The effect didn't hit them immediately. At first, it just seemed like the fun became brighter, louder, sharper. The sound of Lu Shen's laughter acquired a slight echo, and the neon lights above the bar counter danced with rainbow halos, as if someone had smeared the world with psychedelic jam.
"Oh, damn, Lu Shen, you're a genius!" exhaled Jung Ho, clutching his side, and his own laughter sounded unusually uninhibited, almost hysterical in his ears, as if breaking free from some depth he hadn't known existed. "'A team sport'! I can picture our club badge! A ball and... a company!"
Haru Lin felt it differently. A sudden, utterly unsubstantiated wave of confidence washed over him, sweeping away the last islands of skepticism. The world became simpler, clearer, as if all of life's complex puzzles suddenly assembled into one simple and beautiful picture: he was the best, and they were not. His body filled with a warm, pulsing energy, concentrated somewhere in his chest. It seemed he could get up now and effortlessly jump onto the bar counter, and from there — straight to the top of the world.
"You know what?" he said, and his voice sounded strangely slow and deliberate in his own head, as if each word was a minted brilliant thought. "Those newcomers... they won't even understand what happened to them. It won't be a game. It will be... a demonstration of superiority. Like if an adult started playing with blocks with an infant. Only the blocks are their hopes. And we'll just... break them."
He looked at his fingers wrapped around the glass, and they seemed to him instruments of incredible precision.
"Exactly," Hong Ren's voice sounded unexpectedly loud and clear, cutting through the noise of the music.
Usually his speech was monotone; now it held a metallic, hypnotic conviction. He felt his mind sharpening like a razor blade. All extraneous information — the buzz of voices, the thump of bass, the flickering figures on the dance floor — receded, filtered out. Only pure, crystalline focus on the game, and on the geometry of the court, remained. On the four-fold multiplication of points. Numbers and trajectories floated before his mind's eye, forming perfect schematics:
"I already see their movements. They're so predictable… slow. I… I'll read them like an open book with a boring plot… page by page and… and close it at the most interesting part, you understand? Abruptly."
Lu Shen, meanwhile, immersed himself in the euphoria of universal acceptance. The feeling of shame and awkwardness from the recent mockery dissolved, giving way to a blissful warmth suffusing his body. It seemed to him that he was loved, that he wasn't just the life of the party, but its sun. He threw an arm around Jung Ho's and Haru Lin's shoulders, and they, who would usually recoil from such familiarity, just laughed, and their laughter was music to Lu Shen.
"Guys, I love you!" he proclaimed with drunken but utterly sincere spontaneity, his voice ringing. "We're the best! The best! And tomorrow... tomorrow we'll tear everyone apart! And then... then we'll come back here, and I... I'll buy champagne for all the girls! For the whole place! And we'll... we'll fly!"
He waved his hand, and the movement seemed infinitely smooth and significant to him.
But after a while, just as this collective high reached its peak, Jung Ho suddenly slammed his empty glass down on the table.
Clang!
The sound was hard, almost ringing, and cut through the haze of his personal merriment like a knife. He didn't feel a sharp slap of sobriety, but rather a powerful, directed impulse. The drug gave energy and confidence, and Jung Ho, his disciplined, leadership-oriented core, channeled that energy into the only familiar course — towards a goal.
All eyes instantly turned to him.
"Right... guys. That's it. Full stop."
His voice carried an unexpected, iron intensity that strangely contrasted with the gleam in his wide-open eyes. This wasn't natural sobriety, but a sharp, volitional effort, a breakthrough through the chemical fog towards something important.
"We're not here to get wasted. We're here for a charge. And the charge," he paused, looking each of them in the eye, and his warm brown eyes now burned not with kindness but with almost fanatical concentration, "and the charge we've got. Feel it? Full tanks... time to get down to business!"
Haru Lin, whose world was already swaying with pleasant, confident waves, blinked with effort, trying to grasp Jung Ho's thread of thought. His own confidence easily aligned with this call.
"Business?" he echoed, his lips stretching into a haughty smile. "Ah, you mean those newcomers? They've already lost. Mentally... I can see it."
"Girls," Jung Ho threw a sharp, appraising glance at the group of girls at a nearby table, who had already started glancing their way, "we'll save the girls for dessert. For the sweetest dessert after a real victory. Now — game and only game."
His words, spoken with such hyper-focused intensity, acted on the others like a command to fall in. The chemistry in their blood merely amplified the effect, turning his words into a mantra whose meaning suddenly became crystal clear and important.
Haru Lin nodded, his nod sharp and abrupt:
"Agreed, time for business. I... I can already feel those newcomers shaking in their cheap sneakers. Literally. I feel the vibration from here, across half the city. Fear... it has a taste, you know? Metallic, like..."
He was sincere — the altered state had sharpened his perception, mixing reality with unshakable confidence.
Hong Ren silently stood up. His movements weren't drunken, but precise, almost robotic, devoid of fuss. Inside him, everything was quiet and clear, like the eye of a hurricane. One goal. One trajectory. One result. He didn't even look at the others; his gaze was turned inward, on those perfect schematics.
"Let's go," Ming You chimed in confidently, without a trace of doubt, standing up first. His movement was quick and precise, with no hint of the diffused energy possessing the others. "Time won't wait. And time — is for winning."
One by one, they rose from the table. Their shoulders straightened not from drunken bravado but from a strange, hypertrophied readiness. Lu Shen stretched, and the crack of his joints sounded twice as loud in his own perception.
"Oh yeah," he whispered. "Let's go tear everyone apart."
They exchanged final, now serious nods and headed for the exit in formation, not looking back at the club's dimness, the enticing smiles, at Tae Sagi, who, leaning against the bar, watched them leave with a gaze full of undisguised, keen interest.
The club door slammed shut, cutting off the roar of music. They were met by cool, almost icy night air. It hit their heated faces, not sobering them up, but only sharpening the sensations. City lights blurred into colored streaks; the asphalt underfoot seemed not hard but springy, ready to propel them forward, towards the school, towards the court.
"Wow," Lu Shen breathed in deeply and laughed, and the sound of his laughter carried down the deserted street with unnatural clarity. "Ha-ha! The air! It's like... like soda! You can breathe it!"
"Shut up, Lu," said Haru Lin, but without the usual sarcasm. He walked with his head held high, his ash-gray hair stirring in the light breeze. "You're ruining the moment. Feel it? The silence... it's waiting to be shattered by our victory cry."
"They'll try to defend," Jung Ho uttered resonantly. "They'll set up blocks, fight under the basket. But it's pointless. We'll go through them like... a hot knife through butter. Because we are one, and our pulse is one for all of us… feel it?"
"Pulse?" Hong Ren, walking slightly to the side, spoke for the first time on the street. His dark eyes slid over the outlines of buildings as if calculating bounce angles. "I don't have a pulse, I have a beat. A metronome. Every beat is a pass, every beat is a shot. It's all calculated… they… they will move exactly where I direct them, because their movements... they're already written in my head."
Ming You walked silently, slightly behind, observing. His analytical mind registered every detail of their behavior: Lu Shen's talkativeness, Haru Lin's increased arrogance, Hong Ren's hyper-focus, Jung Ho's messianic tone.
"Never thought I'd say this, but... thanks, Tae Sagi. Everything's working as it should, the chemistry is making them perfect tools — confident, fearless, devoid of doubt, and absolutely controllable, because their confidence has been channeled into the course I set."
"Remember how they, those benchwarmers, looked at us after that first game?" Lu Shen couldn't stay quiet; energy was bubbling out of him. He jumped up, touching a sign above a closed store. "Like we'd really shoved their faces in it! And tomorrow... tomorrow we'll shove the whole world in their mouths! Bones and all!"
"Poetic," Haru Lin smirked. "You know you're an idiot, Lu Shen? But today... today even your idiocy has a kind of genius tint."
"I'm not an idiot! I'm... a prophet!" Lu Shen declared, spreading his arms. "I foresee! Tomorrow So Ho will be kicking himself, and that tall, mean one, Jen Ryu... he'll be banging his head against the wall! I see it! Right here!" He poked his finger against his forehead.
"Banging your head against a wall is inefficient," Hong Ren remarked dryly. "Probability of concussion — 34%. Probability of breaking drywall — 78% if the wall is standard. It will be much more efficient to sit quietly in a corner and realize the full depth of their tactical failure... which is what I'll arrange."
Jung Ho turned around, and his face shone with almost religious ecstasy in the lamplight.
"Do you hear yourselves? Do you hear? That's it... the team's power! Not just five people, but one organism! One will! And tomorrow we'll show that to the whole world. Well, to this pathetic school. We'll start there."
They turned onto a deserted street leading to the school. Here, streetlights burned intermittently, creating shifting islands of light and deep, black pits of shadow. In one such pit, by the school's main gate, a group of people was already visible.
"Well, well, well," Haru Lin drawled. "The audience is already waiting... how timely!"