Page 152 of Offside Angle

The pass lands exactly where it needs to.

Elias doesn’t settle it.

He just lets it go.

The shot rips into the top corner before the goalie gets across.

For half a heartbeat, I see the puck sitting in the net.

Then Ravensburg loses its fucking mind.

The goal horn disappears beneath the crowd as Elias throws both arms up and Tyler crashes into him from behind. Cole gets there from the other side, and I’m already skating toward them before I consciously decide to move, slamming into the pile hard enough that somebody yells directly into my helmet.

Behind the glass, our bench is pounding sticks against the boards while Damian is shouting something nobody has a chance in hell of hearing.

I grab Elias by the helmet and knock mine against his. He’s grinning. Not panicking. Not trying to carry all of us by himself. That might feel almost as good as the goal.

We separate and start toward center while the crowd keeps roaring around us, and on the way I glance toward the glass.

Santi already has the camera up.

1–0 Reapers.

I skate past the glass on the way back toward the bench and catch Santi for half a second, camera already raised as he tracks us. There’s a small, sharp smile on his face that I barely have time to register before Damian’s voice cuts through the celebration.

“Don’t get cocky!”

He doesn’t need to tell us twice.

Vanguard comes at us on the next shift like we personally insulted every member of their families.

The next ten minutes are brutal. They’re heavier on the forecheck, finishing every hit with a little extra behind it and throwing bodies into shooting lanes before we can get anything clean through. I take two hard checks along the boards in the same shift, and by the time I get back to the bench I have to roll my shoulder a few times to make sure everything still works.

Apparently it does.

Good enough.

The game keeps tightening around us. Shane stretches across the crease to get a pad on a tip that changes direction almost on top of him, Viktor eats a point shot off the side of his skate and somehow stays upright, and I kill a partial break by forcing their winger wide until he runs out of useful ice. By the time help arrives, I’ve got his stick tied up against the boards and he’s swearing at me as though I personally created the situation.

Every shift has stopped feeling much like hockey. At this point, it’s basically a street fight with occasional rules.

Elias is yelling between whistles, face flushed and eyes bright, but there’s nothing frantic about him now. Cole takes a cross-check square between the shoulder blades, turns around, gives the guy one hard shove in return, and keeps skating without wasting a second looking toward the officials. Even the rookies have lost most of their nerves, Jace and Nico throwing themselves into battles with absolutely no concern for whether they still have functioning bodies tomorrow.

Vanguard keeps coming anyway.

By the final minute, both teams are dragging air into their lungs whenever there’s a whistle, and the ice is chewed to hell from all the stops and hard changes of direction. Vancouver gets one last push in the final thirty seconds, throwing everything toward the crease while we collapse around Shane, but he holds through the traffic and freezes the last puck before anybody can dig it loose.

When the horn finally sends us toward the tunnel, the scoreboard still reads 1–0.

The crowd is on its feet behind us, but nobody on our bench celebrates the lead like it means anything yet.

We’ve played twenty minutes.

There are forty more waiting.

Damian is already in the middle of the locker room by the time the last of us sits down, cane planted beside him and his expression giving absolutely nothing away. “One goal is nothing,” he says. “You played a strong period. Good.”

That single word almost feels suspicious coming from him.