Inside the Seido High School Baseball Team's meeting room, the atmosphere was focused and energized.
The players who had been to Koshien were already engaged in active discussion about their first opponent of the Fall Tournament. For the players who had just earned their spots on the First-string, this carried additional weight. It was their first official game wearing the Seido jersey, and the mix of nerves and anticipation that came with that was entirely natural.
What was notable, though, was how little the nerves showed.
Even the newest First-string additions carried themselves with a settled composure that suggested confidence in their own preparation. They believed their training had brought them to a level where they could meet whatever was placed in front of them. That belief had been earned through work, and it showed.
The coaching staff's briefing on Seisenji had made a genuine impression, but it hadn't shaken anyone's fundamental certainty about the outcome. The opponent was unusual, clearly more thoughtful than their reputation suggested. But unusual and dangerous weren't the same thing, and the mood in the Seido meeting room remained one of controlled, grounded confidence.
Across the city at Seisenji, the atmosphere could not have been more different.
The players were deflated before the game had even been scheduled. Seisenji had always been a program that existed near the bottom of the competitive ladder, and the players had internalized that identity over years of early exits and quiet seasons. It was only after Nishikawa had arrived and found his form that wins had started to come, and even then, most of the team privately credited luck more than ability.
Three consecutive victories in the round-robin had done something for morale, but not enough to change the deeper story the players told about themselves. And then the draw had come back with the worst possible name attached to it.
Seido.
The team that had nearly brought down Osaka Kiryuu at Koshien. The program rated as the nation's strongest offensive unit. If Seisenji's identity was built around patient, disciplined defense, then Seido was the most direct possible test of whether that defense meant anything at all.
The team's atmosphere collapsed almost immediately after the draw was announced. Players who passed each other in the hallways found themselves exchanging heavy looks without any words. The first game hadn't been played, and the mood already read like the aftermath of a loss.
"You're just going to let the team stay like this?"
Ueki, the catcher, put the question directly to Nishikawa. As the Ace and the person whose arrival had changed everything about how the program operated, Nishikawa carried a kind of authority that went beyond his role on the field. If he spoke, people listened. If he stepped forward to lift the room, it would lift.
"Are you scared?" Nishikawa asked, looking at his friend with what appeared to be genuine curiosity.
"Of course I'm scared."
Ueki didn't dress it up. "But what does being scared actually change? Does fear make the game go away? Is Seido going to look at us, feel sorry for us, and let us off the hook? Are we going to forfeit?" He shook his head firmly. "We drew Seido. That's done. So we play them. What else is there to do?"
Nishikawa felt something settle comfortably in his chest at that answer.
"The others will get there on their own. I don't need to tell them. They'll work it out."
He was right about that. Fear, given enough time and nowhere useful to go, eventually exhausted itself. Once the initial shock of the draw had burned through, the remaining question was simple: the game was happening regardless of how anyone felt about it. The choice was whether to walk into it paralyzed or prepared.
Nishikawa himself was not without apprehension. Seido was exactly as formidable as everyone said. He understood that clearly. But alongside that apprehension lived something steadier: a belief in his own mind and his own method that had been tested enough times now to feel reliable.
His path to this point had not followed any conventional route.
He had come to baseball after failing to produce meaningful results as a marathon runner, arriving late to the sport with a physical profile that made coaches skeptical. At 171 centimeters and 55 kilograms, he didn't carry the build that experienced eyes associated with a serious pitcher. When he had tried to join programs through athletic recruitment, the doors had stayed closed. Too late a start. Too slight a frame. The conventional judgment was that players like him rarely developed into anything worth investing in.
He had enrolled at Seisenji the ordinary way, through the entrance exam, without any baseball scholarship attached to his name.
When he joined the baseball team, even within Seisenji's modest program, the coach hadn't thought much of him. The team happened to need one more body to fill the roster, and Nishikawa happened to be available. That was the extent of the welcome.
Two years later, he was the backbone of the program and the reason it had a backbone at all.
Baseball had done something for him that marathon never had. It wasn't simply a physical contest. It rewarded thought. It valued preparation and precision as much as raw athleticism, sometimes more. A team that understood itself clearly, knew what it could not do, and built a coherent approach around what it actually had could beat a team with considerably more individual talent.
The three programs they had eliminated in the round-robin were proof of that. On paper, the talent differences between those teams and Seisenji had been small. In practice, by the time the final outs were recorded, the gaps had looked larger than anyone expected. Understanding the game at a deeper level than your opponent was its own form of strength.
"Instead of sitting here worrying," Nishikawa said to Ueki, "let's think through how to actually play against this dragon."
They pulled their chairs together and started working.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Seisenji roster was going through its own quiet process of arriving at the same destination. Fear, once it had been felt fully and there was nowhere left to go with it, began to feel less like a weight and more like background noise. The game was going to happen. The opponent was going to be Seido. None of that was changeable.
And once you accepted the unchangeable, a certain lightness followed.
"I heard their offense is genuinely terrifying."
"You don't think they're going to put up dozens of runs on us, do you?"
"Even if they score dozens, are they going to score a hundred?"
The laughter that broke out was loose and genuine, the kind that comes when a group of people collectively decides that the situation is too large to be afraid of and too certain to be avoided, so they might as well enjoy themselves. The streak of consecutive wins had given them something real to stand on. They were confident that even in a loss, it wouldn't be a humiliation. Their defense had held for three games, and they had a pitcher who had yet to surrender an earned run.
They still had Nishikawa Yu.
With both sides having done their preparation in their own ways, the first official game of the Fall Tournament arrived.
Summer had given way entirely. The air was crisp, carrying that particular autumn clarity that made everything feel slightly more vivid than it had a month ago. The young men filing onto the field breathed it in before the first pitch was thrown, taking a moment to simply exist in it.
In the stands, thousands of spectators had made their way to the stadium specifically to watch Seido play.
None of them were neutral observers hoping for a close contest.
They had come to see the nation's strongest offensive team operate, to watch what happened when a program of that caliber turned its attention toward an opponent most of them had never heard of before the draw was announced.
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