NIKE -Blue Lock-

Veni, vidi, vici

It is nauseating, the stench.

She knew it.
She knew it very well.

So filthy, so vomitous...
comparable to the reek of rats.

Rats...

By the book, small rodent mammals of the genus Rattus, like mice but generally larger.
A polite, textbook definition.

But for her... they were squalid creatures clawing at the concrete as the sewers dragged them into the drain.

With filth and urine in their eyes and on their fur, desperately clinging to the walls of the gutter, trying to survive a certain end.

Animals so disgusting and filthy that, while trying to climb back to the surface — to a place that was not theirs and to which they did not belong — they break those little claws that carry disease rather than end up in the dump they refuse to accept as their natural habitat.

Rats... the most human of animals.

There were twenty-five minutes left on the clock. The scoreboard read 65', the minute at which the number had frozen.

The score was 4–0.

Below it, in a smaller font and a different color, a five-minute timer.

Five minutes... harmless when seen with a superficial eye.

But when shit and piss slow in the sewage waters, five minutes are enough to trigger the rats' primitive instinct.

And so they stamp, scream, crawl along the filthy walls of that drain.

And losers do the same.

Humans are not so different from rats. They breathe like them, eat like them, die like them and, above all, despair like them.

Yes, because as rats cling to each other to climb the sewer walls, so did those figures around her.

She had seen enough of them to know how to recognize the moment when a human became an ephemeral rat.

And she recognized it in that moment in those who, sitting on the same benches, wore the same colors of the uniform she had been wearing, camouflaged among them.

They are not moving.
But there was no real need for them to move to understand that their primitive instinct was about to take over.

One toys with the cap of a water bottle. Another stares intently at his soles, smeared with earth. One looks a little too long and another a little too briefly.

In their inertia, they were feeling exactly what a rat drowning in sludge feels.

It's normal...
It is the brain's job to switch on that survival instinct common to humans and beasts.

And five minutes are enough to activate that strip of cerebral cortex.
Even less if you know who she was.

Egoist beings... who believe themselves egoist enough.

They do not do it on purpose, really.
They do it without thinking.
Without dignity.
Without even knowing why.

It's just ego.
The ignoble kind, I mean.

The one they possess and wield as if it were a treasure no one else has.

It is the only thing they can still count on: their own ego.

It is no longer the desire to win.
No, no — they only have five minutes after all. Not enough to become heroes of a match they have long understood they are not starring in.