Rebirth In Kurokonobasket - Chapter 190

Shun sat in the stadium stands watching the game between Seirin High and Kirisaki Daiichi High as he ate an after-game meal. He smiled excitedly watched as Seirin entered the courtside to start their warmup.

Shun: “Oh, they are here. Let’s see the canon protagonists.”

Shun watched as the small Seirin squad walked towards their bench. He saw Kiyoshi Teppei, the center, Hyuuga Junpei, the shooting guard, Izuki Shun, the point guard, Mitobe Rinnosuke, the power forward, Koganei Shinji, the small forward, and Tsuchida Satoshi, the substitute forward/center.

Shun: “A full first-year squad. Man, that must be a different kind of experience.”

On the other side of the court, he saw the Kirisaki Daiichi team also started their warmup. He smiled when he saw Hanamiya’s face turn from his smiling expression in front of his seniors to the irritated flashes on his face when he sneaked peeks at Kiyoshi on the other side of the court. Shun felt joy because he knew that he was the reason behind Hanamiya’s irritation and frustration.

Shun: “Serves him right.”

Shun took off his attention from Hanamiya and dived into his memories of this game.

Shun: ‘From what I remember, Hanamiya only entered the game at the end of the game, and that was just to injure Kiyoshi.’

Shun hummed in thought as he gazed at Hanamiya.

Shun: ‘It looks like Hanamiya still doesn’t have total control over the team, and from the looks of it, he still reluctantly listens to his seniors in the club.’

He glanced at Kirisaki Daiichi’s coach and continued his musings.

Shun: ‘Kirisaki Daiichi’s coach is still at the school. It looks like Hanamiya hasn’t taken the position of coach and captain for himself. If I remember correctly, their coach left for some reason, but I am sure that the snake had to do something with it.’

Shun patiently waited for the game to start as he ate his food, he looked at the lunch box in his hand and said to himself.

Shun: “Man, this is good. I have to ask mom to make me more of this.”

-*-*-*-*-*-*-

The game between Seirin High and Kirisaki Daiichi started, and Shun watched the game with interest. He wasn’t interested in Kirisaki Daiichi as he knew that this would be the last year that Kirisaki Daiichi would play standard basketball, next year, they would switch to a style of basketball designed by Hanamiya Makoto.

Shun: ‘Now, Seirin’s style is much more interesting.’

He smiled as he watched Seirin play with their full offensive Run & Gun Speed Basketball. The more Shun watched Seirin play, the more he understood their play style.

Shun: ‘Their style relies on fast breaks after a defensive rebound or inbound after an opponent’s goal.

The team comes invading in an instant, both with passes and fast footwork. It’s a super offensive style and aims to quickly get the ball inside before the defense can organize themselves.’

Shun smiled as he spoke to himself.

Shun: “It’s a fast-paced point war.”

He looked at the two cornerstones of Seirin’s offense, Kiyoshi Teppei and Hyuuga Junpei. Those two formed the first-year Seirin’s in-and-out combi.

He looked at another player on the court and analyzed him.

Shun: ‘Even though they are called the in-and-out combi, they can’t function without the third piece required to complete the formation.’

The silver-haired spectator focused on the wielder of the Eagle-Eye, Seirin’s point guard, the team’s court conductor, Izuki Shun.

Shun: ‘The in-and-out offense comes in when the run and gun offense fails. With Hyuuga’s three-point shooting being a threat, Kiyoshi managing the middle with his right of postponement, playing both center and point guard, and Izuki controlling the offense, they fall into a half-court situation.

They move the ball around till they find a hole in the defense and strike with Hyuuga the moment he becomes free.’

Shun compared his two point guard with Sora to Seirin’s two point guard consisting of Kiyoshi and Izuki. He crossed his arms and harrumphed.

Shun: “Ours is much better.”

The game continued with Seirin maintaining a lead throughout the game, but at the same time, Shun started to pick faults in Seirin’s game.

Shun: ‘They are still terribly new. The in-and-out strategy is highly dependent on Hyuuga. If the ball doesn’t go to Hyuuga, Kiyoshi takes care of it, but they don’t use other players.

Izuki plays point guard and only moves the ball around. He had plenty of opportunities to not pass the ball and score on his own. He has poor shooting skills, even for mid-range shooting, and doesn’t choose clear paths to the basket, which is not good considering he has the Eagle-Eyes.

Koganei Shinji exclusively passes the ball around, his shooting skills are mediocre, but he does play a flexible role in the Run & Gin offense, which is fine, I think.

Mitobe Rinnosuke; all he does is ground defense, minimal screening. He does work on rebounds, but not enough. His scoring abilities are half-assed. He needs to pick up some moves.

Tsuchida Satoshi is a solid rebounder but lacks in almost all other areas of play.’

Shun: “They are disjointed. Even if they play together, none of them are pulling out the best of themselves.

Hyuuga might be the only one in the team that is fulfilling his role, but barely adequately.

Kiyoshi is taxing himself too hard to make the team work together.”

Shun placed his head on his palm and formed a conjecture.

Shun: “He taxed himself to make this team work together and thus the messed up knee. Hanamiya just made the existing problem worse.”

-*-*-*-*-*-*-

The game continued, and just like in the canon, Kirisaki Daiichi called out Hanamiya in the last few minutes of the game.

Hanamiya entered the court with his good/amiable boy smile on his face and was polite with everyone, but somehow he caught silver in the corner of his eye and caused him to look towards it, and there he saw Shun smiling and waving towards him.

Hanamiya’s mask cracked for a split second before it returned it to normal, but inside, Hanamiya was seething and cursing the fates that had caused him to cross paths with the purple-eyed demon. He knew that the smile and wave from Shun was a warning that he was watching.

Hanamiya: ‘If I can’t break that shitty goody-two-shoes, then I would make his life miserable while he is on the court.’

He went to the second-year that he had managed to convert into his pawn and gave him the signal to hit Kiyoshi while hiding it from the referee. From there on out, whenever Kiyoshi came in contact with Hanamiya’s underling, he was elbowed, pushed around, forced to run into sharp screens, stepped on his foot to restrict his rebounding efforts.

And, as expected, Hyuuga was angered when he saw the light bruising on Kiyoshi’s body, and the rest of Seirin was less than pleased seeing that. Hanamiya took advantage of Seirin’s distraught emotion and mental state and closed the point gap with his skillful, strategic playmaking.

As much Shun wanted to deny Hanamiya’s skill, he couldn’t ignore the fact that Hanamiya was an extremely skilled point guard.

It took an impressive offensive rebound from Kiyoshi and an immediate pass to Hyuuga, who shot a three-point buzzer-beater for Seirin to win the game with two points, with the final score of 82-80 in Seirin’s favor.

Shun stood up when he saw Seirin members supporting Kiyoshi to the med bay in the stadium. He pulled up his bag upon his shoulder and walked to the med bay for a meeting with Seirin High Basketball Team. He moved and spoke to himself and sighed in between of his sentence.

Shun: “Let’s go and talk to Seirin. Man, today sure is a busy day. I will immediately collapse on my bed when I get home. Ah, that would be blissful.”

-*-*-*-*-*-*-

In the medical room of the stadium, Riko was treating Kiyoshi with first aid, and Hyuuga was pacing around the room with a frown marring his brows. He growled in anger and stomped his feet.

Hyuuga: “That shitty bitch! Who does Hanamiya think he is? Oh god, let me meet that piece of crap outside, I will pound that smirk off his face.

Argh! I hate just thinking about that human garbage!”

Izuki, who was sitting near Kiyoshi, sighed and tried to mollify his friend’s anger.

Izuki: “Hyuuga, you need to calm down, the game is over. You don’t have to get angry about it anymore.”

Kiyoshi looked up towards his angry and teammate and spoke in agreement with Izuki.

Kiyoshi: “He is right, Hyuuga, calm down. It is nothing serious, so cool down.”

But, Hyuuga wasn’t having any of it, and listening to Kiyoshi and Izuki made him want to yell at them, and so he did.

Hyuuga: “You can’t just brush it off like that-.”

Hyuuga was interrupted by a knock on the door of the room. All of them turned their heads to look at the person who knocked on the door. They saw a silver-haired, purple-eyed person dressed in a black tracksuit with purple highlights on it. He had a bag on his shoulder and a smile on his face.

Everybody in the room except Koganei and Tsuchida didn’t recognize the person because they didn’t play basketball in middle school. The rest of their eyes were wide open when they saw the visitor. Riko was the one who opened her mouth to say the person’s name, breaking the silence due to his arrival.

Riko: “Kageyama Shun.”

Shun smiled a little wider and waved.

Shun: “Yeah, that is me. May I come in? I am not disturbing you guys, right?”

Riko took charge and spoke to Shun. She invited him in.

Riko: “Yes, please, come in, and no, you aren’t disturbing.”

Shun nodded and entered the room. He walked towards the group and addressed Kiyoshi with a smile.

Shun: “It has been while, Kiyoshi-san. The last time we met was what, two years ago?”

Kiyoshi nodded and tried to stand up to greet Shun, but he stopped him.

Shun: “You don’t have to stand. I watched the game. It was rough, wasn’t it?”

Kiyoshi was surprised when he heard that.

Kiyoshi: “You were watching the game? Why?”

The others also wanted to know the answer to that question. Shun shrugged his shoulders and answered.

Shun: “Well, I had to watch the game between the teams that had uncrowned kings on them. I had the chance and took it.”

Izuki remembered what happened earlier the day and asked.

Izuki: “Wait a minute, we saw Teiko today, did you guys have games today?”

Shun looked at the point guard and replied.

Shun: “Yes, we had preliminaries finals today. Tokiwadai and Teiko will be going to the Nationals this year.”

That sentence bought a lot of depressing memoried for Hyuuga, Izuki, and Kiyoshi, but they shrugged it off, and Hyuuga asked Shun a question.

Hyuuga: “So, what brings you here?”

Shun clapped his hands and looked at Kiyoshi and spoke.

Shun: “Oh, yeah! I forgot. I came here to talk to Kiyoshi about his injury.”

Everybody went silent for a moment before Hyuuga asked.

Hyuuga: “What are you talking about? Kiyoshi isn’t injured.”

Everybody looked at Kiyoshi to tell them that he wasn’t injured, and their eyes widened when they saw Kiyoshi looking towards Shun and not refuting his statement.

Hyuuga stepped closer to Kiyoshi and interrogated his teammate.

Hyuuga: “Kiyoshi, what is he talking about?”

Kiyoshi stayed silent for a minute before he started.

Kiyoshi: “He is right, I have been feeling a little off in my left knee.”

Riko stared at Kiyoshi with an incredulous look and hit him.

Riko: “You, idiot! Why didn’t you say anything?!”

Kiyoshi turned his head away from his angry girlfriend and spoke his reason.

Kiyoshi: “I was the one who bought you guys together, and then the pledge on the roof. I couldn’t back off from the club, so I decided not to say anything.”

Hyuuga held his forehead before yelling at Kiyoshi.

Hyuuga: “You, big idiot! Did you fall on your head when you were little? Ugh! I can’t take any more of this today!”

Kiyoshi lowered his head in shame as he felt the looks of worry and disappointment from his teammates.

Shun scratched the back of his head and spoke awkwardly.

Shun: “It seems I have created a problem, haven’t I?”

Izuki shook his head and talked to Shun.

Izuki: “No, actually, you did a good job. If you didn’t tell us, who knew how long Kiyoshi would’ve kept silent about it and kept it to himself and who knew how his injury would deteriorate by then.”

Kiyoshi raised his head to look at Shun and asked.

Kiyoshi: “How did you know that I was injured?”

Shun pointed at Kiyoshi’s right knee and spoke.

Shun: “You were favoring your right knee when spinning, even when the left was the obvious choice. Plus, I saw you looking at your left knee multiple times during the game.

So, I took a shot in the blind, and it seems I was right. Which is good considering that if you had denied it, I would’ve looked like a fool.”

Shun lied to cover his knowledged and laughed to make it seem natural, and what he said was indeed true, so Kiyoshi couldn’t refute him.

Shun assumed and solemn expression and addressed Kiyoshi.

Shun: “I know it is not my place, but you should get it checked, and if it is serious, then take a break from basketball. Let’s just hope that you don’t need surgery, and just rehab would do to get you back to top condition.”

He took out a card from his pocket and handed it to Kiyoshi.

Shun: “My father runs a sports clinic, and if you feel right, you can visit him for a check-up. He will give you a discount.”

He laughed before continuing.

Shun: “I always wanted to say that line, and I am serious about the discount. You will get one if you say that I was the one who referred you. Referral Code: SHUN.”

Riko looked at Shun and said.

Riko: “Your father owns the Kageyama Clinic, doesn’t he?”

Shun was genuinely surprised when he heard that and asked.

Shun: “Eh? How do you know that?”

Riko replied with her family background.

Riko: “My father owns the Aida Sports Facility, and he knows your father, plus your father is pretty famous in the sports circles, so when I saw the card, and you said that was your father’s clinic, I made the connection.”

Shun bobbed his head in response and spoke.

Shun: “Ah, is that so. Small world, huh.”

Shun talked to Seirin for a while before taking his leave. When he left, a barrage of scolding descended upon Kiyoshi, and he had to apologize for minutes before his teammates cooled down.

In the end, Koganei asked while they were leaving the medical room.

Koganei: “So, who was that guy?”

Izuki sighed when he remembered Koganei didn’t play in middle school and started to explain.

Izuki: “His name is Kageyama Shun….”

-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-

[

[2]: Yes, Kiyoshi and Riko dated, but they broke up, they won’t this time. I ship them! Kiyoshi deserves some lovin’.

]