Chapter 850: Quarter Finals IX

The ball changed direction, and for a split second, a sense of relief washed over the fans of red and white.

A heartbeat ago it had been a cannonball, a straight and merciless line toward the top corner. Now it was a spinning, wounded thing, twisting off Unai’s fingertips and skipping toward the near post, where it clipped the turf, hopped once, and rolled toward the byline.

It was loose, and every player on the pitch saw it at the same moment.

Hiro saw it from the ground. He was still half sprawled on the grass with Enzo’s legs tangled beneath him, but Maestro’s Vision had already flared to life behind his eyes.

Lines of light spread across the pitch, tracing the ball’s path, the sprinting bodies, and the collapsing gaps in the Atlético defense.

Romero was throwing himself toward the ball, desperate to clear it. Daniel was too far away, still recovering from his sprint. Unai was on his knees on the goal line, scrambling up.

Then, at the very edge of the lines, Hiro saw a figure that was not supposed to be there.

Erling.

He hadn’t chased Lucien’s shot. He hadn’t moved when the cross died, either. He had simply stayed in the box like a predator that had not yet given up the scent, and when Unai’s fingers grazed the ball, he had known exactly where it would fall.

Now he was sprinting across the face of the goal with his enormous strides eating up the grass.

Hiro’s heart rang in alarm.

No. Wait. That angle...

The ball reached the byline just beside the near post, and Haaland reached it at the same instant.

The geometry of the moment sank into everyone watching like a stone into water. From where he stood, the goal was no longer a goal. It was a seam in a wall, barely wider than the ball itself, and half of it was filled by Unai’s body. Romero was a stride away from blocking it. The post stood like a guard at his shoulder.

The only sensible option was a cutback.

Every defender in red and white was thinking the same thing. Every fan in the stadium was thinking it too. Even Enzo, lying on the grass, thought it. Cut it back and let someone else finish.

But Haaland did not think about a cutback.

Something changed in him then. His ice-blue eyes narrowed to cold points of light, and the noise of sixty thousand people seemed to drain out of the world.

A pale, frost-white glow crept over his skin like winter creeping across iron, and thin threads of blue light crackled along his arms like lightning gathering above a fjord. The air around him seemed to thin.

It was as if a thunder god had woken inside the body of a footballer and was deciding, with great calm, how to end the argument.

He did not take a touch. He did not look at the goal.

He looked at the ball, and then through it.

His left leg swung back like the haft of a hammer, and he struck the ball with the outside of his laces, not toward the goal but away from it, toward the empty air beyond the post.

Crack!

The sound was a whip across the sky.

For one stunned second, everyone in the Etihad thought it was a mistake. The ball was flying wide, impossibly wide, so far outside the frame that Romero stopped his slide and Unai stopped his dive.

Even the City fans began to groan. It looked like a wild, panicked hack at a ball with no angle.

And then the ball bent.

It bent the way no football should ever bend. It curved back through the air as though an invisible hand had caught it by a thread and pulled, spinning so violently that the air screamed around it.

It swept around the outside of the near post by the width of a fingertip, rose over Unai’s desperately stretching glove, and dipped under the crossbar at the last possible moment.

Swish.

The net bulged and rippled.

For a long breath, the Etihad was silent.

Not a cheer, not a groan, not a whistle. Sixty thousand people stared at the ball lying in the back of the net as if it had been conjured from nothing, and the silence stretched until it became unbearable. Then it broke.

The home end exploded.

"GOOOOOAL!"

The roar crashed down over the pitch like a wave breaking on rock. Fans screamed and leapt and clutched each other, strangers hugging strangers, scarves flying into the air like flags.

In the small island of red and white in the corner, the Atlético supporters stood frozen, their hands pressed against their hearts and their faces drained of color.

"Did... did you see that?"

In the commentary box, the first voice had lost all its polish.

"I saw it, and I still don’t believe it! That angle! There is no angle! He was standing on the byline, practically on the goal line itself!"

"That wasn’t a shot, that was a miracle. He sent it out of the stadium’s geometry and called it back."

"The Terminator, they call him! The man who never needed flair, who never needed anything but a single moment! And he just curled a ball around a post from a place where curling should be impossible!"

"I have been doing this for thirty years, and I have never seen anything like it. The fans are going to give this one a name. It was like the northern lights, appearing from nowhere, bending across the sky, and leaving everyone below looking up in awe."

"The Aurora."

"The Aurora. Yes. I think that will stick."

The spectators had given a name to this shot. That just showed how impressive it was.

Just like a lot of others on the pitch, Hiro couldn’t bring himself to move.

He lay with one hand pressed against the turf, staring at the net, and for the first time in months, the world inside his head was completely blank.

He thought he had seen all the possibilities on the pitch. But how wrong he had been.