Chapter 258 - 160: The NFL’s Yellow-Skinned God
My name is Marcus. I’m the starting strong safety for the Seattle Seahawks, and I stand in the middle of the field, ready to stop the opposing offense at any cost.
In the NFL Alliance, physicality is the only law of survival.
At last year’s NFL Combine, I measured in at 6-foot-2, 235 pounds. My 40-yard dash was 4.42 seconds, and I repped the 225-pound bench press 24 times.
My bone density and the ratio of my fast-twitch muscle fibers destined me to be a precision meat grinder, built for interceptions and collisions. In the secondary, I’m an undisputed prodigy. Any running back who dares try to break through my zone gets absolutely leveled, and the only place they end up is the medical tent.
So, when we faced the Giants—a historically weak team—I came in absolutely certain we’d win. Sure, they had some so-called genius Quarterback, Li Wei, but in my eyes, he was just a marketing gimmick, overhyped by money and the media.
Is it just because the market in that country across the ocean has been booming lately that some flashy, yellow-skinned "Mr. 200 Million USD" can even exist in this league? Give me a chance, and I’ll crunch his bones like an Oreo dunked in milk.
But in the thirty minutes of the first half, I witnessed a slaughter.
At one point, I blitzed the strong side. I hit my top acceleration and got within two yards of him, but he still managed to fire a perfect pass right into his receiver’s hands.
At the half, it was 28-15. I thought we were about to get our asses handed to us on the very first day of the preseason.
But when the second half started and the Giants put in a few scrubs with unsteady feet and shifty eyes, I smelled blood in the water.
And sure enough, maybe they were so nervous they pissed themselves, because half a second after the snap, their pocket completely collapsed.
I stood back in the secondary, watching our three behemoths on the D-line charge at a completely unprotected Li Wei.
Three on one. The odds were in our favor.
I could already picture it: multiple fractures, a severe concussion, or both.
And yet, just as those three behemoths closed in, less than three yards away and trapping him in a kill zone, I saw the corners of his mouth curl upward. Was that... a smile?
He didn’t backpedal or try to evade. Instead, he charged right at the first lineman.
He sent our lineman’s massive frame flying, completely knocking him off-balance and sending him crashing to the turf!
Then, as if hitting a turbo boost, he executed an incredibly tight spin, slipping past the second lineman’s fingertips and causing the big man to stumble and fall from his own momentum.
My smile froze on my face.
But a few seconds later, after he shook off the third lineman, he saw there were no open receivers. He tucked the ball and charged straight for my zone like a souped-up hypercar. My blood began to sing.
’This is the perfect springboard for my career.’
The final 10 yards. The edge of the red zone. This was my time to hunt. ’If I stop his run here,’ I thought, ’my name will be leading every sports channel in the country tomorrow.’
I took a deep breath, felt the blood pump into my thighs, and cut in from the side at an initial speed of nearly eight meters per second. My tackling form is textbook-perfect. My eyes were locked on his waist.
BAM!
My arms wrapped around his waist like iron clamps—precise and vicious.
I drove my helmet into his ribs and planted my feet to brake. My 235 pounds of body weight, combined with the friction from my cleats, should have been more than enough to stop him.
In all my training, anyone I’ve tackled like this—even the most elite power backs—goes down within a yard. Tops.
The moment I locked onto his waist, I felt like I wasn’t tackling a human at all, but a completely enraged, full-sprint rhinoceros!
After he dragged me for several yards, I let go in despair and collapsed onto the turf.
Panting, my ears ringing, I heard MetLife Stadium erupt in a deafening, eardrum-shattering roar.
Then, the massive stadium screen cut to Joe Buck’s face, flushed red with excitement...
"He’s wrapped up! Marcus came in from the side, lowered his center of gravity, and has a death grip on Li Wei’s waist! He’s trying to drag Li Wei down!" Joe Buck yelled from the announcer’s booth.
But a second later, the collective gasp of 80,000 people caught in their throats.
Marcus had him wrapped up, but Li Wei’s thighs, like hydraulic pistons, never stopped churning.
With a brutally powerful forward stride, Marcus’s feet left the ground entirely, and his whole body was slammed onto the turf!
"He’s not down! Li Wei hasn’t slowed down at all!"
The director’s wide-angle shot captured an image that will go down in the NFL’s hundred-year history:
Li Wei was like a freight train at full steam. Marcus was like a ragdoll hanging off the back, dragged across the artificial turf, his knees kicking up two glaring green trails of shredded grass.
After being dragged for another two or three yards, Marcus’s grip finally gave out. Li Wei, as if shot from a spring, accelerated again and burst into the end zone.
ROAR!!!
For a full second after the referee raised his arms to signal the touchdown, a strange, silent vacuum fell over the 80,000-seat MetLife Stadium.
But a second later, it was as if a volcano, dormant for millennia, had instantly erupted. The wave of sound threatened to blow the dome off the 1.6 billion USD stadium.
The entire stadium erupted, fans jumping and stomping their feet in unison.
"He’s in! No flags! TOUCHDOWN! Oh my God, the touchdown is good!"
Up in the broadcast booth, Joe Buck, a man who had seen it all and was considered a pillar of North American sports commentary, completely lost his legendary composure. His voice cracked, on the verge of shrieking. He ripped one side of his headset off and leaned halfway out of the booth.
"Troy! Did you see that?! Do you believe your eyes?! He just dragged a 235-pound strong safety into the end zone like a ragdoll!"
The camera quickly cut to his partner, Troy Aikman. The Hall of Fame Quarterback, who had led the Dallas Cowboys to three Super Bowl titles, was pointing a trembling finger at the telemetry panel on the screen.
"I’m looking at these numbers, Joe! The force that Burst from Li Wei’s legs instantly negated all 235 pounds of Marcus’s body weight. It’s like he was running with Marcus on his back."
Troy’s finger jabbed at the highlighted number on the screen. "This means that in those final five yards, the power Li Wei was able to Burst out with approached, or even surpassed, Bolt’s peak speed!"
"So you’re saying if Li Wei was a sprinter, he could break the world record?!" Joe Buck yelled. "Can you believe it? We’re not just witnessing a king; we’re witnessing the NFL’s yellow-skinned God!"
"The 100-meter, I’m not so sure," Troy said, his tone firm. "But the initial Burst of speed Li Wei is capable of could definitely rival Bolt’s. It might even be stronger!"
As the announcers’ frenzied shouts continued, the director astutely cut to a graphic of MetLife Stadium’s acoustic sensors. The peak reading had reached a terrifying 137.6 decibels.
What does that mean? It’s louder than the roar of a Boeing 747 taking off, measured from 50 meters away. It was approaching the physical pain threshold for the human eardrum.
Fans in the front rows instinctively covered their ears, but they kept on screaming themselves hoarse.
Meanwhile, the reaction on the Seahawks’ bench was one of utter devastation.
Seahawks Head Coach Pete, a man known for his iron-fisted discipline and tough demeanor, just stood frozen on the sideline.
The playbook had fallen from his hand and lay on the turf. The backup defensive players, who had been eager to get in the game just moments before, now stared at the slow-motion replay on the jumbotron as if they were watching a monster. A few of the younger players swallowed hard, their eyes filled with pure dread.
Then, a close-up of Li Wei filled the screen.
He didn’t do an exaggerated celebration dance like other players after a touchdown, nor did he pound his chest wildly.
He simply stood up and calmly tossed the grass-stained football aside.
The broadcast camera zoomed in for an extreme close-up.
From the shadow of his facemask, Li Wei’s handsome face appeared on the televisions of millions of families across the United States of America. His breathing steadied, and then he flashed a brilliant smile at the camera.
Meanwhile, about 20 miles north of MetLife Stadium in Palisades, New York, an alarm shrieked through the duty room of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. On a monitor displaying data from a broadband seismometer, a screen that had been steadily refreshing suddenly exploded in a flurry of red alerts.
David, the geology Ph.D. student on duty, was sipping his coffee. The piercing alarm made him whip around in his chair.
David immediately hammered at his keyboard, pulling up the real-time energy conversion formulas and the epicenter location system.
’This is impossible...’ he muttered, staring at the results.
The data panel clearly showed that in the past few seconds, an immense amount of gravitational potential energy had been instantly converted to kinetic energy, smashing into the ground and traveling through the bedrock of New Jersey all the way to the observatory.
The system’s triangulation algorithm produced the precise coordinates of the epicenter in under half a second. The red crosshairs on the map locked onto a massive structure in East Rutherford, New Jersey: MetLife Stadium.
At that moment, social media completely melted down. In under thirty seconds, Twitter’s North American servers were hit with a traffic surge over 300% of their normal peak.
Back in the booth, Joe Buck took a deep breath, settled back into his chair, and delivered his closing statement into the microphone.
"Ladies and gentlemen, and everyone here in the stadium, remember this moment. Remember this summer night. We thought we were here to witness the debut of a talented rookie. But the truth is, we have just witnessed the birth of a new king—no, a new god. From this day forward, the Giants will rule the world. The old era was shattered in that ten-yard stretch of turf. Welcome... to the Age of Li Wei."