THIRD PERSON POV
The horn had barely finished sounding before the field exhaled.
Players stood where they were for a moment, the specific stillness of people whose bodies had been running on something other than oxygen for the last twenty minutes and were only now beginning to remember how breathing actually worked. Sweat darkened collars and soaked through the backs of jerseys. Someone on Team A was bent at the waist with their hands on their knees. Nanase had sat down entirely, which under the circumstances seemed like a reasonable decision.
Hibari ran a hand through his teal hair, the gesture unhurried, and looked at the scoreboard with a calm expression.
Then Yukimiya appeared beside him.
"That," Yukimiya said, adjusting his glasses with two fingers, "was closer than it needed to be."
"Agreed," Hibari said.
Hiori materialized on his other side, still breathing slightly harder than usual. "You read Isagi's eyes," he said, not quite a question.
"He telegraphs," Hibari replied. "You do too, for what it's worth. You just telegraph less obviously."
Hiori considered this. "Is that a compliment?"
"An observation."
Himizu drifted into the loose group from somewhere nearby, his split tongue flicking once, which from Himizu functioned as an expression of general satisfaction. Gagamaru arrived last, standing at the edge of the group with his unblinking prehistoric stare aimed at the middle distance, present in the way that large immovable objects were present.
Yukimiya looked at him. "You did well today, Gagamaru."
"He was fast," Gagamaru said.
"You've mentioned," Yukimiya replied.
Across the field, Isagi had straightened up.
He stood near the edge of the box where it had all come apart, watching the loose cluster of Team B players with the expression of someone filing away information they intended to use later. Then his eyes moved to the far side of the field where Rin was already walking toward the exit, alone, his back to the room, his pace steady and completely indifferent to whether anyone was following.
Isagi moved.
He crossed the field at a jog, closing the distance, and called out when he was close enough to be heard.
"Hey, Ri-"
"I have nothing to say to you."
Rin didn't stop walking. Didn't turn around. The words came out flat and clean, carrying no particular heat, which somehow made them worse than if they had.
Isagi slowed. "I just wanted to-"
"You lost that game for us." Still walking. Still not looking back. "You had a plan and you let him read you. That's on you shitty Isagi."
The exit door opened and closed behind him.
Isagi stood in the space Rin had just vacated and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that wouldn't have made it worse. The observation wasn't cruel, exactly. It was just accurate, delivered with the specific indifference of someone who had already moved on past the game and found the conversation wasteful.
Then Shidou appeared beside him, arriving with that sudden presence he had, and looked at the door Rin had walked through with mild interest.
"Rough," Shidou said, not unkindly.
Isagi said nothing.
Shidou looked at him for a second, then at the field, then back at the door Hibari's team had disappeared through.
"How did he know?" he asked, mostly to himself. "Prince Charming. How did he know where you were going?"
Isagi exhaled slowly. "He was watching my eyes," he said. "The whole match."
Shidou tilted his head. A slow grin spread across his face, the kind that suggested he had just received information he found deeply enjoyable. "He was watching your eyes," he repeated.
"Yes."
"The whole match."
"Yes."
Shidou laughed, a short sharp sound that echoed off the facility walls. "I love that guy," he said, with complete sincerity, and walked away.
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The next match wasn't for a while.
Team B had been told they were playing after Team A and Team C finished their game, which meant there was time and Hibari intended to use it in the most efficient way available, which was to sit somewhere quiet and think.
He found a bench in the corridor outside the locker room and sat with his back against the wall, legs stretched out, eyes half closed.
Shidou was exactly as advertised, a biological phenomenon rather than a footballer, operating on instincts that bore no relationship to conventional tactical logic. Working with him required accepting that some percentage of any given sequence would be determined entirely by whatever Shidou's nervous system decided to do in the moment, which was either a liability or an asset depending on the moment. Today it had been an asset. The equalization had come from exactly the kind of chaotic second ball situation that Shidou existed to exploit.
Isagi was more interesting than he had initially assessed. Someone had looked at a 4-1 deficit and identified the specific mechanical weakness in Team B's defensive structure and built three consecutive goals around it with the patient precision of someone who understood that individual brilliance wasn't going to be enough against a team playing as a collective.
That someone had been Isagi.
The plan had been good. Hibari had meant it when he said so.
He had also meant it when he stripped the ball and left.
Footsteps in the corridor.
He spotted Yukimiya, jacket on now, his model composure fully restored after the match, walked over and sat down on the other end of the bench without asking permission, which Hibari noted and filed away as either confidence or obliviousness and decided it was probably both.
They sat in silence for a moment.
"Your read on Isagi at the end," Yukimiya said. "That was the match."
"I know," Hibari said.
"I wouldn't have caught that." A pause.
Hibari said nothing.
"You were better than me today," Yukimiya said, in the tone of someone delivering a factual assessment rather than a concession. "Not by much. But by enough."
Hibari looked at him sideways. "Was that painful to say?"
"Moderately," Yukimiya replied, his expression unchanged.
"You were cleaner in the final third. Your finish for the first goal was better than anything I produced in the same areas today. Pretty efficient placement, no excess."
Yukimiya adjusted his glasses. "That's the most direct compliment you've given anyone since I've known you."
"Don't get used to it."
Yukimiya leaned back against the wall. "The first selection," he said. "You had me worked out before I had you worked out. I want to know when."
Hibari thought about it. "Third touch," he said. "You have a habit of dropping your shoulder on the side you're not going to before you accelerate. It's small. Most people wouldn't catch it."
Yukimiya was quiet for a moment. "I wasn't aware of that."
"I know. That's why it worked once." Hibari looked back at the ceiling. "It won't work again."
"No," Yukimiya agreed. "It won't."
Another silence, easier this time, the silence of two people who had been circling each other since the first selection and had decided, without saying so directly, that the circling was finished.
"In reality," Yukimiya said, "that match in the first selection was both of us just watching each other."
"Yes," Hibari said. "I scored because you were watching me too carefully to watch the ball."
"And you won today because Isagi was watching his plan too carefully to watch you."
Hibari said nothing, which was its own kind of agreement.
The intercom crackled.
"Team A versus Team C match is now concluding. Team B and Team C players, please report to the pitch for the next fixture."
Both of them stood without ceremony and walked toward the field.
The pitch was the same sterile rectangle it always was, the overhead lights casting everything in that flat clinical brightness that made every match feel like it was happening inside a very large hospital.
Hibari and Yukimiya arrived first and stood at the center circle, waiting. Across the field Team C was already assembling, their players filtering in one by one. Hibari clocked them as they appeared. Karasu first, that crow-like aura of cynical superiority preceding him by several feet. Then Reo, who caught Hibari's eye briefly and looked away with the expression of someone who had processed their last encounter and arrived at conclusions they preferred not to discuss. Then two players Hibari didn't know yet, one with an energy that suggested he had been looking forward to hitting something, and one who moved with the lean explosive looseness of someone whose body had been built specifically for acceleration.
Then Nagi.
Shuffling in last, looking like he had been woken up from a nap which probably wasn't far off.
The VAR announcement came through the speakers, clinical and unhurried.
"The following players will join Team B for this fixture. Shoei Barou. Reiji Hiragi. Hyoma Chigiri."
Three figures came through the near entrance.
Chigiri arrived with that easy athletic grace, his red hair catching the light, and immediately scanned the field. He spotted Hibari and Yukimiya and walked over, not waiting for introductions.
"Chigiri," he said. "I'll be on the wing. If you can get me the ball with open grass ahead of me I'll do the rest. That's where I'm useful." He glanced across at the Team C side, specifically at the lean figure who was currently rolling his shoulders with the barely contained energy of something that had been coiled too long. "That one's Zantetsu. Insane acceleration over short distances. Zero to full speed basically instantly. If he gets a run on me from standing he'll beat me off the line, but if he's already moving I can catch him. Keep that in mind if he gets loose."
Hibari nodded once.He appreciated the absence of ceremony.
Barou arrived next.
He was large in the specific way that suggested the size was functional rather than incidental, and he walked onto the field with the authority of someone who was completely smitten with himself. He looked at Yukimiya, looked at Chigiri, and then his eyes landed on Hibari and stayed there.
"I don't care about tactics," Barou said. "I don't care about systems. I'm here to crush him." He pointed at Hibari with a directness that left no room for interpretation.
Hibari looked at the pointing finger, then at Barou's face, then back at the finger.
"Yea," he said. "Nice to meet you too."
Barou held the stare for another moment then looked away, apparently satisfied with whatever he had been trying to establish.
The three of them turned to the last arrival.
Hiragi stood slightly apart from the others, unhurried, with the quiet self-contained energy of someone operating on a frequency slightly adjacent to the rest of the room. He had been looking at the field but now he looked at them, his expression carrying something that wasn't quite amusement and wasn't quite seriousness, somewhere in between.
"Would any of you like your fortune told?" he asked.
Nobody said anything.
The silence stretched for several seconds.
Hiragi nodded slowly, as if this response had confirmed something he already suspected, and walked toward the field to take his position.
The five of them watched him go.
"Interesting group," Yukimiya said quietly.
"Are they good at soccer?" Hibari replied, and turned back toward the center circle.
KICKOFF
TEAM B vs TEAM C
Karasu tapped the ball sideways to Zantetsu and the match started.
What happened next took approximately one second and covered roughly forty meters.
Zantetsu did not accelerate. Acceleration implied a process, a build from stillness through stages of increasing speed. What Zantetsu did was simply stop being stationary and immediately be at full speed, the transition between the two states so compressed it barely qualified as a transition at all. One moment he was standing on the left wing. The next he was already 10 meters downfield with the ball at his feet and Chigiri several strides behind him, still in the process of building toward a top speed that was not going to arrive in time to be useful.
"Someone cut him off!" Hibari called out, already reading the angle.
Hiragi moved to intercept.
He had been drifting into a position that looked passive and turned out not to be, stepping into Zantetsu's path. Zantetsu, faced with the choice of running through him or adjusting, pulled up sharply and looked for options.
His options were cut inside or pass.
He looked inside. Karasu was there but the pass was tight, the lane narrow.
He looked further inside.
Nagi was drifting along the right side of the penalty area, loose and unhurried, moving with that energy that told he was looking for just the right spot. The pass was long, sailing over Karasu's head, the kind of ball that required the receiver to do significant work to bring it under control at pace.
Hibari read it immediately and moved to intercept, positioning himself between Nagi and the ball's trajectory with the confidence of someone closing down a situation that had already been resolved.
The ball arrived.
And then Nagi did something that had no right to work.
He let the ball come to him at full flight, not jumping to meet it, not moving his body to cushion it, just waiting with that same sleepy patience he brought to everything. At the last possible moment, when the ball was a fraction of a second from sailing past him or bouncing violently off whatever part of him it contacted first, his right foot rose. Almost lazily. And the sole of his boot met the underside of the ball with a touch so soft it seemed to violate some basic principle about what a moving object was supposed to do when it encountered another moving object.
The ball stopped.
Dead. Right at Nagi's feet, sitting there with absolute stillness, the pace and spin and trajectory of the original pass cancelled so completely it was as if they had never existed.
Hibari's momentum carried him one step past the ball before he could correct it.
"Oh. Look at that."
Nagi's shot was low and clean, finding the corner before Blue Lockman had finished processing the fact that the trap had happened at all.
TEAM B 0 - 1 TEAM C
Hibari stood near the edge of the six yard box and looked at the net for a moment.
Then he looked at Nagi, who was already drifting back toward his half with the serene unbothered look of someone who had 0 interest in this match.
'So that's what a natural phenomenon looks like up close,' Hibari thought.
He adjusted his collar.
This was not going to be easy.
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ADDITIONAL TIME
Before the match.
Hiragi had found a quiet corner of the locker room and was laying out a small collection of tarot cards on the bench with the focused ceremony of someone performing a task of genuine importance.
Barou walked past, stopped, looked at the cards, looked at Hiragi, looked at the cards again.
"What are you doing."
"Predicting the match outcome," Hiragi replied, not looking up.
Barou stared at him. Then, against what was clearly his better judgment, he sat down.
Hiragi turned over a card. Studied it. Said nothing.
"Well?" Barou said.
"Give it a moment."
"Give what a moment."
"The cards."
Barou's jaw tightened. "The cards need a moment."
"They're communicating."
Another thirty seconds of silence passed. Chigiri had appeared in the doorway at some point and was watching with his arms folded and the expression of a man who had made a mistake by looking in this direction.
Hiragi finally turned over a second card, considered it gravely, and looked up.
"You will score today," he said to Barou. "But at great personal cost."
Barou stared at him. "What does that mean."
"The cards don't elaborate."
"THEN WHAT'S THE POINT OF THE CARDS."
Hiragi began collecting them with serene unhurried hands. "Would you like your fortune told?" he asked Chigiri.
"Absolutely not," Chigiri said, and left.
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Hello hello so sorry about another wait for the chapter guys.
I actually got a job for the summer so I'm no longer unemployed maxing. Just gotta figure out when I can write chapters at consistent times that is convenient for me.
Sorry you guys have to keep waiting like this, I never intended it to be like this obviously, but life just hits you sometimes.
Nothing that can be done unfortunately.
Hopefully another update soon!
Anyways, hope you guys enjoyed this chapter!
Have a great one guys!
Ussylliss out!