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Ego is a man with a vision. With a dream that burns him from the inside out as he molds it into reality with bleeding fingers and calloused hands. He drags boys around on puppet strings and cuts them loose to be used as stepping stools when they no longer serve a purpose.
Ego is a man with a vision. So, sitting in front of his wall of monitors, watching teenage boys scramble back and forth across the screen, Ego wonders when the fuck his hard-earned soccer project became the next season of Love Island.
And sure, locking a bunch of hormonal teenagers in a room together when tensions are running high is bound to… cause things, but what the fuck. He’s seriously starting to regret putting cameras in every inch of this facility because he can list off the top of his head ten different images he wishes he could erase from his mind.
The first ones are Bachira and Isagi. Monsters of ego, diamonds in the rough but sparkling with the potential that Ego has been sifting the rubbish of this country to find. They live the underdog narrative as they heave and pull their ragtag team forwards.
Ego has no favorites in this dog-eat-dog-world but he keeps an eye on them.
It starts out small. Bachira hunts Isagi down in the spaces between games for extra practice, and Ego ignores it because that’s standard enough for Blue Lock. Team-wide practices are more popular but there’s still value to be found in one-on-one drills.
The practices get longer and more frequent. Ego still ignores the blinding warning signs because he’s busy trying to mold a world-class striker out of two hundred teenagers.
Team Z snags a victory from the jaws of defeat and Bachira latches onto Isagi like he’s trying to tame a bull. What’s even more startling is how naturally Isagi accepts it, leans into it almost, like this is a perfectly normal method of celebrating. Irrelevant. Soccer players have a history of marking victories in questionably touchy ways and the teams will be split up soon enough with Second Selection. Any fragile, half-formed bonds will shatter in the face of an unyielding ego.
(In the middle of watching one of Team V’s games–they need a catalyst, they’re starting to become complacent in their victories–Ego thinks he sees Bachira try to feed Isagi a piece of meat on a different monitor. He chalks it up to sleep deprivation hallucinations. There was a list of potential side effects on the bottle of anti-sleep pills he just took and surely hallucinating is one of them.)
The first stage of Second Selection pulls to a close as Isagi and Bachira find each other again in the aftermath. They form a team with Nagi as they pass through the doors to the next stage and challenge the reigning champions already there.
It’s a slaughter and Bachira gets stolen from right under Isagi’s nose. Good, Ego thinks, this will be a chance for their egos to grow independent of each other. He couldn’t be more wrong.
Bachira looks a bit startled by the decision but recovers quickly, following the others out the door. He pauses when he’s halfway down the field, glancing back over his shoulder.
“If you want me…” His eyes are electric gold as he stares at Isagi head-on. “Come and steal me.”
Ego nearly falls off his chair because what the fuck, they’re building the best striker not the best couple. The way Isagi just nods and accepts the challenge does nothing to ease the absurdity of the situation.
It gets worse when Isagi makes good on Bachira’s promise and actually hunts him down afterwards.
And it becomes supernova-level catastrophic when Ego accidentally looks at the camera of the definitely-not-private closet the two of them lock themselves in later.
Reo and Nagi with their soap opera of a life are the second ones to scar Ego’s retinas. Ego puts them together on Team V because the chemistry they have on the field is decent. Decent for soccer at the high-school level, at least.
Ego sets them up for failure, waits for someone to come tearing through their allegedly unbreakable bond and push their ego through a forced evolution. It comes in the form of Team Z wrenching victory from their grasp with an evolution of their own.
Ego grins, fingers pressed together, as he watches them walk off in opposite directions, eyes blown wide. Nagi seems shell-shocked by the proposition of losing and Reo looks torn by the realization that Nagi isn’t invincible.
Good, good. Now evolve or shrivel up and die.
They both clear the first stage of Second Selection with ease and Ego waits to see which one of them will evolve first. He has a hunch, of course.
As always, his hunches prove correct. (His hunches are fine but it’s his basic survival instincts that need serious sharpening.)
Nagi joins Bachira and Isagi to soar to heights beyond and leaves Reo churning in the dust. Ego watches their pixelated figures disappear off the edge of the screen. That’s one down.
He scans his monitors to find Reo, looking for features awash with emotion–whether it be rage, shock, disbelief, or something else. Whatever it is, he can use it as fuel for his performance.
Ego finds none of those things on Reo’s face. Instead, Reo looks like a late-bloomer about to enter his sad boy era. The color has drained out of his face as he stares at the closed doorway with an expression that can only be described as heartbreak.
This isn’t ego. This is just unrequited pining.
Ego rubs his eyes and checks his connection to make sure Anri-chan hasn’t accidentally switched his feed to some sort of fucking shojo anime. Is this a break-up? What the fuck is he even watching?
He slaps the screen once, but the image doesn’t disappear. Okay, sure, fine, whatever. Reo’s ego runs out of steam and deposits him here at the feet of another hundred boys–another corpse, another foothold in the climb to the top. He had the potential to be so much more, if only he could get past his moping but since he seems hell-bent on his ride-Nagi-or-die philosophy, here in this half-formed state he’ll stay.
Except after a few fumbled games and wobbly recovery, Reo decides to handle his moping by confronting it. And it turns out that that unrequited pining wasn’t quite as unrequited as Ego first made it out to be.
He looks up from a cup of instant ramen at 3 AM and his eyes get viscerally scarred for life.
The third ones are Chigiri and Kunigami. Lightning quick speed meets brute strength and it’s not the most perfect combination but that’s the beauty of this stage. Team Z is a mishmash of talent and they crash violently against each other as they try to slot their skills together in a formula for victory.
Chigiri and Kunigami are the other black horses of Team Z, eager to not be outdone by their monstrous counterparts. They perform above and beyond in that respect. They scar Ego’s brain like no one else–Bachira and Isagi included–do.
Ego tolerates competitiveness to a degree. There’s a fine line between healthy and destructive and he patrols it tirelessly. There’s no point in having one of his players get critically injured over a teenager throwing a temper tantrum so he lurks in conversations, ready to spring in if the arguments take a turn for the physical.
His painstaking preparations backfire when he mistakes foreplay for banter. Kunigami mutters something into Chigiri’s ear and his face flushes red (with anger, Ego mistakenly assumes because he’s severely underestimated the teenage hormone).
They look like they’re about to come to blows and Ego’s finger is hovering dangerously over the “SHOCK SUIT” button when Kunigami suddenly lunges forward. He punches Chigiri in a sense, but he does it with his mouth and a disgusting amount of tongue.
Ego slaps a series of Post-Its on the screen so he can avoid accidentally looking at it for the rest of the night and giving himself irreparable brain damage.
Itoshi Rin. Now here is a boy with nothing but an all-consuming ego, desperate to prove that he is more than his brother’s shadow.
Ego learns many things about him as Blue Lock progresses. He watches as Rin, a cut above the rest, burns a path to the top and tears his opponents apart at their weak points. Ego watches him shred every piece of himself and burn it in the fire of his ego to keep it alive. He takes a kick straight to the face to block a goal and Ego grins wide because this is the type of self-sacrifice needed to stand on the world stage.
And then Ego watches too closely and learns things he never ever needed to know about Itoshi Rin. Never once in his life has he wondered what Rin sounds like in bed and yet now, courtesy of one Shidou Ryusei and a closet (why the fuck did he put so many of those in this facility, they’re nothing but convenient hook-up spots), he has the noise permanently seared into his ears like a brand.
Itoshi Rin sounds like a dying animal when he’s getting fucked and Ego spends the longest twenty minutes of his life trying to find which wire controls the volume so he can butcher it with a pair of scissors.
Ego’s monitor is a warzone by the end. There’s papers taped over half-a-dozen screens and a running list of notes written in blood-red ink on his desk.
- If Bachira and Isagi enter a secluded room together, turn every camera there off immediately
- If for some godforsaken reason, Nagi and Reo are sleeping in the same room, turn off the lights as soon as both of them enter. Fuck scheduled Lights-Out
- Keep Chigiri and Kunigami apart on threat of death
- Do not look at Itoshi Rin
- Do not look at Shidou Ryusei
- Repeat steps 4 and 5
- Break any of the above steps at the risk of your own physical, mental and spiritual health
There is an eighth rule that resides on a little Post-It Ego keeps taped to the bottom of his desk. It’s more of a plan of action than a rule but he still considers it significant enough to be considered part of his guidebook for life.
8. Quit Blue Lock and run a reality TV show instead because you’re a magnet for trashy couples that the American audiences would gobble up
Ego makes the mistake of looking up at his monitor and violates rules 4 and 5 simultaneously. He sighs and slaps another half a dozen Post-Its on his screen as his phone buzzes with a message from some stupid JFU official.
Ego puts his phone on silent and looks at the remaining screens.
He does not want to think about why Nagi’s limping. In fact, he’s not thinking about it all! To prove his point, he quickly redirects his gaze to another monitor and what the fuck is Bachira some sort of animal marking his territory because what other explanation is there for Isagi’s whole damn neck being covered in purple bruises?
Ego takes a deep breath–five seconds in, five seconds out–and reminds himself that sacrifices must be made for the greater good. A good mental reset is what he needs and he directs his attention to the last monitor on his desk.
He’s promptly greeted with a grainy image of Chigiri trying to stick his whole fucking tongue down Kurogiri’s throat and he pulls the plug on all of his computers.
Fuck Blue Lock. He’s going to go change his legal name and find an American sponsor so he can finally afford some fucking long-overdue eye surgery.