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When the Devilbats came around from behind and won the entire damn Kanto Tournament, Habashira didn't cheer. He braced himself.
Spilling out of the stadium with the other spectators, all of them stunned, thrilled, jovial, Habashira only burrowed deeper into his jacket, a dark rock in an effervescent flurry of chatter and elation, like he could ward off what was coming for him. Not that he knew exactly what it would be. But something horrible, certainly. Something crushing, grueling, and Hiruma-shaped. Something soon.
Because this wasn't just a tournament win for Hiruma—this was their ticket to play in the Christmas Bowl, in just three short weeks. For all his celebrations, and despite his recently broken arm, he would already be deep in his machinations for the next thing: how to prepare his scrappy underdog team to take on the undefeated Teikoku Alexanders, and how he could wring every last drop from every other team in Kanto to do it.
At the start of the tournament season, Hiruma had sent around contracts to all the other teams, and then come in person to badger everyone to sign. The contracts said that they'd all unite to help the winning team go on to represent Kanto at the Christmas Bowl, and even though Hiruma's coy smirk made it blatant he fully expected that team to be Deimon, no one else had really believed it. Or rather, everyone else had believed their own team stood a chance of coming out on top. Wasn't that why they were all competing in this tournament? They'd all signed.
Now Hiruma had really pulled it off, damn him, and the terms of the contract were about to come due. Of all people, Habashira knew that Hiruma had zero reservation about making outrageous demands of him. He and his team had spent an entire season enslaved by that maniac, running his every petty errand, answering every 4am call, dropping everything else at a ring. What would it be this time? Backbreaking manual labor to build them some new training grounds? Undercover spy work to get some intel on the fearsome Teikoku Alexanders?
But the more days that passed with not a call, not a visit, the more Habashira's taut nerves began to fray. The more his imagination ran wild.
When he spotted Shin at the supermarket check-out line, basket overflowing with an absurd number of packs of chicken breast and cartons of eggs, he couldn't help but ask.
"You heard from Deimon yet?"
Shin looked up from where he was stacking chicken onto the conveyor belt, four packages per stack. "Habashira."
"The contract," Habashira said impatiently. He must have used too harsh a voice, because the checkout guy gave him a hard stare. To ward off further looks, Habashira grabbed something from the impulse buys shelf, a lollipop, and plunked it down on the conveyor belt.
Shin put a divider down between the lollipop and his mountain of protein, and said, "Yes. They've asked us for coaching."
It came out that Hiruma had picked and chosen from the other teams in the area, and set his own players up for individual training with the best of the best. Shin was spending most of his waking hours coaching Sena, trying to get that little lightning shrimp to run even faster. Offhand, Shin mentioned a slew of names from just about every team in Kanto: Shinryuuji, Seibu, Taiyou… Even that brute Gaou, who had literally just snapped Hiruma's precious throwing arm like a pretzel—Hiruma had gone to him, arm still in a sling, and invited him to coach his center lineman.
And all this time, Habashira hadn't received so much as a text.
So that was why?
He wasn't good enough to train anyone?
Not a single person on that damn team had something to learn from him?
By the time Shin had finished paying for his groceries and loading his arms up with the copious plastic bags, Habashira was seething mad, and his butterfly knife had jumped unconsciously from his pocket to his hand. Blade out, he began to stalk after Shin like he was the problem; he was the one within reach, anyway, unlike that bastard Hiruma.
But before he could get anywhere, the cashier stopped him.
He still had to pay for the lollipop.
***
By the time Habashira left the grocery store, he'd lost Shin. The freak was probably crouched over a grill somewhere, gobbling chicken breasts as fast as he could cook them. Maybe Sena was there too, soaking up some fancy coaching from that.
Habashira unwrapped the lollipop and put it in his mouth. Sour apple. Then he whipped out his cell phone and called the one he should really be furious with.
Hiruma answered on the second ring. Without any preamble, he said, "I need you here. Now."
About to launch into his rant, Habashira choked on it, flat-footed. "You do?" It was exactly what he wanted to hear, wasn't it? No, wait, that would only have worked if he'd been called at the start, with the others. Instead, he'd had to call Hiruma. "Damn right you do! About time you admitted it. …Where are you?"
Despite his anger, he still found himself pulling up to a random clinic on his motorcycle, where apparently Hiruma was doing another round of that nonsense Pure Oxygen treatment for his broken arm.
"You know this stuff is bullshit, right?" Habashira said as he stormed in. Hiruma was leaning against an empty oxygen capsule, basically a big glass tube, that looked barely large enough to fit him inside. The look he gave Habashira was blanker than paper as he waved his plaster-casted arm, heedless of the sling.
"I need to use this broken fucking arm in less than three weeks. For the most important game of my life." Hiruma said this slowly, like Habashira was the idiot. "That means the arm needs to be fixed by then. Get it?"
Okay, Habashira got it. Whether pure oxygen actually sped up healing or not, Hiruma needed his broken arm to be back in working condition in three short weeks. And that meant it was worth doing, whether or not the science was there, whether or not he even believed it himself. He just needed it to happen.
"So what do you need my help with?" Come to think of it, Shin had listed the coaches chosen for all the other Devilbats, but he hadn't mentioned that anyone was coaching Hiruma himself. Habashira was sure he had plenty to teach him, but he wasn't sure how they'd do it with Hiruma's arm like that.
"I'm wasting too much time coming to the clinic. So I bought this oxygen pod from them." Hiruma slapped the massive glass chamber next to him like it was a completely sane thing for a teenager to purchase. "Now I can get pure oxygen-ed 24/7. I just need you to make it mobile."
"You what?" Habashira stared at the capsule, then back at Hiruma. Then back at the capsule. "You bought that? More importantly, you didn't call me here to coach you?"
"Like I said, I need that thing on wheels, so I can be in there all the time, but still get shit done. You know motorcycles. Make it happen. Hook it up to the handlebars or something, and then I can get treatment and still move around. My arm's going to heal right up in no time."
"No, no, hell no." Habashira started to turn around and leave. He should have just left. But something possessed him to turn around and say, "There's no room to fit that on a motorcycle. You're going to need a segway."
And that was how he ended up spending the afternoon in the clinic's parking lot, snarking back and forth with Hiruma the whole time. Habashira called in his motorcycle guy to bring over a segway, and bore with the ridicule (the guy really knew his motorcycles, and Habashira couldn't lose him). Then on delivery, Hiruma terrified the guy with an easy grin and a spray of bullets. And then there were no more comments about that.
Habashira would have liked to keep his motorcycle guy around to help with this ridiculous project, but the gunfire had removed any question of that. So Habashira had spent a few painful hours working out how to get the capsule attached by himself, with Hiruma only "helping" in the form of annoying commentary.
"How the hell am I going to control the segway like that?" Hiruma would say. Or, "Great, you got it on, but now the door doesn't open so I can't get in."
"One more word out of you," Habashira snarled, "and I'll roll you around in the capsule like a barrel."
"Then you'll be rolling me around for three weeks." Hiruma shrugged in a fluid way that made Habashira wonder just how broken his arm really was. "Your call, but I'd think you'd prefer the fucking segway."
Eventually they got Hiruma into the oxygen capsule, and the capsule strapped onto the segway with a whole lot of duct tape, and he wasn't tipping over off balance, and the tubes weren't getting caught under the wheels.
Somehow, he was even more terrifying like that than usual: encased in a giant, reflective-ass test tube, flying at Habashira at top speed no matter which corner of the parking lot he ran to.
The truth was undeniable: he'd created a monster.
***
Habashira made himself scarce after that, and Hiruma never called on him again. He'd never thought he'd be anything but overjoyed to have radio silence from that man, but when he came across the idiot Mizumachi of all people training one of Hiruma's thug linemen in the fields, it made him rev his engine extra loud as he went by.
The night before the big game, he rode by Tokyo Stadium just to see the place where it was going to happen. Though he'd worked and trained and sweated his entire high school career to whip his team into shape, he'd never truly expected to make it here, not really. But then, he wouldn't in his wildest dreams have thought the Deimon Devilbats, of all the shitty teams, would be the ones to do it either.
He still didn't know where their paths had diverged. Where Deimon had started to rise, and his Zokugaku Chameleons had been left behind in the dust. Maybe his team could sense that he'd never really believed it was possible— Maybe that was why—
He'd thought he'd be alone at the stadium, this time of night, but as he parked and approached on foot, he began to hear excited voices, grunts of effort, the soft thud of something that sounded very much like snow. The spotlights were blazing outside the stadium, twin cones of light that illuminated a hazy smattering of falling snowflakes and what must have been a hundred people there, bustling around with wheelbarrows and shovels and the hum of chipper industry. The Teikoku Alexanders' backup teams, all five of them, were hard at work, building an enormous snow sculpture in the shape of Teikoku's mascot, Alexander the Great.
What a colossal waste. What a disgusting display of over-abundance.
Of course it was easy for Teikoku to win any tournament, when they had so many players they could throw five entire extra teams at frivolous nothings, like building a snow sculpture that was going to be half melted by the time the game was underway.
A team like that would never understand what it meant to do the best you could with the slim pickings you had—not when they could recruit the best players from around the country, just to keep them warming the bench, or have them frolicking around in the snow.
He'd show them.
With a couple calls, and instructions to call the others, the rest of his team arrived on guttering motorcycles, one after another. He liked to think it was the noise of their engines, or the building smell of exhaust, that drove the Alexanders away, but their snow sculpture was just about done anyway, and barely any of them spared a look at the Zokugaku Chameleons now gathering.
No matter. They'd forgotten to turn off the spotlights.
Habashira immediately set his team into action, flattening out the ground, gathering snow in great rolled balls, planning the shape of it in his head. Some of them wanted to build a chameleon at first, and when they heard it was going to be a Devilbat instead, there came a round of bitter complaints. But Habashira might not have gotten his team all the way to the Christmas Bowl itself, but he had trained them to listen to him. This was their fight, outside of the stadium rather than in it. And his team could at least work together on this much.
Eventually they all got into the groove of the work, and then it was just shoveling and mounding snow, crafting it with pounding fists, ensuring the pointy ears of the Devilbat rose at least as high as Alexander's head. The teeth and wings were a bitch, and Habashira had to take off his gloves at some points to get the grooves just right, bare hands instantly freezing as soon as they touched the snow.
As it got closer to dawn, Habashira kept urging them to speed up, even as he himself was elbows deep in shaping the thing, packing the snow in tight. This all only made sense if done in the dead of night, with no one else to witness. No one could know it was them, that was the point.
To not be asked for help was humiliating enough.
To be seen giving it anyway would be the end of him.
By the time they were done, Habashira's team no longer felt the cold. They'd worked up a sweat, yeah, but there was also the glow of accomplishment that kept them warm the entire motorcycle ride home.
The fruits of their labor, a giant-scale Devilbat snow sculpture, crowded right up against Alexander, leering into his face, so there was hardly any room to walk the path between. When the tournament started, the spectators would be eking between the two sculptures single-file to get into the stadium, with no choice but to stare up into their giant, battle-locked countenances as they passed.
***
After their all-nighter, it should have been a challenge to stay awake through the match, but Habashira found himself caught up in the live energy of the crowd, cursing and swearing the entire time. At one point, he could have sworn Hiruma looked up right at him in the stands, which was stupid. He had much bigger problems to worry about. Teikoku was too good, too unfairly good, and while Habashira would've been willing to trade anything for his team to be the ones down there instead of Hiruma's, now that it was Hiruma, it was his job to win for the both of them.
And amazingly, impossibly, he did.
"Congratulations, I guess," Habashira said afterwards, catching Hiruma on his way out, probably to celebrate. "Must be all the personal coaching you called in from the other teams. From the decent players, anyway."
"Must be," said Hiruma blithely, entirely unabashed, and Habashira snapped.
"Wasn't there anything I could have offered? Anyone I could have coached? Those thug linemen of yours, you know I could have shown them a thing or two."
Then he would've been a part of it, at least. He'd have been on the field, in a way, the only way he ever would.
"Of course there was." Hiruma stared at him like it was obvious. "You were coaching me."
"You? On what? How to mess up a perfectly good segway?"
"Resentment."
The word dropped from Hiruma's lips, and straight to Habashira's gut. He crossed his arms like they could shield him, but it was already burning inside.
"Think about it." Hiruma put his hand, his left one, on Habashira's shoulder, and leaned in. "After all these years, we finally achieve our dream, we're going to the Christmas Bowl, and my arm is useless. We're a team that's had to scrounge for any scrap, going up against a team that's been given everything: funding, facilities, hundreds of players with nothing better to do than build a fucking snowman. And I don't even know if I'll be able to throw."
Habashira stared at him, stunned. He would have bet his life Hiruma had never expressed these thoughts to his own team, or maybe even to anyone alive. 'My handpicked players are worth a thousand Teikoku robots,' he'd be more likely to say. Or, 'My throwing arm? Just catch my fucking passes, that's your only job to worry about.' It was starting to terrify him that Hiruma had chosen to say these things to him.
"Resentment, that's the only way to beat a situation like this, a team like that," Hiruma continued. "Spite. Rage. Your specialty. Don't think I don't know who made that snow Devilbat out there, to face off against snow Alexander. Or why."
Caught, Habashira looked toward the stadium exit, like he could still see his handiwork. Both of them must have melted by now, after the heat of the day, but that didn't change the fact that he and his team had been there all night, didn't erase the burn in his arms and back and legs, the same as the players who'd been on the field today.
Why had he done that? Why had his entire team spent the entire night toiling away out there, entirely unasked, just so the Teikoku statue wouldn't stand alone at the entrance, undefeated like always?
"Resentment," said Hiruma again, and grinned, patting Habashira's shoulder where his hand was resting. "That's what built the Devilbats statue. That's what got us the win, against all odds. That's the only thing I wanted to hone. And I only learn from the best."