The Rise of the Iron Wall!
Chapter 422: Hardcore English Lesson
Well, his selection to be the best goalkeeper in the national tournament was enough to spark another wave of traffic. More interview requests were sent, just to get blocked completely by Minami and Kumiko.
The boy himself didn’t know that he was a hot commodity outside. No, he knew about it, but he didn’t have any time to care right now. After all, currently, he was being tortured nonstop by Kumiko and Minami, who seemed to enjoy everything here.
"Come on, Ryukkun! Drop down your body until your knee bends at 90 degrees! One miss, and we repeat the set!"
"Ryukkun, go! My strong boy, you can do this! Oh, also, what do you think about the breakfast earlier?"
Higo gritted his teeth as he dropped further down until his knee felt burning. The distraction around also didn’t help, but the boy still forced his brain to process what they had just said before answering with so much difficulty.
"Too... Salty..."
Minami was so dumbfounded when she heard that, before the woman let out a bark of laughter. "Last night, you complained about the dinner being too bland, and today you complain about the breakfast being too salty? What do you want?!" Her tone was full of exasperation.
When people saw this, they would be confused about what was going on here. After all, the question thrown was completely random, not related to the training session at all.
Still, this was the practice method that Kumiko planned to help a thick-skulled boy like Higo master daily English as quickly as possible.
"You train, we will ask you about the most random things in English. You only have five seconds to process everything, and your train cannot stop either. If you failed to give a coherent answer, the set will be restarted. The aim is so that in a high-pressure moment, you can talk with the others in English instinctively, not having to think even for a second about it."
At least, that was what Kumiko explained beforehand. She also negotiated with Minami and Ayaka to turn all the conversations to English, trying to make the boy get used to it.
The reason was simple. If Higo was serious about playing abroad, communication would be a big wall for him to cross.
Research that Kumiko had done revealed that out of ten Japanese players who were going abroad, seven of them failed to adapt quickly, resulting in them getting benched in their first year or even getting sent back to Japan in the next two years because they couldn’t cross that wall.
Higo didn’t know how much truth was in her words, but he still believed her in a heartbeat.
Unfortunately, though, while everything sounded so simple in words, the reality slapped him hard in the face. Just this morning, in his usual ladder drill to train his agility, the boy had to repeat the set six times in a row from getting stumped by either Kumiko or his mother’s question.
This continued in the walking lunges strength, as this was his sixth set out of the three sets that Kumiko set in the last 30 minutes.
Right now, he felt like his knees were burning, and all the sweat drenched on his body was enough to block the cold weather outside. But that wasn’t the worst. No, it was the fact that his brain was so boiled right now that he barely survived that put him so close to the death door.
"Come on, Ryukkun! Three more steps! Oh, another question! In your favorite anime, what is your favorite character, and how did he die?"
The question from Kumiko stumped him for a moment. As he raised his left foot for another lung, though, in a desperate moment, his brain constructed so many words that the boy himself would never believe he was capable of.
"My favorite character is... not Zura, it is Katsura, and he hasn’t died yet!"
As he answered the question, the boy also did the final lunge to cross the finish line, and the moment he realized that this torture was over, his body fell on the ground immediately as he felt like his knees lost all of their strength, turning into mushy jelly.
"Good job!" Kumiko smiled while clapping proudly. "You even managed to see the wrong question and think of the answer quickly! It seems all the good grades you achieved in English lessons are not for nothing!"
Higo felt the corner of his lips twitching when he heard that. Speaking of his grades, English was indeed his best class as he always got around 85 to 90 in the exam. However, all of those tests didn’t really matter once Kumiko forced him to talk like this, as the knowledge he gained in the class was so difficult to retrieve by his brain in a high-pressure moment like before.
"Fucking hell... I am beat..." Higo lay down on the ground, his chest still rising up and down quite violently. He shut his eyes tightly, trying to prevent sweat from rolling down his face before saying, "I get Kumiko-chan, because she is just that brilliant. But Mom, since when did you know how to speak English so fluently?!"
In return, Minami just snorted lightly at her son. "You underestimate me, Ryukkun. Did you forget where I work? Even your Aya-chan learns English from me, and right now, she is in an international department, you know?"
Silence followed as Higo felt like he wanted to slap his forehead. Indeed, this knowledge somehow slipped from his brain.
His mother worked as a manager in an international trade company in Hakodate specializing in sending the town’s seafood outside. While she didn’t do it on a daily basis, most of her clients used English, so it was no wonder she was proficient in it as well.
"Well, don’t think too much about it." Kumiko suddenly chimed in with a mischievous smile. "After you are good enough with your English, we will also start with our German. I mean, we don’t want to get lost in a foreign land, right?"
Higo groaned immediately, for the first time realizing that the next few months would be torture for him.