The silence of the Red Room hadn't fully faded when Raj returned to the main camp dorms. The path he walked was the same gravel trail as always, but his steps felt weighted differently now. No alerts pinged. No cameras followed. Yet he knew — something had shifted. Something had seen him.
What waited at the other end wasn't solitude. It was noise.Voices.Flashes.
A tension in the air that didn't belong to training. It belonged to outside.
As Raj passed the final row of smart-hedges near the squad cluster zone, he saw them — a crowd gathered along the campus press zone boundary. Coaches, scouts, junior players, and a few too many people holding cameras. Beyond them stood his squad, boxed in like a strange exhibit.
