Haise looked at Otoya with a calm smile on his face as he swayed his body lightly from side to side, as though he were simply warming up.
In an instant, he spun sharply on his own feet, disappearing completely from Otoya’s field of vision and playing the ball with precision while, at the same time, holding Otoya back with his hand to stop him from spinning as well and attempting to recover it.
“Your high-speed infiltration and your off-ball movement are very good, I won’t deny that.” Haise remarked with an almost irritating serenity, as though he were having a casual conversation in the middle of a heated match.
“But your thinking is completely wrong.”
He paused for a brief moment before continuing.
“Your ninja mentality limits the potential of your own weapons. And I think it’s something natural, in the end. Someone convinced that life will simply carry them to some kind of top…” Haise shook his head lightly.
“Is truly not fit to be the best in the world.”
Zoom!
Haise advanced across the pitch in a way that seemed almost impossible to follow with the eyes, disappearing and reappearing among the players like a shadow passing through fog.
He masterfully employed the hand game he had copied from Karasu, using it to prevent any kind of effective marking or to slow his progression across the pitch.
“Haise!” The voice of a Team Z player cut through the air, and the ball came his way with force.
Haise received it with complete ease, as though the ball simply belonged to him.
The tricolour let a smile escape from the corners of his lips before stopping abruptly, in full control of his momentum, and then sent the ball to Hiori with a clean, precise pass using his left foot.
“Come on then, you sadist.” Haise said with a completely calm face, almost bored, locking eyes with his teammate.
“I want to test the waters.”
“Okay, okay.” Hiori responded.
“Now it’s time…”
A snowflake appeared delicately beneath Hiori’s feet, and he used that brief moment to activate his vision, letting his eyes sweep across the pitch in a wide, calculated sweep, absorbing every detail of the players’ positions.
“So… let’s go, genius.” Hiori said with a fierce smile on his face before shooting — no, threading the ball through a ridiculously small and narrow space, a corridor that barely seemed to exist.
Karasu’s eyes widened.
‘What?!
What an aggressive, impossibly tight pass!’ Even knowing Hiori’s capabilities up close, he had never truly imagined the boy would be capable of a pass like that.
‘It’s an extreme pass that only…’
BAAM!
Here’s the translation:
‘Only a genius could receive it!’
The ball arrived at its destination with precision — the feet of Haise Sasaki.
“Very good, you demanding sadist.” Haise remarked with a smile at the corner of his lips, already feeling Team V’s resistance closing in around him.
“Ah… Damn.” Haise pulled the ball to the left with a quick touch, then executed the Marseille turn with fluidity to get past one of the markers, while simultaneously holding another player back with a copy of Karasu’s hand game, cutting off any reaction.
Immediately after, he vanished for a fraction of a second before threading the ball through his own legs, reappearing behind the marker to collect it without losing a single step of his advance.
‘What the hell?!
Even watching from the outside, I simply can’t follow where he’s going.
He doesn’t slow down, doesn’t hesitate… He just disappears.’ Karasu thought as he tracked the play with widened eyes, already moving to position himself in Haise’s path and try to stop him.
With the crow planted directly in his way, Haise didn’t waste a single fraction of a second, throwing out a quick stepover and cutting to the left to try to open up space.
Foosh!
Karasu followed him closely, reacting with the speed only he could offer, and raised his hand to intercept.
TAP!
With a precise movement, Haise swatted Karasu’s hand away, and in the same instant wrapped the outside of his left foot around the ball, using his free hand to grab Karasu by the arm and lock his balance.
Haise advanced across the pitch with Karasu desperately trying to hold him back, grabbing whatever he could, but with no success whatsoever — being simply dragged along by the tricolour as though his resistance were nothing more than a minor inconvenience.
Haise looked around calmly as he advanced, his eyes sweeping the pitch, before extending his foot at the exact moment to receive the ball coming his way, and in the same instant raising his other hand to block Otoya, who had emerged from the shadows attempting a stealthy interception.
“What a noisy ninja.” Haise remarked with a bored expression, barely registering the situation around him.
In a fluid and completely unexpected movement, he trapped the ball between his own legs and lifted it with absurd control, executing a precise rainbow flick that passed over both their heads simultaneously, leaving both Karasu and Otoya looking upward with no time to react.
“A mediocre crow and a noisy ninja…” Haise paused for an instant, as though genuinely reflecting on the combination.
“What a magnificent duo.”
Before either of them could recover, Haise leapt lightly between them, and in the air sent the ball to Hiori with a precise trivela using his right foot, imparting a magnus effect on the ball that made it curve elegantly and unpredictably through the air, tracing a trajectory that seemed to defy any attempt at interception.
“I see.”
TOC.
The ball arrived exactly where it was supposed to.
On the other side of the defensive line, Haise had already resumed his run the moment after the pass, as though he knew in advance where he would need to be.
Team V’s defenders tried to keep up with him, but that only made things worse — the more attention they devoted to the number 9, the more gaps opened around them, creating spaces that hadn’t existed before.
It was like trying to hold smoke in your hands.
Karasu noticed this immediately.
‘He’s manipulating the marking.’ His expression twisted as he tracked every movement.
‘No… it goes beyond that.’ Each of Haise’s movements seemed to carry two or three intentions simultaneously, overlapping layers that unfolded one after another.
His run drew one marker.
His change of direction pulled another.
His mere positioning planted doubt across the entire defence, spreading uncertainty like a crack slowly widening.
Even when he wasn’t touching the ball, he kept influencing the match — as though his simple presence on the pitch were a constant threat no one could afford to ignore.
It was irritating.
Absurdly irritating.
Because Karasu could understand what was happening.
He could see every intention, every trap, every layer of what Haise was meticulously constructing with each passing second.
But understanding didn’t mean stopping it.
And that distance between comprehension and action was what truly unsettled him.
“!”
A Team V defender stepped up to press him, determined to cut off the advance before it was too late.
Haise kept moving forward like a spear through the heart of the defence, without hesitating, without swerving, without giving any sign that he had noticed the pressure.
A Team V player tried to intercept him from the side, looking for an angle that seemed favourable — but was immediately neutralised.
Haise’s hand found his opponent’s shoulder with precision, controlling the space between them in absolute terms, without even needing to look at him.
The defender tried to change direction, tried to find a favourable angle to contest the ball, searching for any gap he could exploit — but it was too late.
Haise was already one step ahead.
Meanwhile, Hiori observed everything unfolding from a certain distance, his eyes sweeping the entire pitch through his enhanced vision, absorbing every detail, every movement, every reaction from the defence.
And the more he watched Haise, the more he noticed something that bordered on the absurd.
‘His presence should be a weakness.’
It was impossible to ignore Haise — his speed, his technique, his bearing, his aura.
Everything about him drew eyes in a completely natural way, as though the pitch itself gravitated around him.
Normally that would be a serious problem, since attackers who attract excessive attention end up being marked with greater intensity, end up becoming predictable, read by the defence before they even act.
But Haise had turned precisely that into a monstrous weapon.
‘He uses it in reverse.’ Hiori’s eyes widened slightly, understanding settling in an almost uncomfortable way.
‘He uses the marking itself as the path to goal.’
The defence tried to surround him, compress him, reduce his space and limit his every movement.
But every time they did, Haise found new angles, new corridors, new routes that simply shouldn’t have existed — like water seeping through the cracks of a wall that had seemed completely solid.
As though the defensive pressure were precisely the fuel he needed to keep advancing, turning resistance into momentum.
In front of the box, Haise raised both arms naturally, unhurried.
Karasu and Otoya arrived almost simultaneously from either side, each seeking a different angle, some way to finally pin him down — and were blocked.
Again.
Without him so much as glancing back, without his focus wavering for even an instant, his violet eyes remaining fixed on goal as though nothing else existed in the world beyond that single objective.
FOOSH!
Then he turned.
A quick, precise and completely sudden movement, his body spinning to face away from goal in a fraction of a second while continuing to hold both markers firmly, maintaining total control over the space around him.
Even so, his eyes never searched for the ball, never sought out Hiori, never turned toward any other teammate.
As though he already knew exactly where everything was, where everything would be.
Karasu felt his teeth clench.
Not from anger — from admiration.
‘He learned.’ The Crow’s eyes followed every detail with an attentiveness he rarely needed to give anyone.
‘He really learned.’
The hand game was his speciality, his most personal weapon, something refined with meticulous care over years and countless matches played at the most varied levels.
It was something he considered his own, non-transferable, impossible to simply absorb through observation.
But Haise had grasped its fundamentals in a matter of minutes.
And worse — he was using it at a level that went beyond what Karasu had imagined possible in so little time.
Combining the hand game with speed, strength and an overwhelming physique in a way that controlled the opponent’s upper body while simultaneously dominating their centre of gravity, both things happening at the same time with a disconcerting naturalness.
An application so efficient, so refined, that it was almost offensive to watch.
Because not even Karasu could reproduce it with such ease — and he was the one who had created it.
And then his thoughts moved naturally to Otoya.
The stealthy infiltration, the soft furtive movements to exploit every blind spot, the ability to appear from where no one expected — all of it had been absorbed, all of it had been stolen with a precision that bordered on the incomprehensible.
And thanks to his absurd speed combined with a monstrous football intelligence, Haise could apply the principles of Otoya’s movement even in direct confrontations, face to face, without shadow or cover — something that should have been impossible by the very nature of the weapon, something that ran completely counter to the logic behind its original design.
Karasu watched Haise in silence, the violet flames dancing around his body with an almost living intensity, and the shards of mirror spinning slowly around him like satellites in orbit.
And in that moment, he finally understood with clarity what he was facing.
Haise was not simply a copier.
Copiers reproduce — they replicate forms without necessarily understanding what lies beneath them.
But Haise did something entirely different.
He understood, copied, refined and transformed, all in a sequence that seemed to flow with an absurd naturalness.
Learning not only the specialities of others, but the instincts behind them, the weapons in their deepest form.
And then he began using them with a greater efficiency than their original owners had ever managed.
Karasu felt a shiver run down his spine from top to bottom, slow and undeniable.
A strange and intense fascination invaded his senses and his most primitive instincts, something he had rarely felt in the face of any opponent.
Because for the first time in a long while — perhaps for the first time truly — he was witnessing something genuinely, undeniably extraordinary before his very eyes.
‘What a beautifully magnificent style of play…’
Hiori dribbled past two players with a nutmeg effortlessly, the ball sliding between his opponents’ legs as though it were the most natural thing in the world, and advanced across the pitch with his eyes already locked on Haise, who was contesting control of the space directly against Karasu — and was clearly winning.
Even against the Crow, Haise commanded every centimetre around him with an authority that was hard to contest.
‘Good, he’s inside the box.
With a well-placed pass we can push the lead even further.’ Hiori thought coldly, already calculating the angle as he raised his left leg to play the pass.
“BEHIND YOU, HIORI!” Haise’s voice cut across the pitch suddenly and clearly, fired after a single fleeting glance thrown in the cyan’s direction — a glance quick enough not to compromise his contest with Karasu, but enough to catch the shadow moving swiftly behind Hiori.
TOC.
Hiori lifted the ball at the exact moment, with timing that left no margin for error, causing Eita Otoya’s leg — arriving at full speed attempting to steal the ball from behind — to find only empty air, cutting through nothing.
“Tsk!” Otoya clicked his tongue with barely concealed dissatisfaction, the frustration escaping before he could contain it.
“Cursed omniscient game vision.”
“We agree on something.” Hiori responded coldly, moving the ball skilfully away from the ninja before he could attempt any new advance.
While the Sadist and the Ninja waged their own battle in one corner of the pitch, the Copier and the Crow were locked in an entirely different fight, both contesting every centimetre of space around them with skill — yet Karasu was finding it increasingly difficult to hold his ground.
‘Damn!
I can get close to him for less than a second before he takes complete control of my space.
His strength and agility using my own technique…
easily surpass my own abilities.’ Karasu thought as he tried to hold firm, searching for any opening he could exploit — but he was only one step away from failure, and he knew it.
“Enough.” Haise’s voice took on a serious tone, different from the casual boredom of before, as he placed his hand on Karasu’s upper body and pinned him completely in place with an absurd control.
“Huh?”
“Enough playing at space battles.” Haise said with a directness that was plain and unadorned, his violet eyes already turning toward another point on the pitch.
“I’m taking control of everything.”
His gaze found Hiori, who was struggling to get past Otoya, the battle between the two still undecided.
“Come on, you sadist…” Haise spoke with a calm that carried weight.
“I don’t need a mediocre breakthrough. Show me your prodigy talent.”
Hiori gave a sharp, cutting smile, unlike anything he had shown until then.
Otoya noticed the change in expression immediately, and something inside him contracted.
“Here it comes.” Otoya felt an unease that was hard to name.
Hiori had always been calm and cold, calculated and distant — but when it came to Haise, his nature seemed to shift completely, as though a key had been turned somewhere deep within.
For Hiori, the entire pitch expanded within his perception, every detail sharpening, every space gaining definition, every player revealing their position with an almost absurd clarity.
“Prodigy…” Hiori repeated softly, almost to himself, savouring the word.
His eyes found Haise for a brief instant across the pitch — the copier still held Karasu completely under control, but his gaze was fixed on him, on Hiori Yo, carrying a desire to challenge the entire world with the composure of someone who has already decided they are going to win.
Then Hiori turned his gaze forward.
“You say that as though it were easy.”
Otoya advanced immediately, without hesitation, explosive as always.
FOOSH!
TOC.
The ball left the right foot.
TOC.
It went to the left.
TOC.
It came back to the right.
The ninja went straight past, missing by mere centimetres that might as well have been metres — because Hiori was no longer where he was supposed to be.
“What?” Otoya lost his serene expression entirely, his face opening into a disbelief that rarely visited him, watching Hiori slip away from him in a way so simple, so elegant, so infuriatingly efficient.
Meanwhile, near the penalty box, Haise watched with a gaze that was simultaneously calm and deeply interested, the black spirals spinning almost wildly within his violet eyes, following every detail of what had just happened.
“That.” He murmured, the violet flames pulsing around him with a renewed intensity.
“Is exactly what I’m talking about.”
Karasu heard that with a growing irritation that went beyond simple annoyance, finally grasping the full dimension of what was happening around him.
‘That bastard…
He’s stimulating Hiori?!
A sudden awakening caused by pushing him to his limit, forcing him to shine!’ Karasu processed this with a mixture of rage and disbelief.
‘But why?’
Hiori kept advancing across the pitch without slowing his rhythm, and Otoya quickly moved back to intercept him once more, determined not to let the cyan slip away again.
Hiori’s eyes widened.
He had found a path — and his smile grew, sharp and inevitable.
“And there it is.”
BAAM!
The pass crossed the entire pitch like an arrow, heading toward a completely empty area where there wasn’t a single player to intercept it, far enough to be out of anyone’s reach — except his.
ZOOM!
His body exploded into motion.
On the other side, Karasu felt the control over himself simply vanish — because Haise had decided to release him, with the same indifference of someone discarding something that no longer held any use.
“Hey—!”
Karasu tried to react, tried to reach him, but as always, it was already too late.
Haise had disappeared completely from the reach of his hands, cutting through Team V’s defence with an absurd fluidity, using the opposing players themselves as obstacles against one another — combining Karasu’s copied techniques, Otoya’s furtive movement and his own overwhelming physical capabilities in a combination that shouldn’t have been possible in a single player.
At the same time as he ran toward the point where the ball would drop, Haise was completely immersed in calculations, analysing every finishing possibility available to him.
Because in that moment he knew that Team V’s players were moving specifically to stop him — they weren’t stupid enough to simply let him score without resistance.
‘Bicycle kick…
No.’ Haise discarded the idea while still in motion.
‘Despite my confidence, my current speed could increase the force of the shot too much and hit the crossbar, missing the goal.’
His thoughts kept racing as his feet lost not a single step.
Create something.
A new pattern.’
Before reaching the ideal point, Haise leapt — using his speed and the explosive power of his leg muscles to gain as much momentum as possible, his body rising through the air with an elevation that seemed to defy what it was reasonable to expect of a human being.
“What is he… Ha?!” Karasu’s eyes widened, disbelief taking over his face completely at what he was watching unfold.
Foosh!
Haise kept spinning in the air.
360°.
720°.
1080°.
1440°.
With each rotation, the scene grew more absurd.
The air was cut around him as his body remained strangely stable, as though defying any conceivable logic.
The players on the pitch could no longer follow his movements properly, and even time seemed to slow in the face of that impossible sight.
Using every aspect of his perfect body to sustain that impossible movement.
Haise’s muscles adjusted constantly through each rotation, employing an absurd muscular flexibility to redistribute his body weight without losing stability.
At the same time, his agility allowed him to correct his posture in the air with every spin, maintaining total control even as he accumulated angular velocity in a progression that showed no signs of collapse.
“Is this possible…?” Karasu was the first to voice aloud the thought everyone shared in that instant.
His face, normally carrying confidence and provocation, now showed something that rarely visited him — pure shock, unfiltered, undisguised.
“Is he insane?”
There was no other explanation that made sense.
It didn’t look like football.
It didn’t look like a trained technique or something anyone could reproduce with enough dedication.
It was something entirely new, something that had never been catalogued, something that simply should not exist within a match.
Hiori watched in silence, his eyes widened to a degree he rarely allowed.
Not even his game vision, capable of absorbing and processing the entire pitch simultaneously, could fully comprehend what was unfolding before him.
Beside him, Otoya also stood motionless, without commentary, without jokes, without the sardonic lightness he usually carried.
Both simply watched, unable to understand how Haise still maintained absolute control of his own body while spinning in that way, accumulating rotation upon rotation without any sign of disorientation.
Because that demanded a level of physical coordination that bordered on the impossible.
Any ordinary player would lose their balance after the first few rotations, but Haise used his muscular flexibility to keep his body axis perfectly aligned while his extraordinary agility performed constant adjustments, correcting each deviation before it could become an error.
Talent, technique and physical capability worked together in perfect synchrony, driving everything inevitably toward a single moment, a single instant that had been building since the very first spin.
The violet flames around him seemed to intensify with each rotation, burning with greater force, and the shards of mirror spun around him reflecting countless versions of himself — different possibilities, different movements, different paths — until everything converged, everything collapsed into a single figure.
Haise Sasaki.
Then the ball arrived.
At the perfect instant when his spin reached 1620°.
For a brief moment, the world seemed to stop completely.
His body finally aligned, and his eyes found the goal.
The absurd flexibility of his muscles allowed his torso to twist beyond any normal limit to align the shot even after so many accumulated rotations.
His physical agility corrected the final positioning in a fraction of a second, transforming a seemingly chaotic and uncontrollable movement into a perfectly precise finish.
“Volley…”
His right leg drew back as every muscle in his body contracted in unison, a perfect chain of force preparing to release everything at once.
All the energy accumulated through those rotations was concentrated and channelled into a single movement, a single point of contact.
The muscles of his legs, hips, abdomen and back worked in perfect sequence, harnessing all the elasticity built up during the spins to generate a power that did not seem to belong to a human being.
“From 1620°!”
BAAAAAAAAAAM!
The impact echoed across the pitch like an explosion, the sound cutting through the air in a way that made everyone around feel it in their chest before processing it with their ears.
The ball fired so fast that it disappeared from the players’ sight for an entire instant, becoming a white blur slicing across the pitch with a speed that left no time for reaction, for calculation, for anything beyond watching.
The force of the shot carried all the rotation accumulated during the spin, every degree converted into pure power.
The trajectory began straight, but soon curved in an absurd manner, changing direction more than once as though deliberately defying the laws of physics, as though the ball had a will of its own.
Team V’s goalkeeper reacted immediately.
He leapt and extended his arms, reaching his absolute limit in an attempt to save it.
But still in the air, suspended in that moment that seemed to last longer than it should, he understood the truth with a cruel and inevitable clarity.
He wasn’t going to make it.
GOAL!
Time Z [2] vs [0] Time V
For a long instant after the ball hit the back of the net, the entire pitch plunged into absolute silence.
There was no celebration, no shouts of euphoria, no impulsive reactions.
It was as though everyone present had been stripped of their capacity to respond.
The net still shook violently as Team V’s goalkeeper lay on the grass, his arm still extended toward where the ball had passed.
His eyes revealed an incontestable truth: he had never come close to reaching that shot.
The silence was heavy, almost suffocating.
It was not merely surprise — it was collective disbelief.
The absurd leap.
The successive rotations in the air.
The bodily control that defied any logic.
And then the shot.
The more they tried to analyse it, the less sense they found.
Karasu remained completely still, his eyes fixed on the goal as he mentally replayed every detail of the move.
Yet there was nothing.
No tactical logic.
No conventional technical explanation.
For the first time since the match began, Karasu Tabito had no sarcastic observation ready, no conclusion to offer.
What had just happened was simply beyond his comprehension.
Beside him, Otoya let out a small, nervous laugh — that involuntary reaction that surfaces when someone witnesses something too absurd for the brain to immediately accept.
He ran a hand through his hair as he kept staring at the goal.
“You’ve got to be kidding me…”
It was all he managed to say.
And honestly, those words perfectly summed up the feeling that hung over the entire pitch in that moment.
It seemed as though the very rules of football had been temporarily suspended just to allow that move to exist.
Hiori watched the net sway slowly.
His pass had been perfect, had found the empty space that only Haise could reach — but what happened after was far beyond any prediction he could have made.
Not even his game vision had anticipated that.
A small smile appeared on his face.
While everyone tried to comprehend what had happened, Haise stood still near the box after landing.
The violet flames continued dancing around him as shards of mirror spun slowly, reflecting countless versions of himself.
Yet in that moment, not even those images seemed capable of representing what had just occurred.
Because that was not a copy — it was something entirely new.
That shot was born at that exact moment, on the border between geniuses and prodigies.
…
A miraculous goal that laid bare the absurdity of the Genius’s Talent!
NEXT CHAPTER → End of Phase One
First of all, it took a while to publish because I rewrote this entire chapter due to my own dissatisfaction.
Secondly, I’d like to publish a Lookism story, what do you think?