The Second Half Begins
The second half got underway with Wichita North taking possession first.
"Hoob! Hah!"
Hopkins took a deep breath, recalling the revised game plan as he studied the opposing formation. Most of the players across the line looked worn down—but Jaehyuk, alone, was bouncing on his feet way out in the distance.
Just as I thought...
He'd suspected as much ever since the camp. And with Mateo shouldering most of the plays this game, it only made sense that Jaehyuk, even playing both ways, would be relatively fresh.
Which meant one thing. Just as he'd seen at the tail end of the first half, the second half would revolve around Jaehyuk. As a cornerback, Hopkins's primary assignment was normally the receivers, but he shifted his position to a spot where he could also shadow Jaehyuk.
This time, I stop him. For good.
He refused to lose again. Losing over and over just wasn't in his nature.
"Hut! Hike!"
The receiver across from him took off. And Hopkins trusted the instinct screaming beneath his skin.
"Jaehyuk!!"
A run play. He couldn't say why, but he could feel it in the way the entire offense moved. A strange, quiet confidence radiating from them—an unmistakable air of we cannot fail.
And the reason for that was exactly one thing.
Whap!
Hopkins ran. Not toward a assigned route or a designated man—straight at Jaehyuk. And his read proved dead-on; he could see the handoff already happening.
"Hrraaah!"
"Nngh!"
The first line of defense spotted Jaehyuk taking the ball and shoved back against the attacking linemen. Only one thought filled their heads: stop Jaehyuk.
But the offensive line fought back just as desperately. We hold this ground. We protect the quarterback and the running back. Every inch right now is ten yards of progress.
WHAM!!
The collision shook both sides with everything they had. And in the gap it created, Jaehyuk slipped cleanly through between the linemen.
Fwee—!
A crimson afterimage flickered. The defenders reaching desperately after it grasped nothing but empty air.
Then came the second level. As if they'd been waiting all along, the linebackers and safeties flew at Jaehyuk.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
A single red line. Faint, almost invisible—but there was no other path. Straight ahead. He dropped his stance, coiled his body, and drove forward without slowing, bracing for the impact that was seconds away.
"Huuh!"
Two defenders lit up at the sight, as if looking at something ridiculous. Sure, they conceded that Jaehyuk had elite athleticism and speed—but he lacked absolute mass. Height and weight. One glance told you he was an ordinary build. The men charging to bring him down, by contrast, were all over 185 centimeters and muscle slabs comfortably past 90 kilograms. The freak strength he occasionally displayed was astonishing, but if he could bulldoze this, nothing would make sense anymore.
CRACK!!!
He collided with the first defender. Their vicious tackles met helmet to helmet, and someone went flying backward.
"HAH!!"
The winner was Derby's defender. The helmet-to-helmet impact sent Jaehyuk staggering well back. Finally! Stopped him!—the entire defense trembled at the thought. But something was wrong.
Jaehyuk hadn't fallen.
He wobbled, wrestling his balance back—then whipped into a spin and burst sideways.
"Damn it!"
"Tackle him!!"
To anyone watching, Jaehyuk had been falling for certain. Instead, as if he'd taken no impact at all, he'd converted the very force of the hit into a smooth change of direction.
"Hrrgh."
It wasn't the exact path his Gift had shown him—but because the Gift had lit the way, he hadn't lost the momentum.
Rumble!
Jaehyuk dragged a herd of defenders with him. And waiting in front of them all, at last, was Hopkins.
A situation that felt like déjà vu. Jaehyuk's Gift and Hopkins's instinct began reading each other. Talent against talent.
The red line shimmered, branching into a dozen possible paths.
Fast!
The players chasing behind him. Don't slow the legs—make the choice fast.
Thump—.
0.01 seconds. A sliver of time. Jaehyuk decided.
WHAM!!
Head-on. The very approach that had just failed. But he trusted himself. No one here can stop me. Only I can be free on this field.
Shff.
Juke move. A left-right feint to bewilder Hopkins, layering deceleration and acceleration back-to-back to steal his timing. The result—
Whoosh—!
With a dazzling burst of movement, Jaehyuk cut straight past Hopkins's front. The crimson afterimage brushed faintly across Hopkins's vision.
But.
I know.
Hopkins already knew he couldn't stop Jaehyuk one-on-one. At this stage, no high school player in the country could beat him in a pure head-to-head.
But tackling him after he'd blown past?
The exact moment he relaxes because he thinks he's beaten me!!
Creak.
His whole body twisted. It hurt—but he bore it. He'd anticipated this. To bait Jaehyuk into carelessness, he'd had to sell the act himself. That meant standing perfectly still as though he'd been fooled, then moving at the perfect instant. And that kind of movement took a brutal toll on his body.
...I want to win.
He knew a straight fight was unwinnable. But Hopkins wanted—needed—to win. Even if he tore, fell, broke. He wanted to rise one more time and leap over him.
Me, Kim Jaehyuk—you...
Get caught!
The back of the Redline. Hopkins's outstretched hand, his body wrenched far past its limits, chased it down.
GET CAUGHT!!
The opponent's overwhelming speed. The Redline's explosive acceleration, like a flash of lightning itself. But Jaehyuk had eased off for the juke—there was still a window. Maybe 0.2 seconds. That was all.
GET CAUGHT!!!
No—
CATCH HIM!!!
With my own hands, I'm taking the win!
Grab!!
"...!!"
"!!"
He caught him. The red line's jersey closed in his grip. Even as his muscles screamed and twisted, Hopkins refused to lose focus. Eyes sparking, he clamped down on Jaehyuk. An obsession like madness bleached everything around them white, leaving only the red line in his sight.
"RAAAAAAH!!"
Hopkins's war cry tore through his helmet. And at the same moment, the resistance pulling against his grip grew stronger.
"Huuuk!"
Jaehyuk, for his part, kept driving forward—collar seized in a fist and all. The toes of the feet treading the red line chewed into the grass.
Crrrack!!
"Huk!"
"Aaah..."
"What on earth is that..."
The crowd spat out broken fragments of words as they stared, transfixed. Hopkins, who had at last caught the Jaehyuk no one had managed to stop. And Jaehyuk, still running forward—with Hopkins hanging off his back.
"He's... running while carrying a person...?"
Jaehyuk was outright dragging Hopkins along, ignoring the hands clawing at his jersey. It was a staggering sight—a genuine spectacle of a man sprinting with another human being dangling from him.
"He—he's already ten more yards downfield!"
"What are we even watching right now..."
Jaehyuk's trademark, the Redline, was gone. In its place stood only the monster itself.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
As his speed finally bled away, Derby's tackles came raining down. Even so, Jaehyuk would not fall. By sheer irony, the fact that they'd swarmed him from all sides was what kept his balance.
"GRRRAAAAHH!!"
Thick cords of vein stood out on his exposed neck. Jaehyuk now had three—no, four more players hanging off his body, dragging himself forward one agonizing step at a time.
This was no longer a game. It was something beyond it. The people couldn't even murmur in their trance the way they had moments ago; they simply covered their mouths and watched.
"KIM JAEHYUUUK!!"
"CAP!!!"
The Wichita North players caught up at last. And unlike Derby, they shoved from behind—as a single mass—pushing Jaehyuk and his cargo of defenders onward.
This wasn't something you saw in football. There was the occasional pile-up, a scrum where players swarmed and shoved each other around the ball-carrier—but this was different in kind. In a scrum, the ball-carrier in the middle just gets pushed along, will or no will, and it ends in seconds. Right now, Jaehyuk was still moving, eyes blazing.
Grind. Grind.
One step. Another step. Jaehyuk advanced as if leaving footprints stamped into the earth. Even the referee fell silent, whistle frozen at his lips.
"HRAAAH!!"
Then Hopkins wrung out the last of his strength and hauled Jaehyuk down—using his own body weight to topple him. With players clustered on every side it should have been harder, but in the end, he made it work.
Crash.
At last, Jaehyuk went down under the sheer weight. But not a soul in that stadium could look down on him. Fear and awe were all that remained in his wake.
reeeeet!
Only when the whistle finally blew, late, did the players come back to themselves. They'd moved as if spellbound by something; now they stared at each other dazedly, as if waking from a dream. And at the end of every gaze stood Jaehyuk.
"Whoo... hah... haa."
Jaehyuk caught his breath on his knees. What was reflected in his eyes as he looked up at the sky?
"Hah... hah..."
Hopkins, who had finally brought him down, soon let out a cry of his own.
"RAAAAAAGH—!!"
Helmet off, his face split with a satisfied grin. Sure, that monstrous freak had staged one unbelievable spectacle right to the end. But this was enough for Hopkins. No—thanks to the monstrous performance Jaehyuk had just put on, Hopkins felt all the prouder of himself. He finally caught that lunatic. Stopped him. Even if it was only half a stop, the swelling in his chest was beyond containing. It was proof that none of the training he'd ever done had been for nothing.
"Shut up, you punk."
Then—Jaehyuk, helmet off as well, smirked. With that insufferable smile hanging on the corner of his mouth, he rose to his feet and looked down at Hopkins.
"Not bad, punk. You can actually play."
With that, Jaehyuk turned and jogged back to his position. Hopkins froze solid at the completely unexpected reaction.
Ah...
That monster, whom nobody would ever acknowledge—
He acknowledged me?
Somehow, his vision blurred. He'd lived his whole life collecting recognition, awards, praise. But never once had he been this happy.
"CAAAAP!"
"Holy—damn! Cap stopped that monster!!"
"How?! I can't even believe the tackle happened!"
"Our captain's crying! PWAHAHAHA!"
Only then realizing the state he was in, Hopkins hastily wiped his eyes and scrambled to his feet. His whole body ached and his stamina was spent—but the game wasn't over. He'd stopped Jaehyuk. Now he had to see it through to a beautiful finish.
"This time too! We STOP them!"
At Hopkins's fire-rekindled roar, goosebumps rippled through Derby's players. In seconds they were boiling over, fists thrust skyward.
"UOOOOH!!"
"LET'S GO! DERBY!"
"We can do this! Let's move! RAAAH!!"
The one-on-one duel between Jaehyuk and Hopkins left everyone speechless—the crowd in the stands, the industry scouts gathered there, the broadcast crew, and the online viewers alike. Dragging a grown man down the field. Shrugging off tackle after tackle from the players who followed, refusing to fall—Jaehyuk's footsteps went past chilling and straight into something that made your skin crawl with dread and wonder.
"He is... not human," said commentator Ryan, speaking up at last after holding his breath through it all. "He is football itself."
"I've watched enough sports to know the moments that give you chills, that make your whole body surge without permission. But that play just now? I'd rank it the number one moment of my life," Jack Thomas answered, and his eyes were rimmed red. "All I can think to say is... thank you. Thank you for choosing football."
Watching the man stumble over his own words, not a single viewer said a thing in reply. And no wonder—everyone watching felt the exact same way.
By now, the stream had drawn a full 80,000 viewers, breaking and re-breaking Kansas league viewership records with every passing minute. Sure, the Texas state championships reportedly pulled in anywhere from several hundred thousand to nearly a million across platforms—but this, too, was a staggering feat.
If the broadcast chat was like that, the atmosphere at the stadium was even more electric. The families who'd come to cheer Jaehyuk on could only stand there dumbstruck, muttering, Is that... really our Jaehyuk? Even David, who had courted Jaehyuk so relentlessly, dropped the cigarette from his mouth and stood rooted to the spot. The crowd's mood stuttered and lagged like a freezing video buffer. That was how unbelievable the performance had been.
"S-senior."
"Wh-what?"
"From now on, I will follow your opinions unconditionally."
"......"
David thought to himself: I didn't predict any of this either. That thing out there is basically a monster. But under the weight of the stares around him, he nodded along as if nothing was wrong.
"Jaehyuk is coming to our school," David said out of nowhere.
That was how much the display had just set off every alarm bell he had. Anyone who'd seen that performance with their own eyes would raise hell to steal him away, school after school. Watching Jaehyuk dominate had been a feast for the eyes—but suddenly, David felt very, very tired.