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During the match against Team W in the first selection, Chigiri mulls over the roadmap of his double-faced suicide that is a map of his childhood neighbourhood with a red circle round the local soccer pitch. He watches the seconds tick by as everyone around him bites on nails to stay alive and lose their teeth in the process. In three minutes, his life will be over and he’ll never have to run again. In three minutes, his ACL would still have been torn but not be torn ever again. Three minutes. Sixty seconds three times over. He doesn’t understand why they’re trying so hard, why the pipsqueak that looks like a walking stickman is bothering to even attempt to get past the defenders. There’s no one to pass to, yet he’s pushing himself past the blizzard to go to the convenience store for a single noodle strand—not even a cup—anyway. He looks back at the clock, only for his bones to jump a millimetre too far when a grip latches itself on his shoulder, the weight of it heavier than his own rumination, the grim finally come to reap what Chigiri has sown. Move. He turns and is met face-to-face with swirling vortexes and wiggling wormholes, the answer to the universe held in the small lines between the dark scribbles of Isagi’s irises, but the question is gone as quickly as it came and Chigiri is more stun-locked than he was when his leg went a little too far to the left in miscalculation and tore itself out of love for Chigiri Hyouma so he could live another day, score another goal. How long has it been since he’s touched a ball? When was the last time? The sight of everyone trying heats his insides like a bomb on the verge of corruption. Like a night-blooming cereus, Chigiri’s zeal blooms over the darkness he’d locked himself in and he decides fuck the chains. Fuck the lock. Fuck the bomb and the building it’s held in. To hell with his goal of self-destruction, for the search of a reason to stop living his life, to stop playing the game. Chigiri is going to play with the wires of the ticking bomb on his leg until their frontal lobes dissolve. He puts one foot after the other, and then he does it again. And again. Until he feels the wind whistling in his ears like harpy eagle wings and the blue prison opens overhead to the blue sky. Chigiri runs. And he doesn’t stop. To hell with it all. There is no need for the grim reaper to guide him after death. He will run through the gates of hell himself and run the Devil over with his own two working legs.
After losing to Team Z in the first selection, Nagi Seishiro’s head is filled with visual diagrams of venus flytraps and destroying angels. How much hunger can such a small body hold? He doesn’t understand why anyone would put in so much effort to climb a tree that bears no fruit. What a fruitless endeavour to reach the top of a growing hyperion not even yet ten metres tall. Team Z were bound tight and yet they kept flailing about on the pitch like caged chickens finally getting a taste of freedom, knowing they have wings that do not work, but not letting the fact keep them on the ground anyway. Life is a game of rock, paper, scissors. Throwing all three is not an option, but this blue prison is a life outside of life because nobody is living here. They are surviving. In the attacking third, Team Z are jumping and cheering and cussing in heavenly spirits, and Nagi is on negative cloud nine, which is to say his toes are dunked in molten hellfire, a feeling he cannot name but tastes like haemoglobin evading his senses. He tells Reo but he doesn’t say anything and Nagi isn’t looking at him. He’s staring at Team Z, he’s staring at number eleven. What was his name again? Four and one… Nagi closes his eyes and exhales, numbers floating in the black, the digits converting into a name when the garage doors of his sockets open. Isagi Yoichi. His name is Isagi Yoichi.
After losing to Team White in the second selection, Naruhaya Asahi cried to the sting of onions that wafted nostalgia in the air. His stomach thought of his older sister’s cooking but his heart was stuck on the black and white of a ball instead of the black and white of onigiri, cheap-easy to make for a half-house of six starving souls—starving for a life without soil, starving for a meal the size of a plateau. What they don’t yet know is that you cannot grow without soil. From ashes phoenixes rise, from dirt flowers bloom. The white-bright of the ceiling lights danced warm on Asahi’s face as tears flowed and then dried. He imagined what it would be like to be a plant and eat the sun. If he had to, he would eat himself just to grow double-flowered. To offer his siblings extra green so they will never be hungry again. Perhaps one day Asahi will create a hunger that eats hunger. One morning the sun will not rise and the stomachs of his siblings will be full of stomachs.
At the end of the match against Team Red in the second selection, Barou Shouei sees his reflection in a puddle on the ground that is not there, and is met with the sight of a kitten instead of a lion. He has been living a lie believing it to be a life. He realises he isn’t the king without feeling it and then he backtracks. It doesn’t matter if you don’t put your heart into it. Your heart is connected to your brain and your brain is connected to the rest of you: it hears, it smells, it touches, it tastes, it sees. If you tell yourself you’re ugly, your brain digests it for breakfast and saves it for lunch and leaves the adjective as leftovers for tomorrow’s dinner. If you tell yourself it’s all over while you’re still breathing, your brain eats it; no matter what heart put into it, no matter the mould that surrounds it and signals warning. You are what you eat. So Barou eats his way out of perdition and into resurrection like the shining hero he isn’t. He chops the pitch into jagged pieces of cake and serves them to the local peasants. He gives them no candles, for he has devoured their light. He looks into the eyes of the world’s purest and calls him by his name.
After losing to Team White in the second selection, Reo is stuck in a spot-the-difference game between pyrite and gold. Which is the fool and which is the king? He reads over the contract of something he never owned in the first place and eats the inked words letter by letter just to taste something. Nagi tells him he’s a pain in the ass and he feels the pain as he sits on the ground. He’s stuck on the hardness beneath him, which covers at least two and a half enterprise buildings’ worth of land. Reo is too stuck in his own head and on things he does not own when Isagi gives him the best advice you can get in a dog-eat-dog institute, like an emperor’s wife being handed a knife with a choice: to kill or be killed. Reo feels the last breakfast he ate with his parents collect in the back of his throat, reminding him of what he is doing. To kill or be killed. To live or to die. Kunigami holds him up like a noose and urges him to not look away, so he stares after the backs and concludes that he hates multiples of five and any number with a curve.
After winning against Team B in the Third Selection, Ryuusei gets into a fight with Rin, spitting pink glitter into his mouth in an attempt to make him understand the beauty of the world. Since Rin is ugly on the outside, Ryuusei comes to the intelligent conclusion that his insides need a little sprucing up. He punches him hard enough to bruise his bones and tear his skin, colouring the pale canvas of him like a Jackson Pollock painting. Here are the black lines that look like shrike offerings, the white of torn angel wings splattered in between. For the rest of the week, sparklers burn in Ryuusei’s gut, edging him of what’s to come. Isagi Yoichi is a force to be reckoned with. Ryuusei could see it in his black-sclera eyes and in the curl of his fingers as he slipped between them and scored without asking Ryuusei’s or Rin’s consent. An eternal flame burns within Isagi, his self regenerating anew every campfire song. What value do numbers have that society hasn’t given them? Rin is a fraud, and the real golden gates of Blue Lock lie under Isagi’s sternum. Ryuusei can hardly wait to see what lies behind them.
After losing to Blue Lock in the U-20 representative match, Itoshi Sae walks towards someone (un)familiar. It is like returning home after years, the nashi tree gone and the hedges overgrown, the skeleton of the kennel your father started building for a dog that never was no longer there, but whose carbon footprint is a scar on the lawn. He tells his brother, without looking him in the eye, that he was wrong because older siblings are to never take off the cape. They are meant to walk the boulder up the cliff and over again. They are supposed to look you in the eye and tell you that everything will be okay when everything is already okay. He tells him he was wrong and that Japan can change and he speaks a name that means the world’s rightful. He says it and it tumbles and falls to the ground like a metal soccer ball fallen angel to Earth and cratered in the middle of a field. He does not look his little brother in the eye, so he does not see the worms wiggling under his thin, thin skin, because his whole life he has been hand-held. He has not seen the future. He has not seen the world. Itoshi Sae looks at the future of Japan shaking hands with the past and thinks about what he will eat after his second shower of the night. He decides on something salty. He decides he’ll cook himself dinner and not leave any leftovers.
After losing to his brother in the U-20 representative match, Itoshi Rin keeps his head down low. His venous system is slithering along the outside of his body rather than circuiting the inside, blocked around his eyes like Pac-Man borders. Everyone is discussing what to eat at the all-you-can-eat buffet Anri had organised for them, and Rin has a question dripping serpent from the dagger-tip of his tongue about the morality of cannibalism in the dining hall. He thinks about eating raw meat and how many bites he can take before he keens over like an herbivorous mutt. He thinks about how his brother is a brother and nothing more, just an Itoshi and no radical ice—living, breathing family name without a family, because neither their parents nor Rin ever saw him as anything more than blood; an obligation; a back to look forward to. He kills the fallen angel over and over again in his mind, mumbling hexadecimals under his breath. He does not think about the past he embodied on the pitch, the self he touched after years of being something he wasn’t. Instead, he continues to run in circles, chasing his own tail, forgetting that it is his. He pins the donkey’s tail to Isagi’s forehead instead of the donkey stapled to the wall. Rin will destroy Isagi Yoichi to destroy Isagi Yoichi and not as a means to get to his brother and destroy him for ruining his life and their dream. For once, Rin looks in the opposite direction to Sae, but the path they’re walking is just an ouroboros. Even though Sae’s back isn’t in view because Rin has turned his, it is waiting just around the corner. He raises his head when the fallen angel in the room starts to speak cryptic to him. He looks the fallen angel in the eye and promises him a life worthy of hell. The angel doesn’t flinch. Rin does not cry that night.
After losing to Bastard München in the fifth match of the Neo Egoist League, Don Lorenzo remembers the blue sky under which Snuffy dragged him on the way to the local dentist. The blue prison is nowhere near as light as the sky was that day, but it’s on the spectrum, so it’s good enough. He is filled with the desire to see his older brothers, who may or may not be dead, to be under the night sky beside his eldest brother, guiding his hand and mapping out the stars for him. Here is Polaris, here is the tail end of Canis Major. See those three stars in a line? That is Orion’s Belt. And then his brother kissed a line from his index finger to his ring, telling him that with these Xs he bears the strength of Orion. Lorenzo can feel it burning on the backside of his hand and the magic doesn’t fade. It grows like the magnetic field of a south and south pole rejecting each other. Numbers roll slot machine above every head on the pitch and Lorenzo contemplates the pricelessness of life, how he was handed this tangled ball that many twin-prime-hands have untangled for him over the years, how he costs millions when he used to cost negatives. Fifteen metres away are the crazies celebrating their crazy goal, a three-divided number of nine digits flashing cerebral alarm clock. His stomach is hungry for something that isn’t food. Michael screams nearby and Lorenzo hears bells chiming. It is time to eat. It is time to rest and get up tomorrow to live a life worth living. One day Lorenzo will find his brothers and share with them his bounty. One day Lorenzo will retire and live comfortably for the rest of his long, long life.
After losing to Isagi Yoichi in the fifth match of the Neo Egoist League, Michael Kaiser screams and his body doesn’t stop screaming even once he’s off the pitch and in the shower. His own scream is screaming inside him as he pulls a little too hard on his hair and lathers his body with soap. He almost slips, but even then, he doesn’t reach out for purchase on something before hitting the hypothetical ground. Every orifice of his body is stuffed with euros equal to La Real’s bid and Michael wants nothing to do with the numbers because he is not the best striker in the world. He clasps his hand around his throat and digs his nails into the blue because after all this time he still hasn’t changed. At the end of the road is a longer road that spirals and spirals like the water spiralling down the drain and washing spiders out. Skin wrinkling and ears ringing airport, Michael drowns in his self-love, his teeth bared at his faucet-reflection. He got what he wanted but it’s not enough so Michael will not rinse the shower floor of soap and he won’t grab the railing to catch himself before he hits the ground. An eye for an eye lost in translation, Michael chases the red dot, which is just a trick of the eye, which is just the eye of a manufactured laser pointer. He will impale his own head on a pike to prove to himself that he’s better than Isagi Yoichi. Michael Kaiser will go out in red instead of waves. He will let the world remember him as hasty red fresco, julienned dead across a light-sky.