Chapter 822: Resolve!

The call ended, and the screen went dark in Shun’s hand.

He set the phone down on the blanket and rolled his gaze towards the ceiling.

The television was still on in the corner with the sound muted, and its pale light flickered across the plaster in slow, shifting patches.

Beyond the window, the city lights glimmered against the night, and somewhere past the rooftops he could just make out the low, steady murmur of the sea.

Your spot on the national team isn’t guaranteed either.

The words echoed in his mind.

He knew that. He had always known it. But it was another thing entirely to hear it from Hiro, who had already won the Golden Ball at nineteen and who was now fighting his way back from an injury that might have ended anyone else’s career.

He had all the reasons available to talk about himself tonight. But instead, he had turned his attention to Shun, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

You just have to believe it.

Shun closed his eyes.

For weeks, he had been so fixated on Hiro that he had barely looked at anything else: the injury, the long recovery, the storm in the newspapers.

Somewhere along the way he had forgotten that he was fighting for something of his own, a place in the World Cup squad and a dream he had carried since he was a little kid.

The truth was that he had been coasting. He hadn’t done it on purpose, and his reasons had been decent ones, since he had been worried about his friend and swept up in the noise.

But the result was the same, and he could feel it now in the quiet, like a debt he had been letting grow.

He sat up and rested his elbows on his knees.

I’m going to earn it. He thought about it.

It had nothing to do with the chance that Hiro might not make it back. He wanted the place because he deserved it. After all, every morning he had spent on a cold pitch and every shot he had thrown himself in front of had been leading toward it.

He picked up his phone again and set an alarm for five o’clock.

Across the room, his goalkeeper gloves lay on the chair by the door, creased and worn at the fingertips. He looked at them for a moment, and then he made himself a promise: extra sessions every morning, from tomorrow until the World Cup began.

I’m not only Hiro’s friend. I’m a goalkeeper, and I’m going to prove it.

He lay back down with his heart beating hard and fast against his ribs.

The apartment was as quiet as it had been a few minutes before, but the quiet felt different now, like the stillness in a stadium tunnel just before the players walked out into the light.

**** ****

The evening sun hung low over the training ground, stretching the shadows of the goalposts across the grass, and a cool autumn breeze drifted over the pitch, carrying the smell of cut turf and the faint chirp of crickets from somewhere beyond the fence.

Ichijo Ryu stood alone in the middle of it with a ball at his feet, his breath coming in slow, steady bursts.

He had been practicing for two hours, long after the other youth players had gone home and the coaches had packed away their cones and bibs and driven off.

His shirt clung to his back, and though he refused to admit it, his legs were aching.

This year, he was sixteen, the radiance of youth evident on his face. He had been doing well. However, he had been chasing a ghost.

The ghost’s name was Takahashi Hiro.

Ryu had been nine when he first saw Hiro play. His father, a casual fan who enjoyed a match more than he understood one, had taken him to a youth game, the Kawasaki Frontale under-12s against a rival academy.

On their way, his father had told him that he was about to watch "the future of Japanese football."

But as a kid, Ryu hadn’t understood what that meant. He had only wanted to see goals.

Then Hiro had scored one.

However, the goal was far from ordinary.

He had taken the ball in midfield and simply kept going, weaving past four defenders as though they were cones set out for a drill, and then he had looked up and chipped the goalkeeper with a touch so soft it seemed to hang in the air.

The whole stand had gasped at once.

Ryu remembered his father’s hand tightening on his shoulder, and his own heart pounding, and the certainty that nothing in the world could be more wonderful than this.

It was the kind of goal that made children fall in love with the game, and Ryu had fallen completely.

From that day on, football became his life.

He joined the Frontale academy and trained harder than anyone around him. He watched recordings of Hiro’s matches until he knew them by heart, studying how he opened his body before a pass and how he drifted into space a heartbeat before the defender saw it.

When Hiro left for Europe and became the youngest Golden Ball winner in history, Ryu watched from a distance, like an admirer watching his idol.

He was elated beyond measure.

The person whom he had admired so much had made it to the biggest stage in the world.

He believed that he could do it.

But even he hadn’t expected him to do it so soon.

He was fortunate enough to share the pitch with him for a short time before he left. But he had also promised that he would stand on the same pitch, wearing the colors of the national team.

However, that dream had never felt farther than it felt now.

The news of the injury had hit him far harder than he’d expected. He had been in the middle of a sprint drill when the notification lit up his phone, and he had stopped dead on the grass and stared at the screen.

Possibly career-threatening, the headline said. He read the article three times, hoping he had misunderstood, and he hadn’t.