Coach Anzai's appearance was like a drop of cold water falling into a pot of boiling oil, instantly changing the atmosphere throughout the entire gymnasium.
Tetsuo and the other delinquents were stunned when they saw the smiling old man, but disdain quickly returned to their faces.
He was just an old man. What was there to be afraid of?
But they soon discovered that they were wrong.
When Coach Anzai's gaze swept over them, seemingly without intent, they actually felt an inexplicable pressure.
It was a feeling... as though they had been targeted by some prehistoric beast.
His eyes were clearly incomparably gentle, yet they felt chills from the depths of their hearts and did not even dare to breathe too loudly.
"Coach... Anzai..."
Hisashi Mitsui's lips trembled, and his face was as pale as paper.
If Shirakawa's words had been a sharp blade that tore apart his disguise,
then Coach Anzai's appearance was the light of judgment that exposed all his sins and regrets beneath the sun.
His most miserable, most unbearable, ugliest side was laid bare without reservation before the mentor he respected most.
"M-Mitsui." Coach Anzai looked at him, the smile on his face unchanged, though a trace of complicated emotion flickered in his deep eyes. "It has been a long time. Your leg... has it fully recovered?"
It was an utterly ordinary greeting.
Yet it struck Mitsui's heart like a heavy hammer!
His leg injury!
It was precisely that injury, the one that had changed his life, that had sent him plummeting from the clouds into the abyss. It had turned him from a genius into a "thing of the past" in everyone else's eyes, and because of jealousy and unwillingness, it had eventually led him onto this path of self-destruction.
"I..."
Mitsui's throat seemed blocked