Heartshield 01

Chapter 3 - Jaded

Youske

The first time I met Mari Tanaka was the summer where we were both ten years old. Her father had flown her in from America to stay with her mother, a co-worker of my father's. Doctor Tanaka, newly divorced, walked in with a little girl in her shadow. The little girl kept her long red hair in pigtails and her nose was dotted with little freckles. She wore a green t-shirt and a pair of shorts, and she clutched a football under her arm.

Doctor Tanaka looked at my father and adjusted her glasses before speaking, as she always did. "Doctor Suzuki, why don't you have your little Youske come over and meet my daughter Mari?"

After receiving a demanding look from my father, I slid down off the chair I was sitting in and made my way over to the rather vicious looking little girl. "Hi, I'm Youske Suzuki."

She reached out and shook my hand, smiling a cat-fanged smile. "Mari Tanaka." "Is that really an American football?" I caught myself asking her.

"Yeah, it is. My dad is a football coach in Houston. He used to be a pro. Do you play?" We began to walk out the door and to the hospital courtyard.

"Yeah, with some kids at school."

She stopped and poked my stomach once before squeezing my left arm. "You're a lineman, aren't you? Because if you're not, you should be. You've got the right build."

And from that moment on, Mari Tanaka became my best friend. When she left to go back to America in the fall and I had to resume school, she called me frequently and wrote letters. Most of our letters were composed of different plays to try. We promised each other that we would start our own football team where I could be on the line, and she would be a quarterback. After graduating an American elementary school, she started school in Japan, and I formed the Harijaku middle school football team, the Harijaku Fireballs. We got our name from the color of Mari's flaming red hair, which she dyed purple her third year here. Me starting this team was my "welcome home" present to her. I made sure she was quarterback and she wore a orange tinted eye shield and took the alias of Inferno, which later became Blaze in high school. If the school board found out a girl was playing football, they'd expel her immediately.

"Youske!" Mari growled, my thoughts being interrupted by her cat-like eyes glaring into mine. "How about a little less sleeping and a lot more football?"

"Sorry, Mari." I grinned sheepishly before standing up and looking out at the field at everyone else working hard. As I began to walk towards them, I felt Mari's fingers loop around my wrist.

"What are you thinking about?" She asked.

"Stuff." I said, slipping away and jogging back out the field. I started practicing with the rest of the line, but couldn't get into it like them. I felt so worried for Mari, possibly getting expelled from school and the football team that was created just for her. I knew if we wanted to grind Deimon onto the ground, I'd need to motivate myself a little more, but I just couldn't do it.

"What's going on with you, Suzuki?" A teammate from the line asked. I didn't bother to answer, because I didn't know myself what to do.

XxX

On Friday, the day of our game against Deimon, our team felt like we had been put through a Death March. Mari had worked us to the bone in the past two days that everyone was scared shitless of losing. If Mari was upset, bad things happened. As we stood in the huddle, her scary aura felt kind of bruising. "You guys know we have to win this or I won't be able to help you anymore, right?" Her eyes scanned around the huddle. "Sure, you all probably hate me after what I just made you do, but it was to make you stronger. It'll be difficult to find a quarterback like me if I go."

"Even if this is our last game together, you were probably the best trainer, coach, quarterback, manager we could ask for." I said, smiling at her. "But, this isn't our last game together, so let's send those damn devil bats off with their tails between their legs! Burn! Smoulder! Boil! Scorch!"

"Burn! Smoulder! Boil! Scorch!" The rest of the team called out. We set off onto the field and I matched myself with Deimon's biggest lineman, Ryokan Kurita. We matched in height, but what he had in fat, I had in muscle. Sure, muscle wasn't everything, but I had the determination and willpower to back it up. The way I seen things was that on the field, I was a knight and Mari was a princess. I had to protect the princess from getting sacked by someone twice her size.

"Set, hut, hut!" Mari called as I passed the ball back to her. She wound her arm back for her torpedo pass, a pass no one but our receiver had ever been able to catch. It was very similar to the NASA Alien's shuttle pass. Once that pass was underway, all was over. So, Hiruma was more than likely to devise a blitz. But before anyone could react, the torpedo was off and our receiver caught it, scoring a touchdown instantly. Mari had never been sacked, ever. We never allowed it.

Hiruma looked ready to call another blitz. A four man blitz judging by the concentration locked on Mari's face. She wound her arm back and imitated Seibu's Quickdraw Kid style, shooting the ball off like a gun. To her dismay and surprise, Deimon's wide receiver launched himself from the ground and caught the ball, passing to Eyeshield 21. Mari was fast, being able to run the 40 meter dash in under 5 seconds, but there was no way in hell she could catch Eyeshield, until the gleam in her eye told me otherwise. She had discovered his fatal flaw. When he stopped to change his pace, she charged him, knocking the ball out of his hand and catching it herself. Everyone worked hard to block other Deimon members, letting her dash forward to run the ball herself. Eyeshield took off after her and Hiruma used his amazing agility to break free from our tight end's block. He tackled Mari to the ground, knocking the ball from her hands and laughing as Eyeshield caught it and ran a touchdown. I watched Hiruma hold his hand out to her and pick her up off of the ground.

When Deimon got possession of the ball, Mari devised a blitz. She decided to be the one to tackle Hiruma down, knowing none of us could match his agility. As he scoped out his receiver, Mari snuck around, which was easy for how small she was, and she charged him, catching him off guard. Judging by how Hiruma gripped his ribs when Mari pulled him up, she had hit him like a ton of bricks.

When the first half finally ended, we were beating Deimon 32-26. But, this was no time to get cocky. Through the third quarter and majority of the fourth, Deimon picked up their slack, scoring three touchdowns, leaving the score 44-32. There was only a minute left, and even if we managed to finish this play, we still would never play on the same field as Blaze again. Mari called a torpedo pass, winding her arm back and counting down, very much like Homer of the NASA Aliens. "Three, two, one…zero." She threw the ball and watched it fly through the air to the wide receiver who stood in the end zone. I had never seen a more beautiful pass. Just as our receiver jumped into the air to catch it, Deimon's receiver surprised him with a bump, throwing him off course and handing the other team the ball. He handed off to Eyeshield, who ran the ball down the field at an amazing speed. Just as he crossed the end zone, the game ended, ending the game with 50-32, almost twenty points more than us.

Mari stood in disbelief and stared up at the scoreboard for what could be the last time. "Youske." She gasped, falling to her knees. I reached out to catch her as she looked around at our faces, the school, all the things she had to leave behind.

"You're really going to make her go through with this?" I glared as my eyes met Hiruma's. "All the things she worked hard for, you're just going to let her throw it all away because of some bet?"

"A deal is a deal." They both said in unison, both with the same solemn look on their faces.

Mari pushed me away and stood shakily on her own two feet to face the many people who attended our school. Her hands shakily reached up to her helmet and the announcer leaned into the microphone. "Oh, what's this? Is Blaze finally going to make an appearance?"

"This is my retirement." She said in her plain voice, removing her helmet completely and letting her violet curls tumble down. There was a gasp from the crowd as the headmaster came down from the bleachers and forced her down to his office.

"Would you look at that. Blaze was our very own Mari Tanaka, captain of the Girls sports association. By rules of the Japanese school board, females caught playing all male sports will face expulsion, no matter how noble the cause."

"Hey!" I said out loud, catching attention. Everyone looked at me, surprised. "Can we have a moment of silence or something? We just lost the best football player our team had. She lead us through many victories, making us the fifth best school in the region. We just weren't prepared for the changes Deimon has gone through."

Mari looked back as she was being marched off the field, and to her surprise someone began to lead a chant. Shockingly, it was Rui Habashira. "Ma-ri! Ma-ri! Ma-ri!" He began, having people join in until almost both sides of the field began to scream her name. She gave an earnest smile and looked forward, holding her head high.

"She was some quarterback, huh?" I heard Eyeshield 21 say. "She was just like you, Hiruma."

Hiruma snorted. "Don't underestimate the enemy, pee-wee."

"There's no way she was better than you." Mamori piped up. "If she was that great, she could have turned any of those mediocre players into something to her advantage, right?"

"No, only they can do that for themselves. They would have won if we didn't have Eyeshield."

"No. We would have won if we actually had a team made up of players whose only goal was to win, who leaked determination, who had as much motivation as Mari and I." I cut in, looking out at my team who didn't seem phased at all that our quarterback was in the process of getting expelled. They just sat around, laughing and joking about their merry freaking lives, happy they weren't getting kicked out of school. I tossed my helmet to the ground and glared at the idiots Mari wasted her time on. "I give up." I took off my orange, yellow, and red jersey and the pads and threw them down too. "You're on your own."

Football just wasn't the same if I was protecting someone who wasn't Mari. She was the one who made the sport great. Maybe I could go join the soccer club, or work even harder on my grades…

"You're just going to quit?" I heard someone say from behind me. There stood Ryokan Kurita, the one who I had blocked the whole game. "You're going to leave your team behind?"

"Why should I stay? I only formed the football team for Mari, and if she isn't even in it, than why should I bother? None of those fools out there play football for the love of it, they played because they got to see glimpses of a girl changing in the locker room and to have an excuse to be on top of her."

"But, do you love football?"

"Sure, I'm crazy about it. But I can always find an even better team to play with. I'm done with Harijaku." I closed my eyes listened to the sound of everyone from Deimon walking away before I myself left Harijaku in the dust.

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