersty was about to pounce on the aisle seat, she heard an unfamiliar voice behind their group and turned around. An athletic-looking man with tired eyes smiled in a friendly manner down at Kiersty. Reflexively, she smiled politely back. As their eyes were locked, she could literally see some Skill of the man’s trigger a look of slack-jawed alarm.

Inwardly, Kiersty frowned. Especially in Zone 1, there weren’t many people that bothered to get a detection Skill that would help them when the other party had no malicious intentions. It was bad luck to meet someone like that here.

Not that it mattered. With most of President Greyman’s attention directed at making sure this game went off without a hitch, she hadn’t had time to drum up support for the Hero Initiative. So for now, their passage between Zones was just as free as the average person’s.

Nathan stepped into the second most row without noticing the shocked gaze of the man behind them. “Yea, these are our seats. I call the aisle seat.”

Kiersty was still examining the man behind them, so she didn’t have time to be disappointed that her brother had stolen the seat that she wanted, albeit one row back. Her Sphere of Detection quickly informed her that the man had utilized Survival Instincts and probably detected a possible threat from her. Kiersty’s grin widened slowly.

Why so shocked? Surprised that I feel dangerous to you? I’ll have you know that being a priestess of Arbor comes with some perks.

As the strained staring contest stretched, Dinesh coughed lightly. The man blinked and shook his head. Then he cast a tired smile toward Dinesh. “Sorry, I must have-.... Ah, well, common Tim, let’s take our seats.”

The man had frozen again as he looked at Dinesh. Then, with a steely control that Kiersty admired, the man glanced at Tykes and his expression didn’t even flinch. But his hand was tight on his son Tim’s shoulder as he moved to walk past the group and take a seat.

Yet what caught Kiersty’s attention was the fact that the nine or ten-year-old boy was staring at her with all the stunned awe of Moses receiving a revelation from God. Although Kiersty was slightly pleased by the reaction, she still shook her head inwardly as she shuffled over to take her seat.

I thought we were here for football! What the hell is up with all these boys?!

*****

The back of Derek Moss’s neck itched. The powerful sense of danger that he had gotten from the girl, and even more strongly from the two men sitting with the teenagers, was still on his mind. Gradually, however, Derek forced his twitching body to calm down. Even if all four of the people sitting behind them were powerful, that didn’t make them a threat to him or his son.

After all, they were here for the football game, just the same as them. And Derek had needed to dip into the savings he had built up from the early days of the System, when he had led one of Zone 1’s special forces teams, in order to buy the tickets. For others to afford tickets in this portion of the stadium, right up against the playing area around midfield, they couldn’t be weak individuals.

It’s just insane that I got this close before my Survival Instincts felt anything… Derek grimaced.

The real reason that Derek had felt so panicked was that he saw his son squirming right after noticing the threat from these individuals. Initially, he had worried that Tim could sense something as well, but as he observed his son, he realized this wasn’t the case.

No, from the blank and surreptitious stares that Tim was throwing over his shoulder as he ‘casually’ turned to look around the stadium, he just had a crush on the older girl sitting behind them. And with that realization, the rest of Derek’s anxiety bubbled and faded away. Releasing a tension-filled breath, suddenly he was just a father out at a football game with his son.

“Who do you think will win?” Derek asked, unable to allow his son to so blatantly looking behind him any longer.

Tim straightened and thought about it. “The Stallions. They have the great quarterback, right? They will score more points.”

Although he nodded, Derek cautioned his son in a low voice. “That’s true that their offense will probably be better. The Stallions have Jake Tuck, and if he’s as good as he was in college… hell, I bet he’s better with the System. But you shouldn’t underestimate the Vipers. Their coach was pretty famous before the System arrived for being a defensive mastermind. His team won four Superbowls in ten years under his watch, which speaks for itself. And the Vipers have Donovan Sikes.”

“Who’s that?” Tim asked.

Derek grinned. “A hall of fame linebacker. He probably retired the year before the System came. And with the System… well, age doesn’t matter as much anymore. Even if Jake Tuck is going to someday be the greatest quarterback in history, I’m not sure if he is that man yet. He has to prove it on the field today.”

“But it doesn’t matter how good they are on defense,” Tim insisted. Derek did his best not to smile. His son was at the age where, once he made up his mind, he stubbornly refused to admit that he might have been wrong. “You only win if you score points. And Jake Tuck is better than the other quarterback, so he will score more points. That’s that.”