The boys' locker room was a suffocating mix of cheap deodorant and teenage hormones. While most of the students changed amidst shoving, loud laughter, and arguments about the latest manga, Hinata Shoyo occupied a corner, creating his own bubble of calm.
He had one leg elevated on the bench and was tying his shoelaces. It wasn't an automatic act; it was a ritual. He pulled the laces firmly, securing the knot so it wouldn't shift even a millimeter, but without cutting off circulation.
He finished and planted his foot on the floor. Then, he closed his eyes for a second.
He didn't need a floating screen to know how his body was doing. He felt it. He flexed his toes inside the sneaker. Arch is weak, he noted. He rotated his right ankle and felt a slight pull in his calf. Hamstrings are tight. Range of motion limited to 60% of what I remember.
He stood up and did a small hop in place, landing on the balls of his feet, dampening the sound. His knees responded, but they lacked the explosive spring his mind was used to.
"No full jumps for now," he muttered to himself, rubbing his quadriceps. "If I try to fly with this chassis still under construction, I'm going to break before I even take off. First, foundation."
"Hinata!" shouted a classmate from the doorway. "Stop meditating and move your ass! We've got basketball against Class B today!"
Hinata opened his eyes. Instead of being annoyed, a wide, relaxed smile crossed his face. He slapped his cheeks loudly to wake himself up.
"Coming!" he replied with energy, instantly changing the heavy atmosphere of his corner.
The gym echoed with the high-pitched squeak of rubber soles against worn varnish. The P.E. teacher blew the whistle and tossed the ball into the air.
Chaos broke out instantly.
To a normal observer, it was an average high school basketball game: noisy and messy. But to Hinata Shoyo, who had played in stadiums where the ball traveled at speeds that could break fingers, this looked like it was moving underwater.
Everyone ran after the ball like a swarm of angry bees, clumping together in a mass of arms and legs.
Inefficient, Hinata thought. He didn't run. He jogged smoothly toward an empty space on the wing, reading the flow of the game rather than chasing it. They waste energy running to where the ball is, not where it's going to fall.
The ball rebounded clumsily off the rim. Three boys jumped for it, colliding in the air. The ball was spat out of the turmoil, rolling... directly toward where Hinata had positioned himself two seconds earlier.
He picked it up calmly, feeling the pebbled texture of the synthetic leather.
"Block him! It's the midget!" bellowed a boy from the opposing team—a defender who had a head of height and twenty kilos on him—launching himself at Hinata like a freight train.
In a physical collision, Hinata would go flying. But Hinata had no intention of colliding.
The defender lunged. Hinata, keeping his dribble alive, sank his hips slightly. A textbook drop step. He turned his shoulders to the right, selling the fake with his eyes. The opponent took the bait, shifting all his weight to block a path that no longer existed.
In that split second of imbalance, Hinata pivoted to the left.
It was fluid as water. Without touching him, without using brute force. The opponent tripped over his own feet trying to correct his course and fell to his knees.
Hinata was no longer there.
He dribbled once more, lifting his gaze. He didn't need to activate any special skill; years of experience had given him peripheral vision that covered the entire court. He didn't see jerseys; he saw intentions. He saw openings.
He saw Marin Kitagawa in the side bleachers, who had stopped laughing with her friends to watch the court, eyes slightly widened in surprise.
He saw the teacher yawning near the scorer's table.
And he saw a solitary, tall, hunched figure near the three-point line.
Wakana Gojo.
Gojo was standing there, arms hanging down, trying to occupy as little space as possible despite standing nearly 1.80m tall. No one passed him the ball. to the rest of the class, he was invisible or a nuisance.
Hinata advanced toward the paint. Two defenders ran at him, drawn to his ball handling like moths to a flame.
Perfect, Hinata thought.
He jumped. But not toward the hoop. His body arched in the air, drawing every eye.
At the peak of his jump, he twisted his torso and fired a bounce pass—strong and precise—that whistled between the legs of a confused defender.
The ball hit Gojo's hands with a dry, loud Slap!
Gojo flinched, almost dropping the ball. Panic flooded his face. He had the ball. Everyone was looking at him. He was alone. He searched for Hinata with his eyes, looking for an exit, expecting a shout of frustration.
Hinata landed softly, flexing his knees like a cat. He didn't scream "Shoot!".
He simply looked him in the eye, smiled with contagious confidence, and jerked his chin upward.
Don't shrink. Use it.
Gojo, driven by that gaze that admitted no defeat, raised his arms by pure instinct. He was tall. No one could block him from that height if he stretched. He shot.
The mechanics were rough, but the height was advantageous. The ball hit the backboard... and went in.
"Woah! Gojo scored!" some shouted, genuinely surprised.
Gojo looked at his hands, incredulous. Heat rose to his cheeks. Then he looked at Hinata.
The redhead was already running back on defense, but he turned for a second to give him a thumbs-up and a wink.
The game ended. Hinata was glistening with sweat, but his breathing was rhythmic and controlled, unlike the agonizing panting of his classmates. While the others collapsed onto the floor, Hinata walked to the wall and began his cool-down routine. Hamstring stretches. Hip rotations. Taking care of the machine.
"Hey, Hinata."
The school basketball team captain, a boy named Suzuki, approached while drying his neck with a towel.
"You've got good moves. That feint earlier was brutal. And you have court vision; you read us like an open book."
"Thanks," Hinata said, touching his toes without bending his knees, enjoying the stretch.
"Seriously, why do you waste your time in the volleyball club?" Suzuki let out a short laugh, without malice, but with that casual cruelty typical of adolescence. "I heard you guys don't even have enough members for an official match. You're a joke. You should join Basketball. With your agility and my height, we'd win the district tournament easy."
At the line for the water fountains, a few meters away, Wakana Gojo froze. The water from his bottle overflowed slightly onto his fingers. He knew that tone. He knew what it felt like to have what you like mocked, treated as something inferior. He expected Hinata to laugh, make an excuse, or change the subject.
Hinata straightened up slowly. He ran the towel through his messy orange hair.
His expression wasn't angry. There was no trace of offense. It was an absolute calm, a certainty that seemed to radiate heat.
"Basketball is fun, Suzuki-san. It's a contact sport, it's fast. I get why you like it."
Hinata lowered the towel and looked at his own hands. He opened and closed his fingers, as if trying to grab something invisible in the air.
"But... it doesn't have the sound."
"Sound?" Suzuki blinked, confused.
"The sound of the palm against the leather," Hinata said. His voice didn't rise in volume, but it gained a vibrating intensity. "The sting in your forearms when you receive a perfect spike that was going to kill your team. The electric sensation that the ball connects with you, and you are the only thread keeping it from touching the floor."
Hinata smiled, but not at Suzuki—at the memory of full stadiums and blinding spotlights.
"In volleyball, you can't hold the ball. If you grab it, you lose. You have to hit it. You have to trust blindly that someone else will be there to keep it alive before it falls. It is... an instant connection."
He looked up at Suzuki. His smile became dazzling, genuine, disarming any cynicism.
"I don't play volleyball to win easy tournaments, Suzuki-san. I play because it's beautiful. It's an art to keep the ball in the air. And I'm going to make my team fly, even if we're a 'joke' right now."
Suzuki was left speechless. He opened his mouth to retort, but closed it. Hinata's passion was so physical, so real, that it was almost intimidating to argue against it.
"Ah... well. Your loss," he finally muttered, scratching the back of his neck, uncomfortable with such honesty.
Suzuki walked away. Hinata went back to his stretches, humming a song quietly.
But he wasn't alone.
Next to the water fountains, Wakana Gojo squeezed his water bottle so hard the plastic crunched. His heart beat violently against his ribs.
"It's beautiful. It's an art."
Hinata's words resonated in Gojo's head like an echo in a canyon.
It was the same.
It was exactly the same thing Gojo felt when he painted the face of a Hina doll. The delicacy, the absolute devotion, the fear that people wouldn't understand it because "it's not normal."
Gojo looked at Hinata's small but straight back. For the first time in his school life, the instinct to hide vanished. In its place, he felt a magnetic urgency.
He understands, Gojo thought, feeling a lump in his throat. He isn't ashamed of what he loves.
On the other side of the gym, Marin Kitagawa, who had been waiting for a friend near the door, lowered her phone. She hadn't recorded anything, but her eyes were fixed on the orange-haired boy.
"That face..." Marin whispered, biting her lower lip, intrigued. "That's the face of someone who is completely in love with their world."
Hinata Shoyo didn't know it yet, but he had just recruited his first two real allies. Not with promises or strategies, but simply by being himself.