V1C1 Part7

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7. (COOL BUT WORST) PLAYMAKER

Translation Notes

1. The term used here, 球威, means “pitcher’s stuff”, which basically refers to how effective a pitch is at being the pitch it’s supposed to be

2. Refers to the popular myth/saying/action that writing the character for “person” on your hand and then pretending swallowing it will relieve stress

3. Some neat wordplay here. アタッカー並み means on par with an attacker, but 並みのアタッカー means average attacker

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He felt like he could see Haijima’s smug face painted on the raised set. It was after the opponent blocker fell for the decoy in front of the net and jumped. Kuroba jumped in from behind the decoy with a back-row attack. From the point of view of the opponent blocker, a new shadow suddenly shot out from above the decoy’s head. This was the combination they were best at, called a pipe attack, and it should have been already analyzed by the opponent, but it felt great to be given a face of astonishment that said, “How did you appear there!?” every time. This is the moment when I’m the coolest one on the court.

Haijima’s sets were completely different than his senpai setter’s sets from last year. Kuroba still couldn’t explain it in theory, but even though his senpai’s sets were a big arch that “went up and fell down,” Haijima’s sets “didn’t fall down.” The ball was thrown “straight” to the place where it could only be reached by stepping in the fastest, jumping the highest and swinging his arms at the highest point. If he didn’t stop it, it would just whoosh past him. In practice, he constantly missed the timing and missing the ball, which ended into arguments. While he became reckless everyday, desperate to stop the ball next time for sure—a strange phenomenon occurred today.

As long as he jumped and swung his arms with all strength, the ball would be there. The sets fitted into his hands so cleanly, like they were sticking to his hands, that there was not even a millimeter of deviation. All he had to do was to add power and hit it out with a nice feeling. He cut through the gaps in the opponents’ defense, who were unable to take a step, and landed after seizing the ball with his eyes until it pierced the court. “Yes!” he pumped his arm into the air, still on his knees.

“Yuni!”

“You were so cool!”

While his gathered teammates messed up his hair, he searched for Haijima. He caught a glimpse of Haijima, who was always on the outside of circles like these. Haijima smiled thinly and nodded.

The rotation moved once, and Kuroba came up to the front row right after he did a back-row attack in the back row. When Haijima went down from the front row to serve in exchange, they exchanged a low high-five as they passed each other.

July 26th. The first round of the boys’ volleyball division for the Prefectural Middle School Summer Games, taking place on the two courts of A and B in the Suzumu City Municipal Gymnasium. In the first game on Court A, Monshiro Middle already took the first set. For the second set, the other side came close in the middle of the game because of a disordered receive, but they didn’t allow them to form a comeback and extended a wide lead again to close out the set. It was a three-set match, so if they took this set, they would have a straight-set win.

Haijima moved back considerably in the service zone, almost to the wall, and got into the serve position. He put the ball in his left hand and extended his arm straight out in front of him. His narrow eyes were narrowed even more sharply and he stared at the other side of the net with a fixed gaze. For a moment, the stands that were cheering loudly fell deathly silent. Everyone held their breaths at the clear, intimidating something Haijima was clad in.

Taking just one second to lightly adjust his breathing, he tossed the ball up high without any perceivable jump and hit a powerful jump serve from a beautiful, textbook-like form. The gym became filled with cheers that bordered on roars once again.

But it was a bit too long. It’s out—Kuroba could see it in his eyes, but there was no time for the receiver to avoid it. The ball bounced up all the way to the ceiling with such tremendous power (1) that the receiver nearly fell over.

Ah——.

His body moved naturally before he could think about it, and he jumped. Above the net, he caught hold of the ball that returned directly and knocked it down to the opponent’s court.

Since sixteen schools participated in the first round, the passages behind the gym were crowded with players in jerseys of all sorts of colors, teachers, and management staff.

“Somehow while I was in a daze…”

“We won!”

“With a team of only eight people!”

“Yuni, you reacted well to that direct one.”

“Well, I guess. For some reason, I feel like I can see the ball really well today. Also, when I see the opponent’s faces, I somehow know what they’re gonna do.”

“What the hell’s that, that sounds cool. I’m falling for you!”

“We should have talked to the girls from class more. All I could hear was the moms’ voices.”

“Agh, I was switching the moms’ voices with the girls’ voices in my head, but you just dragged me back to reality!”

Having finished their match in good time, everyone was still in good spirits, and there was a constant stream of excited chatter. It seemed that the match that started at the same time in Court B was carried over to the third set, so muffled cheers and the sound of the ball bouncing could be heard. When he wondered why this extremely stupid conversation never ended, he realized that it was because Haijima wasn’t there to chop through the mood. He was supposed to be with them when they left the court, but…

Their advisor, who had said he was going to drop by the management headquarters, came back just then.

“Sensei, do you know where Haijima is?”

“He went back inside. The second match in Court A is about to start soon. He said that he’s going to go watch it since it’ll decide who we face in the second round.”

“Eh…He didn’t have to go alone.”

If it’s for our next opponent, then shouldn’t we all go scouting them out, not just Haijima? A tinge of dissatisfaction sprouted in his heart as he thought that he should have at least called out to them.

“Didn’t Haijima want to give you guys a break because he was worried? You’re fine now, but if you get too excited, you won’t enough energy for the second round.”

Haijima worried about them? It was a phenomenon that seemed like it wouldn’t happen even if the heavens and earth were turned upside-down. It was exactly a phenomenon. It was equal to a natural disaster that only happened once every few hundred million years or so.

But, it was true that playing two games in one day was unfamiliar terrain for them. Although everyone seemed to be in good condition right now, it was hard to predict how tired they would be in the second game.

“But, you know, I knew Haijima had volleyball experience, but I didn’t expect him to be that good. Even when I stopped by the headquarters earlier, teachers from other schools kept coming up to me and asking who that player was.”

“Hey, what about me? They didn’t ask about me?”

“Hmm? They didn’t.”

“Tch. My efforts always get overshadowed by Haijima.”

When he pouted and grumbled that, he was soothed with “You’ve got this from now on.”

“Keep this up for the second round. Don’t get too worked up about it and just have fun with everyone.”

He thought he was in good form and stood out quite a bit, but he guessed that Haijima’s skill was so outstanding that his own level wasn’t enough to leave an impression. He couldn’t believe that he was getting noticed by the volleyball team advisors from other schools, who was probably much more discerning than their own advisor.

“We’re gonna win”—Haijima was extremely confident, but at the same time, he was a realist. He never gave lenient assessments to himself or others, and he wasn’t the type of guy who would say soft and easy effort goals like “It would be nice if we could win.” He said that back then because he had a serious expectation that was possible.

He had a feeling now that it really might not be a dream if Haijima was there.

If they won four times, they won the championship. They had already cleared one match. Three more to go.

We can…reach it…?

I want to win, he thought. I want to win next time too. And after that. And then if we win after that—. When he heard it in June, he felt a lot of bewilderment, but now for the first time, he definitely wanted to win. His heart began to beat fast.

***

Right when they entered the venue since the time for the second round’s official practice was approaching, cheers similar to an angry roar rose up, and the entire team leaned back in the same direction despite themselves.

A horizontal banner—which wasn’t there in the first round—with the words “Monshiro Middle School Boys’ Volleyball Team” written with excessively good handwriting was hanging from the second-row bleachers. And next to that, there was a square flag with “Spread your wings! Kuroba UNIVERSE!”

His face turned hot.

“Wow. Yuni’s cheering squad is amazing.”

“It’s like we’re at Koshien.”

His teammates were more taken aback and put off rather than being jealous. Their parents formed a small cheering squad for the first round, but it was just a modest thing where they cheered for their children on the spot, with no bells and whistles or anything else. The huge cheering party that newly appeared completely swallowed that up, sounding their megaphones loudly and as for his relatives, they were shouting in voices that couldn’t be called refined.

“…That’s Grandpa’s writing.”

On a pure-white cloth, the words “Monshiro Middle School Boys’ Volleyball Team” were written in bold, stirring letters like a rampaging dragon in all black ink. Come to think of it, when he went out this morning, his mother was in a hurry making phone calls to here and there. It would have been better if his family had just come here modestly instead of taking the time to organize something like that and be late for the first round.

The other one, “Spread your wings! Kuroba UNIVERSE!”, had a black background and decorated with sparkly gold tinsel, and it was a lot more lowbrow than his grandfather’s single brush stroke. Right above where that deathly embarrassing flag—which he thought of as more like harassment—was hanging, he saw Itoko shouting into a huge megaphone. …If she had the time to prepare that, she could have come for the first round. You should have seen that really nice back-row attack in the first round.

Yorimichi…didn’t seem to have come. He couldn’t spot him as far as he could see. He was sure he would have heard that there was a game today through Itoko.

“Oh, Haijima, your grandma came. I wonder if my mom also invited her.”

He tugged on Haijima’s uniform and whispered that into his ear. “Huh…” Haijima didn’t look all that happy as he looked up at the stands, straining his eyes as a wrinkle formed between his brows.

“Can’t see her.”

“Right there. She’s above ‘team.’”

“Even with contacts, my eyes aren’t as good as yours. It’s fine.”

He immediately gave up and returned his eyes to the court.

“Concentrate, Kuroba.”

He said in a low tone. He can see Haijima’s consciousness narrowing and condensing. As though saying that the world he needed only existed inside that nine-by-eighteen-meter court, he raised his awareness by shutting out outside gazes and cheers. He could feel that the power of his concentration that made his skin tingle just by being next to him.

“Y-Yeah. Got it.”

Kuroba responded vigorously with all his might, but even if he took his eyes off the stands, he couldn’t get rid of the feeling of being surrounded his relatives’ faces, faces, faces from 360 degrees.

The rotation started with Haijima on the right back as the server and Kuroba “diagonal” to him on the left front. The rotation was made so that Haijima, who was strong at serving, got to serve as much as possible, and either one of the tall Kuroba and Haijima was always in the front row. There were six people, so there were three pairs of players connected by diagonal lines, and one’s partner was called one’s “diagonal.” The diagonal relationship was always maintained even when the rotation moved. However, when he became absentminded, he sometimes lost track of his current position, which was quite confusing.

Back-row players weren’t allowed to jump up to block, and they could only spike by doing a back-row attack from behind the attack line (the line three meters from the net).

As though saying that victory went to the one who made the first move, Haijima smashed in a jump serve with all his might from the very beginning. A jump serve was hit with a lot of force, and consequently had a high risk of error. In practice games, Haijima used a low-risk jump float serve, but right when he wondered what he was going to do in the official match today, he was actively using a jump serve.

Regrettably, it went behind the end line and was out, giving their opponent their first point, but the air in the opposing court was frozen for a moment.

“Don’t worry about it!”

His teammates called out to him, but Haijima didn’t seem to care about the mistake in the first place and unashamedly responded lightly with one hand, staring over the net with a brazen expression as though that was his substitute for a greeting. Even though it didn’t result in a point, he had successfully planted the seed of fear in them that made them think, “What would happen if that had gone in?”—Their amount of experience was different by one or two orders of magnitude. And more than anything, the fearsomeness of Haijima was that he had such nerves of steel.

Haijima was making the game in a literal sense. As a setter, he didn’t just set up his teammates’ offensive, but also controlled the mood in the opponent’s court. He of course knew that the difference between their amounts of experience couldn’t be filled in overnight, but he felt strangely impatient.

He felt like it took an awfully long time for his own first serve order to come around. He impatiently waited for the rotation to move, and when he went down into the service zone and was about to receive the ball,

“…ba! Kuroba!”

Haijima’s voice burst into his ear, and he jumped. He was so out of it that he didn’t hear him, as though there was a membrane around his head. He looked and saw Haijima pointing to the right position of the front row with an unusually anxious look on his face.

The color drained out of his face. The rotation was wrong. He was in the front row for one more time. Nagato, who was in the original service order, was standing confused in a halfway place.

“S-sorry.”

“No, it’s my fault too. I thought I got it wrong when Yuni moved back…”

He talked to Nagato and hurried back to his defensive position. Haijima was about to go to him to say something, but the whistle prompting Nagato to serve sounded. The cheering squad was noisy in the stands, probably because they didn’t understand why the server was suddenly changed.

Something’s wrong…I can hear the voices from the stands well, but the voices on the court are distant. He almost felt like he was standing in the bleachers right now, not on the court.

He felt the rotation was moving quickly, contrary to earlier. His sense of time wasn’t stable. The wrong service order came around this time, and he ran to the serve zone and received the ball. He stood facing the net and took a deep breath to try to calm down, but couldn’t breathe in deeply.

Haijima’s first jump serve suddenly replayed in his mind. Kuroba also practiced the jump serve. He was getting able to hit the ball squarely more and more, and practice could be exhilarating sometimes. It would no doubt feel good to carry out that kind of thing successfully in a game. He would be able to show the cheering squad his good points, but of course his accuracy was not yet usable, so he made sure to do a jump float serve as usual…

Huh? Which foot do I usually step forward with? What’s the timing for the toss? What’s ‘usual’?

His usual way of doing things had completely slipped out of his mind.

Beep—.

The whistle sounded.

He didn’t immediately understand what the signal meant. Something was wrong. His own court was in a panic. After the referee showed the opposing team’s score, he made an “8” sign with his fingers.

An eight second violation!?

The spectators were buzzing once again about the point loss that was difficult to understand to the layman’s eye. If you didn’t serve within eight seconds after the whistle sounded, your opponent scored. It wasn’t like he didn’t hear the first whistle. And yet, he himself had absolutely no idea why he made such a basic mistake.

Haijima made a hand gesture towards the bench, and the advisor, who received it, hurriedly requested a timeout.

“You’re nervous, aren’t you.”

Haijima poked him above his heart with his fist. He didn’t seem angry, but he was definitely fed up. A series of careless mistakes that had nothing to do with the play itself.

“Do you have stage fright or something?”

“Ugh… I’ve never really been in a situation where I’ve gotten stage fright, so I don’t know.”

Was he nervous? He was aware that he was overly concerned with unnecessary things. During the first round, he was able to see the court so well and concentrate on his own task. He knew what he should do without thinking about it and his body moved. It was as if he was being made use of by being incorporated as a part of the organic matter that was the game Haijima finished weaving. He wasn’t displeased with that at all; rather, he felt euphoric. And yet, after they entered the second round, that feeling suddenly stopped, his field of vision abruptly narrowed, and only the voices in his mind increased.

Haijima sighed at him.

“Write down ‘people’ and swallow it.” (2)

“Can’t, can’t you give better advice?”

“I’ve never been nervous. I could tell you all about play, though.”

He felt like he was being shown the disparity between them again. “Can’t be helped, Yuni. If that many of my relatives came, I’d get nervous too. Don’t worry about mistakes.” Though everyone else encouraged him, the sigh Haijima alone had given him weighed heavily on him.

The thirty second timeout went by in the blink of an eye. In the end, he noisily dashed back to the court without putting his feelings in order.

Anyways, there was nothing to do but to recover from here. Right when he moved back to the rear, he immediately got a gesture for a pipe attack from Haijima. It was a fast back-row attack from the middle using the center’s A-quick as a decoy, which was the source of their points in the first round. The shocked face of the opposing blocker who was drawn in by the decoy and jumped at it when he jumped in from over the center’s head was so satisfying—.

“!?”

This time he kept blocking. The do-or-die expression of the opposing blocker appeared from the other side of the net that was like a towering wall, blocking the course. How—!? The ball crashed straight onto the block and was knocked down onto his own side. While falling on his behind from the excess momentum, words such as “What?” came out of his mouth.

As he let his mind wander for a moment and stared at the opposing court, where there were fervent roars, from beneath the net, his teammate was held out in front of him. After he borrowed that hand and stood up, he reflexively drew back his hand when he saw that it was Haijima.

“Sorry.”

An apology slipped out of his mouth. For what? Getting blocked? Drawing back his hand?

“It’s fine. There was no helping that. They’ve already guessed that you’re the only one who could hit it properly. We should have marked them thoroughly.”

Haijima seemed to have accepted the former’s apology. His eyes never left the opponent’s court, where they were exchanging high-fives and celebrating, and spoke quickly. If the only decent hitter was Kuroba, and he was marked for it…then what were they going to do?

Haijima gave him a sharp side glance. He looked fed up again.

“I told you not to let it show on your face… Shake off the guy blocking you as much as possible. However, don’t think you’re not being marked, stay calm and watch the block. I told you about straight and cross. They’re not at a level where you can’t get rid of them.”

Well, from Haijima’s level, middle school volleyball in a rural prefecture like this would seem like a piece of cake. The prefectural finals in a place like this was probably the same size as a subdivision preliminary in Tokyo. It was no consolation for him, as it only deepened his inferiority complex.

Haijima scattered his sets to other attackers, but Kuroba always had a block on him whether he hit or not. The opponent seemed to think that as long as Kuroba was suppressed, the rest of the team couldn’t hit too hard, so they could respond with receives. Unfortunately, it was an effective strategy.

Although the team was able to score some modest points with Haijima’s skillful direction, they still were unable to score consecutively due to the lack of a decisive blow. The seesaw game where stress accumulated continued. No, in terms of overall team morale, the flow was completely on the other side. There were more and more situations where the receives were so disordered that even Haijima had trouble covering them, and when he couldn’t get the set, the rest of the team couldn’t do anything.

Far from regaining his composure, Kuroba was experiencing the sensation of gears steadily becoming less and less aligned. Even though his mind was panicking, his body wouldn’t work together with it. It was like his head and body were doing on their own thing on this side and the other side of the court. While his spike success rate had decreased, moreover, at the beginning there were many times where he would slam the ball into a block and get shut-out, and it became noticeable that he was making the mistake of getting it caught in the net himself, let alone hitting the ball into the blocking.

“Just stop looking at the blocks. It’s better not to. Don’t think about avoiding them, just hit it where it’s easy to hit.”

Haijima pulled on his uniform and whispered that, but he was only extra confused by the change in instructions. Didn’t he say “Watch their blocks” earlier?

Did my jump power go down? Aren’t my legs getting tired? The instant he realized that this is what it was to play two games in a day, his body suddenly became heavy. Are my knees okay? Don’t I feel more burdened than usual? He suddenly started to worry about the growing pains that should have been unrelated to this. What if that thing that hurts so much I couldn’t sleep at night hits me during the match? What do I do? What do I do? What do I do——?

Haijima was saying something from his diagonal position to him. But he couldn’t hear his voice. He could probably hear him physically, but his heart was blocking his ears. Listening to Haijima’s just reasonings now was of no use whatsoever.

Do you, who’s completely disconnected from nervousness or agitation, have the words that I want, the words that will help me? I don’t think so.

He didn’t remember at what point—Haijima turned away with a look of resignation on his face. Ah, if Haijima has given up, then this was already a complete loss, he thought.

For some reason, only a small click of his tongue and the word “useless” reached his ears without being cut off.

***

“Get in line, Yuni.”

It was only when Nagato called out to him that he realized that the game was over. A smattering of applause came down from the stands. When he absentmindedly looked at the score board that was still standing on the court, he saw that the set count was 2-0, and the winner—Monshiro Middle School.

…Wait, what? Did something…happen…? I have almost no memory of touching the ball…

Even when he looked over the faces of his teammates standing in a line along the end line, he didn’t actually feel like they had won at all. Were these really the faces of a winning team? The atmosphere was not as merry as it had been when they won the first round, and everyone looked somewhat apathetic and subdued. And maybe it was just his imagination, but the applause from the stands seemed like it was just done out of politeness.

When he was about to line up next to Haijima, who was standing there with his expression erased, he recalled it along with the flashbacks of some scenes—it was all Haijima’s doing.

Haijima’s play changed after that tongue click and badmouthing.

The jump serve was of course incredible, but Haijima’s original domain was at the net. At the net, the control of the ball was not passed over to anyone—neither opponents nor even his own teammates. Rather than entrusting the set to the attacker, the cases where he hit the ball by himself by performing dumps increased dramatically. A dump was a surprise attack where the setter pretended to set the ball and returned it to the opponent’s court with their left hand, but the power of the dump released from the left hand of the ambidextrous Haijima was not confined to the level of a surprise attack. He smashed it into the opposing court with the same power as an attacker spiking with all of their strength. It should have temporarily made the opponents agitated and close the score gap considerably.

However, it was from there that Haijima showed his demon-like true power. When the opponent marked his dumps and started to block it, he switched from hitting hard to deliberately hitting the ball lightly at the head of the block where they jumped with power in preparation for a strong hit to make it drop to his own side. He pulled off the feat of getting down low to pick up the rebound that gently dropped down without a moment’s delay and swinging it to a nearby teammate with an underhand pass and the instructions “Give it to me!” This time, he used his right hand to smash the ball that was set to him by his panicking teammate into the opponent’s side.

The venue was stunned by the powerful spike that was on par with an attacker’s, or even stronger than an average attacker’s (3), and even the referee’s whistle was a beat late.

How was he able to do that…? It was technical, but more than that, what kind of nerves did he had that enabled him to play in a way that overturned the foundation of team sports like that in front of people?

To be honest, Haijima, you’re…disgusting.

When he heard “Thank you,” he hurriedly matched them in a small voice and bowed. For an instant, he felt as if the shadow of Haijima standing next to him broke out of its human shell and swelled up into a warped shape, and a shiver ran down his spine.

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