Restart!
Kiyora received the ball, and the instant he saw Haise begin to approach, he passed it to a teammate without hesitation.
The decision had been made before the confrontation could truly begin.
Knowing what he knew now about Haise’s physical capabilities—about the speed, the strength, the adaptability that had turned every attempt to contain him into a lesson about one’s own limits—Kiyora’s instincts had reached a simple and absolutely rational conclusion.
Direct confrontation was territory that should not be occupied.
Keep the ball moving.
Passes.
Collective progression.
That was the path.
“Oh.”
Haise stood still for a second, genuinely impressed by the change in approach.
There was something he respected about it—not the avoidance itself, but the intelligence of recognizing where a confrontation was unfavorable and acting accordingly.
“So that’s what your instinct is telling you? Smart.”
Kiyora shifted his body one way and accelerated in the other, leaving Haise behind with a fluid movement that took perfect advantage of the space created by the attention Haise himself had directed toward him.
But Haise didn’t follow him.
He remained still for a fraction of a second, his eyes reading the field with that processing speed that showed no visible expression, and then made his own decision.
He ignored Kiyora completely and ran.
Foosh!
The burst of speed was of a different nature from anything he had shown so far in the match.
It wasn’t the speed of pursuit or reaction.
It was something closer to an Olympic sprinter who had saved a specific gear for a specific moment and had decided that this was the moment to use it.
Haise tore through several players with a voraciousness that asked no permission, and those in his path felt him before they saw him—a wave of air rushing past with such intensity that several instinctively stepped back before understanding what had happened.
And then he simply appeared.
In the field of vision of the player carrying the ball, Haise’s eyes burned with those irregular violet flames, his presence filling the space in a way that wasn’t proportional to the physical volume he occupied.
“Move aside.” His voice came out low and absolutely direct.
“This stage isn’t for extras.”
His foot extended with a precision that left no time for a reaction, removing the ball from the Team Y player’s control with a touch that was surgical in intent and immediate in execution.
The control with his left foot followed naturally, without interrupting his rhythm.
“Hiori!”
Baam!
The ball flew.
Hiori received it, and something happened that he hadn’t expected.
‘What a smooth pass…’
He had prepared himself for something violent, for the force Haise put into everything he did with his feet, for the impact that would require extra control to absorb properly.
But the pass had arrived with a softness that completely contrasted with the speed it carried.
Fast enough to be impossible to defend, precise enough to land exactly where it needed to land, and gentle enough that controlling it became the easiest thing in the world.
‘I thought it would be violent.
But it was unbelievably smooth and fast.’ Hiori kept the ball at his feet, an unusual thought crossing his mind.
‘He improved his passing to this level?!’
He had never imagined it.
In none of the scenarios he had built around what Haise was capable of had passes of that specific quality ever appeared as a variable.
Haise smiled as he accelerated, cutting across multiple players without distinction, allies and opponents treated with the same indifference as someone who only saw the space he needed to occupy and not the people standing in it.
“Come on already, you sadist!”
His voice rang out in the middle of his run, loud and completely unconcerned with anything around him.
“Your passes can be like that too, but I want it right up ahead! Give me a pass that’s hard to reach!”
Hiori’s eyes widened.
For a second, he stood there processing what he had heard, and then something happened in his eyes that had not been planned and had not asked permission to exist.
A blue flame ignited within them, fueled by something that lay somewhere between challenge and the genuine indignation of being called a sadist by someone who had just requested an impossible pass as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“You bastard…” Hiori muttered, his teeth slightly clenched.
“If that’s what you want, then I’ll give it to you!”
His right leg passed behind his left with a precision that required no extra momentum, and the nutmeg came out with the naturalness of someone who had already found the angle before executing the move.
The marker was left behind as Hiori advanced into midfield, the fire still burning in his eyes.
Foosh!
Kiyora emerged from the shadows with that instinctive presence that never announced its arrival.
But Hiori had already noticed him.
To protect the ball, he had shifted it away before Kiyora’s foot could reach it.
“Tsk!”
Kiyora clicked his tongue in frustration.
“What is it?” Hiori asked, moving the ball to the left with that fluidity that didn’t need speed to be effective.
“Has that freak of nature invaded your mind?”
The ball went to the right with his left foot before the question had even finished settling.
Kiyora stayed close and did the sensible thing—a shoulder block.
Hiori wasn’t on Haise’s physical level, and Kiyora knew that.
It was a different equation, a confrontation that should have had a different outcome.
But Hiori didn’t move.
Kiyora’s shoulder check landed squarely, the force carrying the intent of ending the play before it could go anywhere.
BAAM!
But instead of being pushed away, Hiori absorbed the impact and turned with it, as if the contact had been anticipated and incorporated into the plan before it ever happened.
His body rotated with the force rather than against it, and his left foot found the ball in the exact space Kiyora’s own movement had unintentionally opened.
Kiyora’s eyes widened.
“He used my pressure?”
For a brief instant that lingered longer than it should have in the memory of anyone watching, Hiori and the ball seemed to glide around Kiyora as a single unit—fluid and inevitable.
“You’re wrong.”
The voice came out calm.
Completely calm.
Not the effortful calm of someone trying to sound composed in a difficult moment, but the genuine calm of someone who had reached a conclusion and was simply stating it.
“What?”
“You thought I couldn’t hold my own physically.”
Hiori didn’t look back as he spoke.
“And that I wouldn’t be able to pass to him.”
The ball rolled forward.
“No.”
FOOSH!
Kiyora immediately turned to chase after him, but the distance had already been created in that moment of hesitation, and distances created by Hiori Yo when he decided to create them were not the kind that could be recovered easily.
The blue flames in Hiori’s eyes burned with a different intensity than before.
More resolute.
“He’s only forcing me to become better.”
The words surprised him before they surprised anyone else.
Because they were true, and he had known they were true long before he said them, but hearing them aloud carried a different weight than simply knowing them internally.
Ever since Haise had appeared, everything had become more difficult.
Every pass demanded greater precision than the last, because anything less wouldn’t reach where it needed to go.
Every read of the game demanded greater depth, because Haise had already read three layers beyond before Hiori had reached the first.
Decisions had to be made faster, because beside someone who processed things at that speed, hesitation was simply the absence of action.
There was no room for anything less than his maximum.
And strangely…
Hiori didn’t hate it.
In fact, as the field opened up before him and his lungs worked with the intensity of the moment, the feeling he found wasn’t opposition or resentment at all.
It was love.
For what was happening to him.
For what he was being forced to become.
“If I want to keep up with him…”
It simply happened, the entire field appearing before him at once as a complete picture.
The defenders and their positioning.
The available angles and the ones that were closed.
The spaces that existed now and the ones that would exist in two seconds if nothing changed.
The timing of every element.
And at the center of it all, the gravitational point around which everything else orbited without realizing it was orbiting.
Haise Sasaki.
A monster in motion, charging toward a future that only he seemed capable of seeing clearly enough to run toward before it existed.
“Then I need to evolve too.”
Hiori planted his foot into the ground.
The entire field lay before him, open and readable in a way it had never been before that moment and perhaps would never be exactly the same again, but it was like that now, and now was what mattered.
“Alright.”
A genuine smile appeared on his face.
Not the calculated smile of someone managing a situation.
The smile of someone who had found exactly where he wanted to be.
“If you want an impossible pass…”
His leg moved.
BAAM!
The ball exploded off his left foot with a force that had not been present in his previous passes, slicing through the air on a trajectory that wasn’t aimed at Haise, wasn’t aimed at where Haise was running, but at an empty space—a point absurdly far ahead, so far ahead that the same conclusion arrived simultaneously in the minds of every player with an angle to see it.
“Too far!”
“No one’s reaching that!”
“What the hell is he doing?!”
The ball continued flying.
And from somewhere on the field, a laugh cut through the air above everything else.
“HAHA!”
Loud.
Full.
Completely devoid of any restraint.
The laugh of someone who had just received exactly what he had asked for and was genuinely delighted by the result.
The violet flames in Haise’s eyes intensified to the point where their irregularity seemed to have found a rhythm of its own, burning with a quality that belonged to him alone.
“That’s it, you sadistic bastard!”
And then he accelerated again.
“This genius has summoned me.”
Hiori spoke while looking at Haise’s figure, his voice carrying something that had not been there before this match, something that had been awakened by a specific sequence of events, words, and moments that could no longer be undone.
“So all I can do is answer his summons. So I won’t disappear into the darkness… and so I’ll give him expectations to carry…”
His eyes found the trajectory Haise was carving through the field with his own moving body.
“I’ll be the one who lays down the red carpet!”
It was an impossible pass to reach—or so they said.
But for that genius fighting to score with only a minute left on the clock, it was merely another challenge he would overcome.
‘Then…’
Haise reached the edge of the penalty area and read everything in front of him in a single instant.
Five defenders, plus the goalkeeper.
‘They reinforced the defense because of me?
How fun!’
His lips slowly curved upward, and the smile that appeared carried neither intimidation nor concern.
It was the genuine expression of someone who had just been handed exactly the kind of problem he enjoyed the most.
Hiori’s pass arrived with the violence that had been promised, slicing through the air on a trajectory that demanded precision if it was to be received without immediately losing control.
Haise raised his foot.
The ball crashed down onto it with force, and for a fraction of a second it seemed as though the speed would be too much to absorb.
But his foot gave way at precisely the right moment, distributing the impact and converting the violence of the pass into a stillness that should not have been possible.
The ball settled gently onto the grass as if it had arrived on its own and chosen that spot to rest.
And then the first defender appeared.
The elastico came out without any visible preparation, the ball slipping through the defender’s legs with a precision that left no room for a reaction, and Haise was already on the other side before the player had finished processing that he had been beaten.
“W-What?!”
Two defenders came at him together.
Haise spun the ball around its own axis, moving left at a speed that forced both markers to commit their bodies, then he went right, and then he spun completely, facing both of them in a movement that took less time than it took to describe.
The defenders’ legs locked up, their balance compromised by the sequence of directions their bodies had followed before their minds could redirect them.
Haise passed by them as though they had willingly stepped aside.
Only two remained.
His foot swept over the ball with a touch that sent it rolling at high speed, striking his heel and rising into the air.
Another touch followed, lifting it even higher above the heads of the two defenders waiting with their arms slightly raised and their eyes fixed on the ball.
As the ball climbed, Haise circled around them from the side, spinning with a fluidity that seemed to ignore the physics of the situation itself.
And when the spin ended, the ball descended directly in front of him, as if it had been waiting for him all along.
As if the two had arranged a meeting.
His violet eyes locked onto the goal.
In that instant, nothing else existed.
There were no defenders.
No goalkeeper.
No noise from the field.
No weight from the scoreline.
No final minute dictating that this would be the last play of the match.
There were only those eyes, that goal, and the distance between them—a distance that was about to cease existing.
“It’s over, Team Y.”
BAAAAAAAAAAAM!!
The centrifugal force of his spin still lived throughout his entire body when his left leg moved, and Haise wasted none of it.
Every ounce of that rotational energy was concentrated into a single point of contact that lasted less than a second.
His left leg exploded into the ball.
The impact produced a sharp, decisive crack.
The force was so immense that the ball simply vanished.
There was no visible trajectory.
No arc to follow.
Only a white blur tearing across the penalty area in a line that seemed far too straight to have been created by a human being moving at rotational speed.
The goalkeeper reacted in desperation, throwing himself forward with both arms outstretched.
Instinct took over because the window for conscious decision-making had expired before it even began.
It was useless.
Completely useless.
THWAAAAACK!!
The net caved inward with a violence that had not been announced, snapping backward with such force that the entire goal trembled.
The posts vibrated faintly, as though they had just received something they had never been fully prepared to withstand.
The silence lasted exactly one instant.
GOAL!
Team Z [2] — [1] Team Y
“AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!”
Haise roared the instant the ball struck the back of the net.
It wasn’t a cry of relief.
It wasn’t the kind of sound that escapes from someone who barely survived something.
It was the roar of someone who had conquered.
Someone who had taken what he wanted and made it his own, and needed to express that feeling in a way words could never fully contain.
His body spun with the remaining momentum of the shot before both feet planted firmly into the ground.
His chest rose and fell heavily, each breath sharper than the last.
The violet flames in his eyes burned wildly, reflecting a euphoria so intense that it bordered on madness in a way that was not metaphorical at all.
The entire field seemed to freeze.
The defenders remained motionless, still processing the sequence that had just unfolded before them. This chapter was taken from novelping.com without permission.
The goalkeeper was still sprawled on the ground with an arm stretched toward a ball he had never truly had any chance of saving.
Even the players of Team Z needed a moment before they could react to what they had just witnessed.
Because that final sequence had been absurd.
An impossible pass launched into empty space.
A first touch that should never have worked at that speed.
Four defenders eliminated in succession as though they had collectively agreed to step aside.
And then a shot powerful enough to make the goal frame shudder against its posts.
Haise spread his arms.
His smile was enormous.
Wild and Alive.
The smile of a man standing exactly where he wanted to be, doing exactly what he had been born to do, without a single part of himself held back for another moment.
“THAT’S IT!” His voice echoed across the entire field, loud and completely unrestrained.
“THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT!”
The mirror fragments spun around him at increasing speed.
The violet flames burned with that irregular rhythm that belonged to him alone, fiercer than they had been at any point earlier in the match.
Every heartbeat seemed to occupy more space than it should.
Every sensation was amplified to the point that the world around him felt more real, not less.
This was it.
This was football.
A sport that demanded everything, where impossible challenges appeared only to be crushed by a talent that was still discovering the true extent of itself.
Haise’s eyes found Hiori.
The cyan-haired boy was still near the halfway line, standing there and staring at him with an expression suspended somewhere between astonishment and something that had not yet found a name.
Haise pointed directly at him.
“THAT PASS WAS PERFECT, YOU SADISTIC BASTARD!”
Hiori froze for an entire second.
“What kind of compliment is that?!”
“It’s a compliment!”
“It definitely isn’t!”
“It got me fired up!”
“That’s your problem, not mine!”
Haise’s laughter rang out loud and completely genuine, the kind that couldn’t be manufactured because it came from somewhere real before there was time to decide whether expressing it was appropriate.
It was the laugh of someone who had received exactly what he had asked for from a person who had understood him—not completely, perhaps not even close to completely, but enough.
To Hiori’s eyes, however, the image was something else entirely.
It looked as though Haise was illuminated by a light that didn’t come from the field.
Didn’t come from the stadium.
Didn’t come from any source that could be pointed at or explained.
A light descending from somewhere above all of it, choosing that boy with white hair and dark roots as its resting place.
A divine entity boasting of its conquest.
“This guy…”
Hiori began.
Then stopped.
The train of thought never reached its destination because he became absorbed before he could find the conclusion, consumed by the sensation of witnessing something that possessed neither a technical name nor an established category.
Only the naked reality of a creature made for this.
A creature called a striker.
And at that moment, it was being exactly what it was without making a single concession to the world around it.
On the other side of the field, Kiyora watched with a sense of helplessness he had never asked to feel and could not push away.
The aberration born to become the world’s number one was standing right there.
Undeniably.
He seemed divine now in a way that could not be attributed solely to the goal, the match, or any single event.
It was the sum of everything.
And that sum was far too great to fit inside any reasonable explanation.
Here is the translation:
There was a strange feeling somewhere inside Kiyora.
Strange because it had not been invited.
Strange because it did not fit the moment, the defeat, the scoreboard that remained there without any regard for what he had given in that match.
It was relief.
A kind of silent, unjustified relief that existed as though a part of him — the part that had been born with a fifty percent chance of surviving and had spent his entire life developing the instinct to sense boundary moments before they happened — had recognized something that was destined to occur long before that field, that match, that goal.
And had simply accepted it.
But alongside that relief, there was discomfort.
Real, persistent, the kind that does not disappear when ignored because it did not come from outside — it came from within.
The feeling that his dream had been confiscated by someone who seemed to have been born with a claim over it before anyone else could even reach out and try to grasp it.
Not through violence.
Not through cruelty or any gesture that could be pointed to as unfair in a technical sense.
Simply taken.
Like something that had always belonged elsewhere and was merely passing through before returning to where it was supposed to be.
“How unfair…”
The words came out low and without dramatization.
Without the exaggerated weight of someone performing a defeat for an audience.
Just the honest observation of someone looking at a reality and naming it as it is.
Kiyora did not cry.
There were no tears in it, and there was no time for them, because another feeling had begun to take shape in the exact space the defeat had opened, growing with a steadiness that needed no explosion to be real.
He wanted to see it up close.
That aberration.
That existence which had arrived in the world without asking permission, without consulting any dividing line, without considering whether it was convenient or timely or reasonable.
Haise Sasaki had simply appeared, like something inevitable that the universe had decided would exist regardless.
And one day, Kiyora wanted to defeat it.
Not out of hatred.
There was no hatred in it, and he was honest enough with himself to know that.
Not because he wanted to deny Haise’s existence or erase what he had seen on that field.
But because a dream that could be taken like that — so naturally, so effortlessly — was not a dream that deserved to merely be protected.
It deserved to be reclaimed.
His eyes remained on Haise for a few more seconds.
The white-haired striker was still standing with his arms open, laughing without any restraint, fragments of mirror spinning around him like a constellation that had chosen to take human form on that specific field on that specific day.
A monster.
A genius.
An anomaly.
A future that seemed impossible to stop by any reasonable force that existed in the present.
The small smile that appeared at the corner of Kiyora’s mouth was not decided.
It simply appeared, the way the best things appear, before there was time to approve or reject it.
“So this is the wall, huh…”
Not a wall built to make people give up at its base.
A wall built to be climbed, to test what each person was made of, to separate those who looked up at the top and went home from those who stayed and began searching for where to place the first handhold.
It did not matter how impossible it looked from down there.
It did not matter how many times it threw someone back to the ground before allowing one more step.
Because if Haise Sasaki was at the top of that mountain waiting for whoever was brave or mad enough to try to reach it, then Kiyora Jin was willing to spend every last drop of himself in that attempt.
And someday — on a day that had no date or shape yet but which he could feel existing at some point in the future with that specific clarity of an instinct that had never lied to him — he would drag that aberration down beneath him.
…
The impossible pass reached its destination.
The genius answered the challenge.
And Team Z takes the lead!
NEXT CHAPTER → The Red Carpet