Lut paused, shaking his head slowly from side to side, still trying to process the impossible reality of what he’d witnessed. “I swear, it was like we were moving in slow motion, wading through mosses, and he was… just… teleporting around us. Teleporting! I’m not even exaggerating! It felt like he could bend space and time on the court! Teleporting!” Lut, the bastion of cynicism, the guy who usually scoffed at anything remotely fantastical, was starting to sound genuinely unhinged, on the verge of believing in actual teleportation. James had officially broken his grip on reality.

  Even Saim, the gentle giant, the team’s center, usually the quietest, most reserved member of their group, was adding his soft-spoken voice to the growing chorus of bewildered pronouncements. Saim was the epitome of meekness, the kind of guy who apologized to the basketball hoop if he missed a shot, who wouldn't hurt a fly, let alone an opponent on the court. So if Saim was freaking out, if Saim was contributing to the hyperbole, you knew that something truly extraordinary, and perhaps slightly terrifying, had transpired.

  “He’s… he’s just… too much,” Saim stammered, his eyes wide and slightly gzed over with remembered awe and maybe a hint of primal fear. “Too fast, obviously. But also… too strong. Like, ridiculously strong. And… and he sees everything before it happens, I swear! It was like… like we were trapped in a slow-motion movie, you know? Everything was sluggish, heavy, predictable.

  And he was… he was just… gliding through it all. Like a phantom. Like a fish swimming effortlessly through air. It was… it was just… unreal.” He trailed off, shaking his head, unable to articute the sheer impossibility of James's performance.

  Anderson, Mr. Arrogance personified, the guy who usually acted like he was too cool for the entire concept of school, and definitely too cool to admit even the slightest hint of defeat, was also starting to crumble. He’d been quieter initially, trying desperately to maintain his carefully constructed facade of nonchant superiority. But eventually, the sheer weight of the collective hyperbole, the undeniable evidence of James's otherworldly skill, became too much for even Anderson to ignore. His carefully crafted arrogance finally cracked under the pressure.

  “Monster,” he decred simply, finally breaking his self-imposed silence. The single word hung heavy in the air, den with the weight of his utterly shattered arrogance, his completely demolished confidence, and a grudging, almost horrified respect. “He’s a monster. A basketball monster. There’s no other word for it.” Coming from Anderson, whose vocabury usually consisted of variations on “epic fail” and “totally me,” it was practically a Shakespearean pronouncement.

  And with each retelling, with each increasingly embellished and sensationalized description, the rumors about James grew wilder, more outndish, more… conspiratorial. The whispers started to veer off the rails entirely, careening into the realm of full-blown conspiracy theory territory. Whispers about James being genetically modified, a secret government experiment gone rogue, or maybe a sleeper agent activated for basketball domination, started to circute, initially as nervous jokes, as desperate, slightly hysterical attempts to rationalize the utterly inexplicable.

  “Maybe he’s got impnts,” one Motijheel student suggested to his friends, leaning in conspiratorially, his voice dropping to a dramatic, stage-whisper. “You know, cybernetic enhancements! Like in those sci-fi movies we watch! That’s gotta be it! That’s why he’s so fast, so strong, so ridiculously accurate! It’s the only logical expnation! Right?”