JSWGAS Chapter 98

Chapter 98

98.

IH Preliminary Round Day.

Aoba Johsai’s team uniform is a refreshing cyan-green, making it particularly eye-catching among the various schools – of course, various rapidly spreading rumors are inevitable.

“Wow, Aoba Johsai’s here!”

“It’s Arao! It’s said that he beat Shiratorizawa’s captain, Munemura, after the match last year!” The person who said this was very certain, “My classmate was there!”

Arao turned his head and glared fiercely at the person who said this, “It’s all a misunderstanding! I didn’t lay a hand on him!” He tried to explain, “That guy won the game and came to talk trash to me! Isn’t it only natural that I cursed back!”

Saijo laughed: “In the end, he couldn’t out-curse Munemura and stomped his feet in anger. If no one had intervened, you might have started fighting.”

Kokonoe: “How lame, Arao-senpai.”

Miyano: “He’s just a muscle-headed idiot.”

“You two—!” Before Arao had time to teach these guys who were mocking him a lesson, he heard whispers from the side again—

“That tall guy who looks like a fox is Saijo?! Damn it, that guy stole my brother’s girlfriend—”

“Eh, really?!”

Arao: “Pfft.”

Aoba Johsai’s gazes silently shifted.

Saijo: “…Rumors are unreliable. I only occasionally participate in mixers; I’m actually quite chaste, you know.” He quickly changed the subject, “Besides, that guy is even more outrageous, right?”

Everyone looked in the direction he pointed. The originally neat line had unknowingly lost a small tail far behind. Oikawa Tōru was surrounded by a group of girls wearing other school uniforms, making it difficult for him to move—although judging from his body language, he was quite enjoying it.

Iwaizumi Hajime took a deep breath, suppressing his anger, but he didn’t immediately roll up his sleeves and rush over. He turned his head to look at Kokonoe Taka beside him, took a volleyball out of his bag, handed it to him, and said in a serious tone: “I’m counting on you.”

Furue was confused: “Counting on Kokonoe for what?”

Kokonoe Taka sneered: “Got it.”

So, under the watchful eyes of everyone, the two of them looked serious. Like two master thieves who had just completed a heist, they exchanged an ordinary volleyball. Then, the tall one turned around in a standard basketball shooting posture—wait, that’s a volleyball, not a basketball, right?—and accurately smashed the weapon onto the head of the handsome guy who was attracting all the attention, through the scattered crowd.

“Ouch!!!”

“Good aim.”

“Yeah.”

High five.

As for the victim’s protests, they ignored them in unison.

The other teammates who witnessed everything didn’t know where to start complaining—but watching Oikawa Tōru pick up the volleyball in a disheveled state, covering the back of his head, and gritting his teeth, the first thing to say was, after all: “…Nice one.”

Oikawa Tōru walked back to the team angrily, surprisingly without making a fuss, but rather silently stuffed the ball into Iwaizumi’s hands in a huff. After that, he even darted from the end of the line to the very front, under the pretense of not wasting Oikawa-sensei’s face that could hold the stage.

But whether it was the fact that he hadn’t spoken to Kokonoe Taka since they gathered this morning, or the camaraderie from Iwaizumi…

Furue spoke the voice of everyone.

“Are they having a cold war?”

The first-year students who knew a little bit about the situation chuckled dryly.

When they arrived at the spectator seats and sat down, the two of them even sat on the far right and the far left, a movement that almost made everyone hallucinate kindergarten children having a temper tantrum. If there were a “I’m breaking up with you!” dub, it would be even more similar.

“Kokonoe…”

“Hmm?”

Arao approached one of them, paused for a moment, and, despite feeling a chill down his spine from the junior’s rare bright smile, he still bravely finished the rest of his words as the captain: “…You and Oikawa…”

Kokonoe Taka heard these words, and the fake smile on his face grew bigger and bigger. “Is there a problem?”

Arao: “…No, please pretend I didn’t say anything.”

That smile was full of the implication that he would kill you if you dared to intercede! And did he skip over some key event during just one day of vacation?

Arao stepped back and turned his head to look at Oikawa Tōru, who was sitting the furthest away in a straight line. The latter was already raising his usual frivolous smile, chatting up a student from a nearby unfamiliar school—

“Um,” the boy in the black uniform who was being chatted up pointed behind Oikawa Tōru and hesitated, “Your teammate is glaring at you…It’s okay to ignore him…” Before he could finish speaking, he watched Oikawa, who had just been full of nonchalance, quickly turn his head around. After discovering that the gaze came from Arao, he turned back with great disappointment. The contrast made the boy with “Karasuno High School” written on his back choke a little.

“It’s okay, it’s okay – don’t mind him.” Oikawa Tōru raised his tone, but if you listened carefully, you would notice a faint gnashing of teeth. “Where were we? You’re from Karasuno?”

“Karasuno High School, first year.” The boy who was being chatted up paused, his face still vaguely worried. “My name is Sawamura Daichi.”

“I’m Sugawara Kōshi.” The light-haired boy next to him smiled kindly, leaned back, and revealed a slightly awkward third person.

“I’m Azumane Asahi.”

Let’s put aside how Oikawa Tōru was enthusiastically displaying his social terrorist abilities. On the other side, Iwaizumi Hajime nudged Kokonoe Taka’s arm that was hanging by his side: “Are you still angry at Trashikawa?”

Kokonoe Taka silently averted his eyes: “I’m not angry.”

Iwaizumi Hajime stated firmly: “Yes, you are. When you lie, you subconsciously avoid eye contact.”

Kokonoe Taka had no choice but to turn his head and look at him, repeating: “I’m not angry.”

Unexpectedly, Iwaizumi Hajime didn’t continue to dwell on it, but rather followed his words: “Okay, you’re not angry.” He smiled, his reliability almost overflowing. “It’s okay to be angry. I’ll help you beat him up…just like just now.”

Kokonoe Taka was left speechless by what he said and almost raised his hands in surrender – and then two heads suddenly popped out from behind the back of the seat.

“You’re a completely different person when you’re with Oikawa, Iwaizumi-kun.”

“I can’t help but feel sorry for Oikawa.”

Iwaizumi Hajime frowned and asked: “Huh? What’s there to pity about that guy?”

The pink-haired one said: “The key is attitude, attitude is important!”

The black-haired one nodded quickly.

Kokonoe Taka sighed, covering his forehead, picked up the two people who were secretly eavesdropping, and threw them back into their seats: “Ah Yi is usually very gentle to people other than Tōru.” (T/N: Ah Yi is a nickname of Iwaizumi)

Hanamaki symbolically struggled twice: “Putting ‘gentle’ and ‘Iwaizumi’ together is as strange as using dipping sauce instead of dipping gravy when eating grilled meat.”

Matsukawa didn’t need Kokonoe to do anything and consciously sat down: “…That’s not right, is it? It should be dipping gravy that’s stranger.”

“Huh? Of course you have to eat dipping gravy with grilled meat! Dipping sauce is heresy!”

…They started arguing.

Iwaizumi Hajime: “…So what exactly did these two come here for?”

Kokonoe Taka: “…I don’t know, just ignore them.”

The two of them sat down again. Iwaizumi Hajime caught sight of the lines on the face of the person next to him softening, and he, who never beat around the bush, said, “Oikawa won’t say what he said to you that night.”

As he said this, he recalled the night before, when he had given the setter, who had been hiding things and talking around in circles without getting to the point, a thorough cleanup from head to toe. But the stubbornness that the other party sometimes showed was something even he couldn’t handle, so he had no choice but to drag the setter, who was half-dead, home.

And on the way home, the setter, who hadn’t made a sound for a long time, muttered, “You’re thinking about going back and asking him.”

Iwaizumi glanced at him, “What else?”

“He definitely won’t say it.” The culprit still had his usual light tone, but it was inexplicably convincing.

This premonition was mostly confirmed when Iwaizumi Hajime saw Kokonoe Taka’s straightened lips at this time. This guy was always like this, difficult to guess yet easy to understand. As expected, Kokonoe Taka lowered his eyelashes and said in a muffled voice: “It’s nothing. Just some words deliberately meant to make people angry.”

See, in the end, Oikawa Tōru was right. This clumsy lie didn’t need the familiarity of their past relationship to be exposed. One or two were like this – the fact that there were unspoken secrets between two friends, but only kept from himself, made Iwaizumi Hajime unconsciously tighten his jaw.

…But in the end, he still didn’t say anything.

The first game quietly ended amidst everyone’s various thoughts. When the retreating team bowed, they vaguely saw tears in the corners of their eyes. Aoba Johsai’s group stood up, and Iwaizumi Hajime called out from afar: “Oikawa, let’s go!”

The person who was called bid farewell to the innocent classmate next to him who had endured a game of harassment, but the three departing figures were somehow permeated with a sense of avoiding something like the plague.

“They’re first-year students from Karasuno.” Oikawa Tōru explained after returning to the team, “Ah, it’s said that they were a very strong school a few years ago, but their level seems to be just average in the last two years…” It was also a coincidence that they had just watched the game between the former powerhouse Karasuno and the usually steady Johzenji, and the final result was 2:0, Johzenji won – and they would also be Aoba Johsai’s opponents in the afternoon game.

It’s just that as time passed, the three-year-old and five-year-old in cold war still couldn’t reconcile. In the end, Oikawa Tōru unconsciously reached out his chopsticks to grab the meatloaf on Kokonoe Taka’s plate, and the climax was reached when he was hit on the hand not too lightly or too heavily.

“Ouch!” Oikawa Tōru cried out softly, raised his eyes, and was about to complain as usual, but he heard a cold, low voice, “Behave yourself.” The person who said this had a half-smile, refusing firmly, which for a moment made Oikawa Tōru really obediently withdraw his hand.

But when he lowered his head and saw the back of his hand was slightly red, he realized a step later that the other person’s tone had lost its usual intimacy and helplessness – Kokonoe Taka was angry, he knew this, but he didn’t care that much. After all, he felt that what he said was right, and the reason he was sulking and not talking to him today was only because of that inexplicable photo yesterday.

And when Kokonoe Taka got up to leave, the words he whispered in his ear made him freeze again, swallowing a few coquettish complaints like “stingy”.

“You said it yourself, I don’t need to force myself.” Kokonoe Taka paused, giving him enough time to react, and finally smiled gently, “And you…you should start by behaving and eating your own food, Tōru.”