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Yoichi’s phone buzzes, filling the room with its incessant ringing. A quick glance to the lit-up screen tells him that his manager is calling. He ignores the call in favour of the harsh light emitting from the television. The livestream replays highlights from the match of Germany’s Bastard München versus their U-20 team, before cutting to an interview segment.
A reporter clad in a black suit holds a microphone up to a Bastard player, the number 10 adorning the back of his jersey in bright gold. She asks a single question in German, and the player responds in kind. The subtitles are delayed, but Yoichi leans forward all the same.
I will lead Germany to victory in the U-20 World Cup, declares Michael Kaiser. His back is straight, his gaze fixed on the cameras. There’s no hesitation in his voice, only pure certainty. Determination dances in his eyes. Yoichi feels the corners of his lips quirk up in a half-smile, as if in response to this declaration of war.
His phone rings again. This time, the name Ego Jinpachi is displayed on the screen. Yoichi reaches over and taps the answer call button.
“So you can answer my calls but not Anri-chan’s?” Ego asks the moment the call connects, and Yoichi winces apologetically.
“Sorry,” Yoichi says. “I got distracted.” Ego hums noncommittally, knowingly.
“So what do you think?”
The name Michael Kaiser burns bright in Yoichi’s mind. He thinks of a bicycle kick, executed flawlessly under impossible circumstances, with perfected, honed precision and power.
“He’s… interesting,” is all Yoichi says.
“Really?” Yoichi can practically taste the glee in Ego’s words. “Would you like to go to Germany then, and see for yourself?”
Two phone calls and one thirteen hour flight to Munich later, Yoichi squints up at the building that held the brightest talents of German football. He’s impressed to say the least, though he can’t say he’s surprised. The legendary Noel Noa, after years off the field, had stepped back into the limelight to announce a new training program for German youth football. He had delivered results, broadcasted his program’s success on international television, and the money had come flooding in. From what Ego had told him, the building was home to state-of-the-art technology, designed specifically to push its players to their limits, and then beyond that. The whole facility had cost millions to build, and millions more to maintain.
“Wow.” Beside him, Bachira Meguru stares up at the building with star-struck eyes. “Hey Isagi, do you think they have an onsen in there?”
“Unlikely,” says Kunigami Rensuke curtly, though not unkindly. “This is Germany, not Japan. Besides, we’re not the only team they’re hosting.”
“Blegh.” Bachira sticks out his tongue in disappointment, then skips to the entrance. The automatic doors slide open, revealing a well-lit atrium. A blast of cool air hits Yoichi in the face.
“Isagi,” Bachira whines. “Hurry up, I wanna explore.”
“Sure, sure,” Yoichi agrees mildly. He steps to Bachira’s side and casts a quick glance around the atrium, shoving down the swell of disappointment when he does not catch a glimpse of blond, blue-tipped hair or a rose tattoo.
He’s already in Germany. He’ll meet Michael Kaiser soon enough.
They called it the Neo Egoist League. It’s the sort of corny name that Yoichi imagines Ego would have come up with in another timeline. Yoichi watches Kaiser draw his foot back, watches it connect with the ball, watches the way the ball hurtles towards the net, a nigh-unstoppable Kaiser Impact, and stops.
The ball stills at Yoichi’s feet. His lips curl into a smile, not one of his perfected smiles for the media, but a genuine one.
“Hello,” he greets Kaiser. Yoichi is almost a full head shorter, and has to tilt his head back a bit to make eye contact with Kaiser. “I came here to meet you,” he says in German. Younger him had loved Noel Noa so much that he had decided to learn German to better understand his idol’s speeches. Now, his pronunciation is stiff and awkward from disuse and he lisps over a couple syllables, but from the way Kaiser’s expression changes, Yoichi knows that his message got through.
Kaiser’s rage simmers beneath his skin, in the blue of his eyes, and he spits something out in rapid-fire German that Yoichi doesn’t catch at first. It’s only when Bachira wordlessly hands him a pair of in-ear translators and he puts them on does Kaiser’s voice filter through.
“-matter. You’re just another obstacle in my life. I’ll crush you all the same. At the end, the only one worthy of the throne will be me.” The words are harsh, devoid of kindness. An emotion snakes under Yoichi’s skin. He wants to tear Kaiser apart, to strip him down to his bones, to figure out what makes him tick, and devour that too.
“Alright,” he hears himself say despite the roaring in his ears. “I’ll see you on the field then, naked emperor.”
And so began their tango. They danced to the tune of balls hitting nets, to piercing, screeching whistles that signified a goal scored. Their stage was a grass pitch a hundred-and-five metres long and sixty-eight metres wide, their audience the world.
Yoichi reshaped and reforged his mind, shattered and then rebuilt himself, pieces of a puzzle falling into place, the final picture never quite completed. Kaiser, too, did not disappoint. He had peered into the same twisted, warped future that Yoichi saw, then stole his goals, his glory, and had the audacity to grin when Yoichi had vowed violent despair.
“You’re obsessed,” Bachira had told Yoichi once in the privacy of their rooms.
“I’m not.” He instinctively rejects the idea.
Bachira laughs. “You’re like a schoolgirl with a crush,” he says in a sing-song voice. “Everyone sees the way you look at Kaiser.”
Yoichi hurls a pillow at Bachira’s face, who collapses into a fit of giggles. Yoichi’s face feels far too warm as he splutters out denial after denial.
But Bachira’s words had struck a chord within him. Since when did the other twenty players on the field fade from his mind? Since when did his gaze instinctively seek out Kaiser’s? Since when did being the world’s best become beating Michael Kaiser?
In Yoichi’s final game in the Neo Egoist League against Paris X Gen, he crushes Michael Kaiser’s empire underfoot. Yoichi sees the way something extinguishes in Kaiser’s eyes, like a moth that flew too close to a flame and crumbled to ash, and he feels…nothing.
This isn’t right. He’s supposed to feel glee, joy. He’s devoured Michael Kaiser, consumed him in his entirety. He’s beaten his greatest rival since his arrival in Germany, accomplished the singular goal he’d set out to achieve from the very start, and yet it is a hollow victory.
He is, for a lack of a better word, disappointed. Disappointed that their dance of teeth and claws and cruel, cutting words had come to an end. Disappointed that as interesting as Kaiser had been, he wasn’t special.
Ah, it was fun while it lasted, he thinks to himself, counting the number of blades of grass at his feet.
All it takes is a split second.
Gold streaks past him. Yoichi tears his eyes away from the green of the pitch, and to the twin blue ends of Kaiser’s hair, to the indigo inked on his skin. There’s something unfamiliar in his eyes, not quite the cocky glint of an emperor who believed himself infallible, but rather the gaze of someone who had thrown it all away, and decided to start again.
“Return to zero. Then turn zero into one,” Ego had said, a long, long time ago, when Yoichi had been nothing more than a no-name striker, held together by fraying threads of a dream. One to ten. Ten to a hundred. A hundred to a thousand, a million, and then further beyond that.
Yoichi had taken the torn, frazzled ends of that dream and held onto them even as they had cut into his palms and drawn blood, even as he had collapsed to his knees in pure exhaustion, even as his body and mind became battered and bruised. He held on, and refused to break, because his dream was all he had.
Yoichi had conquered Kaiser’s empire, ground it into fine dust scattered to the winds, and the emperor without a crown had taken the parts of himself buried beneath the rubble and reforged himself in the still-burning fires of his kingdom as something new altogether.
In Kaiser, Yoichi sees himself: the no-name player who cried at a qualifying match’s loss-turned-superstar, all because he was too stubborn to let go of his dream, even in the face of impossibility.
Look at me, Kaiser screams with his eyes. Look only at me, he is saying. Look at what you created. The faintest glimmer of gratitude is bright in his gaze.
And Yoichi does. He sees the egoist that is Michael Kaiser reborn, hears the pounding of his own heart that is both adrenaline and something more, and feels a wild, wide smile bloom upon his face. The emptiness inside him vanishes, and pure, unfiltered excitement takes its place. He blinks once, acknowledgement and understanding conveyed in a single action, then bounds forward, chasing after that brilliant radiance.
They win against Paris X Gen, with a score of 3-2.
After the match, Kaiser corners Yoichi in the empty locker room, when the rest of their teammates have filed out. Exhaustion lingers at the corners of Kaiser’s eyes, but his words are steady.
“You’re a fucking asshole,” he says, his grip tight on Yoichi’s wrist. Yoichi grins at the familiar banter.
“Learn how to thank me properly, you fucking bastard,” he says in reply, suppressing a shiver when Kaiser’s fingers leave his wrist to ghost up his exposed forearm, then towards his neck.
Kaiser is close, too close. His frame crowds around Yoichi, pressing him against the cold iron lockers. Something raw, desperate and vulnerable swirls in his eyes. Yoichi swallows the lump that arises in his throat.
“Tell me to stop,” Kaiser says, his voice soft, a near-whisper. His free hand clutches at Yoichi’s waist, his nails digging into Yoichi’s skin hard enough to leave marks. Yoichi finds that he does not mind that at all.
“I think,” Yoichi responds when he’s pulled together enough courage to string together a coherent sentence, “that you should stop being such a fucking coward and kiss me already.”
There’s a pregnant pause. Kaiser stares at Yoichi wide-eyed. The seconds tick by. Three, four. Then, Kaiser surges forward, capturing Yoichi’s lips in a kiss that tastes faintly of strawberries.
It’s a short, chaste kiss, barely a few seconds long. When Kaiser pulls away, the tips of his ears are red, betraying his embarrassment. Yoichi reaches out, hooks his fingers into the collar of Kaiser’s shirt and pulls him down for another kiss, laughing all the while.