Momoi witnessed the silent collision between the two titans with a sudden chill down her spine, despite the day's warmth. She, whose life was dedicated to deciphering numbers, probabilities, and patterns, felt momentarily adrift.
It wasn't hard to see that, on a purely instinctive level, a primal, challenging message had been exchanged between Sae and Aomine. It was as if two beasts, each sovereign in its own territory, had suddenly spotted each other through the forest. Both could feel the fierce will residing in the other—a hunger for victory in Sae, a bored challenge in Aomine.
And for the first time in a long while, the data in Momoi's mind failed to provide a clear answer. She couldn't predict upon whom victory would fall if that tension were to materialize on a court. Her normally infallible database was incomplete, sabotaged by two fundamental and frustrating reasons:
The Itoshi Sae Anomaly: His parameters didn't fit any normal distribution curve. Everything about him—his posture, his gaze, his very aura—indicated levels so elevated she couldn't calculate them. He was an absolute outlier, a point off the chart that defied any attempt at conventional statistical analysis. How do you measure something that seemed to exist on a completely different scale?
The Veil of Depth: She had witnessed the flame of Sae's obsession, felt its destructive and magnetic heat. But it was like looking at the surface of a dark, turbulent ocean. She couldn't see what lay in the depths. The true extent of his talent, his moves, his real physical capabilities—all of it remained hidden, a closed book of which she had only read the blurb, a frightening synopsis. Analyzing Sae was like trying to predict a hurricane's trajectory having only seen the first cloud on the horizon.
And then, her heart was pulled towards Aomine.
Dai-chan.
She had an unshakable confidence in his raw talent, in that spark of genius that seemed capable of transcending logic itself.
But a shadow loomed over that thought: the bitter memory that Aomine had stopped training since his second year. And now, they were in their third. A whole year of stagnation, of neglect, while his talent lay dormant. Rust, however fine, had surely set in.
Before Momoi could articulate another word, desperately trying to find a way to dissipate the tension cutting the air like a blade, Aomine interrupted.
"Dai-chan—"
"Satsuki..." Aomine's voice was a low drawl, but laden with an intent that made her eyes widen. He ignored Sae for a moment, his gaze fixed on her. "When were you gonna introduce me to this guy?"
A slow, dangerous smile stretched his lips, a smile Momoi knew all too well. It was the same predatory grin he wore on the court when an opponent finally piqued his interest—not his usual boredom, but a spark of anticipated pleasure.
Momoi instinctively shrank back, her shoulders curving slightly. She didn't want this. She didn't want to be the spark that ignited an unpredictable rivalry. She didn't want to see those two worlds collide with a force she felt was capable of breaking something inside both of them.
It was then that a hand, surprisingly gentle, came to rest on her head. The sensation was a shock. Sae, without breaking eye contact with Aomine, placed his hand on her pink hair and began to stroke it with a calm that was almost supernatural, given the context. His touch was firm but gentle, a stark contrast to the coldness in his voice moments before.
"It's alright," Sae said, his voice a quiet assertion meant only for her, but loud enough for Aomine to hear.
"There's no need to shrink back like that." His fingers sank lightly into the soft strands of her hair. "I'd like to play against him, too."
That simple declaration, uttered with absolute serenity, was the equivalent of throwing gasoline onto a crackling fire.
Aomine's smile widened, transforming into something truly ferocious. It was no longer just interest; it was acceptance. The spark in his dark eyes ignited, and his latent ferocity, which he kept under a veneer of indolence, rose to the surface. He straightened his shoulders, and his relaxed posture became that of a predator ready to strike.
Sae, sensing the shift in the air, slowly removed his hand from Momoi's head. He took a step forward, placing himself directly face-to-face with the Ace of Teiko Middle School.
And then, something changed in him. The calm aura he had projected to comfort Momoi began to dissipate, replaced by something dense and oppressive. His obsession, that black and turquoise force Momoi had witnessed before, began to overflow once more.
The air around him seemed to vibrate, and the evening light appeared to darken around his silhouette.
His eyes fixed on Aomine, his gray eyes now gleaming with a cold, determined inner light, Sae issued the challenge, his voice flat yet laden with immense weight:
"Shall we, then, Aomine Daiki?"
There was a public court nearby, and Aomine already had the ball with him.
"You can start, since I was the one who challenged you," Aomine conceded, while Sae said nothing about his choice.
The sound of the first dribble of the ball against the court's asphalt was sharp and authoritative, cutting through the heavy air like a starting gunshot. Tok. A loaded silence. Tok. Each resonance was a heartbeat of the duel itself, a metronome marking the final seconds of a balance about to shatter.
Sae seemed to merge with the ball, his fingers caressing it with a coldness that was almost disdain. His eyes, the color of tempered steel, showed no emotion, only calculation. That rhythmic, precise sound was the kind that precedes something inevitable—like the clinking of crystal before it shatters on the floor.
And then, the world slowed down.
It was a visceral perception, first for Aomine, then for Momoi, who watched with her hands clenched against her chest. For Sae, however, everything seemed to be happening at normal speed—it was the rest of the universe that couldn't keep up.
He took a step forward, a seemingly simple movement. Aomine reacted with the feline speed that had made him famous—a beast's reflex, a fluid shift that would have shut down any other player. But Sae's body seemed to break the very laws of time. His center of gravity shifted to the right with mechanical precision, his hips rotating like the mechanism of a Swiss watch, without a millimeter of waste. The ball, an extension of his will, descended and bounced off the floor in perfect sync with his body.
Aomine took the bait. His muscles tensed, his body weight shifted to the side, his tendons primed to explode and intercept the path. A brief, false triumph flashed in his eyes—he had read the move.
And that's when everything collapsed.
Before Sae's foot—the one that had initiated the fake—could even touch the ground again, he executed the second fake. It wasn't a subsequent move; it was an interrupted continuation, a violent yet paradoxically fluid twist that defied physics.
His torso pivoted on its axis, his body weight shifted back like the pendulum of a mad clock, and the ball control switched hands in a motion so fast it produced a single, sharp sound—an audible tap that rang out like the click of a trigger.
Sae's body, now a blurred silhouette, cut through the air in a smooth, lethal curve, his sneakers scraping the floor with a blade-like hiss. The illusion was perfect. For a fleeting instant, two phantom images of Sae materialized before Aomine's eyes—one ghost stubbornly going right, the specter of the initial move, and the other, the mortal reality, cutting left.
Aomine's brain, accustomed to processing the impossible, stalled. The contradictory information was a short circuit in his senses. He tried to react to both realities simultaneously, his feet hesitating in a micro-spasm of catatonic indecision.
And in that exact second of paralysis—a vacuum in time he had never known—Sae completely vanished from his field of vision.
'Was that... Speed?!' Aomine thought before turning and chasing after Sae.
A blue and silver hurricane crossed the empty space. Before Sae could consolidate his advantage, Aomine Daiki, driven by pure athletic instinct, recovered the ground with an explosive burst of speed that seemed to distort the air around him. He planted himself in front of Sae once more, his chest rising and falling with a slightly labored breath, but his eyes were wide, not with fatigue, but with furious incredulity. The Panther had been tricked, and the taste was new and aggressive.
Sae, in contrast, remained unmoved. His breathing was controlled, his face a mask of ice. He didn't seem surprised or frustrated by Aomine's miraculous recovery. It was as if everything was part of a script he himself had written. Then, with a calm that bordered on provocation, he dribbled the ball to the side, once, twice, a clear and silent invitation. The sound of the bounce was a solitary challenge in the tense silence that had fallen.
'A one-on-one?' The question echoed in Aomine's mind, a swift thought accompanied by a fierce grin. It was the language he understood best. Two players, one ball, and the whole court to decide. His muscles tensed, his senses sharpened to their peak, ready to read every minute unit of Sae's movement.
But it was then that his eyes widened again, this time with pure shock.
Sae began his dribble, his body leaning slightly to the right. Aomine reacted, closing the angle. And then, there was a void. An infinitesimal moment, a glitch in the game's matrix. The ball, which should have been following the rhythm of the dribble, simply vanished from Aomine's peripheral vision. It wasn't a movement too fast for the eyes; it was a break in expectation.
It was in that instant of induced blindness, in the fraction of a second when Aomine's brain tried to process the disappearance of the duel's primary object, that Sae acted.
With a motion that was more intention than gesture, his left hand – the one not in the spotlight – pushed the ball with a dry, precise touch. It didn't go forward or to the side, but in a low, straight line, skimming the floor. The ball passed like a shadow, not beside Aomine, but through the most intimate and inviolable space: between his spread legs.
At the exact moment the ball vanished on one side and reappeared on the other, Sae's body, as if pulled by an invisible string attached to the sphere itself, slid to the side, gliding past Aomine with a supernatural speed. He ran, capitalizing on the vacuum of reaction he himself had created.
By the time Aomine realized it, his world collapsed. The sound of the dribble now came from behind him. Sae had already passed him, the ball recovered with mastery, his back now a humiliating and immaculate image before the Panther's astonished eyes.
'When did he...?'
The air seemed to suspend itself the moment Sae elevated. It wasn't a jump of raw power, like Aomine's, but a calculated ascent, an explosion of pure efficiency. His body stretched against the court's sky, an elongated and relentless silhouette, before he slammed the ball with a final, dry thud that echoed like a verdict in the absolute silence.
The ball bounced, solitary, on the asphalt, the sound marking the end of that ghostly round.
Sae landed with the lightness of a feline, the soles of his sneakers touching the ground almost noiselessly. His fingers instinctively rose to adjust the strands of silver hair disheveled by his movement, a surprisingly mundane gesture after the supernatural display. Inside, however, his mind was a whirlwind of cold calculations.
'Playing without the Predator's Eye is different from what I'm used to,' he reflected, his internal perception analyzing every microsecond of the play. Without the vision that deconstructed movements into raw data, the world became more fluid, less predictable. 'In the end, I can only faithfully rely on my Speed and Spatial Awareness to see this guy's moves.'
And that was the true revelation. Sae had meticulously accustomed himself to activating the Predator's Eye in controlled sequences during matches, an intensive training to master his new ability and extract its maximum potential. It was his absolute trump card, the weapon he had forged to set the basketball world ablaze. Yet, against Aomine Daiki, the Ace of the Generation of Miracles, he had decided, in a move of what was probably arrogance, not to reveal it.
This duel wasn't about winning with everything he had; it was about measuring himself, about understanding the foundation of his own raw talent, without the crutch of his most extraordinary ability. He was testing himself against a monster, using only one chain from his own shackles.
Without a word, he bent down, picked up the ball that was still bouncing weakly, and walked back to Aomine. The Panther's gaze was a visceral mix of fury, disbelief, and a newly born respect, forged in the iron of humiliation. Sae extended the ball, his face still a mask of impenetrable serenity.
"Your turn."
...
Aomine didn't wait for a signal. Driven by the humiliation simmering in his veins, he launched his attack like a bolt of dark blue lightning. His dribbles weren't the economical, efficient movements of Sae; they were pure street expression, full of unnecessary flair, exaggerated spins, and abrupt changes of pace that seemed to defy logic. It was unpredictability incarnate, a chaotic choreography designed to confuse and disorient.
Sae, however, didn't move. His feet were planted on the ground, his blue-gray eyes tracking the ball's trajectory like a hawk tracking prey in an open field. He didn't react to the flourishes, the body feints.
He was observing the core of the movement, the point where intention became action. When Aomine finally exploded toward him, a hurricane of speed and arrogance, Sae... simply let him pass.
It was a surrender so unnatural it seemed like a mistake. Aomine broke through the defensive line with ease, his triumphant smile falling from his lips. But it lasted less than a blink.
Because Sae hadn't been left behind. He had moved so fast, with such a supernatural acceleration, that his departure created a residual afterimage in the air, a ghost of himself that still appeared to be standing still. His real body had already pivoted and closed the distance, his arm extending like a lance not in a wide motion, but in a precise, economical strike.
Baam!
The sound was sharp, metallic, the sound of a truth being imposed. The ball was ripped from Aomine's grasp at the exact moment he relaxed it, in the instant of vulnerability after passing an opponent he believed had already been neutralized. Aomine continued forward by inertia, but the ball remained. Stolen. Cleanly.
The deciding factor wasn't pure speed, but Sae's heightened Spatial Awareness. He didn't just see Aomine; he saw the space Aomine occupied, the hidden patterns in his apparent randomness.
And he identified the flaw: Aomine, accustomed to being the untouchable panther, became careless at the very moment of victory. He left his ball-handling exposed, arrogantly convinced that no one had the reaction speed or the courage to challenge him there. Sae not only had both; he had the perception to exploit them.
Aomine's eyes widened, not with anger yet, but with pure, raw shock. He felt the void in his hands before he even visually processed the steal. And when he turned, Sae was already in possession of the ball, holding it with an insulting casualness.
"You're fast, but sloppy." Sae's voice was flat, a clinical diagnosis that cut deeper than any insult. Before Aomine could retort, Sae began to dribble.
And Momoi, who watched the scene with her heart in her throat, felt a new kind of shock. "I-is that...", she whispered, unable to complete the thought.
His dribbles were a near-perfect replica of Aomine's style—the same spins, the same abrupt changes of direction, the same flourishes. But it was a distorted copy, filtered through a logical mind. And something sounded off. The sound of the ball bouncing on the asphalt wasn't constant; it oscillated, speeding up and slowing down in a disconcerting way, like a heart in arrhythmia.
Then, deliberately, the rhythm slowed. The ball's bounce became lazy, inviting. It was a trap, obvious and blatant. Aomine, his pride wounded and eager for redemption, took the bait. He lunged for the steal, his fingers hungry for the ball.
At the instant Aomine committed to the movement, the dribble's rhythm accelerated violently. The ball, which seemed to be in a dead spot, stuck to Sae's hand and he exploded to the side, a silver arrow that bypassed Aomine's off-balance body with an ease that was, in itself, the greatest humiliation.
Momoi could see clearly that from that point on, the outcome had already been decided.
"Dai-chan..."