Reiji Hiiragi

Hiiragi is a tall young man whose long black hair is gathered up into a bun. His irises are a striking, uniform white, and a small mole sits just beneath each eye, twin marks framing his gaze. Through the Second and Third Selections he carried the number twenty-two on his jersey.

Open and easy to talk to, Hiiragi is deeply into fortune telling; barely meeting Nagi, Chigiri, and Baro, he offers to read their futures with a tarot app on his phone. He lights up whenever a prediction lands, brims with confidence in both his readings and his football, and enjoys needling opponents with talk of his own skill. At his core he is a coldly logical thinker who leans on statistics and reason to unpick and outmaneuver whoever he faces.

That reliance is also his fault line. When events refuse to follow the numbers he trusted, frustration boils over quickly, and being called names is enough to set him off just as easily.

Hiiragi lines up as a forward but plays like a tactical director, someone who wins through carefully plotted strategy. Feeding on the data he keeps on rival players, he builds scoring formulas around their past behavior, a style Nagi likened to a cross between his own and Isagi's. Its flaw, as Nagi points out, is that the information he clings to can go stale in the middle of a match.

His Big Data Soccer channels that fortune-telling fixation into cause and effect on the pitch. By reading opponents' personalities, thinking, and movement patterns, he forecasts how they will act and assembles a plan to break them in both solo and group duels, as when he saw straight through Nagi and Baro to get past them. The catch surfaces when a player changes, such as Baro suddenly choosing to pass, leaving Hiiragi stubbornly running an outdated read.

He also owns a formidable trap, in some moments the equal of Nagi's, though his shines most on the move rather than from a standstill. He proved it by trapping at a full run against Nagi without shedding speed and by controlling the ball while spinning into a finish.