In the monitoring room, Ego stood in front of the screens with the kind of smile that rarely appeared in its entirety, and when it did, it carried a slightly unsettling quality for anyone not accustomed to him.
“HAHAHAHAHA!!!”
The laughter burst out sharp and without warning, and his hand slammed against the desk hard enough to make the surrounding equipment vibrate slightly.
It was a genuine and unfiltered expression from someone who had just witnessed exactly what he had expected, in the way he had expected, at the moment he had expected.
“You crazy brat!” Ego said to the screen, as if Haise could hear him, as if the distance between them didn’t exist.
“You really are that demanding! That Ego suits you perfectly, you insane genius.”
Beside him, Anri watched with the look of someone who was genuinely lost and had already accepted that she would probably remain lost for a while longer.
She turned toward him, clutching her clipboard against her chest.
“Ego…”
“That’s your Ego…” Ego said, his voice lowering slightly as his hand rose to partially cover his face in a gesture that failed to hide the smile underneath.
“Who would’ve thought that you’d discover it in a single match?”
He stared at the screen for a moment, and there was something about those two seconds of silence that differed from all of Ego’s other silences.
Warmer.
Closer to something he rarely allowed himself to show in public.
“A step has been taken.” He murmured, almost to himself, before his voice returned to its usual tone.
“Don’t even think about backing down now, you selfish brat.”
Anri looked at the screen and then back at Ego, and the thought came to her with a clarity she hadn’t expected.
Whether Haise Sasaki was truly Ego Jinpachi’s son or not, the two of them were absolutely alike.
The same mad laughter.
The same smile that existed somewhere between genius and insanity.
The same way of inhabiting a moment with such overwhelming intensity that everyone else present became little more than supporting characters in the story of their existence.
She turned her attention back to the screen replaying the goal on a loop—the Spinning Volley—and her mind began working on its own, breaking the moment into smaller pieces in an attempt to understand what had truly happened.
The idea had never crossed her mind as a realistic possibility.
It was too risky.
It demanded too much from the body, too much from the available space, and required everyone and everything to move in a very specific way for it to work.
Yet it had worked.
It had worked in such a way that everyone on the field, opponents and teammates alike, consciously or unconsciously, had moved in a manner that created the exact conditions Haise needed.
As if the entire field had conspired around that moment without realizing it was doing so.
“What are you daydreaming about, errand girl?”
Ego’s voice cut through her epiphany before it could reach a conclusion.
Anri blinked.
“Ah.” She quickly composed herself and turned toward him.
“I was thinking about how he scored that goal. It was unusual and risky.” She paused as she organized her thoughts into words.
“There was a chance he could’ve injured himself, or injured other players. But beyond the risk, it’s simply unusual for someone to score like that. Anything could have gone wrong.”
Ego let out a small, quiet laugh.
“Heh.”
It was the kind of sound that escaped from someone who had just confirmed something they already knew, but from a perspective far broader than everyone else’s.
Anri looked at him, and Ego pointed toward the screen without taking his eyes off it.
“You’re looking at the execution.”
His voice was calm, free from the exaggerated lecturing tone he sometimes used.
It was simply a direct observation.
“But you’re ignoring the most important part.”
Anri blinked.
“The most important part?”
Ego smiled.
It was a different smile from the others.
Something simpler.
Something rarer.
The smile of a father who had just watched his son do something that filled him with a pride so genuine it didn’t need to be spoken aloud.
“Haise never planned only the shot.”
He let the words breathe for a moment, his eyes fixed on the frozen image on the screen, reflecting the field, the players, and the moment suspended just before impact.
“He planned the ideal scenario for his desires.”
Anri remained motionless.
The difference between those two things settled over her slowly, and the more it settled, the larger it became.
Ego continued:
“He observed the players. Read the positioning of every player on the field. Understood their movement patterns before they even materialized.” The pieces were placed one by one, each sentence fitting into the last with the precision of someone dismantling a mechanism to reveal how it worked on the inside.
“He thought about the requirements necessary for that specific goal to become possible. Then he controlled the pace of the game during the final minutes so that those conditions would be created and collide at the right moment.”
The screen replayed the sequence again, and this time the players’ movements looked different.
Not chaotic.
Directed.
As if an invisible hand had been arranging every piece without any of them realizing they were being arranged.
“Combining multiple factors simultaneously and then giving them a form of expression is something he developed during the Legend Prospect.” Ego paused briefly.
“And then he created a situation where that goal became possible.”
The silence that followed carried a different quality from the ordinary silence of the monitoring room.
“His weapon may not have been fully discovered yet.” Ego finally said, his eyes never leaving the screen, the smile remaining in place with a gentleness that rarely inhabited his face.
“But one thing is undeniable.”
“Haise Sasaki was the center of the game.”
…
Hiori jumped onto Haise’s back without warning.
Haise’s instincts reacted before thought could, his arms closing behind him and catching the weight with enough firmness to keep both of them from crashing to the ground together.
“YOU DAMN GENIUS!”
Hiori’s grin was wide and completely devoid of composure, his heart racing at a pace he had never experienced on the field before.
Something inside him had shattered along with that goal—the weight of the Expectations he had carried all this time, the responsibilities his parents had forced onto him, all of it transferred onto Haise.
And as expected, to him, that weight seemed so ridiculous that it might as well not exist.
“How did you plan that?! And when?!”
“You cyan idiot.”
Haise threw him to the ground with the same energy someone would use to shrug a coat off their shoulders—without malice, but without any particular gentleness either—before running a hand through his own hair in a gesture that carried more relief than vanity.
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while.” He began, his voice carrying that straightforward cadence of someone simply stating facts and having no particular interest in making the story sound dramatic.
“While I was adapting to that short idiot, I was also thinking in parallel about how to score against Team X.”
Hiori was lying face-down on the ground, absorbing both the pain of the impact and the information reaching him, each with roughly the same intensity.
“To pull it off, I needed a first-rate playmaker while I built the rest of the ideal scenario.” Haise continued, his eyes drifting toward the field as if he were still replaying the sequence in his head.
“But I still didn’t know exactly how I wanted to score. I discarded several options because they were too easy to anticipate, too easy to deflect, too easy for any attentive defense to shut down.”
He paused briefly—not for dramatic effect, just long enough to organize the next part.
“Then I thought about forcing a fake battle using my speed. Drawing the defenders in, making them commit their positioning, and using Nishioka as an involuntary physical support during the shot.”
Hiori slowly got back up from the ground, his face caught somewhere between pain and genuine astonishment, like someone listening to the anatomy of something that had seemed impossible to explain through mere logistics.
“And how did you know I’d send it over the top?”
Haise looked at him with that expression that wasn’t exactly patience, but tolerated the question.
“I created the conditions for that goal.” He said it as casually as if he were commenting on the weather.
“I even nudged you into using a lob pass for me. The high trajectory was necessary for the timing of the jump to work within the scenario I had constructed.”
Hiori froze.
“What?”
“You think it was a coincidence?”
Haise looked directly at him.
“Throughout the entire match, I was guiding the situation in that direction.”
“For that goal to exist the way I wanted it to, a very specific scenario was necessary.” Haise concluded.
His violet eyes seemed disturbingly calm to Hiori.
“So I created it. To score the first and only goal of this match.”
From the very beginning, Haise had never been searching for an opportunity to score.
He had simply decided it would be better to create one.
And there was a monstrous difference between those two things, the kind of difference that separates entire categories of players without most people ever realizing where the line is drawn.
Most strikers waited.
They read the field, monitored the spaces, and waited for an opening to appear on its own.
Then they exploited it with all the speed and technique they possessed.
Geniuses created the opening.
But Haise had gone beyond merely creating an opening.
He had constructed every element necessary for that opening to become that specific goal.
Not just any goal.
Not one possible goal among many others.
That goal.
With that trajectory.
At that exact moment.
With those exact people standing precisely where they needed to be.
Hiori’s pass.
The defenders’ positioning.
Nishioka’s movement, turned against him without him ever realizing he was being used.
The exact timing of the jump.
The ball’s trajectory through the air.
The angle of the volley.
Everything.
Every piece had been placed exactly where it needed to be long before anyone on the field realized a pattern was forming. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
Like a line of dominoes beginning to fall silently while everyone was still looking in the wrong direction.
A shiver ran down Hiori’s spine.
Because it meant something.
Something that took a moment to fully settle before he could grasp the scale of what he was realizing.
While everyone else had been busy playing football, Haise seemed to be playing the same sport on an entirely different level.
A game that existed above the field, above the match, above anything the others even had the vocabulary to describe.
Hiori turned his gaze back to him.
Haise was standing on the field.
No heroic pose.
No excessive celebration.
No triumphant expression from someone who had just accomplished something extraordinary and wanted the entire world to know about it.
He simply looked satisfied.
In that specific, quiet way an inventor looks while watching a machine finally work after hours spent assembling its components, checking every connection, and calculating every tolerance.
“And you call that thinking?”
Haise raised an eyebrow.
“Yes.”
“That’s not thinking.”
Hiori pointed at him with the conviction of someone speaking from a place of genuine certainty.
“That’s psychopathy.”
“It’s planning.”
“It’s psychopathy with extra steps.”
“It’s still planning.”
“You manipulated an entire match.”
“I manipulated the field for exactly thirty minutes.”
“That does not help your case.”
“I’m not trying to defend myself.”
The answer came so quickly and with such a complete lack of any need for justification that Hiori needed a few seconds just to process it.
There was no regret there.
No irony.
Just the simple statement of someone who genuinely saw nothing that needed defending.
Hiori buried his face in both hands.
“My God…”
“What is it now?” Haise asked, without urgency and without any particular concern.
“I thought I had just made the pass of my life.” Hiori said, his hands still covering part of his face.
“You did.”
“But apparently I was just a cog in the machine.”
“An extremely important cog.”
“THAT DOESN’T HELP!”
Hiori’s voice came out with an intensity he hadn’t intended, carrying all the specific frustration of someone who had felt like part of something grand for approximately thirty seconds before discovering he had merely been a very well-positioned chess piece.
Haise laughed.
Not the restrained, controlled laugh he used when deliberately provoking someone.
It was a genuine laugh, short and edged with that same trace of madness that had appeared after the goal, and which seemed to be the most honest expression he had available whenever something truly amused him.
He sat down beside Hiori with the casualness of someone choosing a chair in an empty room.
“But I’ll hardly ever score that goal again.” He commented, his voice returning to its usual calm cadence.
Hiori nodded.
That much, at least, made sense.
The conditions required for that goal to exist were far too specific, dependent on too many variables to become something reproducible in the exact same form.
“But I’ll turn it into a pattern.”
Hiori slowly turned his head.
“Huh?”
“What?” Haise looked at him with that smile that carried confidence without apologizing for its existence.
“Are you surprised? I have complete confidence that, with my talent, I can turn something unrepeatable into a pattern.”
Hiori stared at him for a moment.
After everything he had seen during that match, after every play, every adaptation, every piece moved across a board that only Haise seemed capable of seeing in its entirety, after the goal and the cold, straightforward explanation of how every element had been calculated and placed exactly where it needed to be, after all of that…
He could still be surprised.
“Give me a break.” Hiori said, his voice carrying an incredulity that had completely crossed over into another territory entirely, reaching a place that could only be described as resigned admiration.
“You’re abnormal.”
“Hehehe~”
…
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