"The Autumn Tournament, first round, third game. West Tokyo, Seido High School Baseball Team versus East Tokyo, Seisenji Academy. The game officially begins."
Under the watch of over a thousand spectators, the players from both teams walked to the center of the field and bowed to one another.
"Please guide us!"
"Please guide us!"
After days of building dread, the Seisenji players had reached a kind of acceptance. They were playing the nation's strongest offensive team. That fact had been turned over so many times it had worn smooth, and somewhere in all that turning, the sharp edges of it had started to dull.
They had imagined this moment many times before arriving. In those imaginings, the Seido players had taken on an almost mythological quality: enormous, fierce, the kind of presence that announced itself from across the field and made the opposition feel small before a single pitch had been thrown.
Now they were actually looking at them.
The Seido players were taller than average, on the whole. Aside from that, they were not dramatically different in appearance from any other high school team. Two of them stood out for reasons other than intimidation: one had noticeable stubble, and another was on the heavier side. But the rest of them were, if anything, unexpectedly ordinary in their appearance.
More than ordinary, actually. If someone had put the question of attractiveness to a vote, the Seido roster would have ranked comfortably in the top three across all of Tokyo.
Though that was largely Zhang Han's contribution to the average. Isashiki Jun and Masuko Toru were doing what they could to moderate the score, but it wasn't quite enough.
"They're not as scary as I thought."
"I was expecting three heads and six arms."
"They don't look that much different from us."
The fear that had been sitting on the Seisenji players for the past several days began to lift in a way that surprised them. Looking at the people they were about to play against, they felt something shift. Then one of them made a connection that the others quickly recognized: the players they had seen dominating at Koshien, the ones their minds had inflated into something larger than life, those were the third-year seniors. All of them had graduated. The roster standing across from them now was composed almost entirely of first and second-year players who had been promoted to fill the space left behind.
The Seisenji players looked at each other, and what passed between them was unmistakable.
They had been frightening themselves.
Ueki, watching this play out from his position, felt a quiet surge of respect.
As expected of Nishikawa. He had considered this too.
They had known, in an abstract way, that the current Seido lineup would look very different from the one they had watched at Koshien. But Nishikawa had never pointed this out to his teammates. When Ueki had asked him about it directly, the answer had been characteristically patient.
"There's no way to stop our players from being scared. So let them be scared. Let them be scared all the way to the limit, until the fear runs out. When they finally see the actual team in front of them, the contrast will do more for their confidence than anything I could say."
At the time, Ueki had found the nerve to ask the question underneath all the others.
"Are you saying we actually have a chance to win?"
His voice had been slightly unsteady when he said it. He meant every word about fighting to the end, but privately, the gap between what Seido was and what Seisenji was felt like something that couldn't simply be strategized away.
Nishikawa had thought for a moment before answering.
"The game hasn't been played yet. Nobody knows. If paper strength were all that mattered, nobody would need to play at all. You would just compare the numbers, send the stronger team through, and go home. That's not how it works."
He hadn't said they would win. He hadn't said they would lose. He had simply made space for the possibility that the result was not already decided, and that was enough to shift something in Ueki's chest.
Most of the Seisenji players had come into this game with the attitude of people who expected to learn something from the experience. Ueki and Nishikawa had come with something different in mind. They had talked through every scenario they could imagine, offense and defense, and they had built strategies for each. The preparation had been thorough. The intelligence gathering had been detailed. Everything was in place, and the only thing left to do was execute.
The central piece of their preparation concerned Tanba Kouichiro.
It hadn't taken much analysis to conclude that Tanba would be the starting pitcher. The evidence pointed in one direction with very little ambiguity. He was the second-year Ace, the most experienced arm on the current roster, the only Seido pitcher who had stood on the Koshien mound. After Hidezawa's graduation, the rotation had no one more qualified or more ready. For a first-round game the coaching staff would take seriously, the probability of Tanba starting sat above eighty percent.
Accordingly, roughly eighty percent of the strategies Nishikawa and Ueki had developed were built around facing Tanba.
They had watched every recording they could find. They had analyzed his mechanics, his tendencies under pressure, the conditions under which his performance dipped. The conclusion they reached was measured but real. Tanba's pitch quality was genuinely high. His consistency, however, was not always reliable. In the right circumstances, with the right approach, runs were possible.
The more uncertain half of the equation was what happened after those runs. Holding onto a lead against a Seido lineup that still had Yuuki and Zhang Han in it was a different kind of problem. Even with the third-year heavyweights gone, a roster built around those two retained serious offensive teeth.
"I'll find a way to keep them quiet," Nishikawa had said. "If it comes to Yuuki and Zhang Han and I'm not able to handle them through normal pitching, we put them on base intentionally and work around them."
Ueki had started to object.
"There's no room for hesitation. We're the underdog. That's simply what we are. If winning requires that, then that's what we do."
Nishikawa had already resolved himself completely. They had come here to fight with their backs against the wall, and if the moment required unconventional choices, he would make them without second-guessing.
The plan was solid. The preparation was thorough. Everything was accounted for.
And then the game started, and within the first few moments, the entire framework they had built began to crumble.
Because the player who walked out to the pitcher's mound was not Koichiro Tanba.
The Seisenji players stared. The figure standing on the mound was someone they recognized immediately, someone whose game footage they had reviewed more times than they could count. Someone who had no business being in this particular spot on this particular field.
"Is that Zhang Han? Is he pitching?"
"What are you talking about? He was already a pitcher back at Matsukata. He reached the national runner-up with that team."
"That's not the point! Why is he on the mound right now?"
The strategies built around facing Tanba. The eighty percent they had dedicated to preparing for his tendencies, his weaknesses, his patterns under pressure. All of it was standing somewhere in the dugout, completely irrelevant.
The game had not yet thrown its first pitch, and Seisenji was already adjusting.
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