Elena drove her marker into the whiteboard, scribbling jagged lines frantically. To an outsider, the complex web of arrows and circles might have looked like high-level calculus, yet the clutter felt superfluous. Everyone in the huddle knew they were doubling down on a singular, blunt philosophy.
"Okay, listen up. Their number 11 has finally woken up," Elena said, her gaze sweeping across the faces of her players from left to right. "But that changes nothing about our winning condition."
Elena slashed a series of aggressive arrows pointing straight toward the Herons' baseline. She didn't have to bother with defensive rotations on the board. Her message was as clear as day: Attack.
"Keep hammering them," she commanded. "The Herons' defensive line is paper-thin. If we hesitate, if we start worrying about shielding our own court, we surrender our positioning and lose the pressure game. We force them to break before we do."
Standing on the periphery of the tactical circle, Himeko absorbed the instructions. She knew Elena didn't intend to insult her. The strategy made mathematical sense: trade blows and trust that Osea's firepower was heavier.
Yet, a cold sense of self-reproach gnawed at her from the insides.
She had been invisible for the entire match. Every time she jumped, the ball bypassed her hands. Logic told that her presence channeled the attack toward her defenders, serving a tactical purpose. But logic offered little comfort to her pride. A Middle Blocker existed to stop the ball. If she jumped and touched nothing but air, if she couldn't alter the trajectory of the game with her own hands, then what was the point of her existence on the court?
TWEEEEEEEEET!
The sharp blast of the whistle announced the start of the third set.
Himeko forced the knot of insecurity in her stomach to loosen. There was no room for doubt on the hardwood, not when the score was tied at one set apiece. She locked away the frustration of the previous rounds, burying it deep beneath her captain's mask. She had a job to do.
"Service!"
The referee's arm swept forward.
Willow Vance stood at the baseline. She bounced the ball against the floorboards. Once, twice, three times, a ritual to steady her nerves. She exhaled a long, shaky breath, then tossed the ball into the air.
Her palm struck the leather with controlled force. It was a standard float serve, clean and flat, sailing over the net to put the ball in play.
The Herons' libero stepped into the path of the ball. She accepted the easy serve, absorbing the momentum with her platform. The ball popped up, arcing perfectly toward the net.
The Tarin setter stepped under the pass, her hands raised. Scanning her eyes superficialy, on the left wing, Jiayi Rui was already beginning her approach, the inevitable focal point of the attack.
The ball left the setter's hands, climbing toward the peak of the antenna.
Jiayi Rui began the sequence. Her movement followed the textbook rhythm taught in every junior high gym across the country. Left foot forward. A gathering step. The explosive plant of the right foot. Absolute boring efficiency with zero reliance on overwhelming physical prowess.
Himeko Nakamura watched her from across the white tape. The rookie's face remained an expression of placid disinterest, the look of someone waiting for a kettle to boil or watching paint dry.
Yet, those eyes were alive.
Jiayi's pupils darted, scanning the defensive line, the block, the floor. The disconnect between that sleepy expression and those hyper-active eyes sent an irrational irritation through Himeko's chest. It felt damn familiar, in the early days in the capital, trying to decode the chaotic nonsense of Kevin Marvant, until forcing herself to learn a completely new language of reaction. Himeko pushed the thought down. She had a trap to spring.
The two women launched from the floorboards.
They ascended in unison, rising into the glare of the stadium lights. Himeko extended her frame. She spread her arms wide, leaving a tempting gap between her hands, a visual lie designed to lure the hitter into a false sense of security.
Jiayi Rui hung in the air. The saturation bled from the world.
The vibrant blue of the Divers' jerseys faded to slate gray. The yellow of the ball dulled to ash. The roar of the crowd sounded like underwater silence. In this monochrome stillness, Jiayi looked at the obstacle in front of her.
She saw the wide gap between Himeko's hands, even a skilled player would think this is a free, open door.
She shifted her gaze to Himeko's shoulders.
The tension in the blocker's trapezius muscles was a bit off. Himeko's center of gravity listed subtly to the right. Her body is tighter than usual, as if looking like a spring waiting to release. Every link she perceived from Himeko looked very shaky.
Tricky.
The realization arrived instantly. This was clearly a trap. In a fraction of a second, Himeko intended to snap her arms inward to the right, closing the seam to crush the cross-court shot.
Jiayi's arm drew back. She adjusted her targeting parameters.
In the real-time world, Himeko triggered the trap. With a violent exertion of her core, she shoved her arms aggressively to her right, intending to slam the door shut on the diagonal attack.
Jiayi Rui swung. Her hand connected with the ball, driving it straight forward. She fired the attack directly into the space Himeko had occupied milliseconds ago.
The ball screamed through the vacuum left by the shifting block. It met zero resistance.
THUD.
The impact against the floorboards was sickeningly clean. The ball buried itself into the varnish mere feet from the net, on the very line Himeko had been standing to protect just a moment before.
Gravity reclaimed them both.
Himeko landed on the balls of her feet, her hands still pressed to the right, guarding a ghost. Her head whipped around in slow motion. She stared at the ball settling on the floor, the sequence of the play failing to compute in her mind.
She turned back to the net.
Jiayi Rui landed opposite her. The impact of her sneakers against the wood was soft, actually it was completely soundless, Himeko noticed that just now.
Their eyes met through the white mesh.
Jiayi stood upright, brushing a strand of hair from her face. For a single second, her girl-next-door mask slipped. Her eyes looked dead into Himeko's soul.
The gaze was lifeless, patient, and utterly convinced of its right to feed. Himeko had seen that same look once before, carved into Ivanka Symphony's face the instant she stepped over her broken opponent in the finals: the calm, royal indifference of something that has never once questioned whether it sits at the very top of the chain.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Jiayi blinked.
The light returned to her eyes. The corners of her mouth softened into that unassuming smile once again. She turned away, jogging back to her teammates to high-five the libero, disappearing back into the camouflage of being 'normal.'
Himeko shivered.
The summit she had measured her whole life against suddenly felt impossibly high, already occupied by something that had never needed to climb; only to wait at the top for the rest of them to arrive as prey.
The Tarin Herons' setter had a diamond in her hands yet she treated it like a rock.
Every pass that floated to the net went to one place. It didn't matter if the reception was sloppy. It didn't matter if Jiayi was stumbling backward or if the angle was impossible. The setter pushed the ball to jersey 11. She forced the rookie to fix broken plays, demanding miracles.
Himeko jumped.
She sealed line, sealed cross, built the same fortress that had caged Kevin Marvant for eight straight weeks.
Jiayi Rui glided through the walls.
Always, the ball just hitting the one square centimeter Himeko wasn't. The ball kissed her elbows, licked her fingertips, and kept going.
Ninety percent of the time, Himeko grabbed air.
Yet the scoreboard lied in Osea's favor.
Jiayi's attacks were lethal against Himeko, yet due to this initial all-out, that unbeknownst to the doubting Himeko that her blocking actually helped the team. The bad sets robbed Jiayi of velocity. The predictable rhythm allowed the Divers' back row to set up camp.
In one play, Himeko panicked in the air. She threw her hands wide, desperate to catch the ghost. In doing so, she inadvertently created huge, obvious windows.
The ball sailed through these windows.
Lisa Denire stood there. The ball came to her chest like a magnet.
Pop.
"Got it."
Willow set the counter.
Jules Moreno smashed the ball into the floor.
It happened again, again and many times. Himeko jumped, terrified she was out of position. Jiayi avoided her hands effortlessly. The ball flew straight to back court defenders.
Dig. Set. Kill.
The Divers were winning by a landslide. The normal script was broken, the captain was mentally defeated, yet the machine kept scoring. Himeko was failing her way to a blowout victory.
"Point, Set, Match! Port Osea Divers!"
The warehouse detonated. Drums thundered like artillery.
"GRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH."
Jules Moreno roared, scooped Sarah into a rib-cracking hug, then turned to milk attention from the crowd. Raising her arms high to hype everyone up, the crowd responded with earbleeding decibel.
“And your MVP tonight - twenty-two kills -JULIA MORENO!”
The team swarmed the bench, already arguing over who will eat the most the seafood, laughing about how the Herons folded like cheap origami.
Himeko sat alone on the end of the bench.
She pulled a heavy white towel over her head. She hunched forward, elbows on knees, staring at legs of moving teammates who didn't register the rising turmoil within her heart.
At least, the darkness under the towel felt safe.
Her hands trembled.
Two months.
She thought about the Facility B. The sweat. The bruises on her forearms from Kevin's spikes. The endless repetition of "Again." She had learned to track the monster. She had learned to read the impossible. She thought she had summited the damn mountain.
Tonight, a rookie with sleepy eyes and a bad setter had erased her existence... and her hope.
She hadn't touched the ball. Not really. She was a traffic cone that Jiayi Rui politely stepped around.
Zero, Himeko thought. And back to zero...
"Cap! Bus leaves in twenty! Seafood time!" Jules slapped her shoulder on the way past.
Himeko nodded beneath the towel, didn't bare to look up.
The stadium emptied out. Lights clicked off in sections until the court was a dim with a few small light left.
Brooms scraped bleachers. Swish. Swish.
Ten minutes after the last teammate vanished, she finally stood, slung the bag that felt heavier than the loss, and started walking.
She pulled her phone from her pocket, her reflection on the phone looked a bit melancholic despite her stoic self until screen lit up her face.
No new messages.
She opened the chat with Kewkvin145. The last message was the horrifying volleyball-face photoshop from that morning.
She stared at it. She waited for the typing bubble. She wanted him to say something. Anything. Maybe a joke about the score. Maybe a sarcastic observation about how useless she looked in the second set assumed he watched her at home and not in a match right now. She wanted the 'Stranger' to tell her it wasn't as bad as it felt.
Himeko sighed. She shoved the phone into her pocket.
She walked toward the player tunnel.
The tunnel was cool and damp. The concrete walls echoed her footsteps. Clack. Clack. Clack. It was a long, dark throat leading out to the parking lot where the bus had left since she told them she would catch up later.
She kept her head down, watching her shoes.
Tap.
A hand touched her left shoulder. Himeko stopped.
Adrenaline dumped into her system. The frustration of the match, the self-loathing, the pent-up energy, it all coalesced into a sharp, violent reflex.
She spun on her heel. She dropped her bag. Her hand balled into a fist, rising instinctively.
"Who-"
A figure cowered against the concrete wall.
It was an old man.
He wore a beige cardigan that looked like high fashion 50 years ago, looked like senior citizen clothing nowaday. A tweed flat cap was pulled low over a mess of white hair. He held a cane in front of his face like a shield.
"Whoa! Whoa! Friendly! Friendly fire!"
The voice was deep but not overtly deep. It definitely did not belong to a geriatric citizen. She swore to herself that she had heard this one many times before.
He lowered the cane slowly. He reached up and pulled the glasses off as well as his fake beard. A familiar, annoying, handsome face grinned sheepishly at her.
Kevin Marvant straightened up. The cardigan strained against his chest muscles.
"It's me," Kevin said, wincing funnily. "Damn, Himeko, you are going to punch a random person for real?"
"Oh, Kevin..." she breathed. "Kevin?! Why are you here?"
