Chapter 89: I Can Help You

Reyes could do everything a top-tier holding midfielder needed to do, comfortable on the ball, excellent range of passing, particularly gifted at the kind of raking diagonal ball that splits a defence in one motion. During his best Barcelona years, he’d been the genuine engine both ends of the pitch ran through.

Thirty-one wasn’t old by most standards, but a career riddled with injuries had left his form wildly inconsistent, though in the handful of Serie A appearances he’d actually managed to stay fit for, the quality had never been in question.

Beyond clearing his name over the doping ban, what Saint actually needed from Reyes was simple: several more genuinely healthy seasons. Which meant solving the injury problem came first, before any of the rest of it mattered.

Saint, as it happened, had a solution for exactly that too. Scout’s Eye had quietly upgraded again the moment the season officially wrapped, the system had been building toward it for a while, and the full upgrade had already completed itself by the time Saint checked.

’Iron Constitution: physical conditioning of all players under the host increases by 10%.’

A squad-wide buff, genuinely remarkable in scope. Ten percent sounds modest on paper, but the actual effect touches nearly everything; stamina, recovery, resistance to knocks, the works.

For a veteran like Teale, that kind of boost effectively shaved two years off his legs. And for injury-prone players specifically, the benefit ran deeper still, fewer soft-tissue problems, faster recovery windows, a genuinely lower baseline risk across a full season.

Which meant Reyes, whose entire career had been derailed by exactly this kind of fragility, stood to benefit enormously, and that was before accounting for anything else the system had waiting.

The system store turned out to be the real discovery, though. A genuinely vast catalogue of items; some practical, some bizarre to the point of uselessness, novelty cards for bad luck or stomach bugs that Saint had no intention of ever touching.

Some purchases were one-time consumables, others permanent upgrades, skills, mostly, and none of them cheap. The least expensive option on offer still ran two hundred points.

Buried further in, Saint found something genuinely remarkable: a potential booster, capable of bumping a player’s ceiling up a full letter grade after use.

A full grade, not a fraction of one, a B-level player, properly used, could be pushed straight to A-level.

There was a supporting item too, though it worked differently, rather than directly raising potential, it simply accelerated how quickly a player’s actual ability closed the gap toward whatever ceiling they already had.

Powerful tools come with a price to match, and the system’s own economy made that painfully clear, cheaper than the skill unlocks, certainly, but the potential booster still ran a full hundred points on its own.

Saint hadn’t had time to work through the entire catalogue yet, there was simply too much of it, and too little time to browse properly. But one item in particular had jumped out immediately, purpose-built for exactly Reyes’s situation.

’Reinforced Frame: significantly reduces a player’s injury risk for one full season. (Effect voids upon transfer.),

’Cost: 20 points.’

Points, naturally, had to be earned through results, specifically wins. Saint’s current balance sat at thirty-four.

The system’s own explanation laid it out plainly: a Championship win earned two points, a Premier League win earned three, and defeats earned nothing regardless of how the match went.

Villa’s actual season tally added up to twenty-four points through league results alone. The remaining ten had come as a single lump bonus, promotion itself, which the system had rewarded generously given the scale of the achievement.

Beyond league form, silverware carried its own separate rewards: a league title worth ten points outright, a Champions League triumph worth twenty, and a domestic cup worth five.

Silverware of any kind still sat a long way off for Villa, so there wasn’t much point dwelling on it yet. The actual priority right now was rebuilding the squad properly, only once that foundation existed would any of those bigger prizes become realistic.

Which was exactly the project Saint was mid-stride through right now. His actual meeting with Reyes wasn’t scheduled until the afternoon, which left the morning free, a proper stretch of time to spend with Grace, soaking up Barcelona itself.

Barcelona sits as the largest port city on the Mediterranean, widely billed as the jewel of the Iberian Peninsula and Spain’s single most visited destination.

There was something almost familiar in that description, Birmingham carried its own claim as the industrial heart of the Midlands, though nobody would ever confuse the two cities’ tourism numbers. Both, in their own ways, had once stood as genuine seats of regional power in their respective histories.

Football, though, was where the comparison truly broke down. Even sharing a city’s own name the way both clubs did, Barcelona and Villa occupied entirely different tiers of global recognition.

Barcelona’s name had long since outgrown Spain, outgrown Europe even, recognised practically everywhere the sport was played. Villa, for all its own history, remained a name that meant everything in the Midlands and considerably less the further you travelled from it.

By the time afternoon arrived, Saint made his way to meet Reyes properly. Thirty-one wasn’t young in football terms, but it wasn’t old either, arguably the exact stage of a career where everything a player has learned finally meets a body still capable of delivering it.

Whatever turmoil had surrounded him in recent months, none of it showed in his manner, the moment he spotted Saint approaching, a small, genuine smile crossed his face.

"Marco... I can help you." Reyes, for his part, wasn’t a stranger to Saint’s name by this point either, despite having spent most of his career in Italy rather than England.

A Championship manager causing this much of a stir across an entire country’s football press, and somehow, against every expectation, consistently coming out the winner in every public exchange along the way, had made Saint impossible to ignore, wherever you followed the game from.

"Really?" Reyes’s expression stayed skeptical. Whatever Saint had accomplished domestically, it seemed like a stretch to assume that same influence stretched to clearing a doping suspension handed down by an entirely different football association.

"I’ve got a friend, Jasper Ashcombe-Wren." Saint’s actual plan involved leaning on Jasper’s family connections to quietly push for an independent retest of the original sample.

There was, of course, one crucial precondition to any of that actually working; ruling out, with total certainty, that Reyes had genuinely taken anything banned in the first place. And that was precisely the one thing nobody else on earth could confirm the way Saint already could, given what his system had already told him.

"Marco... have you ever heard of acupuncture?" Saint said, somewhat carefully.

"Vaguely, some kind of mysterious Eastern practice, isn’t it?" A genuine gap in cultural awareness, laid bare.

"Not mysterious, medicine. Traditional Chinese medicine, thousands of years of accumulated practice, refined across countless generations." Saint leaned into it with total conviction, and it landed, few people argue with something that’s survived millennia intact.

Anything that endures for that long tends to carry real weight, whatever the specifics.

"You think it could actually help me?" Reyes still sounded unconvinced, despite himself.

"Only one way to find out, isn’t there? What’s the alternative, sitting on the sidelines indefinitely?" Reyes, as it happened, did have one other option on the table, a move far outside Europe entirely, the same kind of career-ending departure plenty of fading talents eventually settled for.