My Ultimate Gacha System-Chapter 340 - 14: St George’s Park I
Monday, June 12, 2023 Bergamo — 6:00 AM
The alarm went at six and he was already half-awake because he’d been drifting since five, and he turned it off before the second buzz and sat on the edge of the bed while the room was still dark.
Shower. The clothes he’d laid out the night before. Coffee that he made and poured and left on the counter without finishing. He walked through the apartment once — kitchen, living room, bedroom — without any particular reason, then went back to the kitchen and looked at the counter where the coffee was going cold.
His bag was by the door. Passport in the front pocket, wallet beside it, phone charging from the wall.
The BMW was in the garage two floors down and it was staying there. He had no use for it in England.
The driver arrived at half six and he put his bag in the boot and got in the back and the car pulled out onto the street while Bergamo sat quiet and grey in the early morning, and the A4 stretched ahead toward Milan while he sat with his hands in his lap and said nothing and the driver said nothing and the motorway passed under them.
He left his phone off.
Milan Malpensa — 7:45 AM
Business class check-in took four minutes and the terminal was the version of itself that existed before seven AM — purposeful, sparse, the kind of crowd that knew exactly where it was going. Nobody looked at him.
He boarded at half eight. The flight to Heathrow was two hours and he spent the first hour reading and the second looking at the English Channel through the window while the cloud cover moved under the plane and the land appeared beneath it — flat, green, grey sky even in June.
The car service was at arrivals with a grey Mercedes and a driver holding a printed card reading D. WALTER — ENGLAND FA, and the drive to Burton-upon-Trent was ninety minutes up the M1 and M6 Toll and England outside the motorway windows was flat and practical and different from Italy in a way that was less about what was there and more about what wasn’t — no hills in the distance, no terracotta, no cypress trees. Service stations at regular intervals. Small towns with red-brick buildings and supermarket car parks visible from the road. The sky the particular pale grey that was the English version of summer.
He fell asleep somewhere past the M6 interchange and woke when the car slowed at a gate.
St George’s Park — 12:20 PM
The security guard checked his name on a tablet and waved them through, and the driveway inside was long with oak trees running along both sides — old trees, the kind that had been there for decades before the facility was built around them — and then the complex opened up ahead.
Fourteen pitches visible through the treeline, the grass the specific dense bright green of surfaces maintained daily by professional groundskeepers. An indoor structure with a fabric roof sitting further back, large enough to hold a full-size pitch inside it. The main building was glass and steel with the FA crest above the entrance doors. The Hilton hotel wing extended away to the right in pale render. Everything was clean and purposefully built and noticeably larger than any training setup he’d worked in before.
The driver stopped at the main entrance and Demien got out.
A staff member was through the glass doors before he reached them — a woman in her thirties with an FA lanyard. "Demien Walter?"
"Yeah."
"Welcome. I’m Amy, player liaison. I’ll take you to your room and then to the manager."
She walked him through the main building — corridors wide enough that two people could pass without turning, framed England shirts at intervals on the walls, a medical suite visible through a glass panel to the left, video analysis rooms whose doors were closed, a tactical whiteboard built into the wall outside one of them with last session’s work still on it. Everything smelled clean in the specific way that purpose-built elite facilities smelled clean, slightly different from club training grounds.
The hotel wing connected through a covered walkway and the room was standard Hilton — proper bed, proper bathroom, desk with power sockets in the surface, TV already loaded on the FA’s custom interface, and a tactical board mounted to the wall beside the wardrobe.
One bed already had a bag on it.
The name written on the tag was PHILLIPS — K.
"Your roommate should be back shortly," Amy said. "Most of the squad arrived yesterday. You and a few of the City players are the last ones in. Training’s at three. Kit’s already at your spot in the changing room." She checked something on her tablet. "Manager’s ready when you are."
She left and he set his bag on the empty bed and sat beside it.
Down the corridor someone was laughing at something. English accents. A television audible through the wall. He didn’t recognise the voices yet.
He unpacked his boots and set them by the door. Plugged in his charger. Put his training gear on the chair. Then sat back down and looked at the room.
Manager’s Office — 12:50 PM
Amy knocked and Southgate said come in and the office was modest for the position — a desk, a monitor showing match footage paused mid-sequence, a whiteboard covered in formation arrows and positional marks, shelves with folders, the specific contained quality of a room where work actually happened rather than where work was performed.
Southgate stood and shook his hand across the desk. "Demien. Good to have you here. Sit down."
They sat. Southgate looked at him without any particular hurry.
"How was the journey?" he said.
"No problems," Demien said.
"Good." Southgate leaned back slightly. "I’ll be straight with you about what this camp is. You’ve had a serious season — the Coppa Italia final performance specifically, but the whole year before it too. That’s what earned you this call-up." He paused. "But I want you to understand what you’re walking into. The level in this environment every day is different from what you’ve been training in. That’s not a criticism — you’re nineteen. It’s just true. What I want to see is how you handle that adjustment."
"I understand," Demien said.
"Minutes against Malta and North Macedonia aren’t guaranteed," Southgate continued. "I’m telling you that directly because I think you’ll want to know rather than wonder. But I don’t bring players here to watch. If you train well you’ll play." He looked at him steadily. "Any questions?"
"No," Demien said. "I’ll be ready at three."
Southgate nodded once and they shook hands again and the meeting was done.
Dining Hall — 1:10 PM
He walked in alone with his tray and the hall was two-thirds full and loud at the level that came from professional familiarity rather than from socialising, and he recognised faces before he’d crossed the threshold.
Kane at the far table with Rice and Saka. Walker and Stones two tables across. Foden laughing at something Grealish had just said. Alexander-Arnold looking at his phone with one hand and eating with the other. Henderson at the end of a table nearest the window, talking to Maguire.
He moved toward the nearest table with a spare seat and Rice caught his eye before he got there.
"Walter, yeah? Atalanta?" Rice said.
"Yeah."
"Sit." Rice moved his water bottle without making it a thing, and Demien set his tray down and pulled the chair out.
Rice extended his hand. "Declan."
"Demien."
Saka leaned across from Rice’s other side. "Watched the final on TV. That third goal — the turn before you shot. How did you know he wasn’t going to close the angle faster?"
Demien thought about it. "I didn’t," he said. "I just knew the far post was there."
Saka nodded at that the way footballers nodded at things that weren’t explanations but were still correct.
Kane was at the same table further down, in conversation with Grealish, and when there was a natural gap in whatever they were discussing he looked at Demien and gave a single nod. Not warm. Not cold. The nod of a captain who hadn’t formed an opinion yet and wasn’t pretending otherwise.
Demien understood that completely.
The conversation moved on to City’s treble — Walker’s view from inside it, Stones on the final against Inter, and then Grealish asking Rice something about West Ham’s Europa run that Rice gave a short answer to. Demien listened and ate and didn’t force himself into threads that didn’t require him yet. He was the new face. That had a process.
