Zantetsu Tsurugi

Zantetsu is a tall figure at 187 centimeters, topped with spiky, dark hair. His most distinctive touch is a pair of glasses he keeps on even during matches, though the lenses are purely for show. He wears the standard black-and-gray Blue Lock bodysuit and tracksuit, and his jerseys ran from Team V's blue number 10 through Team White's number 53.

Sharp thinking is not Zantetsu's strength. He loves to sprinkle his speech with idioms in a bid to sound clever, yet he usually mangles them and has to ask whether he got them right, which earned him the nickname 'Baka Zantetsu' from Reo and Nagi. Calm and even-tempered most of the time, he loses that cool the instant anyone calls him stupid, insisting that genuinely smart people would never stoop to such an insult.

His trouble with comprehension runs deep: he struggled with textbooks, could not work out a train fare, and repeatedly misread how Blue Lock's tests actually functioned. Still, he is stubbornly driven, living by the motto of carrying through whatever he sets out to do. Discovering a gift for running, he threw himself into sport, chasing the oddball ambition of one day being crowned 'World's Most Esteemed Moron,' and he settled on football through little more than a hunch. Coming from a household of dentists, he is fastidious about brushing his teeth and calls himself the family's black sheep.

Zantetsu is a pure speed forward who also fills wing and wingback roles. Being left-footed suits him to an inverted-winger brief, quick enough to reach the byline for a cross yet just as ready to cut inside and strike. Everything hinges on his explosive acceleration, which lets him mirror an opponent's movement and cut it off; Chigiri reckoned that inside ten meters not even he could outrun him, marking Zantetsu as most lethal over short bursts.

That burst spawns a set of trademark moves: the Double Wing Boost, where he and Chigiri trade short passes at full sprint to tear down the flank; the Bullet Train Maglev, which drags a rival into a straight-line race he is built to win; and the Jet Counter, a sudden surge that slips past a pack of pressers by turning their momentum around. His finishing rests on a fast, accurate left-foot shot that he can just as easily convert into a cross into the box, and like the program's elite he can drop into the immersive Flow state.