Overdeveloped | Amateurs

Leo glanced at the jumbotron. The livestream numbers were in the billions. Chat scrolled by in a blur of emojis and death threats. These people didn’t see teenagers. They saw gladiators. They saw products.

He heard a crack. Not a bone. A sponsor patch on his chest. Veridian Dynamics flickered and died. overdeveloped amateurs

They reset. Panting. Not from exertion—their augmented lungs could process oxygen at Himalayan efficiency—but from the sheer, crushing weight of being too much . Leo glanced at the jumbotron

The stadium went silent. The AI froze. The sponsors’ screens glitched. For five glorious seconds, there was no algorithm, no contract, no highlight reel. Just two overdeveloped amateurs, finally amateur enough to refuse. These people didn’t see teenagers

But as they fell, Leo smiled. Because for the first time in his life, he wasn’t falling as a champion. He was just falling.

Leo, callsign Chimera, wiped a film of nano-sweat from his brow. He was seventeen. His body was a cartographer’s nightmare of hyper-developed musculature—deltoids that looked like cannonballs, a trapezius ridge that sloped into his neck like a mountain range, and quads so vast he couldn’t bring his knees together. He had never climbed a real staircase. He had never lifted a bag of groceries. But he could generate a 4,000-newton roundhouse kick, verified by LIDAR.