How was it that fast?
The Seisenji leadoff batter stood in the box with his eyes full of something that hadn't been there a moment ago. Before he could process what was happening, the ball had already gone. It had appeared, traveled eighteen meters, and buried itself in the catcher's mitt in a span of time that his reflexes hadn't come close to covering. His eyes had barely tracked it. His hands hadn't moved at all.
From the dugout, he shot a look back at his teammates that carried a very specific message directed at his Ace.
You told us he wasn't that dangerous.
"The pitching is very fast."
"The momentum isn't overwhelming, but the speed is something else. It was gone before I could follow it."
Up in the stands, the same bewilderment was spreading through the spectators. The questions moved through the crowd quickly, one person asking the next.
"Did anyone bring a speed gun?"
"Who would think to bring one to this game?"
That was the honest answer. Neither Seido nor Seisenji had come into this tournament with a reputation for elite pitching velocity. A speed gun was the kind of equipment you brought when you expected to need it, and nobody had expected to need one today.
Nobody had expected Zhang Han to be on the mound.
In the outfield, Isashiki Jun watched the commotion in the stands with a small, knowing smile pulling at the corner of his mouth.
He remembered the first time he had seen Zhang Han throw like that. The reaction had been exactly the same: surprise that shaded into discomfort before you had time to think through why. Once you had enough exposure to it, the adjustment became possible. But the first time always landed the same way, regardless of how prepared you thought you were.
Against second-rate opposition, Zhang Han's current pitching was more than sufficient. This first at-bat should wrap up cleanly.
Then the count turned to two balls and one strike, and Isashiki's expression shifted.
"Thwack!"
"Ball!"
"Thwack!"
"Ball!"
Two consecutive pitches straying outside the zone after the first strike. The rhythm that had seemed so certain a moment ago had developed a visible crack.
In the Seisenji dugout, Ueki's jaw tightened.
"He's trying to get us to chase. Throwing balls on purpose to see if we'll bite."
It was the most reasonable explanation he could construct on short notice. Zhang Han was experienced enough to try something like that, and the Seisenji batters were nervous enough to potentially fall for it.
Nishikawa, sitting beside him, shook his head slowly.
"I don't think so."
He was looking at the mound with the same focused attention he brought to every situation that required understanding something the surface reading didn't fully explain. The pieces he had were scattered but suggestive. Right-handed hitter. Pitching with his left hand now. No appearances on the mound at Koshien despite the team's desperate need for reliable pitching.
He connected them one by one, and the conclusion he arrived at felt almost too strange to say out loud.
Zhang Han's left-handed pitching was new. Not refined, not polished, not something that had been developed quietly over months. New, as in recently acquired. As in, the pitcher on that mound right now was functionally a beginner in the role he was currently performing.
The logic was absurd on its face. And yet, having eliminated every other explanation, it was the one that remained.
"Pass the word along. Nobody swings before two strikes."
The Seisenji players didn't fully understand the instruction, but that wasn't required. Trust in Nishikawa had been established through enough correct calls that following his guidance had become something close to instinct. The team had been built around his judgment, and they moved according to it now without needing the reasoning laid out in advance.
The leadoff batter received the signal and adjusted, settling back into a more patient approach. The velocity was still uncomfortable, but he was beginning to find the rhythm of it, beginning to understand the timing well enough that simply watching the ball become a more manageable task.
Behind the plate, Miyuki was working through his own calculations with considerably more anxiety than he was showing on the outside.
Zhang Han's control in practice had been consistently solid. Seven or eight out of ten pitches finding the zone was the standard he had been operating at before today. So what was happening now?
He was weighing whether to call a timeout and go to the mound when Zhang Han settled the question himself.
Having received the ball back from the umpire, Zhang Han simply stopped. He stepped off, took one long breath in, released it fully, then took another. The process was quiet and unhurried, as though the count and the situation and the watching crowd had temporarily ceased to be relevant concerns.
Then he stepped back onto the rubber, found his set position, and resumed.
The tightness that had been visible around his eyes was gone.
In the stands, a man in his fifties with a full beard and the particular stillness of someone who had spent a very long time watching baseball closely sat forward slightly. Something in his expression sharpened.
"Self-adjustment."
He said it quietly, almost to himself.
It was a rare quality. Rarer than most people understood. The ability to recognize in real time that your mental state had drifted from where it needed to be, and to bring it back through deliberate internal effort, without a coach calling timeout, without a catcher walking to the mound, without any external intervention.
In adolescent athletes with the kind of hormonal volatility that came with age, maintaining that kind of regulation under game pressure was genuinely exceptional. Among professionals, only a few could do it reliably.
Miyuki felt the shift from where he was crouching. It wasn't something he could have explained in technical terms, but it was there. His compatibility with Zhang Han was imperfect, and they were still developing their working relationship. But moments like this made it difficult not to feel a certain respect for the person on the other end of the battery.
Zhang Han was going to throw a strike.
Miyuki was certain of it before the ball left the hand.
"Whoosh!"
The ball came through like a white flash cutting the air, faster than the ones before it somehow, more decisive in its path.
The Seisenji batter, who had resolved to keep his bat still, watched it arrive and felt the apprehension in his chest intensify. That ball looked nothing like the two that had missed. It looked like the first one had, except with the uncertainty removed.
"Strike!"
Two strikes, two balls.
"Whoosh!"
"Thwack!"
"Strikeout!"
The batter had known it was coming. The two-strike count left him no choice except to offer at anything close to the zone, and when the pitch arrived, his bat was moving but the ball was already past it. The timing gap between his swing and the ball's arrival at the catcher's mitt was not something a batter could manufacture a solution for on the fly.
The second batter came up and walked away with the same result. One foul, one ball, two strikes, then a clean strikeout on the finishing pitch. Zhang Han had found his rhythm fully now and wasn't letting it slip again.
In the stands, the crowd that had come to watch the nation's strongest offense found itself unexpectedly absorbed in the pitching instead. The supporters who had been anxious about the pitching staff since Hidezawa's graduation sat with wide eyes, reassessing what they thought they knew about this new version of the team.
"Zhang Han! Zhang Han!!!"
A cluster of girls holding handmade signs chanted his name with the organized fervor of a group that had done this before. There was something almost theatrical in the timing of it, arriving just as the moment on the field had reached its peak.
The third batter, Seisenji's catcher Ueki, stepped into the box already carrying the weight of watching two teammates go down without a fight. The atmosphere around the plate felt different from what he had prepared for.
He was struck out in three pitches.
Three batters. Three strikeouts.
"That was so fast."
Ueki stood at the edge of the dugout steps after coming back, turning the at-bat over in his mind. The ball had been moving too quickly for his eyes to do what they needed to do.
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