Salman, the point guard, finally managed to croak out some words, but his voice was shaky, barely a whisper.

  "Three… three of them…" He looked around at his teammates, eyes darting from face to face, desperately searching for… something. An expnation? Reassurance? A sign that he wasn't hallucinating? But nope. Nothing.

  Just bnk stares and equally bewildered expressions. They were all in the same boat – adrift in a sea of "WTF just happened?"

  Lut, the shooting guard, ran a hand through his hair, messing it up even more. His face was etched with pure, unadulterated confusion. "This is… this is not possible," he mumbled, shaking his head. "It's just… not physically possible." He kept repeating it, like a broken record, trying to convince himself that what he'd just witnessed was some kind of eborate prank, a mass hallucination, maybe a really convincing deepfake in real life. Anything but reality.

  Saim, still fuming, kicked at the ground, sending dust flying.

  "This is… this is cheating! There's gotta be some kind of trick! No way anyone can make shots like that, consistently! It's just pure luck! Right?" He tried to sound forceful, but even he didn't sound convinced. The repetition was getting to him. The sheer, mind-boggling improbability of it all was starting to sink in, heavy and cold.

  Anderson, the small forward, was the first to actually voice what everyone was starting to feel in their gut. "Guys… hey, guys," he said, his voice quieter now, more serious.

  "Think about it for a sec. Did you see his face? He didn't even look surprised when it went in. Both times. It's like… like he was expecting it to go in. Every time." He paused, and you could practically see the gears turning in his brain, a chilling realization clicking into pce. "Like… like he knew it was going in. Before it even left his hands."

  Nikhil, the human brick wall, finally spoke up, his voice low and gravelly, like rocks grinding together. "Yeah… yeah, Anderson's right," he grumbled, nodding slowly. "He looked… confident. Way too confident. Like… like he's got some kinda…" He hesitated, searching for the right word, and then spat it out like it was poison. "...ability." The word hung heavy in the air between them. Ability. It wasn't just skill.

  It implied something more. Something… different. Something they weren't sure they wanted to understand.

  The cold, hard truth started to dawn on them. This wasn't just a lucky streak. Nah.

  This wasn't some dude having a "hot hand," like in those cheesy sports movies. This was… something else. Something completely unprecedented.

  Something… almost unnatural. It felt like they were witnessing a glitch in the matrix, a cheat code in the game of reality. Like James was pying by a different rulebook altogether.

  A rulebook they didn't even know existed. They were facing James, this confident new kid from Banani, and he was bending the ws of basketball right in front of their eyes. And the worst part? They had absolutely no clue how to stop it.

  No counter-strategy. No pn B. Just… bewilderment.

  Remember that cocky confidence they strutted onto the court with? Yeah, that was ancient history now. The swagger? Deader than disco. The taunts and trash talk? Silenced.