NIKE -Blue Lock-

Winning them all

But this she already knew that.

Nicole smiled victoriously with her eyes, later hiding them behind her pair of sunglasses and returning to have a straight posture.

There was a reason why she liked Aiku Oliver, leaving out being attractive, nice and not clingy: he was completely lost to her.

Whether because of her personality or her body, that did not matter. In any case, Nicole was aware that the boy's last thought of the night and first thought of the morning was about her.

Her red eyes shifted away from Aiku for a moment, meeting a few meters away the teal ones of the prodigy.

Itoshi Sae was staring at her with such intensity that anyone could not have maintained such a gaze.

Nicole Vinciguerra, on the other hand, smiled slyly, thinning her eyelids and returning the cold prodigy's heavy stare with a mocking, commanding one.

She noticed the imperceptible movement of the boy's rosy lips, aware that he was on the verge of a grimace.

She was probably one of the only people who could move the boy's robotic expression, and this even Itoshi Sae knew.

Reason why he despised her and was interested in her even more.

Sae saw the girl open her lips, probably to say something to the team captain, never taking her piercing gaze off him.

Then she stood up, shifting her eyes to Oliver for a moment to say one last thing to him and later raising them back to the pink-haired one.

This time the eye contact was extremely brief, as she sneered with that smile of hers that he so hated but aspired to see again, and then she turned her back to him.

And he dared not for a moment turn his teal eyes away from the female figure who was growing smaller and smaller.

He couldn't have done it even if he had wanted to. And in any case, he would not have wanted to even if he was forced to.

Skip time
Five p.m.

"EGO-"

The man sighed, looked away from the analysis of a fourth-section team and raised an eyebrow toward the woman's harried figure.

"What?" he asked without a tone in his voice, watching Anri with a deadpanned expression as she tried to regain the oxygen lost during her run.

"Vinciguerra-san." she said with difficulty, signaling the cell phone and then the TV set in the room, as if to suggest turning it on.

Ego, without a moment of hesitation, grabbed the remote control. He was not overly surprised to see that the news itself was talking about the italian girl.

"And after disappearing for weeks without letting her haters, her fans, and the agencies she was in contact with know anything, Nicole Vinciguerra is finally back with us." said the announcer, smiling toward the camera as a portrait of the redhead was shown in the background.

"The young winner, nicknamed Nike, is at this moment in the Japanese Sport Palace, ready to give her interview after so much unexpected press silence." she continued, and Anri anxiously shifted her gaze to Ego, trying to read his face.

Ego, however, remained impassive and expressionless in front of the screen, trying to pick up any information hidden even behind the interviewee's facial expressions.

It seemed to him that he told the girl to simply take advantage of Itoshi Sae's invitation and study the prodigy's movements, and if she had to, also perform her duties with the agencies she had a contract with.