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Hiori scored.
Hiori Yo fucking scored.
The Baby Blue NPC fucking scored a fucking goal!
How was this even possible? A middling background character shunted to the left side-back, someone who wasn't good for anything except serving convenient passes, had become the thing Rin hadn’t been able to achieve: Number One.
It had only been for a single, fleeting moment, but in that millisecond when the ball had crashed into the net, it was as if a glacier of ice had erupted inside, spearing into the ground and out towards the crowds in the stands beyond. It had been a chilling, awe-inspiring moment that no one on the field, neither Japanese nor French, had expected.
Well, none apart from that Kansai Crow, Karasu Tabito, apparently.
Curse it all. How lukewarm. How disgustingly tepid. Baby Blue had made Rin look like a worthless, pathetic second best without a care in the world. Since when had he even been capable of pulling off a goal like that? He shouldn’t have been on Rin’s radar. He should have been staying in his place, existing so far out of Rin’s capacity for care that he was never worth paying attention to.
Never worth paying attention to…
Was that it? Hiori Yo, the quiet, calm boy who hung out with Isagi too much, had turned out to be more like a sleeper agent than a useless background character. How sadistic.
But… that couldn’t be right. No, that goal only existed because of the Crow. If the Crow hadn’t fed Baby Blue that pass back, abandoning Blue Lock’s core ideals, that goal would never have happened, and it will also never happen again. It was a fluke, unable to be recreated.
So, that settled it. Hiori Yo had embarrassed Rin on the world stage with a fluke. That was surely the end of it, right? The rage bubbling in Rin’s gut was all because of abandoned egos and a desperate situation.
That should have been the end of it, and yet… he was furious. His stomach was twisting, festering with a rage at the mere thought of being second place for the smallest of instances. Fancy talk about egos, drive, and philosophy meant nothing in the face of clear, plain results, and the results showed that Rin — and Isagi — had both been shunted from joint-first to joint-second.
-—-
The humiliation ritual that was Ego tearing into the Crow was borderline amusing. On the field the guy had boasted his skills and given the illusion of competence, but he should have known that the Four Eyes would see right through him. The goal was a joke. It would never happen again. While direct revenge wasn’t possible, a public verbal flogging could act as a suitable alternative.
Not to mention, there was one thing Rin had to be thankful for in this situation, although he wouldn’t word it that way. Thanks to that fluke goal, the tactics were changing. Now, Isagi was dead in the water. In a way, it was frustrating. The two of them were joint-first, in their own bubble, separate from the rest of this team. On the other hand though, Isagi was clearly stumbling behind in his battle of mentalities with that French midfielder, Hugo. The mere notion that Isagi was likely questioning the ‘Number Two’ mentality was just a show of how Rin was ultimately the stronger of the two, no matter how much the rankings said they were equal.
And as a nice bonus, Rin was now playing as a one-top striker, Isagi relegated to the midfield. How pathetic of him. He had some catching up to do.
However, despite the highs of this half-time breather, one thing was gnawing at Rin’s gut. Hiori, the goal scorer himself, had remained silent throughout Ego’s entire desecration of Karasu’s mentality. In fact, Hiori had gazed at Ego with a look of determination during the speech denouncing the Number Two philosophy.
He was sitting on a bench in front of his locker space, wiping sweat from his brow with a towel draped around his shoulders. His face was so hard to read. Nothing betrayed a sense of anxiety, neither did he seem overjoyed that he was the one who had given the team a chance of pulling back victory. There was no gloating, no fishing for compliments. He was just… there.
Rin’s feet moved before his mind could catch up.
He didn’t do much, merely coming up next to Hiori and sitting himself down, retying his shoelaces and taking a swig from the water bottle in his hand. He had his own sweat towel on his shoulders and he took the opportunity to wipe himself down. Hiori made no effort to acknowledge him beyond a polite smile and a slight nod of the head. Several long seconds of silence followed.
And the gnawing feeling inside Rin persisted. Then, it snapped.
“You didn’t pass to me,” he muttered, eyes trained to the floor. “I was open.”
“Hmm?” Hiori finally acknowledged him properly.
“Why didn’t you pass to me when I called for you?” Rin didn’t know if his tone sounded angry or curious. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to come across as. Angry, probably.
For a moment, Hiori said nothing. Then, he stretched his legs out and craned his neck back. “Ya wouldn’t have scored if I’d passed to ya,” was all he said.
“Bullshit. You don’t know that.”
“Ya weren’t payin’ attention to yer surroundin’s. Loki would’ve outrun Chigiri and caught up to ya before ya could receive the ball.”
“Fuck that speed freak. Next time I want the ball, give it to me.”
“Only if the moment is right.” Hiori then paused, drinking his own water. “Ya know, I didn’t wanna take the shot back there. Not at first.”
Rin froze.
“Karasu had a chance,” Hiori continued. “I gave him the ball because I knew he could score. The opportunity was right there. He just didn’t take the chance and gave the ball back to me instead, so I trusted him in the moment and it got us a goal.”
“Pathetic,” Rin said involuntarily. “So you just scored yourself because he was too chicken to try?”
“It was more like he didn’t understand my pass, and I’m not gonna pass back to someone who doesn’t understand me,” Hiori explained. “It’s true that the goal we made together can’t be replicated. I’m fine with it having happened the way it did. But it’s not the goal I originally envisioned and I won’t lie about that.”
For some reason, those words were so… different from anything Rin had expected to hear. Was Hiori happy with the goal? Or disappointed? It sounded like he was a bit of both.
“I’m still the Number One around here,” was all Rin could think to say back. “One shitty goal like that won’t let you surpass me.”
“Ya and Isagi both, last time I checked, Joint Number Ones.”
“And yet he’s now been demoted to midfield while I’m up at the front, so I’m currently winning in that regard.”
“That’s very true.”
As far as Rin knew, Hiori and Isagi were quite close. They were friends, and Hiori had worked as a loyal passer to Isagi during the latter part of the Neo-egoist League. On the playback footage of those matches, he’d come across like a devout cheerleader, someone who would always have Isagi’s back no matter what.
So, to hear him so openly agree that Isagi was lagging behind, not living up to his position as a Number One, it was strange.
Strange, yes, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
“Pass to me in the second half,” Rin’s words were laced with a demanding tone. “I’ll score a goal you’ll understand perfectly well and solidify my position at the top of this team.”
That made Hiori snort. “Alright, but Loki has been on ya all game so far.”
“I’ll shake him off. What do you take me for?”
“Well,” Hiori shrugged, “maybe ya don’t hafta get rid of him completely before I’d be willing to pass to ya.”
Rin frowned.
Hiori continued. His eyes seemed to grow wider when he spoke, deep pools of azure that were almost like the calculating depths of a snowy owl’s. “Write me an unpredictable script that Loki won’t ever understand.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” For some reason, Rin had the feeling he’d heard Hiori say something similar before.
“Ya’ll know what I mean when ya receive my pass.” A smile curled onto Hiori’s lips. “It just has to be for a single second. If ya create an opening, an instant where a goal is in your grasp because you’re the field’s truest Number One, yer guaranteed to receive a pass from me, one that will land at your feet. I’ll choose ya then.”
His voice was like a flurry of winter snowflakes whipped up in a gust of wind. He was so cold and logical, but at the same time so passionate, it was as if there were a deep, unsatisfied desire festering inside him, searching for the one who would receive his pass and understand it. Not Karasu, with his abandonment of Ego’s ideals. Not Isagi, who was getting shut down too much to take a shot.
Hiori was saying one thing with that little speech: ‘I believe you have what it takes, Rin, so prove it to me’.
Any other time, the opinions of an NPC would have flown over Rin’s head, uninteresting, easy to ignore. But this NPC had scored a goal. That was, unfortunately, counting for something right now, given that Japan were currently losing.
“So you’re all for this Number Two bullshit?” Rin asked. It was odd. He normally wasn’t one for conversations this long.
Hiori didn’t answer immediately. “I don’t know what to think,” he eventually admitted, “and I don’t think Isagi does either. No one does, and we still have half a match left to play to figure out where we all stand. But to me, if being a Number Two means playin’ to yer ‘aptitude’, the role ya were born to play in a sense, and bein’ a ‘striker’ really just means playin’ for the goals yer own ego wants, no matter how unrealistic, then…” he trailed off.
He didn’t finish whatever he was about to say.
Rin didn’t push it. Half of him still didn’t really care enough to find out what the end of Hiori’s philosophical tangent was supposed to be. However, there was a small part of him wondering what the cyan-haired boy next to him was thinking… what he had in mind for the second half of this match.
Whether or not he’d send a pass Rin’s way in the end.
But before any more discussion could take place, the end of half-time was upon them. There was no more time to discuss anything. Whatever happened next, it would happen on the field, in the heat of battle, with life and death on the line.
Perhaps, in the flurry of clashes about to come, in the violent clutches of Rin’s destructive fervour, an ice-cold, perfectly precise ball would land at his feet, right at the spot where the enemy would ‘break’, and in that perfect, destructive window he'd score a sadistic goal that would send the entire French team into despair.
-—-
Aptitude. It was a puzzling thing. And egoism was no different. The two sides of this war of ideals danced in Hiori’s mind as he stepped up to the field for the second half of the match.
He was familiar with aptitude, with playing for the position one was born to play. After all, he himself was a striker, bred for scoring goals and reaching to the heights of the world stage. That was his aptitude. Karasu had seen it back in the first half, and had known about it since they had both met. It was why he’d sent that pass back instead of going for a goal, because he was fully embodying the Number Two mindset and he was so viscerally aware of Hiori’s aptitude for being a striker.
But if that mindset was what went against Blue Lock, then… was Hiori being a striker, in some ironic twist of fate, the thing that pit him against Blue Lock in turn?
His ego burned inside him. Produce the greatest striker. Not be the greatest striker. Winning the World Cup was secondary to finding that perfect talent who could rise to the top, and then becoming the key to that person’s success was what really made his heart race.
Perhaps, in order to embody the ‘striker’ ideal that Ego was searching for, Hiori would have to make it clear that he was no longer playing for that very position?
His genes told him to go for goals. His upbringing begged him to score and take the success for himself. In that moment when Karasu had sent the ball back, he’d given in to those urges. He’d listened to the aptitude he’d been created to perform.
But now, falling into position in their new formation, he glanced down the field towards Itoshi Rin at the top of the field. In this match, Rin was the Number One. He had proven his worth over Isagi for the rest of this match. All that was left was for the right moment to grace itself, in which both of them could form a link.
Whatever was about to happen, Hiori’s ego burned bright when his eyes fell on the number 10 jersey in front of him.