Lucien's golden aura flared.
He read it. The moment was coming, the heartbeat in which Hiro would scan and calculate and then choose, and Lucien's boot was already moving, a fraction of a second ahead of the ball.
However, Hiro did not scan.
For the first time in the entire match, the lines of light vanished from his eyes. Maestro's Vision dissolved like mist in the sun.
There were no paths and no angles and no probabilities, no numbers scrolling across the pitch. There was only the ball, rolling toward him, and the quiet, enormous silence in which the stadium seemed to have vanished.
He did not think. He did not calculate. He simply moved.
The gap that Lucien had spent weeks searching for, the gap between thought and action, was not there. For one impossible heartbeat, the two were the same thing. Hiro's left foot swung through the ball, for the first time, as though it had been meant to arrive at that exact spot all along.
