After school, a horde of students descended upon the gymnasium. You’d’ve thought a famous band was putting on a surprise concert in there, or that a flea market selling ridiculously high-quality goods at ridiculously low prices had somehow booked it as their venue, but the truth wasn’t even close to that straightforward. The actual event that had drawn such a crowd was the girls’ basketball team’s practice match. It wasn’t even a practice match with another school—they’d just split the team up into two groups to play against themselves.
I’m not exactly in the know when it comes to basketball, but as far as I could tell, our school’s team wasn’t anything special. I can barely tell one sport’s ball from the other, to be fair, so I couldn’t exactly judge how amazing of an event that sort of practice match was, but I still felt pretty safe in concluding that they usually don’t fill a fairly sizable two-story gym’s bleachers to capacity. Yeah, that couldn’t possibly be normal.
Normal or not, though, I sure am witnessing it right here and now...
I was up on a second-floor landing, leaning onto the handrail and looking down at the gym below. My eyes were fixed on a particular player, and even not knowing the first thing about basketball, I couldn’t help but be impressed as she dashed her way through the gym.
Her black ponytail swayed elegantly with each step as she sprinted, faster, more agile, and more beautiful than anyone else on the court. She played like she was dancing, and I think everyone’s eyes were glued to her, really. After all, the majority of the audience had shown up just to see her, Rinka Aiba, in action.
Aiba was tall for a girl, with strikingly handsome facial features, and she emanated a constant aura of refreshing composure that became all the more evident when she was playing some sort of sport. She also had the sort of womanly figure that I couldn’t help but admire, and the gym clothes she was wearing made all those curves stand out in a way that I could only describe as super erotic...
Wait, what am I thinking?! She’s your friend, Yotsuba! Not cool!
As I glanced around the room, it seemed pretty likely that I was the only one present whose mind was stuck in the gutter, at least in that particular sort of way. She might have been breathtakingly beautiful, and she might’ve had a figure that just screamed grace and femininity, but her status as the school’s prince overwrote those traits entirely in the eyes of her fans. Her fans, and one more observer...
“Eeek! Shoot, Rinka! Shoot!”
...that being the school’s resident princess, Yuna Momose, who was standing beside me and cheering her lungs out for Aiba.
The first time I heard those two get called “the Sacrosanct,” all I could think was, Wow, now that’s an over-the-top nickname. I ended up looking it up in the dictionary, and found that it meant something to the tune of “something sacred or holy that must not be interfered with or transgressed upon.” That didn’t really strike me as prime nickname material, and I kept thinking it was weird for a pretty long while, but the more I watched the two of them together, the more I realized how oddly on-point it was.
“Whoo, nice shot! Hey...Yotsuba, what’re you spacing out for?”
An unexpected poke to the cheek brought me back to reality. “Bwuh?” Guess I was a little too lost in thought for a minute, there.
“Come on,” said Momose, “you’re supposed to be cheering for Rinka! Wasn’t she amazing just now? She snatched up the ball mid-pass, dribbled it right past the other team, and scored with a layup shot, just like that!”
“Wha—aw, no! I totally missed it!” I was there as Aiba’s friend, sure, but I was also just as invested in catching every moment of her epic heroics on the court as her most obsessive fans. It had been a pretty long while since the last time she’d gotten called in to play in one of these games, after all! I’d been looking forward to it for so long!
“I’m going to tattle on you to Rinka if you space out again, for your information!”
“R-Right, sorry,” I awkwardly apologized.
“Of course,” she added, “knowing Rinka, she might’ve caught you already.”
“Huh?!” She can’t really be watching me while she plays basketball, can she? A second later, I shook my head. This was Aiba we were talking about! It was completely plausible that she’d noticed me zoning out even while she was focused on the match!
Aiba was so good at sports that calling her “athletic” felt like a hilarious understatement. No, she was the ultimate athlete. Her ability to play any sport to the point of perfection made the fact that she’d never joined an athletic club feel like a waste. Track and field, swimming, dancing, tennis, dodgeball—literally nothing was out of her comfort zone, and it went without saying that basketball was no exception. The members of our basketball club were dedicated and diligent, but she was still better than all of them. And, like, transparently better than them. Enough so that even a complete layman like me could tell.
“It’s funny, though. She’s made it perfectly clear that she won’t play in any official matches and that the most help she’ll give them is subbing in for practice games, and yet she still gets more requests than she could ever possibly accept,” said Momose with a sigh as she leaned onto the handrail. She didn’t sound upset, per se. More exasperated, really.
“I guess playing against someone as good as her makes for great practice, or something?” I theorized.
“Hmm,” said Momose, “I wonder about that. I mean, these people practice...well, maybe not every day, but they practice all the time, right? Don’t you think getting crushed by some girl who isn’t in a club at all, much less theirs, and who doesn’t even do any proper training would kill their motivation more than anything else?”
Frankly, I couldn’t have agreed with Momose more. Then again, my mindset was probably about as far from that of one of those athletic-oriented types as it could get. I didn’t understand how those people thought at all. That said, I had a feeling that the biggest reason why they asked Aiba to play for them had nothing to do with practice, or motivation, or any of that stuff. It was a pretty awkward explanation to bring up with Momose, though, so I kept my mouth shut.
“Aiba!” shouted one of her teammates, drawing my attention back to the court. Just in time too—I looked back right as the ball got passed to her, and I gasped in shock. She caught the pass no problem, of course, but something was wrong. There were three players keeping a mark on her at once!
On second thought, though, I realized it was actually pretty reasonable. When Aiba got the ball, it was more or less guaranteed that she’d immediately turn around and score with it, so the excessive caution made sense...or at least it did to an amateur like me, anyway. The other team’s blockade hadn’t seemed to faze Aiba at all, in any case. She’d shaken them off and left them in the dust without breaking a sweat, and she’d done it just in time to snatch her teammate’s pass from the air! Her timing couldn’t have been more perfect!
“Wow...” I mumbled to myself. No matter how many times I saw her borderline superhuman feats of athleticism, they always rendered me speechless. I didn’t really know how skillful you’d have to be to pull off the stunts she managed, but at the very least I knew for a fact that it was out of the question for me. Nope, absolutely not, not on your life!