NIKE -Blue Lock-

Baltimore oriole

Sense it, if you will.

An undeniable tension, ethereal yet palpable, hangs suspended in the atmosphere.

It pillages your solitary reserve of oxygen, just like a cruel thief, and tightens around your lungs, squeezing them into a compacted sphere.

It seals your lips and tears at your vocal cords, distorting your voice and coercing you into a profound silence.

It seizes hold of your heart, wrenching it from your chest, and parades it as a trivial bauble in a grand larceny, deeming it unworthy.

It locks eyes with you, compelling you to divert your gaze, bowing your head in submission.

Do you perceive it?

Darling reader, I'm talking to you now...

Do you feel it?
Do you feel her?

Not yet?

Fret not, you soon will.

Victory extends no clemency.
Neither to me, and assuredly...

...nor to you.

Still in Ego's office

The silence in that office was oppressively thick. Each of them could immediately perceive the rhythm of their own hearts, some faster and more restless than others.

"What..."

Anri didn't dare to lift her gaze to the boy with orange hair, and Ego was too engrossed in staring at the profile of the figure with the red wig.

And her?

"Say it again, Rensuke..."

She was smiling at him. A smile so cruelly indifferent, so violently innocuous, so... futile.

How could she look at him like that? With those lips pulled into a careless smile? With those red eyes that seemed to be filled with the blood he had shed for him? No... for her.

"Say my name again."

Kunigami couldn't close his eyelids. His heart was slow, surprisingly, but it was so slow that he almost feared it would stop. The bead of sweat trickling down the line of his spine was cold, icy to the point of making him shiver.

Or maybe it was her. Maybe she was making him tremble. After all...

"Nicole Vinciguerra..."

...all losers tremble in the face of Nike.

Her name on his tongue was so strange, so wrong, so unusual, so inappropriate. It tasted like a flavor never experienced before, a taste foreign to your taste buds, akin to that of a strong liquor the first time you experience it.

It was wrong.

It was wrong that she was smiling. But it made so much sense now. Her cruelty... now it made sense. Her malice... now it made sense. Her wickedness... now it made sense. Her inhumanity... it all made sense.

Nicklaus Vinciguerra's... Kunigami had never been able to explain it. He couldn't understand where his lack of mercy came from.

But Nicole Vinciguerra... Nike.
She was a monster. There was nothing to explain: she was born to be superior to humans, to crush them under her golden heel and bury them under the laurel leaves that fell from her crown.

She was the very same figure that had appeared at that gala, marked with the wounds of a war, and had mockingly shown that what killed men for her was merely an accessory. Oh, how could he even forget the shiver he felt once he looked her way.