After the match against Team W, Haise had simply done what needed to be done.
He took a shower.
Got himself ready to sleep.
Existed through the post-match period with the same indifference he existed through any other moment that did not specifically demand something from him.
Fifteen goals or zero goals, the process of washing sweat from his body and finding a position to rest was essentially the same.
When he stepped out of the bathroom with a towel draped around his neck, he found Hiori.
The cyan-haired boy looked pale.
Not the pale of someone who was sick or cold, but the specific pallor of someone who had encountered something that permanently reorganized what they considered possible within certain limits.
His expression carried an incredulity that had not yet found resolution, like someone who had seen the face of God and was still trying to process whether it had actually happened.
“Hm?”
Haise looked at him with that direct attention that never wasted time on preambles.
“Why that look?”
A brief pause.
“Don’t tell me you mistook the inevitable for a miracle.”
Hiori took a deep breath before answering, like someone who needed to organize the air in his lungs before organizing his words.
“That was…”
He paused, searching for a term that came close to communicating what he was trying to say and finding none that felt sufficient.
“Simply unbelievable, to put it mildly.”
The disbelief lived in his voice, not as exaggeration but as an honest report of the state he was currently in.
“I know your physical and technical abilities. I know them well.”
His eyes remained fixed on Haise.
“But that…”
Another pause.
“There is no way that should be possible. Even taking your limits into consideration…”
Haise silenced him with a look.
It was not a hostile look.
It was simply the look of someone who already knew where the conversation needed to go and was indicating the path before it wasted time going somewhere else.
“Hiori.”
He began speaking with the calm cadence of someone explaining something he considered important, though not urgent.
There was no impatience in his voice, only the certainty of someone laying out a principle he had already accepted as fact.
“I’ve already told you how Talent works. It is a stone. And for it to develop, it must be refined and polished so it can shine brighter.” Raising a finger as he continued, he maintained steady eye contact with Hiori.
“Everything I did was within the boundaries of my talent. And by developing talent, it becomes possible to extract weapons, which are nothing more than the combination of Talent, Physical Abilities, and Ideal. All of my weapons are the result of that formula. Even the Field Vision that you and I share was created through it.”
He allowed the explanation to settle for a moment before continuing.
Tilting his head slightly, he posed a question instead of immediately providing the answer.
“So tell me. Are weapons and talents really that different from one another?”
Hiori fell silent.
The movement of his thoughts was visible on his face as he carefully examined the idea, turning it over from different angles before arriving at a conclusion.
“Ah… No. I don’t think so.” The answer came out thoughtfully, carrying the uncertainty of someone discovering the conclusion while speaking it aloud rather than reciting something he already knew.
“Exactly.” Haise crossed his arms.
“Weapons are the fruits of talent. But talent also depends on weapons.”
Confusion appeared on Hiori’s face immediately.
Haise noticed it before a single question could be voiced and decided to elaborate further.
Leaning against a nearby wall with a relaxed posture that somehow never diminished his awareness of his surroundings, he continued.
“Most people believe talent is something fixed. As though it were a predetermined quantity assigned at birth—a resource that can be used well or wasted, but never increased.” His eyes narrowed slightly.
“I completely reject that idea.”
He paused briefly before continuing, his tone remaining calm and matter-of-fact.
“Because talent without a weapon never reveals its true value. It’s like a precious gemstone buried underground. It might be incredibly valuable, but no one will ever see its brilliance while it remains hidden.” His gaze remained steady as he delivered the final point.
“Not even the person carrying it.”
Understanding began to emerge slowly in Hiori’s eyes.
It was not immediate enlightenment but the gradual construction of an idea, like a structure being assembled brick by brick.
The final shape had not yet appeared, but the framework was becoming visible.
“You mean…” Hiori hesitated, testing the thought before committing to it.
He wanted to make sure he had truly understood what Haise was saying.
“That developing a weapon also develops talent?”
“Exactly.” Haise’s response came without the slightest hesitation.
“The more refined a weapon becomes, the more deeply you understand the talent that gave birth to it. And the more deeply you understand your talent, the more weapons you’re able to develop.”
A slight smile appeared at the corner of his lips.
“It’s a cycle. One thing feeds the other indefinitely.”
Hiori fell silent once again.
But this time, it was different.
It wasn’t the silence of someone who was lost.
It was the silence of someone who had finally found the map and was far too occupied reading it to speak.
Something had clicked into place that had previously refused to fit, and the process of settling that realization required a moment of quiet.
Maybe what frightened him wasn’t Haise’s ability.
Not the fifteen goals.
Not the absolute domination he had displayed on the field against opponents who were far from weak.
Maybe the most frightening thing was the speed at which he evolved.
The way every match wasn’t merely a demonstration of what he had already developed, but scaffolding for what he was still building.
“Do you understand now?”
Hiori took a few seconds before answering.
Then he let out a small, tired laugh and shook his head with the particular resignation of someone surrendering to a truth they never asked to receive, yet received all the same.
Haise raised an eyebrow.
“Unfortunately?”
“Yeah.” Hiori ran a hand through his hair as a sigh escaped him, carrying the weight of someone who had acquired a new perspective and was still figuring out what to do with it.
“Because every time I think I’ve finally understood you…”
His gaze met Haise’s.
“…you find a way to seem even more absurd.”
Haise’s smile appeared instantly, wide and completely uninterested in being modest about it.
“Thank you.”
“That wasn’t a compliment.”
“I know.”
But there was still something bothering Hiori.
Something that didn’t fit perfectly into the explanation he had been given, a missing piece in the puzzle he had spent the last few minutes trying to assemble.
He understood the logic of talent.
He understood the relationship between talent and weapons.
He understood the formula Haise used to interpret a player’s evolution as something alive and continuous rather than fixed and predetermined.
But there was still one missing piece.
That specific piece which had transformed the match against Team W into a massacre so overwhelming that it had left Hiori standing pale in the Blue Lock hallway, wearing the expression of someone who had seen the face of God and still hadn’t fully processed what that meant for his understanding of anything.
“That blowout…” Hiori finally broke the silence.
“Where did it come from?”
Haise looked at him briefly.
For a moment, Hiori thought the question would be ignored with the same indifference Haise reserved for things he deemed unworthy of an answer.
But then a small smile appeared on the bicolored boy’s face, different from the other smiles Hiori had learned to recognize.
It wasn’t arrogant, didn’t carry the edge of madness that surfaced on the field, and wasn’t provocative in any recognizable way.
It was almost the smile of someone who had been asked a genuinely interesting question and was pleased by it.
“You could say it was actually the ultimate expression of my Talent, Physical Ability, and Technique.”
Hiori blinked.
“Technique?”
“Yes.”
Haise nodded with the naturalness of someone confirming something he considered obvious, yet was willing to elaborate on out of consideration for the person he was speaking to.
“Most of my weapons follow the standard formula.” He raised a few fingers as he listed them, breaking down the structure with the precision of someone who had thought about it countless times before ever needing to explain it to someone else.
“Talent, Physical Ability, Ideal. That combination produces most of the weapons I’ve developed so far. Then I’d reinforce those weapons with the absurd Technique I possessed, using it as an amplifier for what already existed.”
His gaze drifted toward the ceiling for a few seconds, as if consulting something stored somewhere above the immediate surroundings of the conversation.
“But that was different.”
Hiori’s attention sharpened instantly, the reading instinct he had developed recognizing that what came next mattered more than what had come before.
“Different how?”
Haise looked back at him.
“I stopped reinforcing my weapons with my Technique as an amplifier, and I removed the Ideal from the equation entirely.”
Hiori frowned with the expression of someone who had just heard something that directly contradicted everything he had learned moments ago and was still trying to locate where the contradiction truly existed.
Because that went against everything Haise had just explained.
The Ideal was part of the formula.
It was what gave a weapon its direction, what defined its purpose and shape.
Removing the Ideal from an equation that contained it as an essential component wasn’t merely a variation of the recipe.
It was a logical impossibility.
“You removed… the Ideal?”
“Exactly.”
Haise pointed at his own head with the kind of direct gesture that needed no further elaboration to convey what it meant.
“The Ideal normally defines the direction of a weapon. Its purpose. Its form. The objective it pursues, the filter that determines what enters its construction and what gets left out.”
Then he pointed at his own body, and there was something different about that second gesture, as if he were distinguishing two territories that normally overlapped but, in that specific case, had operated as completely separate things.
“But in that match, I just wanted to let everything out, and to do that, I stopped considering the Ideal.” The smile widened slightly at the edges.
“By removing my Ideal, I played using all of my strengths and created that blowout.”
Hiori’s eyes narrowed as he tried to follow the explanation, building the image piece by piece with the materials being given to him, feeling as though he was getting close to understanding something while that something remained one step ahead.
Haise continued, his voice carrying the cadence of someone describing an event precisely because imprecision would be dishonest to what had actually happened.
“My Technique. My Physical Ability. My Talent.”
A pause separated each element, leaving room for Hiori to think.
“All of them were refined to the extreme and used without any kind of Ideal or direction. It was simply for release.”
‘That absurd blowout…
was just the sum of all his strengths?!
Logically speaking, I know a genius like him can make something like that function perfectly, but even so…
How many factors did he have to account for to pull that off?!’
A shock ran through Hiori’s entire body.
And he looked at Haise as if he were staring at a madman.
Not the kind of madness that was frightening because it was destructive or unpredictable.
The kind of madness that was frightening because it made sense.
Because once you followed the reasoning all the way to its conclusion, you arrived at a place that should not have been possible to reach—and yet it was there anyway, concrete and irrefutable, waiting for anyone brave or insane enough to walk toward it without turning away.
And Haise had reached it.
“See you in the morning, curious tomboy.”
Haise simply turned around.
For him, the conversation was over.
With his hands in his pockets and the towel still draped over his shoulders, he began walking toward the dormitories with the kind of steps that carried no sense of urgency whatsoever.
Hiori watched his back for a few seconds.
There was something he wanted to say, something that had begun taking shape during their conversation and still hadn’t found the right words.
He remained silent, thinking, reflecting on what he was actually trying to express and whether the words available to him were enough to carry it.
Then he simply shook his head.
…
It wasn’t a reaction he consciously chose to have.
It happened before there was time to decide whether it was appropriate, his body responding with that involuntary honesty that the mind sometimes cannot suppress quickly enough.
He was watching the footage of Team Z against Team W for the second time.
Or maybe the third.
He had lost count somewhere between the first replay and the moment he realized his hands were gripping the notebook more tightly than necessary.
This looked like something from another world.
‘He’s not playing the way he normally does.’
The thought came with the particular clarity of conclusions reached after extensive processing, when enough information had finally accumulated to produce an insight that hadn’t been available before.
‘It’s as if…’ Karasu swallowed hard.
‘He stopped using logic.
And started playing more instinctively.
Taking full advantage of his perfectly developed body, his talent, and his technique in a way that makes his abilities function without even considering the possibility of failure.’
He opened his notebook and began writing, the pen moving with the urgency of someone who needed to externalize a thought before it escaped in the form it had arrived, before his mind reshaped it into something more palatable and therefore less accurate.
“Two different playstyles,” Karasu muttered as he wrote, his voice low and focused.
“One style is calm, a logical use of his abilities, prioritizing the perfect execution of every movement and skill, with a calculated and controlled margin of error.”
He paused for a second, rereading what he had written before continuing.
“The other, meanwhile, uses a flexible and fast style. His abilities are enhanced through physical capabilities pushed to their absolute limit. Every movement and skill becomes unpredictable because he prioritizes perfect improvisation for the situation at hand. There is no identifiable pattern because the pattern is the absence of a pattern.”
The pen stopped over the paper.
Karasu stared at what he had written for a few seconds, then tightened his grip with a force that bordered on snapping it in half, the knuckles of his fingers whitening slightly under the pressure.
A small bead of sweat slid down his face.
Because the more he tried to analyze Haise Sasaki within a framework that could be studied and exploited, the more that framework revealed its own inadequacy.
It was like trying to build a cage for something that existed in a dimension the cage itself could not reach.
The materials were correct.
The logic was sound.
The analysis was competent.
And yet.
The result was a player with two completely distinct styles of play that could coexist within the same match, that could be switched between or fused together depending on what the situation demanded, and that in neither case offered an obvious weakness that could be exploited before he adapted and eliminated that weakness himself.
Karasu didn’t like that feeling.
It wasn’t the kind of discomfort that came from a loss or an unexpected result in a particular match.
It was something deeper and more persistent—the discomfort of repeatedly examining an opponent, consuming every available angle of information about them, and still not finding what he was looking for.
He didn’t like looking at an opponent and finding no answers.
He didn’t like feeling as though he was falling behind in a race he had believed he was winning.
But most of all—and this was the hardest part to deal with—he didn’t like admitting when someone scared him.
Karasu had spent enough time inside that project to develop a reasonably accurate read on every player who had crossed his path.
He had encountered the strong and acknowledged their strength without letting that acknowledgment turn into intimidation.
He had encountered those who tried to seem greater than they were and had dismantled that illusion before it could cause any real damage.
It was that ability—fast and precise reading—that made him dangerous beyond what technical statistics could capture.
And Haise was starting to scare him.
“What kind of monster are you…?”
The question came out quietly, almost a whisper, directed at the frozen image on the screen, at the figure standing among the defeated with that bored expression that did not match the score displayed above the field.
His eyes returned to his notes.
Two styles.
Two approaches.
Two completely different Haises existing within the same player as available resources rather than stages of development.
One dominated the match through logic, constructing scenarios with the patience of an architect who knows the structure must exist before the building can be inhabited.
The other destroyed the match through instinct, unleashing everything that had been built without the filter of reason and without the limitations of what had been planned.
And the worst part was that Karasu wasn’t sure which of the two was more dangerous.
The pressure of his hand on the pen gradually increased, without any conscious decision behind it.
CRACK!
The pen snapped between his fingers.
He didn’t notice.
His mind continued working with an intensity that found no stopping point, searching for patterns where no identifiable patterns existed, searching for weaknesses where every apparent weakness revealed itself to be a variable Haise had already considered and incorporated before it could be exploited, searching for openings in a structure that had been built without leaving any visible gaps.
Anything.
He needed to find something.
It was what he had always done, with every opponent he had faced both inside and outside Blue Lock.
He found the point where the armor had a joint that had not been reinforced with the same care as the rest and exploited that point with the precision of someone who had prepared specifically for that moment.
But Haise wasn’t offering a point like that.
Or at least, he wasn’t offering any that were visible from the information available.
And there was a huge difference between having no weakness and having a weakness that simply had not yet been found.
Karasu clung to that difference.
Because no matter how monstrous Haise seemed in every frame of that video, in every note he had written in his notebook, in every calculation he had attempted and abandoned for being insufficient…
He was still human.
He had to be.
There had to be a limit where the body stopped responding with the same perfection it had displayed up until now.
There had to be a moment where the mind made a mistake that instinct couldn’t correct in time.
There had to be a specific condition, a particular context, a combination of pressures that would reveal the flaw hidden beneath it all.
There had to be a way to defeat him.
…Right?
…
Standing before a monster, the Crow begins to taste despair and slowly falls into his hands.
NEXT CHAPTER → Collision