WARNING: LONG CHAPTER!
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Karasu only resumed walking toward Team V’s designated area after Haise and Hiori had completely disappeared from sight.
The mocking smile was still present on his face, but it no longer carried the same lightness as before.
His steps remained relaxed.
His hands stayed in his pockets.
The same casual posture as always.
Nothing that would reveal anything to an outside observer.
But behind that carefree appearance, his mind was operating at a completely different pace than his exterior suggested.
That conversation had been far more productive than it appeared.
While Haise had been throwing out provocations and talking about reaching the top of the world with that conviction that never asked permission to exist, Karasu hadn’t been particularly interested in the words themselves.
He had been watching.
Analyzing every reaction.
Every micro-expression.
Every detail that might reveal something about Team Z’s striker beyond what the recordings had already shown.
It was a habit he had developed long before Blue Lock.
When he finally reached Team V’s section, he leaned his back against a nearby wall and closed his eyes for a moment.
The image of Haise immediately surfaced in his mind.
Annoying.
Arrogant.
Overconfident.
At several points, almost unbearable.
But none of those traits were what truly held his attention—what remained after the irritation faded and only analysis was left behind.
The problem was something else.
Above all else…
Haise was frightening.
Karasu hated admitting that.
He especially hated admitting it to himself, because admitting it to himself meant it was true in a way that could no longer be conveniently ignored.
But ignoring facts was stupidity.
And Karasu had many flaws.
Stupidity wasn’t one of them.
He had studied Team Z’s match recordings with a level of attention he hadn’t devoted to most opponents.
He had watched the goals.
Observed the movements.
Searched for patterns again and again with the methodical patience of someone who understood that preparation was where matches were truly won or lost.
And the more he watched…
The more uncomfortable he became.
The reason was simple and absolutely inconvenient:
Haise wasn’t exceptional in one specific area.
He seemed to be exceptional in practically all of them.
Mentally, Karasu began organizing what he knew with the precision of someone assembling a report that would need to be consulted later.
His physical abilities were absurd.
Speed, explosiveness, motor coordination, balance, and endurance were not merely present, but functioning in perfect harmony, without the trade-off that normally existed when an athlete developed one of those qualities at the expense of another.
There wasn’t an obvious physical weakness to exploit.
It was as if that body had been built exclusively for football.
His finishing arsenal was another gigantic problem.
The variety was far too impressive to be attributed solely to training.
First-time shots.
Long-range strikes.
Improvised finishes in chaotic situations.
Shots with their angle altered at the very last instant.
At multiple points throughout the recordings, Haise seemed capable of scoring from any position on the field, so long as there was even the slightest opening to work with.
His dribbling was a nightmare for a different reason than the ones Karasu had anticipated.
It wasn’t just the refined technique or the ball control.
It was the creativity.
The absence of identifiable patterns.
Talented players normally possessed tendencies.
Habits that appeared repeatedly and could be studied and exploited given enough time.
Haise seemed to reinvent his answers to every situation as though his previous moves didn’t exist as references.
It was like trying to predict the next play of someone who hadn’t memorized any plays at all.
Karasu grimaced when he reached the part that bothered him the most.
His vision.
That was, probably, the most disturbing aspect of all.
The striker seemed to see spaces before they even appeared.
He anticipated movements with a consistency that couldn’t be attributed to luck.
He identified opportunities invisible to most players.
And he manipulated positioning with an ease that seemed disproportionate to the amount of time he had spent at this level.
More than once throughout the recordings, it felt as though he was constantly several seconds ahead of everyone around him.
And then there was his off-the-ball movement.
Perhaps that was the very trait that made everything even more absurd.
During his analysis, Karasu had lost track of Haise numerous times.
Not because he had physically disappeared.
But because he moved at high speed into areas that most players wouldn’t even consider occupying, as though there were a completely different map of the field inside his head.
A map with routes that no one else had identified as routes.
It was as if Haise was creating his own paths.
Karasu slowly opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling above him.
“…What a pain.”
The conclusion was depressing.
More depressing than he wanted to admit.
And more than he was accustomed to feeling toward any opponent within Blue Lock.
For the first time since entering the project, he felt something close to genuine frustration.
Not the fleeting frustration that came from a poorly executed play.
But the deeper frustration of someone staring at a problem and failing to find an obvious solution.
Facing Haise was like facing the final boss of a video game.
Not the ordinary kind.
Not the kind that merely demands persistence and a recognizable pattern.
But that specific type of enemy that seems designed to test the limits of the player, with speed and strength and intelligence and versatility and mechanics that feel unfair the first time they appear and continue feeling unfair even afterward.
“…What a ridiculous guy.”
Even so, a smile slowly began to form on his face.
Because there was something Haise seemed to forget.
Bosses existed to be defeated.
It didn’t matter how strong they seemed.
It didn’t matter how many advantages they possessed or how impossible defeating them appeared at first glance.
Every boss had a defeat condition.
Every fortress had a crack hidden somewhere that its builder had either failed to notice or underestimated.
Every player, without exception, carried limitations that existed precisely because they were human.
‘But bosses can be beaten.’
The smile widened as the thought settled with the same firmness that defined the way Karasu arrived at his convictions.
‘That’s why I’m certain I can beat that arrogant idiot.’
He turned his gaze back toward the ceiling.
Curiously, Haise’s monstrous confidence didn’t bother him in the way it should have.
In fact, it made everything more interesting.
There was no value in defeating an ordinary player.
No weight behind the result.
No particular satisfaction that came from overcoming something that had truly resisted.
Overcoming a player who genuinely believed he was destined to stand at the top of the world was something entirely different.
That was the kind of thing that made his blood boil.
As absurd as it was, Haise was still human.
His body possessed limits imposed by gravity and biology regardless of talent.
His mind certainly had blind spots that he himself had yet to identify, because nobody identifies their own blind spots without outside help.
His habits would inevitably create patterns, even if those patterns were patterns of having no patterns.
And his decisions, no matter how brilliant they were, carried risks that could be exploited from the right angle.
Maybe Haise was faster than Karasu.
Maybe he was faster than Otoya too.
Maybe he was physically superior, more creative, more complete, more talented by practically any metric one could choose to measure.
Karasu had no problem admitting those things.
Because football had never been decided solely by who possessed more strengths.
It was decided by who could better exploit their opponent’s weaknesses.
And at that moment, while the ceiling of Blue Lock existed above his head with the indifference of things that have no opinion about what happens beneath them, Karasu made a definitive decision.
He would waste no more time cataloging Haise’s strengths.
He had already found more than enough to form a complete picture of the force standing before him.
From that moment onward, he would focus all of his efforts on finding the flaws.
Because, in his experience, the more perfect someone appeared…
The more devastating the fall was when someone finally found the exact point needed to bring them down.
…
The following morning, Team V walked onto the field with the characteristic confidence of a team that had yet to experience defeat within this project.
The players took their positions without the need for many words, with that economy of communication that only exists in groups who have played together enough times for movements to speak before voices.
Thanks to Karasu, who had assembled the entire formation using his analytical abilities.
Speaking of him, at the front line stood Karasu and Otoya, both waiting for the opening whistle.
Karasu wore his usual mocking smile, the expression of someone who considered there to be nothing on that field worthy of genuine concern.
Beside him, Otoya maintained the almost irritating calmness he carried regardless of circumstance, the face of someone about to participate in an ordinary training session rather than an elimination match where every result carried real consequences.
“Is the Aomori Messi scared, Extraordinary?” Karasu asked, casting a sideways glance at his teammate without fully turning his head.
Otoya’s expression didn’t change.
“Not at all.”
The response came with the naturalness of something that hadn’t required any thought.
“And you, Karasu?”
A small laugh.
“Nah.”
Days earlier, when they had met during the qualifiers, the two had been nothing more than strangers forced to share the same competitive environment, and neither had made much effort to make that coexistence pleasant.
Karasu thought Otoya was too weird.
Otoya thought Karasu was too annoying.
That was simply how things were, and there wasn’t much more to say about it.
But time had done what time occasionally does without asking permission.
It hadn’t created friendship.
Not exactly.
That wasn’t the right word for what existed between them, and using that word would have been dishonest in a way neither of them would tolerate.
It was respect.
Karasu didn’t believe all people were equal.
Quite the opposite.
He had built his worldview upon the fundamental distinction between those who possessed something extraordinary and those who did not.
In his experience, most people belonged to the second category without knowing it or without wanting to know it.
The so-called Mediocre.
But not Otoya.
He belonged to the other group.
The Extraordinary.
It was something that justified his presence in this place in a way that went beyond rankings or results.
Something Karasu recognized because he knew how to recognize it, because he had developed that exact ability to read people as part of everything that made him dangerous on the field.
And that was precisely why he enjoyed playing alongside him.
PIIIIIII!
The whistle echoed across the field, and the match began.
Team V started with possession, and without a moment’s hesitation, Karasu immediately accelerated forward, his feet meeting the grass with a rhythm that appeared relaxed to outside observers but carried an absolutely specific intention behind every step.
His eyes had already found his target before he even took the first stride.
Nishioka Hajime.
The ace of Team X.
The famous Messi of Aomori.
The player who carried practically all of his team’s offensive expectations on his shoulders with the confidence of someone who had borne that weight enough times to stop questioning whether he could handle it.
Karasu smiled.
While most players watched the ball, he watched people.
He had learned early on that the ball went where people decided to send it, and that understanding people was understanding the game in a way that analyzing the ball alone could never fully achieve.
And at that moment, all of his attention was focused on Nishioka.
‘Let’s see.’
Karasu initiated his play, running forward, but stopped when he noticed Nishioka approaching with the intention of using his Ankle Breaker against him.
‘Whether you’re truly Extraordinary…’
The edges of his smile sharpened.
‘…or just another guy using a nickname that’s too big for his talent.’
Before the two could even directly contest possession, Karasu took the initiative.
His arm rose between his body and Nishioka’s with a naturalness that made the gesture seem like part of the movement rather than a separate decision, immediately establishing control over the space surrounding the ball before any real challenge could take place.
It was a clear demonstration of field intelligence.
The specific quality of someone who didn’t merely react to situations but constructed them before they existed, creating advantages at the very moment others were still trying to understand what was happening.
Nishioka tried to respond, searching for an opening to apply pressure.
He found none.
Karasu had already occupied the ideal position, calculated the perfect distance, and turned the physical confrontation entirely in his favor before his opponent had enough time to influence the outcome.
The ball remained under control with a security that required no visible effort to exist.
A mocking smile appeared on Karasu’s face.
“What happened?”
His eyes remained fixed on Nishioka.
“I thought you were Extraordinary.”
The provocation hit its target with the precision of someone who had aimed before pulling the trigger.
Nishioka’s eyes narrowed in irritation, and Karasu read it the instant it happened, with the ease of someone who had developed that ability to read people as much as any technical skill on the field.
And he didn’t let the opportunity go to waste.
“What a shame.”
His voice carried that performative boredom that was sharper than any direct aggression.
“Just another Mediocre.”
The reaction came exactly as planned.
Irritated, Nishioka surged forward to reclaim the ball by force, anger taking control of the decision before any calculation could temper it.
It was exactly what Karasu had wanted from the beginning.
BAAM!
Without even looking behind him, he sent the ball into a seemingly empty area of the field.
For an instant, the pass appeared to have no destination.
Nothing to justify it beyond a misread of the situation.
And then Otoya appeared.
Like a shadow that had been there the entire time but had only now decided to become visible.
“Nice one, Karasu. Leave the rest to me.”
He controlled the ball without losing speed and burst forward with that silent fluidity that was uniquely his own.
Movements that never announced their direction before committing to it.
A center of gravity that shifted with such agility that anticipating the next turn became impossible.
Where most players needed to slow down to change direction, Otoya seemed to glide across the pitch like something that had learned the laws of physics and decided they were merely suggestions.
One defender attempted to intercept him and was left behind before completing the approach.
Another appeared immediately afterward with the determination of someone who had calculated a better angle.
He failed as well.
It was like trying to chase someone who consistently wasn’t where he was supposed to be.
Someone who exploited openings that no one had identified as openings until they were already irrelevant because Otoya had passed through them.
“Go on, Extraordinary!” Karasu shouted after him.
Otoya didn’t respond.
There was no need to.
He continued advancing with the same calmness as always, forcing Team X’s entire defense to reorganize itself with the urgency of people realizing their formation was being dismantled faster than they could rebuild it.
Until the opening appeared.
“Let’s go, Crow.”
The pass came with absolute precision.
And Karasu was already there.
There was no visible sign of communication between the two.
No exchanged glances before the play.
No gesture that could be interpreted from the outside as a signal.
It simply looked as though they shared the same train of thought, knowing where the other would be before the other had even decided to be there.
Nishioka appeared in his path once again.
Determined.
Wearing the expression of someone who had decided this would be the stopping point.
And once again, Karasu raised his arm, controlling the distance with the same perfection he had displayed at the beginning, preventing the approach, nullifying the pressure, eliminating any possibility of an effective challenge before it could even be attempted.
“Nice one, Mr. Ninja.”
The ball arrived.
Karasu didn’t waste a fraction of a second.
BAAM!
The shot came off first-time.
Clean.
Accurate.
Ferocious.
All three qualities existed at once, without any one diminishing the others.
The ball tore through the air at tremendous speed and buried itself in the back of the net before the goalkeeper could finish reacting.
GOAL!
Team V [1] — [0] Team X
Team V’s celebration wasn’t excessive.
Some players threw their arms into the air.
Some yelled.
Others merely smiled with the quiet satisfaction of people who had carried out exactly what they intended.
At the center of it all, Karasu and Otoya approached one another without any rush, and the only thing that connected them was a brief slap of hands.
Simple.
Without fanfare.
Yet carrying the unmistakable weight of something that didn’t need ceremony to be meaningful.
Karasu wore the same assured smile he always did.
Otoya wore the same composed expression he always carried, like a river continuing along its course without caring whether the path was easy or difficult because its direction had been chosen long before the journey began.
To the two of them, that goal didn’t feel extraordinary.
It was merely the expected outcome of a partnership that worked.
On the field, however, there was someone for whom that moment held an entirely different meaning.
Nishioka Hajime was on the ground.
His jaw locked tight.
His fists were clenched so hard that they had dug into the grass before he had consciously decided to do so.
His breathing was heavy.
His gaze remained fixed on Karasu with an intensity that refused to fade.
The words still lingered.
“Just another Mediocre.”
It burned.
It hurt in a way that went beyond the wounded pride caused by a poor result in a single match.
It was the kind of pain that had reached something deeper.
Something that had been struck before.
Something that had already been vulnerable long before this moment because this wasn’t the first time.
It wasn’t the first time someone had crushed his pride like this.
It wasn’t the first time someone had treated his dream as though it were nothing more than the ground beneath their feet.
It wasn’t the first time someone had treated his existence as nothing more than a convenient stepping stone toward something they considered greater than him. The source of this chapter is g.com.
And then an image surfaced in Nishioka’s mind almost without being summoned.
Two-toned hair.
Confident eyes carrying that irregular violet flame.
An irritatingly self-assured smile that didn’t need volume to occupy every available space.
Haise Sasaki.
It was exactly the same feeling.
The same frustration.
The same suffocating sensation of standing before someone who didn’t even consider your existence a relevant variable in their calculations.
“As if that arrogant idiot wasn’t enough already…”
Nishioka’s fingers dug into the grass as his body processed what he was feeling in a way that still lacked direction.
Only intensity.
It wasn’t fear.
It wasn’t despair.
It was anger.
Pure and unfiltered.
The kind that doesn’t cool when the moment passes, but instead hardens into something more enduring.
And more dangerous.
The scoreboard glowed above the field, displaying Team V’s advantage, and Nishioka stared at it without truly seeing it, because his mind had gone somewhere else entirely.
He wasn’t thinking about qualifying.
And he wasn’t thinking about surviving inside the Blue Lock.
Everything occupying the space inside Nishioka Hajime at that moment could be reduced to a single need.
Simple and Absolute.
To crush them.
To crush those arrogant bastards who had trampled over him!
…
PIIIIIII!
The match restarted immediately after the goal.
The ball rolled to Nishioka’s feet, and unlike what most people expected, he didn’t search for a pass.
He didn’t wait for his teammates to get into position.
He didn’t attempt to rebuild the structure that had been shattered by the goal they had just conceded.
The instant he gained possession, he burst forward without hesitation.
The decision caught Karasu off guard.
Normally, after conceding a goal, a player would try to regain control.
Reconstruct the formation.
At the very least, take a moment to breathe before launching another attack.
Nishioka did the exact opposite.
He drove forward alone, accelerating straight through the center of the field with the urgency of someone chasing something that wasn’t on the pitch.
Or someone.
‘A direct attack?’
Karasu narrowed his eyes as he moved to cut off the path ahead.
‘Why?’
While the Crow searched for the logic behind that decision, Nishioka’s mind was somewhere else entirely.
Far away from that field.
‘Why did I have to meet that demon…?’
The memory surfaced without permission.
The two-toned hair.
The confident eyes carrying that irregular flame that seemed to burn from within.
The arrogant smile that didn’t need volume to dominate every bit of space around it.
Nishioka suddenly slammed on the brakes in the middle of his run.
His body twisted to one side, disrupting the rhythm of his advance with a shift that hadn’t been telegraphed by any preparatory movement.
Then a step to the left.
Decisive.
Immediate.
Karasu extended his arm to control the distance.
But Nishioka slipped past him.
The ball was nudged to the opposite side with a backheel touch as he rotated his body to follow it, fluid and instinctive.
The kind of movement that never passes through conscious thought because it comes from somewhere deeper than deliberate decision-making can reach.
‘My prestige…’
The ball returned to his control.
‘My image…’
Another touch.
‘My conviction…’
His gaze darkened with the specific weight of someone carrying something that didn’t possess the shape of an ordinary memory.
‘What do I have left?’
Ever since that defeat, something had changed.
Not just in his football.
Not just in the way he carried the ball or chose the moments to accelerate.
Something had changed inside him.
In a place that football could touch, but that was larger than any single match.
Haise had been the first player to completely destroy his weapon.
The first.
And the only one.
His Ankle Breaker had always worked.
Always.
Without any meaningful exceptions.
It was an absolute weapon.
A technique capable of dropping any defender unfortunate enough to stand in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It was what defined him on the field.
The point where his identity as a player and his most refined technique merged into a single thing.
Until he met Haise.
Since that day, every time he tried to execute it, a memory surfaced before the movement could be completed.
An image.
A physical sensation of what it had felt like to have his own weapon turned against him.
The moment Haise had adapted.
Understood.
And surpassed something that had been built to be unsurpassable.
The moment his pride had been crushed.
And whenever that happened, for a fraction of a second—
For an instant so brief it could barely be measured, yet perfectly real in its consequences—
His body froze.
Enough to turn a perfect weapon into a flawed one.
That was why he had been forced to change.
To find another way to dribble.
Another way to advance.
Another way to be dangerous without relying on the thing that had stopped working the way it needed to work.
“Too slow.”
The voice appeared out of nowhere at his side.
It was Otoya.
Like a shadow.
Like something that had been there the entire time and had only now decided to reveal its position.
His foot slid across the grass in a sweeping tackle aimed at stealing the ball with the silent precision of someone who had calculated the angle before making the move.
“Oh, fuck off!”
Nishioka reacted without processing the decision.
His body moved before any conscious instruction could arrive.
He jumped.
Kept the ball under control.
Hung in the air for an instant that was brief in duration but long enough for thoughts to pass through it.
‘These two are good.’
Karasu.
Otoya.
The most dangerous duo on Team V, operating with that level of synchronization that required no visible communication because it had been built through previous plays, shared reads, and trust that had arrived by the hardest path possible.
He recognized that.
‘But that guy…’
His jaw tightened.
‘I’m sure he’s even better than they are.’
And then it happened.
A figure appeared before him with that particular clarity possessed by things that exist only inside the mind but that the brain chooses to present with the same texture as reality.
Unreal.
Impossible.
Nonexistent on the field.
Yet perfectly clear where it stood.
Haise.
Or more precisely, the ghost of Haise that his own mind had constructed from the materials of defeat and insecurity.
Fed by every moment in which his Ankle Breaker had stalled for a fraction of a second because of a memory that refused to stop being present.
The arrogant smile was there.
The eyes filled with certainty were there too.
Exactly as he remembered them.
Without a single detail softened by time.
“You talk too much.”
The voice echoed inside his head with that calmness that was more irritating than any display of aggression.
A vein bulged on Nishioka’s forehead.
“You damned apparition…”
The image merely continued smiling.
Watching.
Judging with that absence of explicit judgment that was worse than any direct criticism.
Waiting to see what he would do this time with the weight that had been placed upon him without any intention of doing so.
Waiting to watch him fail again.
Nishioka didn’t look away.
And then something began to change.
Because for the first time since that memory had started appearing without being summoned, he didn’t retreat.
Nor did he try to push the image into some corner where he could ignore it until the match demanded all of his attention.
His face twisted into an expression that wasn’t despair.
Nor was it collapse.
It was pure irritation.
“Enough.”
The ball touched the grass.
His feet landed.
His eyes opened fully with a clarity that hadn’t been there during the previous minutes.
“If you’re going to keep haunting me…”
His gaze sharpened with that quality of resolve that wasn’t seeking anyone’s approval.
“…then I’ll surpass you.”
The ghost of Haise remained silent.
Simply smiling.
But for the first time since it had begun appearing, that smile no longer carried the same crushing weight it had carried every previous time.
Not because it had diminished.
But because Nishioka had finally stopped running from it.
And stopping was the first step.
Not toward defeating Haise Sasaki.
But toward defeating the ghost he had built inside his own mind from the bricks of defeat and the cement of wounded pride.
FOOSH!
BAAM!
Karasu’s foot struck the ball with surgical precision, and in a single instant possession vanished from Nishioka’s feet.
“What are you staring at, Mr. Mediocre?”
Karasu couldn’t hide the self-assured smile that appeared on his face.
That stubborn expression on Nishioka’s face was beginning to amuse him.
But the response he received wasn’t the one he expected.
Nishioka didn’t even look at him.
His gaze briefly dropped to the ball before moving forward.
Far beyond Karasu.
Far beyond Team V.
“At my ultimate challenge.”
His voice came out firm.
Without hesitation.
Without doubt.
And then he ran.
Karasu remained still for a moment, confused.
‘Ultimate challenge?’
If Team V wasn’t the challenge Nishioka sought to overcome, then who was?
The answer appeared almost immediately, causing Karasu to frown.
‘Haise Sasaki…?’
Before he could pursue the thought any further, something happened.
Otoya had received the ball and was already beginning one of his usual silent counterattacks—
When a shadow appeared out of nowhere, as if it had crossed the entire field in the blink of an eye.
Brown flames burned around Nishioka’s body, and his eyes carried an unstable strangeness.
His foot reached the ball before Otoya could react.
The steal was aggressive and Voracious.
Almost desperate.
As if he were tearing away something that belonged to him.
Nishioka was already running again.
Straight toward the goal.
Straight toward the invisible obstacle that existed only within his own mind.
‘I will surpass him.’
The thought emerged stronger than any shout.
Stronger than any fear.
He suddenly stopped.
The ball slid beneath his control.
His body spun— And then he executed a perfect elastico, leaving Team V’s marker behind like a statue.
‘To do that, I need to discard my weaknesses.’
Another player appeared in front of him.
Nishioka feinted a run to the right.
His shoulder leaned.
His hips turned.
Everything pointed right.
But at the last instant, he cut left, and the defender reacted too late.
The grass seemed to disappear beneath his feet.
Karasu chased after him again, trying to close the angles and predict his movements.
But something was different.
Nishioka was no longer seeing Karasu.
Nor Otoya.
Nor the field.
Inside his mind, there was only one person.
Only one obstacle.
Only one challenge.
The ghost of Haise Sasaki, with his arrogant smile and crushing presence.
When Karasu tried to intercept his path, Nishioka slipped away.
When Karasu tried to predict his movement, Nishioka was already somewhere else.
It wouldn’t be correct to say that he was avoiding Karasu.
Because at that moment, what he was avoiding was the ghost of Haise Sasaki.
And for the first time since that ghost had been born, he managed to get past him.
‘I got past him!’
Nishioka’s heart pounded.
There was something different about that moment.
A sensation that hadn’t been present during the previous plays.
The feeling of moving forward without being dragged backward by the weight of what had been left behind.
Karasu had been left behind.
Team V’s defenders were disorganized.
The space ahead of him was open in a way it hadn’t been open enough at any point since the start of the match.
‘Now all I have to do is—’
“We won’t see each other again after this match.”
The voice appeared.
Suddenly.
Without warning and without any logic.
Without the slightest consideration for the moment it had chosen to appear.
The ghost was there again.
‘What…?’
Nishioka’s body froze for a fraction of a second that his brain stretched into an eternity while it lasted.
Every millisecond expanded by the urgency of what was being interrupted.
‘No…’
His gaze trembled.
‘That’s impossible…’
The figure remained there.
Motionless.
Watching with those eyes that carried the calm certainty of someone who had never needed to shout to be heard.
Judging without explicit judgment, which was always the hardest kind to endure.
As always.
‘Why…?’
The anger began to rise from a place that had been accumulating it since long before that match.
Since long before that day.
Fed by every time his Ankle Breaker had stalled for a fraction of a second that should never have existed.
‘Again…’
His jaw tightened.
‘Again…’
His hands curled into fists with nowhere to go.
‘Again…’
The brown flames surrounding him flared violently, unstable in a way that perfectly reflected what was happening inside him.
‘AGAIN!’
Nishioka didn’t think.
He didn’t analyze.
He didn’t reason through the moment, the angle, or what was strategically correct to do from that position on that field at that minute of that match.
He simply reacted.
“STOP GETTING IN MY WAY, YOU BASTARD!”
His arm sliced through the air as though it could actually strike the apparition.
As though a physical movement could reach something that existed only inside his head and drive it out with enough force to keep it away for good.
And then he shot.
A left-footed trivela.
Not just muscular strength, but everything else that had accumulated inside him.
The frustration.
The anger.
The pain that had begun on that specific day and had never found a resolution since.
FOOOOOOSH!
The ball rose.
Spinning.
Curving.
Tracing a trajectory whose beauty didn’t match the ugliness of the emotions that had created it.
As though the movement had found a form of grace regardless of its origin.
For an instant, time seemed to slow.
Nishioka’s eyes followed the ball with that total concentration that only exists when something matters too much to be observed from a distance.
His heart followed it as well.
Every centimeter traveled by the ball feeding something inside him that had begun small and grown with every rotation.
It was going in.
Straight toward the goal.
Every centimeter fueled his hope.
Every spin seemed to push it closer to where it needed to arrive.
For a moment that lasted long enough to be real, Nishioka believed.
He believed he had done it.
He believed he had overcome the ghost through the force of his own anger.
BAAAAAAM!
The sound echoed across the field with a cruelty that had never been asked for, yet existed all the same.
The ball exploded against the post.
And rolled out beyond the goal line.
Nishioka stood still.
Motionless.
His eyes remained wide as they followed the ball rolling away, slowing with the dwindling momentum of something that had spent everything it had and had nowhere else to go.
His breathing faltered before attempting to start again.
His chest ached with that particular kind of pain that isn’t physical, yet is felt by the body all the same because there is no true separation between what happens inside and what happens outside.
Because he knew.
He knew exactly what it meant.
Without needing anyone to explain it to him.
It hadn’t been just a missed shot.
It hadn’t been just a wasted opportunity in a match that still had time for other chances.
It was proof.
Proof that he hadn’t overcome it.
Proof that the ghost was still winning.
Proof that at the decisive moment, when anger and football needed to coexist but only one could take the lead, it had been the anger.
The brown flames surrounding him began to weaken.
Flickering.
Wavering.
Like a bonfire that had burned through its fuel faster than it had been fed.
From the outside, those watching saw only a player who had missed a chance in a competitive match.
Nothing more.
The interpretation was simple.
And incomplete.
But inside Nishioka, something far greater had just collapsed.
He hadn’t awakened.
He hadn’t evolved.
He hadn’t overcome the trauma, nor the rival who had created it.
He had failed at the very moment when overcoming it had been closer than at any other point since that defeat.
And that was the most painful truth of all.
Not the post.
Not the scoreboard.
Not the match.
But the fact that he had come so close and still it hadn’t been enough.
The strength left his legs gradually and inevitably.
His body collapsed forward, and his fingers dug into the grass before there was any conscious decision to kneel there.
And then all the frustration he had been carrying since that day, compressed and without an outlet, finally found the only form of expression it had left.
“DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT!!!”
The scream tore across the entire field.
It wasn’t anger.
It wasn’t hatred.
It lacked the directional quality of either of those emotions, which at least know where to point themselves.
It was despair.
The scream of someone who had seen his own weakness with absolute clarity and couldn’t tear it out of himself no matter how hard he tried.
The scream of someone who continued chasing a rival who wasn’t even present on that field that day.
Who existed only as an image inside his own mind.
And was still winning.
While the match continued around him, Nishioka remained kneeling on the grass.
Breathing heavily.
His fingers still buried in the turf.
From the sidelines, Karasu watched.
And for the first time since the start of that match, he didn’t smile.
Because now he understood with a clarity that hadn’t been available before that scream.
Nishioka Hajime’s most dangerous opponent wasn’t on Team V.
He wasn’t on the field.
It was a shadow that Nishioka himself had built, fed, and kept alive every time he had tried to ignore it instead of facing it.
And not even that—
Not even the shadow of this person— Was something Hajime Nishioka had managed to defeat.
…
During the final minutes, Nishioka had ceased to exist as a player.
He hadn’t left the field, and his body was still there, occupying space, wearing the uniform, moving whenever the flow of the game pushed him somewhere else through sheer inertia.
Yet it was like watching a corpse with body heat, something that retained the outward shape of a player while having completely lost what made a player dangerous: the will.
Whatever spark had driven him earlier had been extinguished, leaving behind only a shell that continued to move because the match around it had not yet ended.
Team V took advantage of that with the cold efficiency of a team that recognizes an opportunity and feels nothing in particular about where it came from.
Three more goals were scored in the following minutes, each one meeting less resistance than the last.
With every ball that found the net, the scoreline drifted further away from the idea of a competitive match and closer to a simple tally, a count of how thoroughly one side had overwhelmed the other.
PII!
The final whistle echoed through the stadium with the unmistakable sense of finality that final whistles always carried.
Team V [5] — [0] Team X
Karasu made his way toward Nishioka with the same smirk that had been fixed on his face throughout the entire match.
Beside him walked Otoya, carrying the same calm serenity he always seemed to possess, untouched by either individual goals or the scale of the victory itself.
“What happened?” Karasu asked, his voice carrying that casually mocking lightness that worked as provocation precisely because it never sounded forced.
“Lost the will to live, Mr. Aomori Messi?”
There was no reaction.
Nishioka didn’t move, didn’t answer, didn’t even lift his eyes.
His jaw remained slack, his expression unchanged.
There was no indication whatsoever that Karasu’s words had reached him.
He lay on the grass staring up at the ceiling illuminated by Blue Lock’s artificial lights, wearing the distant expression of someone who had retreated to a place beyond the reach of outside voices, insults, or mockery.
‘I lost…’
The thought settled inside him with the depressing certainty of a conclusion that could not be challenged.
‘Once again, I lost to that monster.’
A slow sigh escaped his lips as he continued staring upward.
The ceiling remained exactly what it had always been—indifferent, constant, and utterly unaffected by the turmoil beneath it.
For a few moments, nothing changed.
Then the giant screen lit up.
Jinpachi Ego appeared on the screen with that presence that seemed capable of occupying any environment he chose to inhabit, regardless of whether he was physically there or not.
He was eating yakisoba covered in mayonnaise and an amount of seasoning that made Anri—visible in the corner of the screen—wear the expression of someone who had considered the possibility of a heart attack and concluded that it was statistically unlikely, but not impossible.
“Congratulations, Team V,” Ego said while casually twirling noodles around his chopsticks with a level of ease that made no concessions to the formal nature the situation might have suggested.
“You managed to secure a good victory here.”
“Hm.” Karasu replied with the calm confidence of someone who considered the praise accurate but unnecessary because he had already known it himself.
“Obviously, idiot.”
“Yeah.” Otoya added with the brevity that defined him.
“We’re the strongest team here.”
Ego stared at them for a moment with those eyes that always seemed to evaluate before allowing any clearer expression to settle across his face.
“Oh, really?”
The camera moved.
And another live feed appeared on the giant screen beside Ego’s.
Every member of Team V froze.
The players of Team X froze as well.
The image displayed on the screen remained motionless for several seconds.
Seconds that felt far too long.
Far too heavy.
The kind of seconds that silence transforms into something larger than their actual duration because nobody present could produce a reaction that felt appropriate for what was in front of them, and in the absence of an appropriate reaction, the silence simply continued.
The field shown in the broadcast looked like the aftermath of a war.
Players were scattered across the field in every direction, with no pattern and no organization to their positions.
They looked less like a team that had just finished a match and more like the remnants of something that had been completely exhausted.
These were bodies that had reached the point where continuing was no longer an option their bodies could offer.
Some players remained kneeling with their heads lowered, unable or unwilling to look up.
Others sat motionless, staring into nothingness with the expression of people who had gone somewhere deep within themselves and had not entirely returned.
A few were simply lying on their backs, gazing up at the ceiling illuminated by Blue Lock’s artificial lights with the passive resignation of those who had stopped caring about their own position in space.
Every one of them was defeated.
Every one of them was broken.
Every one of them had moved beyond the point where resistance remained an available choice.
And at the center of that scene stood only a single figure.
Haise Sasaki.
White hair with black roots framed a silhouette that seemed impossible to ignore.
He wore the black Blue Lock uniform crossed by blue lines, and the number 9 was printed across his back with a simplicity that required no embellishment to communicate exactly what it needed to communicate.
His black cleats had crossed that field in a manner the numbers above it attempted to describe, yet no number could ever fully capture.
He stood motionless and alone, completely dominating the image not through size or posture, but through something that had no technical name and yet existed all the same.
It filled the space around him with a presence that the empty field only amplified, like a stage that makes an actor appear larger simply because nothing else exists around him to compete for attention.
Yet even that was not the first thing that drew the eye.
It was the scoreboard.
Because the scoreboard looked wrong.
It displayed the kind of number your eyes read once and immediately send back to be read again, convinced that the first reading must have been a mistake.
There are limits to what people accept as possible within a football match, boundaries that define expectations no matter how talented a team may be.
The number displayed above the field existed beyond every one of those limits.
15 — 0
Victory for Team Z.
The silence that overtook the stadium was not something anyone consciously chose.
It simply happened.
Sound vanished as though the collective mind of everyone present had reached the same conclusion at the same moment: there were no words prepared for what they were seeing.
No one spoke.
No one moved.
No one even blinked within the span of time they normally would have.
Because this was not a victory.
It was not a blowout in the ordinary sense of the word, with all the usual implications of superior talent overcoming insufficient resistance.
What stood before them had surpassed that definition entirely.
It was a massacre.
It was the most honest word available.
And even that word felt too small compared to the number.
Karasu felt his eyes drift back to the scoreboard once more with the involuntary insistence of someone waiting for a second reading to correct the first.
Fifteen.
Not five, which would already have been an unmistakable declaration of superiority.
Not six, which would already have been enough humiliation to define the character of an entire match.
Fifteen.
A number that did not exist within the vocabulary of any result he had witnessed or studied inside this project.
A number that had never been calibrated as a realistic possibility by any calculation he had made regarding what could happen on this floor.
His mind worked to find a variable that could make it comprehensible.
A special circumstance.
An explanation that could fit into some reasonable framework.
None came.
Beside him, Otoya stood just as still, like someone who had stopped processing the outside world and was using every available resource to process a single piece of information.
The calm expression he wore like a second skin had disappeared for the first time Karasu had ever witnessed.
In its place was something he was not accustomed to seeing on that face.
Genuine surprise.
“Fifteen…”
The words came out quietly.
Almost a whisper.
As though volume itself were incompatible with that moment.
“Is that even possible?”
The question went unanswered because Otoya himself wasn’t sure whether he was asking Karasu or asking himself.
And Karasu didn’t know the answer either.
Across the field, the players of Team X stared at the screen with reactions that ranged from shock to disbelief to the simple confusion of people unable to organize what they were seeing into a form that made sense.
But none of them compared to Nishioka.
Because Nishioka recognized that figure better than anyone else on that field possibly could.
The hair.
The posture.
The oppressive presence that forced everyone to notice him immediately.
Haise Sasaki.
And now the scoreboard confirmed with numerical cruelty what Nishioka had already felt during that match.
On the field.
At the moment his knees had buckled for the first time before something his reflexes had never been built to process.
The man who had defeated him wasn’t terrifying simply because he was strong.
It was because he was absurd.
An anomaly, if one preferred.
Something that should not have existed within this facility according to any reasonable calculation of what was possible to find here, inside a project that had gathered the three hundred best young strikers in Japan and still produced that number on the screen.
“That bastard…”
Nishioka’s voice came out low, without any specific destination.
But there was no hatred in it.
There was something more difficult to carry than hatred, because hatred at least has a clear direction and an energy that fuels movement.
What existed in Nishioka’s voice was simply resignation.
The specific resignation of someone staring at irrefutable proof of something he had already suspected, while desperately hoping that suspicion was wrong.
A miserable hope that had been stepped on, shattered, and ground into dust.
The very existence of that scoreboard was cruel.
It was the undeniable cruelty of the superiority possessed by the one who had caused it.
On the giant screen, the camera zoomed in.
And then everyone was finally able to see Haise’s face with a clarity that distance had previously spared them from.
There was no sign of exhaustion.
No expression belonging to someone who had just participated in something the numbers above the field described as historic.
He looked bored.
Not the kind of boredom born from passivity, but its opposite.
The dissatisfaction of someone who had found something and discovered it was not large enough to fully satisfy what he had been searching for.
As though fifteen goals were still not enough.
As though he was searching for something greater.
Something more difficult.
Something more worthy of everything that had awakened within him.
Karasu felt a chill travel down his spine.
Not fear.
He had learned long ago not to confuse the two.
It was instinct.
The same instinct that allowed him to separate the strong from the weak, the exceptional from the ordinary, those who had arrived here through genuine merit from those who had arrived through favorable circumstance.
And at that moment, that instinct was not whispering.
It was screaming.
That was not a normal player.
It was not even a great player in the sense the expression normally carried.
It was something beyond that.
Something that existed outside the categories Karasu had built over the years to organize what he saw on the field.
Something that could not be measured by the standards he had relied upon until now.
Ego watched their reactions through the broadcast, and his smile grew wider with every second of accumulated silence.
Exactly the reaction he had expected.
“Interesting, isn’t it?”
No one answered.
Because no one could take their eyes off the screen quickly enough to formulate a response.
“You were all so busy believing you ruled this floor…” There was a satisfaction in his voice that he made no effort to conceal.
“…that you forgot to look at the monster living beneath you.”
Karasu clenched his teeth.
Otoya crossed his arms with the slow, deliberate movement of someone processing information that had not yet reached a conclusion.
Nishioka closed his eyes.
On the giant screen, the camera zoomed in even further until Haise’s violet eyes filled the display, carrying that irregular flame that felt completely at odds with the bored expression surrounding them.
They seemed to pierce through the screen itself.
To find every single person watching with a directness that should have been impossible through a broadcast.
Ego smiled.
Not the satisfied smile from before.
This was a different kind of smile.
The kind that existed specifically to announce that something was about to happen that the people around him had not yet considered a possibility.
“Congratulations on your victory, Team V.”
The silence that followed lasted only a single second.
A single second that every person present felt in its entirety.
“But your next opponent…”
The pause landed like a death sentence.
Short.
Cold.
“…is that monster.”
And for the first time since entering Blue Lock, since stepping past opponent after opponent with the ease of someone who had always known he would go far, Karasu Tabito could not smile.
…
Fear settles over Team V after witnessing the massacre caused by Team Z’s egoist.
Is defeat already inevitable?!
NEXT CHAPTER → The Monster
After reviewing it, I noticed that my text ends up looking very similar to AI translation due to the translation I use.
Natively, I’m Brazilian and don’t know much English, and to avoid delays I use AI to translate the text more quickly and efficiently.
Maybe you didn’t even notice, and I made you notice, sorry lol.