Haise wore a calm, peaceful smile.
That alone was unsettling enough, but at a moment when Team Z had just conceded a goal, there was something uniquely disturbing about that expression that made Hiori pause and genuinely reconsider whether what had happened was really as serious as it seemed.
He walked over.
“Haise, why did you let him score?”
“I wouldn’t say I let him.” Haise replied with the same direct, unembellished logic that was his default way of communicating anything.
“I could have controlled the ball, there’s no doubt about that. But Kiyora was able to assume a completely unconventional shooting form, and on top of that, he had completely disappeared from my considerations.” A brief pause.
“In other words, he vanished from the scenarios I had imagined. And by doing so, he allowed himself to throw his body at the ball and score in the end.”
Hiori processed that in silence for a moment, reorganizing what he had seen through the perspective Haise had just provided.
“Hm. I get it.” His eyes briefly drifted toward Kiyora before returning to Haise.
“He was overshadowed by your presence, but by throwing himself to the limit, he managed to regain his presence and score.” A pause.
“Looks like your insane presence comes with a few drawbacks.”
Haise gave a slight nod, accepting the observation without resistance, then cracked his neck with a motion that sounded louder than usual in the silence of the field.
“But even so…”
Violet flames began burning within his eyes with that irregular intensity that appeared whenever something inside him had reached a decision.
“It’s not like I’m going to lose.”
His eyes met Hiori’s with a weight that needed no volume to be felt.
“Don’t underestimate me, Hiori.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
PII!
Restart!
The ball came toward Haise, who received it before lifting his eyes to find Kiyora standing in front of him.
“You’re not going to talk, are you?” Haise said, his voice carrying that lightness that only existed on the surface.
“Fine then. I’ll draw my own conclusions.”
Tap!
Tap!
Tap!
Haise’s feet worked at a frequency that made it difficult to distinguish one movement from the next, the stepovers creating a sense of direction that Kiyora’s body began believing before it had permission to, pulling him toward the left.
Tap!
Then the ball went right.
The touch was precise and economical, changing direction in a span of time that offered no room for Kiyora’s body to correct what it had already decided.
The elastico was completed before the reaction could even begin, and Haise was already on the other side with the ball at his feet, accelerating forward with that speed that seemed to have no visible point of origin.
“He’s fast!”
Without slowing down, Haise spun the ball and nudged it outward, carrying it behind his right foot before a precise touch sent it straight to the left, threading it between the legs of a player who had arrived to help without being invited into the play.
‘2…’
He reached the opponent’s half and found two players positioned directly in front of him, carrying the determination of men who had decided this would be the line where he stopped.
Haise burst to the right at full speed.
Both followed.
Then his heel touched the ball, redirecting it left with a smoothness that completely contrasted the velocity that had preceded it.
One player was left behind.
The other tried to recover, but Haise had already cut again, his body spinning around itself before slipping past on the right with a fluidity that turned both defenders into incredulous statues in the middle of the field.
‘5…’
Fifty meters separated Haise from Team Y’s penalty area.
And what stood before him was no longer one or two players.
It was a barricade.
Three players positioned together, closing every space with the shared awareness that allowing Haise to reach the box was a risk they had no intention of taking.
“Hm.” Haise looked at them for a moment.
“Not bad. Let’s begin.”
Without warning, he passed the ball to Hiori, who was advancing down the flank.
Every gaze that had been fixed on Haise shifted, trying to reposition around what had changed, searching for the new center of danger.
And during that brief interval, Haise simply vanished from everyone’s consideration.
Baam!
Hiori returned the ball straight into the middle of the three Team Y players forming the barricade, earning immediate confusion from all of them.
“What?”
“He’s giving it away?”
“Idiot, hahaha!”
Baam!
The ball was intercepted by something none of them had seen arrive and was immediately sent back to Hiori, who was already prepared to receive it.
He dribbled past his marker with that characteristic economy of movement and sent the ball back toward the barricade players, who rushed toward it with the certainty that this time they would close the space.
But all they saw was a shadow pass by.
The ball was returned before any of them could touch it, and the shadow vanished again before their eyes could fully lock onto it.
“What the hell is happening?!” one of the barricade players shouted, confusion and frustration arriving at the same time, neither of them being useful.
Kiyora was sprinting along the outside, his eyes wide as he processed what he was seeing with an attention the barricade players clearly lacked.
The ball arrived at the barricade once more, and Kiyora followed its path with his eyes as the thought organized itself.
‘Moving through blind spots at incredible speed.
And he even managed to conceal himself all the way to the penalty area.
This guy is…’
Haise appeared inside the barricade.
Not from the side.
Not from behind.
From within it.
As if he had simply chosen to exist in that space the instant the ball arrived, receiving the pass before anyone in the barricade could close the angle.
‘Way too insane!’
Kiyora completed the thought at the exact moment his feet carried him in front of Haise, instinct arriving before conscious decision as it always did.
“Hey, fringe-boy. How’s it going?”
The words came with that disarming lightness Haise used whenever he was completely in control of a situation.
His eyes met Kiyora’s for an instant.
Then the corner of his vision caught the barricade closing in from both sides, and a smile appeared on his face with that specific quality belonging to someone who had just seen exactly what he wanted to see.
“Show me your limit again, alright?”
Foosh!
The ball rolled against Haise’s own foot before being lifted into the air, rising above the three-man barricade on a trajectory that forced them to commit to an aerial block.
In the same motion, he spun around them, using his hand to prevent one of them from turning around, and raised his leg to shoot.
Zoom!
But the angle changed at the last instant.
The ball gained spin, and the speed of that rotation did something that defied the intuition of anyone trying to read it.
It floated.
Its expected path shifted through the air with the smoothness of something that had decided to take a different route halfway through its journey.
Kiyora had already jumped for the header, his sharpened instincts responding to the decisive moment just as they always had.
But he found only empty space where the ball should have been.
“Ah, so that’s it?”
The voice came from above.
Haise was standing on Kiyora’s back, one hand finding support while his eyes followed the ball as it began its slow and inevitable descent.
Trapped beneath the weight and position of a body that had never been invited but had arrived anyway, Kiyora couldn’t move freely enough to change what was about to happen.
“So you have sharp instincts.” Haise continued, his voice completely calm, as if they were having a conversation somewhere far removed from any urgency.
“The ability to sense borderline decisions. You can feel the decisive moment when you need to act before it fully materializes.” A pause, his eyes never leaving the descending ball.
“Isn’t that right?”
The ball continued to fall.
“So that’s your philosophy?”
His left leg moved.
“What a…”
BAAM!
The bicycle kick was executed with a precision that required no visible preparation because it had been prepared from the moment the ball was lifted.
The power.
The angle.
Everything had been calculated before anyone realized a calculation was taking place.
The ball exploded forward, cutting through the air in a straight line and slamming into the back of the net before the goalkeeper could even process its trajectory as something that needed to be saved.
GOAL!
Team Z [1] — [1] Team Y
Haise rolled out of the motion, completed a backflip with the natural ease of someone simply finishing a sequence that had already begun, and landed with his eyes already on Kiyora.
The smile on his face carried that edge of madness that appeared whenever something satisfied him in a way that went beyond the result itself.
“Be more selfish.”
Kiyora stared at him in disbelief.
There was a limit to how much the mind could process in succession before it simply stopped trying to find a reasonable explanation and accepted that what it was witnessing existed outside any category it knew.
Haise had torn through a large portion of Team Y with a combination of speed and invisibility that should not have been able to coexist within the same player.
He had used collective disorientation to become literally imperceptible in the middle of three players who had formed a barricade specifically to contain him.
He had dribbled past Kiyora and the entire barricade with a rainbow flick that lifted the ball above everyone.
He had scored a bicycle kick goal that had been architected as the conclusion of a fake volley trap that nobody had noticed being set up.
And in the middle of all that, he had figured out how Kiyora thought and how he played.
In a single half of football.
‘What kind of body and brain was this guy born with?!’
The thought came with an intensity Kiyora had not expected, and it brought with it something more personal, something deeper than any technical analysis could ever reach.
He had been born with a fifty percent chance of surviving childbirth.
That was a piece of information he carried with the familiarity of something that had become part of who he was before he had even possessed the vocabulary to describe it.
And with it had come an early understanding that there was always a dividing line.
One side or the other.
One outcome or the other.
The instinct he had developed throughout his entire life—that ability to sense the decisive moment before it fully arrived—had been born from that. Follow the newest chapters on novelping.com.
From that early and involuntary awareness that things could go either way.
But as he looked at Haise, something in that logic began to waver.
‘Maybe he was born with a one hundred percent chance of becoming a genius.’
The thought moved forward before Kiyora could stop it.
‘Maybe the dividing line itself decided that he had to be born no matter what.
Like an inevitable existence for the world.
Something that needed to happen regardless of any variable.’
Haise Sasaki as inevitability.
Not as the result of favorable circumstances, cultivated talent, or specific conditions.
But as something the world had decided would exist in order to force change.
Kiyora stood there with those thoughts for a moment longer than football usually allowed.
And at the end of that moment, with the mad smile still on the two-toned boy’s face and the mirror fragments floating around him as though they belonged to that body just as naturally as eyes and lungs did, Kiyora reached a conclusion he had never intended to reach.
He was genuinely unsure whether Haise Sasaki was actually human.
“Biologically and psychologically speaking, he’s abnormal by nature.”
Hiori approached Kiyora with that calm presence that never announced its arrival—it simply appeared.
He had read the expression on the fringe-haired player’s face with the ease of someone accustomed to observing before speaking, and had decided that the doubt he saw there deserved an answer.
“I took a look at his data,” Hiori continued, his eyes briefly drifting toward Haise before returning to Kiyora.
“And that guy is the most suited person here to become number one. Which made me wonder why he’s ranked so low.”
Kiyora looked at him with genuine confusion.
“So I came up with a hypothesis.” Hiori paused briefly, organizing his thoughts in the way he wanted them to be understood.
“Maybe the reason he’s down here isn’t because he’s physically incomplete. Maybe it’s because there’s still something missing in his mind. He observes, studies, analyzes, learns, and then incorporates it into his own football.” His eyes remained fixed on Kiyora, serious and direct.
“It’s as if he’s using Blue Lock to discover something about himself that he still doesn’t understand.”
Hiori took a small breath as he glanced down at the synthetic green grass of the field.
“He was born with the body of a number one. Speed, strength, coordination, talent, adaptability, instinct.” Each word was delivered as a fact, without dramatics, without the inflection of someone trying to impress.
“He already possesses all of that. And now he’s developing a mind that matches that body.”
Hiori let that settle for a second before continuing.
“The scariest part…” A small, almost involuntary smile appeared at the corner of his mouth.
“…is that he has no doubts about himself.”
Kiyora blinked.
“Huh?”
“Normal people grow through doubt,” Hiori replied, his voice carrying the calm of someone who had reached a conclusion after a long time observing, not before.
“They evolve because they question their own limitations. Because they find a wall, crash into it, and then decide whether they’ll stop or find a way to get through it.”
His eyes returned to Haise on the field.
“But Haise doesn’t do that. He simply accepts that he can achieve something and then finds a way to make it happen. Doubt never enters the process because he doesn’t leave room for it.”
Kiyora’s expression slowly changed as the pieces came together into a picture that was both simpler and more unsettling than anything he had imagined.
Because it really did describe Haise.
With a precision that needed no exaggeration to be impactful.
“That’s why…” Hiori continued, his eyes still fixed on the field.
“…his mind is being forged at an absurd speed. Without the friction of doubt slowing it down.”
The silence that followed lasted exactly as long as Kiyora needed to absorb all of that before forming his next question.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because he’s interested in you.”
“Huh?”
Hiori corrected himself almost immediately, his tone remaining neutral.
“In your philosophy, I mean.” Hiori’s gaze shifted back to Haise on the field, who was smiling with that open, slightly unsettling excitement that appeared whenever something genuinely interested him.
“Strictly speaking, he wants to know what makes your whimsical Ego flow. And he believes you have the answer.”
Kiyora looked at Hiori, then looked at Haise.
The smile was still there—wide and carefree, completely oblivious to the effect it had on anyone who had spent the last few minutes trying to understand what exactly was standing in front of them.
‘This guy…’
Kiyora swallowed hard.
‘…is a freak of nature.’
It wasn’t a metaphor.
It wasn’t an exaggeration born from the frustration of being outplayed repeatedly within a matter of minutes.
It was a conclusion reached with the seriousness of someone who had been born understanding that the world is full of dividing lines, that things can go one way or the other, and that very rarely does something appear so completely outside any line that should have existed.
Haise Sasaki had not emerged from one side or the other.
He had emerged from a place the dividing line had never considered a possibility.
Before the abnormal creature that Haise Sasaki represented—with his violet eyes burning with that irregular flame, his mirror fragments floating around him like extensions of something that still lacked a complete name, and that mad smile that lacked the decency to disappear after everything he had done—Jin Kiyora could see only one thing with absolute clarity.
An aberration had appeared in the world.
And it had appeared with a single purpose.
To claim the summit that so many aspired to reach.
…
The abnormal creature known as Haise Sasaki—the Number One of Blue Lock—stood before everyone, still in the process of being forged…
NEXT CHAPTER → Aberration