The Saint Maddox Odyssey

”Come on, mate... a proper night out awaits.” Saint got home to find Jasper already dressed to the nines, clearly ready to go.

”Not tonight.” Saint shook his head.

”Ugh... mate, you’re such a letdown lately.” Jasper looked genuinely disappointed.

Fair enough, really... it had been Saint’s own idea in the first place, floated a few days earlier, only for him to bail the moment it actually came time to go.

Saint had normal needs like anyone else, and after this long single, he’d started thinking it might genuinely be time to meet someone. His actual day-to-day, though, offered essentially zero opportunity for that; training grounds and tactics boards weren’t exactly a dating pool.

Jasper had seemed like the obvious solution; well-connected, endlessly social, the kind of person who could get Saint out of his own head for one evening. Saint didn’t especially want anything casual out of it, though; if anything, he still liked the idea of something real, whenever it eventually came.

Beyond that, the job itself had put more strain on him than most people watching from outside could possibly guess, and Saint had genuinely felt he owed himself some kind of release valve. That was the whole reasoning behind tonight’s plan.

Except the system chose exactly this moment to finally check back in.

Four straight wins had done something else, too; it cemented Saint’s position at the club completely. Whitlock, watching from a comfortable distance, had clearly seen enough. Barring something catastrophic, the head coach’s job at Villa now belonged to Saint for as long as he wanted it.

⟦Attention: return home immediately. Physical conditioning enhancement about to initiate.⟧ The voice arrived flat and mechanical, same as ever.

”Actually... can’t do tonight after all. Knackered,” Saint said, already halfway up the stairs.

Jasper didn’t push it. Saint rarely came out with him anyway, so this wasn’t much of a surprise on its own; though the fact that Saint had actually suggested it in the first place, then backed out this fast, was a little unusual.

Everyone’s entitled to their own rhythm. Jasper and Saint got along easily enough, shared a roof more often than not lately, but neither made much habit of managing the other’s evenings.

Whatever Saint’s change of plans, Jasper’s own night carried on regardless... sports car keys in hand, off into whatever the evening had waiting for him.

Saint’s own night took a very different shape. No wine, no company; just his own bed, and sleep pulling him under almost instantly.

Painful? Not remotely. If anything, it was the single most genuinely restorative thing that had happened to him in weeks, arguably since he’d first arrived in this body at all.

Waking the next morning, something about the world felt subtly different; not wrong exactly, just recalibrated somehow.

What he could say for certain: he felt sharper than he had in ages, genuinely full of energy in a way that made the accumulated exhaustion of the past month feel like it had simply evaporated overnight.

”No visible change,” Saint muttered, checking himself over in the bathroom mirror.

”Wait... no, that’s not right either.” A longer look told a different story. His skin looked healthier, somehow... clearer, less worn down.

His build had shifted too. Curious now, he pulled his shirt off entirely and found his muscle definition had sharpened considerably, genuine visible abs where there’d only been the suggestion of them before.

”Bloody hell!” What actually caught his attention next had nothing to do with his stomach. Saint had never considered himself lacking in that department to begin with, but this was a noticeable jump even by his own standards.

”Does ’enhance physical fitness’ come with side benefits I wasn’t told about?” Saint asked the system directly.

No response, as usual. The system never explained itself.

It did, however, deliver a follow-up task, right on cue.

⟦Lead Aston Villa to promotion.⟧

⟦Reward: system upgrade — additional permissions unlocked.⟧

”You’re taking the mick, surely.” Saint stared at the message, genuinely stunned.

Fair reaction, given the circumstances. When he’d first taken this job, Villa had been one place off the relegation zone... one place, full stop.

And now the system was casually asking for automatic promotion. Twenty-four teams in the Championship, forty-six rounds a season, and with the Sheffield Wednesday win banked, Villa had exactly ten fixtures left.

”Wait... hang on, where do we actually sit in the table right now?” Saint didn’t even bother finishing his shower, he was out of the bathroom and booting up his laptop before the thought had fully formed.

He’d been so consumed with tactics and opposition analysis these past weeks that he genuinely hadn’t stopped to check the wider picture properly.

Sixty-two points. Four straight wins had taken Villa from fifty to sixty-two. In most Championship seasons, sixty-two points with ten games left wouldn’t be considered a serious promotion position.

But when Saint actually scanned the teams above Villa in the table, the picture looked considerably more encouraging than he’d expected, and it completely reframed the scale of what the system was actually asking.

Bristol City, Preston, and Villa all sat level on sixty-two points. Just ahead, on sixty-three, sat Reading. A three-point gap across a single result was more than closeable with ten games still to play, and the sides directly above weren’t pulling away by much.

Millwall, meanwhile, had drawn their last two matches since losing to Villa; proof enough of exactly how thin the press’s attempts to mock Barrow had actually landed; results-wise, Millwall hadn’t collapsed at all.

Above Millwall sat Rotherham and Ipswich, level on sixty-seven points combined. And right at the summit, on seventy-two points, sat Derby; the club with the deepest recent pedigree in this division, unsurprisingly holding top spot.

In other words, Villa’s sixty-two points sat just ten behind league leaders Derby. With ten games still to play, that gap was genuinely, mathematically closeable.

Saint’s own read on the situation shifted almost as fast as the system’s demands had. A minute earlier, automatic promotion had sounded absurd. Looking at the actual table, it suddenly didn’t feel remotely impossible.

”Premier League... the actual fucking Premier League. Villa against United, Arsenal, Liverpool, City, Chelsea, the lot... proper big boys’ football.” At that moment, Saint’s expression had gone somewhere between manic and dazed.

”Oi... you alright in there?” The bedroom door swung open right in the middle of it.

And then? Well. Saint was still, at that exact moment, entirely undressed.