Rukawa Kaede landed, turned, and immediately ran back on defense without even glancing at the basket.
A real man never looks back at his shot.
The entire sequence flowed seamlessly, as though the gauze covering his left eye did not even exist.
"Is… is that really an injured player?"
Someone in the stands muttered in disbelief, their jaw practically dropping to the floor.
Hainan's Jin Soichiro pushed up his glasses, unable to hide his shock.
"His movements… they're even more streamlined than before. He's eliminated every unnecessary motion."
Maki Shinichi nodded, his gaze deep and thoughtful.
"Taking away his vision actually awakened his animal instincts?"
"He's… already got one foot through that door."
"That Juro guy… what exactly did he do to him in the locker room?"
"Did he unlock some kind of enlightenment?!"
At the sideline, Makino Juro lifted one corner of the towel covering his head.
Looking at Rukawa's back, the corners of his mouth curled upward.
"Not bad."
"Still a stupid fox, though."
…
Back on the court.
Kishimoto Minori was panting like a broken bellows, sweat dripping onto the wooden floor with soft pat-pat sounds.
With Minami gone, Toyotama's entire offensive burden had fallen onto his shoulders.
"Give me the ball!"
Kishimoto shouted with bloodshot eyes.
Itakura Daijiro hurriedly fired the ball over.
The moment Kishimoto caught it and half-turned, Akagi Takenori descended upon him like a black iron tower.
"Get the hell out of my way!"
Kishimoto gritted his teeth and forced up a floater.
But there was clearly no strength behind it.
CLANG!
The basketball slammed off the rim and ricocheted away.
"The rebound belongs to this genius!"
Sakuragi Hanamichi exploded upward like a spring from the ground, snatching the ball firmly out of the air with one hand.
The instant he landed, he roared.
"Mitsui! Catch!"
The ball transformed into an orange streak of lightning, slicing precisely across the court.
Rukawa intercepted it cleanly halfway down the court.
"Damn fox, that wasn't for you!" Sakuragi shouted.
Kishimoto and Itakura charged in like two rabid dogs, trapping Rukawa from both sides.
Their eyes were bloodshot.
"Get him!"
Kishimoto nearly ground his back teeth to dust.
Toyotama's pride absolutely could not be dragged across the floor by some one-eyed cripple!
Yet Rukawa suddenly stopped outside the three-point line.
He did not step on the gas and accelerate.
Instead, his entire body seemed to have been stripped of its bones, becoming strangely loose and relaxed.
His dribbling slowed to one-tenth of its normal speed.
The basketball lazily struck the floor, then slowly bounced back into his palm, as though someone had switched the entire scene into slow motion.
Kishimoto's eyes were completely drawn toward that slowly bouncing basketball.
Even his breathing unconsciously slowed by half a beat.
"What the hell is this kid doing?" Itakura was sweating bullets.
"Who cares what he's doing? Just crush him!"
Kishimoto's blood rushed to his head, and he lunged forward like a hungry tiger pouncing on its prey.
And in that split second, something straight out of a ghost story happened.
On Kishimoto's retina, Rukawa Kaede and the basketball suddenly vanished into thin air!
No afterimage.
No warning.
It was as if someone had forcibly cut him out of three-dimensional space.
Kishimoto lunged into empty air, stumbling so badly that he nearly threw out his back.
He turned around in confusion.
Rukawa had somehow appeared behind him.
He was calmly raising the ball, lining up his shot.
"What the hell?!"
Kishimoto's scalp went numb.
His brain completely short-circuited.
Had he just spaced out?
Or had this kid activated some kind of teleportation cheat?
Toyotama's center, Iwata Mitsuaki, charged over like a bear, desperately attempting to block the shot.
"Not a chance!"
Rukawa did not even raise his eyelids.
His wrist flicked lightly.
Iwata's eyes nearly popped out of his head.
He swore he had been staring directly at Rukawa's hand the entire time.
Yet the moment the basketball left Rukawa's fingertips had somehow been skipped!
One frame, the ball was still in his hand.
The next frame, it was already floating through the air.
The entire trajectory in between seemed to have been deleted by a hacker.
Swish!
The crisp sound of a clean basket rang out.
Iwata stood beneath the hoop like a wooden statue, his face filled with disbelief.
He felt as though he had just watched a badly encoded movie with dropped frames, with the most important frame somehow missing entirely.
"BEEP! Basket counts!"
The referee's whistle shattered the silence.
For a full three seconds, the entire arena was completely silent.
Then the stands erupted with a roar powerful enough to blow the roof off.
"What the hell just happened?!"
"How did he get past him? Did he teleport?!"
"Ref! I want to report this guy! He's using hacks!"
The spectators grabbed their heads and shouted wildly.
The sheer visual impact of something that seemed to violate the laws of physics shattered everyone's understanding of reality.
On the bench, Makino Juro sat calmly, tapping his fingers against his knee.
"The human brain takes roughly a fraction of a second to process visual information and convert it into motor commands," he said suddenly.
Ayako looked completely confused.
"Speak human."
"Simply put, when an extremely slow rhythm suddenly switches into a speed beyond the limit, the massive information gap can directly overload the opponent's processing capacity."
Makino Juro chuckled.
"In simpler terms, their visual cortex crashes."
He raised a hand and pointed toward Rukawa on the court.
"That extremely fast breakthrough was so absurdly fast that Kishimoto's brain simply treated it as a junk file and deleted it."
"It's like watching a movie. If the difference between two frames is too large, your eyes perceive it as a stutter, as though something in between is missing."
Makino Juro shifted into an even more relaxed slouch and delivered his conclusion.
"Rukawa Kaede is deliberately creating that visual bug, forcing his opponent to experience a mental blackout at the critical moment."
"This is his Zone."
"I call it…"
"Cicada's Empty Shell."
The substitutes beside him swallowed hard.
Their entire understanding of basketball seemed to have been refreshed.
"Artificially creating a visual bug?"
"Forcing the opponent to black out?"
"That's freaking unfair!"
Coach Anzai happily pushed up his reflective glasses.
"Juro, you've certainly handed him a blade capable of 'killing.'"
The scene shifted back to the stands.
Maki Shinichi gripped the railing so tightly that the veins on the back of his hands bulged.
"This can no longer be explained simply by being fast."
Jin Soichiro sucked in a breath.
"He actually turned the physiological limits of the human body into a weapon?"
Maki Shinichi nodded gravely.
"The defender experiences the illusion that time itself has been 'erased.'"
"That's practically an attack from a higher dimension."
Kiyota Nobunaga's legs went weak.
He dropped heavily into his seat and muttered to himself.
"What the hell are you supposed to do against that?"
At the highest point of the stands, the kings of Sannoh Kogyo looked down upon the court.
Coach Domoto Goro stood with his arms crossed, his tone unreadable.
"Can you see what's going on?"
Fukatsu Kazunari still wore his usual poker face.
"A bug-like switch between extreme speed and extreme slowness."
Sawakita Eiji licked his lips, his eyes filled with the excitement of a hunter who had finally found interesting prey.
"Now that's interesting."
"He can actually create an illusion that resembles deleting time."
Kawata Masashi stroked his chin.
But his gaze passed over Rukawa and locked firmly onto Makino Juro standing at the sideline.
"It should have something to do with that guy named Makino Juro."
Coach Domoto Goro nodded deeply in agreement.
"Shohoku…"
"This bone is harder than I expected."
END OF CHAPTER
The King Of Slacking Off - MrBehringer's Secret
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