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Before his parents got divorced, Asou Takeru lived in Miyagi and he played volleyball with other kids his age. He loved the feeling of the ball touching the palm of his hand whenever he spiked, and even more so, the sense of pride when no one could touch the ball and return it. But everything changed when that monster, Tendou Satori, started playing with them. Tendou was a peculiar child with a weird, bowl-cut, red hair, a pair of freaky eyes and a creepy smile. Nobody wanted to go near him. He blocked Asou's spike and Asou fell on the ground as he struggled to connect with the ball and return it to the opponents' side, only to have Tendou block it again, this time with no one fast enough to receive it and thus earning them a point.
Asou Takeru never forgot about that day - it was the last time he played volleyball. Tendou Satori looked terrifying, scary wide eyes and a smirk on his mouth as he looked down on Asou. It was a scene forever imprinted in his memories no matter how hard he has tried to erase it. The humiliation he felt that day was engraved in his head - how he looked up at Tendou as he remained on the ground, unable to move, pinned down by Tendou's eyes that looked as if they were mocking him. Asou was frustrated on how just like that, he was dragged down from the pedestal he had built himself to stand on. He pitied the people who would have to go against Tendou in the days and years to come because that day Tendou Satori looked truly frightening, he lived up to the name the other children gave him - he was a monster.
Takeru moved with his father to Tokyo after the divorce and his father remarried shortly after. He picked up a baseball bat when his stepbrothers invited him to play with them. And when he hit the pitch his younger stepbrother threw, far and wide, the stirrings of something special with the potential to become wonderful began inside his chest. It was a fluke, his younger stepbrother insisted that afternoon and continues to say up to this day as his older stepbrother laughs at them the same way he laughed at their youngest brother's protest at that time. But since that day, when he picked up a baseball bat one lazy summer afternoon in a Tokyo suburb, he has never let go of a baseball bat.