Hiori approached Haise, who was standing there with that inward-looking gaze that usually meant his brain was somewhere his eyes were not.
“What is it?” Hiori asked.
Haise blinked lightly, returning to reality with the gradualness of someone occupied with something important and not particularly fond of being interrupted before finishing it.
“I’m having trouble.” he said, without preamble, without the pride that would stop most people from admitting such a thing out loud.
“I’ve been splitting my focus between the Messi of Aomori and the other players at the same time, and it’s starting to overload me. Lack of experience.” A short sigh escaped him.
“There’s a difference between a team addicted to a single player and a truly selfish team.”
Hiori considered that in silence for a moment.
He was right.
Dividing his attention between the most dangerous opponent on the field while simultaneously monitoring his own teammates waiting for him to slip up was a different burden from simply playing well.
It was a kind of pressure that never appeared in training because it depended on real circumstances, real speed, and real consequences.
“You’re talking about Team Z?”
“Who else would I be talking about?” Haise replied with the weariness of someone explaining something he considered obvious.
“Just look at them. They’ve been obsessed with stealing the ball from me since the beginning. Waiting for me to fail, for me to lose control for a second, for me to make a mistake that justifies their existence on the field.”
Hiori discreetly followed Haise’s gaze and recognized the pattern immediately.
Team Z had spent the entire match watching Haise with an attention that wasn’t that of teammates—it was the attention of opportunists.
Waiting for the moment the ball left his feet so they could claim it as though it had always belonged to them.
Under the current circumstances, it was essentially one against twenty.
Haise had excluded Hiori from that calculation, not out of carelessness, but because he genuinely still didn’t know what Hiori truly wanted.
And Haise was not the kind of person who included variables he didn’t understand in his plans.
“And do you have a plan?”
Haise looked at him.
The irritation was mild, like a small flame that didn’t need to grow larger to communicate its heat.
“You’re far too curious for my liking.” he remarked, and the hostility in his voice was real enough to make Hiori flinch slightly without realizing it.
“Tell me, why would I tell you? Just because we’ve talked?” A brief pause, his violet eyes fixed on Hiori without a trace of softness.
“Don’t fool yourself into thinking something like that matters, idiot.”
Hiori remained silent.
There was no proper response to that, and he knew it.
So he simply stood there and listened.
Haise turned his back to him before continuing, his voice carrying that coldness that wasn’t gratuitous cruelty—it was simply honesty without any wrapping paper around it.
“I’m polite enough to treat people with respect.” he said slowly and clearly.
“But if you want to keep up this irritating habit of asking me questions without giving me a single reason to trust you, then you can go to hell.” A flame flickered from his eyes for an instant, small but real.
“Everything I’ve told you so far has been obvious. But from this point onward, it will be something that belongs exclusively to me.”
Without another word, Haise walked away.
His eyes were already on the field, tracking the movement of the ball that had just been thrown in from the sideline toward a Team Z player.
The player received it with the characteristic hesitation of someone who didn’t quite know what to do next.
‘I’m taking too long to help him.
If this keeps up…’
Whoosh!
Haise was already moving, slicing through the space between himself and his teammate with a speed that left no time to react, stealing the ball from the feet of his own teammate with a naturalness that made the act appear almost harmless.
Then he drove toward the penalty area without slowing down.
Nishioka spotted him immediately and gave chase, with two other players closing in from the side.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
Nishioka’s foot shot out, attempting to intercept the trajectory before it could fully develop.
But Haise didn’t slow down.
The shoulder check came with the same dry, direct force as before, pushing Nishioka out of the lane of advance with the same efficiency.
“Tsk!”
Another player came from the right, faster and closer.
Haise raised an arm while shielding the ball with his body, creating a human barrier between the opponent and his objective.
Then, with a precise touch, he slipped the ball through the player’s legs before circling around him, using his hand to prevent him from turning in time to follow the movement.
Baam!
The third player, who had been charging in from behind without slowing down, crashed directly into the one Haise had just beaten.
Both of them hit the ground together in an impact that solved two problems at once without Haise needing to spend even a second thinking about them.
“How desperate.” The voice was familiar.
Irritatingly familiar.
Nishioka had appeared in front of him, blocking the route to the goal with that smile that seemed to exist solely to provoke people.
“Looks like you’re scared.”
Haise narrowed his eyes.
There was something genuinely exhausting about this.
Not Nishioka’s presence as an obstacle—that was simply football.
It was the effort he put into provoking him that went absolutely nowhere, words desperately trying to find a wound and missing the target completely every single time.
“You’re not much of a talker, are you?” Haise said, his voice carrying a boredom that wasn’t performative.
“You don’t even know how to hit a sore spot. But that’s fine.”
His eyes dropped to the ball for a fraction of a second.
“We won’t be seeing each other after this match.”
His heel moved with a precision that required neither momentum nor any visible preparation.
The ball shot off, cutting through the air along a trajectory Nishioka had not calculated—because no one had calculated it—rising slightly before beginning its descent toward a specific point on the field.
Nishioka stood there, genuinely incredulous, his eyes following the ball as it flew and then slowly descended with an almost deliberate gentleness.
Right to the feet of Hiori Yo.
“Sorry for the delay, boss. But I’m here to fulfill my role.”
Hiori commented with that characteristic ease that only he could maintain in a moment of tension, the ball at his feet and his eyes already reading the field ahead. Get faster updates on novelping.com.
The smile that appeared on Haise’s face was small and fleeting, but real.
“Finally, you cyan-haired idiot.”
Whoosh!
And then Haise simply stopped thinking about everyone else.
His focus narrowed until only two things existed: the opponents who needed to be overcome and the allies who could be used.
With that brutal clarity guiding every step, he tore through Team X’s defensive formation at a speed that asked no permission, moving like a runaway train that didn’t go around obstacles because it simply ran them over.
‘When did he know I would help him?’
Hiori asked himself the question as he moved the ball forward, his eyes tracking Haise, who was already making his return run.
The pass came.
Haise returned it.
And the two slipped into a fluid one-two combination that carved through the defense as if it had never prepared itself for two players who barely knew each other to function as though they had trained together for years.
‘No…
Since when was this my idea?’
The question remained unanswered because there was no simple answer.
There was only the field, the ball, and the strange feeling that all of this had been inevitable from the very beginning.
Expectations.
Haise had always considered that word useless.
A burden people carried without question, directing their lives according to what others expected of them instead of what they themselves wanted to achieve.
But for that very reason, he understood expectations better than most.
And because of that, he knew, without Hiori needing to say a single word, that the cyan-haired boy had carried the weight of being number one on his shoulders since before he had even learned how to write his own name.
And without realizing it, he had handed that weight to Haise Sasaki the moment he made that decision.
‘Expectations.
Dreams.
Best in the world.’
Haise received the ball, feinted left with a naturalness that left no room for doubt, and passed it to Hiori at the exact moment he cut inside with an acceleration that created the space he needed.
‘Those are all burdens carried by the best in the world.
That’s what makes a being worthy of being called the best in the world…’
Around him, the mirror fragments reflected faces.
Ego.
Hiori.
Nishioka.
Kira.
Haise looked at Kira’s reflection for an instant.
Then crushed it in his hand while receiving the ball back and calmly flicking it upward with his heel, the movement far too smooth for the intensity burning within his eyes.
‘An extraordinary existence.’
‘And that extraordinary existence…
possesses everything.’
He looked at Hiori as he passed the ball once more, and there was something in that gaze that went beyond football, beyond the match, beyond that specific field.
An uncontrollable fire that was no longer trying to restrain itself.
‘That existence belongs to me by right.
You damned people who have everything in life…’
Whoosh!!
Haise cut left with a speed that surpassed anything he had displayed up to that point, and in the same instant crushed the remaining fragments.
Nishioka.
Hiori.
Ego.
All reduced to shards that vanished before they could touch the ground.
‘I don’t care what you throw at me.
Your dreams, expectations, fears, ambitions, whatever they may be…
I’ll take them all for myself!’
He collided with Nishioka, and the impact was real and deliberate.
But what made Nishioka freeze wasn’t the physical contact.
It was Haise’s eyes.
So irregular.
So intensely focused on something that wasn’t on that field, in that moment, or within the shared space between the two of them.
‘Do you like this, old man?
I’ll take your dream and make it reality.
Right here and now, I’ll show you a glimpse of your dream!’
“He’s completely oblivious to me.” Nishioka muttered, almost to himself, struggling to process what he was seeing in a way he had never experienced on a football field before.
“And to every other player.”
As if he had heard him, Haise’s eye fell upon him.
With the weight of someone who had already decided everything before looking.
“Get ready, shorty.” The words came out low and perfectly calm, carrying a certainty that needed no volume to be felt across every inch of the field.
“Even if it’s only one goal, I’ll make fear and despair consume you with just that.”
And then Haise waited.
His eyes fixed on the ball still at Hiori’s feet, his body already prepared, his mind already three steps ahead of whatever would come next.
…
Hiori dribbled past the player in front of him with the economical elegance of someone who never wastes movement, slipping the ball through his legs with a precise touch and reclaiming control on the other side without breaking rhythm.
His eyes found Haise, who was standing still at the edge of the penalty area.
But why…
Wait!’
The glimpse came like a lightning strike, too fast to be called reasoning, too fast even to be called intuition.
It was something between the two—a vision of what would happen in the next few seconds if he sent the ball in that direction, at that moment, with that intention.
‘Alright.
Then let’s do this.’
Hiori had his weapons, and he knew how to use them.
The sharp vision that read the field before the field itself unfolded.
The left foot that delivered passes with a precision that didn’t rely on power.
The composure under pressure that allowed him to see clearly while the world around him accelerated.
With all of that combined, there was a certainty inside him that transcended any common sense that could be applied to the situation.
Haise would be able to reach that pass, but only according to Hiori’s sense of reality.
Baam!
The ball flew toward Haise, who was being marked by a total of three players.
Nishioka, and two center-backs positioned to close down every angle available to him.
‘No matter how I send this ball.’ Haise’s mind processed information at a speed his eyes never revealed outwardly.
A thousand ways to score were created and discarded within fractions of a second, each one evaluated and abandoned until one rose above the rest with a clarity that left no room for doubt.
‘The most challenging part is…’
The ball was arriving.
Haise lowered his body, shifting his weight into a stance that communicated one clear and unmistakable thing to anyone watching.
A jump.
The center-backs read it, anticipated it, and then leaped.
Rush!
But there was no jump.
The movement was cut off before it could truly exist, transformed into a sprint the instant the center-backs were already in the air, unable to correct the decision their bodies had already committed to.
Nishioka came immediately after, faster, closer, carrying the determination of someone who wasn’t about to let another play slip away.
“I’m going to follo—”
Shhhiiiic!
Haise stopped so abruptly that the movement looked physically impossible for someone carrying that much speed.
He reversed direction on the spot, slipped behind Nishioka before the sentence could even leave his mouth, and then Nishioka felt it.
A weight.
And a shadow above him.
His eyes widened in a fraction of a second that contained more genuine disbelief than anything he had experienced on that field so far.
‘YOU MANIAC!
YOU’RE A PSYCHOPATH, AREN’T YOU?!’
Haise Sasaki was above him.
One hand braced against Nishioka’s back for support, his body elevated, suspended in a moment that defied any reasonable interpretation of what a human being should be capable of doing with their own weight and momentum in a situation like that.
On the other side of the field, Hiori’s eyes were completely wide open, and the thought that crossed his mind in that instant was simple and absolutely definitive.
Common sense does not work on Haise Sasaki.
It never had.
He simply hadn’t had proof until now.
BAAM!
GOAL!
「Spinning Volley」
The ball flew into the net with a power and trajectory that the goalkeeper had never calculated—because no one had calculated it.
And the silence that followed lasted exactly as long as it took for the reality of what had happened to settle over every person present on that field.
Team Z [1] — [0] Team X
Victory for Team Z!
Haise landed on the ground.
There was nothing elegant about the landing.
No calculated pose.
No carefully maintained composure.
Just both feet meeting the turf and the weight of the moment falling with him in a way that needed no ceremony to be real.
And then he smiled.
It was different from his previous smiles.
Wider.
More alive.
With an edge of madness that wasn’t trying to hide from anyone.
The smile of someone who had just done exactly what he wanted and had felt every second of it completely.
His eyes turned upward, toward nowhere in particular.
Or perhaps toward somewhere only he could see.
“My Ego is really demanding.” He said, his voice carrying a shameless lightness that contrasted with everything that had been said and done over the last few minutes.
“But it suits me, don’t you think, old man?”
The mockery was there, clear and deliberate, directed at Ego with the twisted familiarity of someone who had understood the nature of their relationship and decided to embrace it completely, without embarrassment and without compromise.
The crazy smile remained on his face.
And for a moment, the entire field fell silent around that boy with white hair and dark roots, mirror fragments slowly fading into the air, a goal on the scoreboard, and an Ego finally revealed in its true form.
…
With an unexpected and completely insane goal, Haise Sasaki defied expectations and claimed everything that had been imposed upon him to fuel his Ego!
NEXT CHAPTER → Abnormal