Team Reforged; Power and Overpower
Copyright© 2026 by FozzieBare
Chapter 9: I Know Somebody. The Line is Crossed
The DirttyThirtty were good. Adrian had come to this conclusion approximately thirty seconds into watching their first VOD and had spent the next four hours attempting to discover some evidence that he was wrong. He had failed.
“They’re really fucking good,” Reuben said.
Adrian paused the video.
“Thank you, Reuben.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I’d managed to avoid that particular tactical insight.”
“I’m here to help.”
Amy leaned forward, elbows on her knees. On the big screen, The DirttyThirtty were dismantling a team that had made the Round of 16 in Spring. Not spectacularly. Not with some grand tactical flourish that could be diagrammed and admired afterward. They were just better. Every trade was slightly favorable.
Every retreat happened slightly before it needed to. Every pilot seemed to know where the others were going to be before they got there.
“They finished fourth in Spring for a reason,” Amy said.
“Yeah.”
Adrian restarted the video. Thirty seconds later, he stopped it again.
“There.”
Cass squinted.
“There what?”
“That.”
“Very helpful.”
Adrian rewound five seconds. The DirttyThirtty’s right-side pair began moving backward almost simultaneously with an enemy push.
“See it?”
Natalia nodded first.
“They didn’t get called back.”
“Exactly.”
Reuben frowned.
“You can tell that?”
“Their captain’s mouth isn’t moving.”
“Maybe he talks with his mind.”
“No.”
“Could explain a lot.”
Adrian ignored him.
“They’ve been together long enough that they don’t need every order. They know the shape of their own tactics. Captain calls the first part, they already know what the next two parts probably are.”
Amy leaned back.
“So no easy fracture point.”
“No obvious one.”
That was the problem. TeamTotallyTomorrow had been vulnerable because two excellent pilots were holding together a merely decent team. Quantum Core had been vulnerable because they were so relentlessly correct that Reforged could overload the process they used to arrive at the correct decision.
Electrum had been vulnerable because Amarillo had ripped the people who made their decisions out of the team in the middle of a tournament. The DirttyThirtty?
Nothing obvious. No star they depended on too heavily. No weak pilot to repeatedly attack. No rigid tactical doctrine that Adrian could turn against them. No freshly promoted captain issuing commands to people still listening for someone else’s voice. They were simply a very good WarMAC team.
Adrian hated those. Not personally. Tactically.
“You know what we could try?” Reuben asked.
“No.”
“Winning.”
Adrian slowly turned his head. Reuben grinned. Amy laughed. Even Adrian did, eventually.
“Fine,” he said. “That’s Plan B.”
“What’s Plan A?”
“Figure out how.”
Coach James had spent most of the morning reading things he should not have been reading. Some of them were about him. Most were about Reforged. A few were about Kelto. All of them made him angry. The problem was that he could no longer clearly identify what he was angry at. Reforged?
Certainly. Kelto?
Definitely. Himself?
He refused to examine that one too closely. A message window opened on the side of his screen. You awake?
James stared at the name. Darren. He considered ignoring it.
Instead he typed:
Obviously. The response came immediately. Saw the interview. James’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. And?
There was a longer pause. You want my opinion?
You’re going to give it whether I do or not. Correct. James almost smiled. Almost.
Then:
Look, man. I hate those fuckers too. James snorted. At least Darren understood that part. The next message appeared. But check all your thought processes. You’re letting anger fill in for decision-making. I did that with the Blades. Look what it cost me. There was a pause. I can’t believe I’m saying this.
Tony, make sure you’re not doubling down on stupid. James’s smile disappeared.
He typed:
The numbers don’t lie. The three little dots appeared. Stopped. Appeared again.
Then:
The numbers don’t lie, but are you sure it’s the same equation?
James stared at the sentence. He could practically hear Darren saying it. Annoyingly calm. Annoyingly reasonable. Annoyingly like someone who had himself spent too much of his life discovering what happened when certainty hardened into armor. James closed the message window. He did not answer.
Five minutes later, there was a knock on his office door.
“Yeah?”
One of his players stepped inside.
“Coach James?”
“Yeah, kid.”
“It’s about Reforged.”
James leaned back.
“What about those fuckers?”
The player hesitated. That caught James’s attention immediately. Players hesitated before telling coaches one of three things. They were hurt. They had screwed up. Or they were about to suggest something they already knew the coach would not like.
“One of my ... er ... friends offered to help.”
James stared at him.
“Help how?”
“He wants to go in.”
James did not move.
“Go in where?”
“Their systems.”
Silence.
“He thinks they have to be using client-side hacks. Something that changes the values before the server sees them. Or maybe changes what gets displayed. I don’t know exactly.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“I know.”
“You’re asking me to okay breaking into their system.”
“No.”
The kid swallowed.
“I know, Coach. That’s why I didn’t tell him to do it.”
A pause.
“Yet.”
James stood up. The player flinched. Good. He should. James walked around his desk. For one bright, clear second, everything became simple. He should tell the kid no. Not just no. Absolutely fucking not. He should get the name. He should call Kelto. He should call Reforged. He should document the conversation and make sure nobody in Overpower went anywhere near this lunacy.
That was the correct answer. He knew it. There was no ambiguity. No gray area. No tortured interpretation of a tournament rule. This was someone suggesting breaking into another team’s computer system. James looked at the player.
“I’m going to say this one time, kid.”
The player nodded.
“You do NOT have permission to do this. Do you understand that?”
“Yes.”
“Say it.”
“I do not have permission.”
James held his gaze.
“Yes. Yes, I understand.”
James nodded.
“Good.”
The player turned toward the door. James could still stop him. Three words. Do not do it. Or four. Tell your friend no. Instead James said nothing. The door closed. He stood alone in his office. His stomach hurt.
You do NOT have permission.
Not:
Do not do it.
He knew the difference. Of course he knew the difference. He had spent weeks accusing Reforged of crawling through the spaces between what rules said and what people meant. And he had just done exactly the same thing. James sat down.
“I have to know.”
The room did not answer.
“I need to know.”
Still nothing.
“It’s eaten me up for too long.”
He opened Darren’s message again. The numbers don’t lie, but are you sure it’s the same equation?
James closed it.
The Duel Round took thirty-eight minutes. It felt like three hours. Amy won the first duel by the approximate margin of one functioning left leg actuator, half an armor plate, and stubbornness. She left her station sweating. Adrian pointed at her.
“You enjoyed that.”
“I did not.”
“You’re smiling.”
“I enjoy winning.”
“Different thing?”
“Entirely.”
Adrian lost the second duel. Not badly. That almost made it worse. His opponent had simply read him correctly twice in a row. The first time, Adrian had expected him to respond to the obvious feint. He had not. The second time, Adrian had expected him to know Adrian now expected him not to respond to the obvious feint.
He had responded. Adrian died while trying to decide whether he had just been out-thought or had out-thought himself. Reuben waited until Adrian removed his headset.
“So.”
“Don’t.”
“Did the theoretical buffers overflow?”
“Reuben.”
“Just checking.”
The third duel went to Natalia. Barely. When the result flashed across the tournament screen, Reforged had the Duel Round. Two points. The DirttyThirtty had zero. Nobody in Reforged celebrated particularly hard. They had all watched the same matches.
“Two points,” Adrian said. “Take them. Forget them. Next round.”
Cass’s first 4v4 lasted fourteen minutes. For twelve of them, Reforged thought they were winning. Cass had laid the field exactly where she wanted it. The DirttyThirtty had seen her use mines before. They knew she liked to turn terrain into an argument. So Cass showed them mines. She showed them routes where mines should have been.
She showed them one obvious safe lane. They avoided it. Good. That was what she wanted. Then they avoided the second lane. Also good. Then they refused to enter the part of the map Cass had spent the first five minutes shaping at all. Cass stared at her tactical display.
“They’re not coming.”
Reuben’s voice came over comms.
“Can we send them an invitation?”
“They’re rotating.”
“Where?”
Cass saw it. Too late.
“Oh, fuck.”
The DirttyThirtty had not solved her minefield. They had made it irrelevant. They pushed hard through an ugly section of terrain nobody sane would have chosen voluntarily, accepted superficial damage, and hit the flank of Reforged’s formation before Cass could reposition the minelayer.
Two minutes later, it was over. 2–2. Cass came out angry. Not furious. Angry in the colder way that meant she was already replaying it.
“I made them solve a problem.”
Adrian nodded.
“And they declined the assignment.”
“Assholes.”
“Very inconsiderate.”
The second 4v4 went worse. Elias did not attempt anything clever. That had been the point. If The DirttyThirtty expected Reforged to manipulate assumptions, Elias would give them nothing to manipulate. Straight lines. Simple fire discipline. Good target selection. Fundamentals. For eight minutes, it worked.
Then The DirttyThirtty simply played the same kind of WarMAC better. Not much better. Enough. They isolated Becky for six seconds. Six seconds was enough. Once she was gone, Elias had to pull Natalia back to cover the electronic warfare gap. That weakened the center. The DirttyThirtty hit the center.
Trevor counter-pushed. They were waiting for it. When the round ended, Reforged had killed three machines. The DirttyThirtty had killed four.
Score:
REFORGED 2
THE DIRTTYTHIRTTY 4
There was a peculiar silence in the team room. Nobody panicked. Nobody needed the speech about how they had come back before. But they had also not been down after both 4v4s very often. Adrian looked around.
“We’re trying too hard.”
Amy glanced at him.
“You’re going to need to narrow that down.”
“We’re trying too hard to beat them at being clever.”
Cass folded her arms.
“They just beat us playing straight.”
“Yep.”
“Your solution?”
“Stop giving a shit how they want to play.”
Reuben raised a hand.
“I like this plan already.”
Adrian turned toward the tactical board.
“They know each other. Fine. They anticipate each other. Fine. They make good decisions. Fine.”
He pointed at the next format. Six versus six.
“We’re not going to make them stupid.”
Amy smiled faintly.
“We’re going to make them hurt.”
“There she is.”
Six hours after the player left his office, James’s phone rang. He knew who it was before he looked. He answered.
“Coach?”
“Please tell me you found something I can take to Kelto.”
A pause.
“No.”
James closed his eyes.
“Fuck. They’re clean?”
“No.”
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