Chapter 104

The opening match of the Third Selection closes with Team A edging Team B five to four, and a jubilant Nanase bowls Isagi over in celebration. Shido, too, gushes over the winning strike, claiming he sensed sparks crackling off Isagi and looking forward to his explosion, though Isagi cannot articulate how he pulled the goal off. Rin, sourly branding the finish a fluke he was robbed of, snarls that Isagi truly gets under his skin.

Shido needles Rin as third-rate for refusing to credit another's brilliance, and with the match over and no cards to fear, the two agree to settle it with fists. They trade punches and insults as Otoya looks on gleefully and Karasu, scorning them as children, denies that his side lost to such players. Isagi and Hiori haul Shido back while Nanase and Chigiri restrain Rin, and the loudspeaker warns that any more fighting means disqualification.

Later, in the monitor room, Isagi studies footage of the match with Nanase and gropes for words to explain his decisive goal. Hiori urges him to keep breaking down his play so he can sharpen his ability to act without thinking, likening the required reflexes to those a skilled gamer develops as a game like Tetris speeds up. The reason Isagi can perform at all, Hiori says, is the sheer volume of experience he has banked, and Isagi settles on describing that instinctive state as a trance.

Grateful, Isagi tells Hiori and Nanase the goal would never have happened without them. Nanase confesses Isagi was the only player he could stay in step with, while Hiori downplays his own steady showing yet admits the goal thrilled him and gave both of them a case to remain in Blue Lock. Nanase caps the exchange with enthusiastic high-fives.

Trance, whose title literally reads as Trip, is the hundred-fourth chapter and the first of Volume 13, set in the Third Selection Arc across twenty pages. It arrived in Japan on October 14, 2020 and in English on May 17, 2022, and it feeds the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth anime episodes. Isagi ends the chapter resolved to reproduce his trance, just as the next contest between Team A and Team C begins with Reo telling Nagi to watch him.