"Han-san!!!"
"What a hit!"
"Zhang Han, Zhang Han!"
The female fans in the stands were the first to react, their cheeks flushed, their voices carrying well above the general noise of the crowd. But they weren't alone in their excitement for long. Ordinary baseball fans who had followed the Koshien coverage on television were now experiencing something different. Watching it happen in person, in real time, with nothing between them and the field except open air, had a quality that broadcast footage simply couldn't replicate.
"That swing didn't look like much, but the power behind it was something else."
"You haven't seen what he did at Koshien. The Ace of Osaka Kiryuu couldn't stop him either."
Osaka Kiryuu had finished the summer as national champions. Compared to them, Seisenji occupied a different category of competition entirely. The distance between the two programs wasn't a gap so much as it was a difference in kind.
Inside the Seido dugout, the runners came home one by one. When Zhang Han crossed the plate, hands came out from every direction, and he worked his way down the line returning high fives with a genuine smile.
There was something different about this group, and he felt it clearly.
The third-year seniors had maintained their dignity in the way seniors did, with occasional pointed looks and a general atmosphere that reminded first-years of their place. There had been real value in that structure. Zhang Han had never resented it. But it had also created a specific kind of distance that lived in the background of every interaction.
These current teammates had no such agenda. Most of them had come up to the First-string around the same time he had, or not long before. The ones who had arrived earlier, Yuuki and Tanba principally, carried themselves with experience rather than hierarchy. The dynamic across the dugout was different, and the difference felt good in a way that was difficult to put simply.
He had spent his first year as someone else's junior. This year, for the first time, the team felt like it was genuinely his.
That said, he knew what he was looking at honestly.
The gap between this group and the seniors they had replaced was real. It wasn't something most observers would notice from the stands, and it certainly wasn't reflected in the current score. Five runs in the first inning, with the bases loaded at one point, was not a performance that invited criticism. If you had assembled five professional players and asked them to produce the same inning, the task wouldn't have been simple.
But Zhang Han had been at Koshien. He had played alongside Azuma Kiyokuni and the others when they were operating at their peak, and he had seen what that version of the team looked like from the inside. What had made those Koshien performances possible wasn't any single player's ability. It was the way the whole group had combined. The seniors' talent for drawing attention, exhausting pitchers, and creating opportunities through collective pressure had amplified everything Zhang Han did at the plate. Without them setting the table the way they did, his numbers would have looked different.
If he had said this out loud, most people would have told him he was being too hard on himself.
He didn't think he was. He thought he was being accurate.
He also recognized something in himself that gave him a moment of wry amusement. The seniors, Azuma Kiyokuni most of all, had operated with the kind of unfiltered directness that prioritized power and confrontation over everything else. Zhang Han had absorbed more of that attitude than he had noticed while it was happening. He felt a mild dissatisfaction now watching his teammates find their way on base through calculated indirection rather than direct engagement, even though the results were objectively good.
That was his own bias, and he knew it. Effectiveness was effectiveness. A run scored by a bunt and a stolen base counted the same as a run scored on a home run. The scoreboard didn't record the method.
He would figure that out more fully as time went on. For now, he filed the observation and moved on.
At the far end of the dugout, Coach Kataoka watched the inning conclude with quiet satisfaction, though his thoughts had already moved past the celebration and into the structural questions that the score raised.
The decision of where to place Zhang Han in the batting order had generated real debate within the coaching staff before the season began. Roughly half the coaches had argued for him at cleanup, the fourth spot, on the basis that his hitting profile made him the more naturally dominant presence in that role.
Kataoka had gone back and forth on it.
Zhang Han's ability wasn't the issue. His hitting characteristics, specifically the combination of power and situational effectiveness, made a genuine argument for the fourth spot. But Yuuki's on-base percentage was exceptional, and that quality had its own kind of strategic value that wasn't immediately obvious from a simple strength comparison.
The problem with putting Zhang Han fourth was what it did to the arrangement around him. Yuuki would need to bat third. With a high-on-base hitter directly ahead of Zhang Han, opposing teams would calculate the risk of pitching to Zhang Han with Yuuki on base and reach a straightforward conclusion: walk Zhang Han and pitch to the next batter instead. That decision would become more automatic as the season progressed and Zhang Han's reputation solidified further.
Placing Yuuki fourth and Zhang Han fifth inverted that calculus. Pitching around Yuuki meant facing Zhang Han. Pitching around Zhang Han meant facing Yuuki. Neither option was comfortable, and the mutual reinforcement between the two of them in adjacent spots created a core that was genuinely difficult to gameplan against.
The tradeoff was that the first three batters in the order carried less individual destructive power than the previous lineup had enjoyed. Without Azuma Kiyokuni anchoring the top of the order, there was no obvious replacement who brought the same combination of ability and intimidation. That was simply the reality left by graduation, and no arrangement of the available pieces could fully compensate for it.
But the first inning had shown that the current three-four-five configuration had a functional logic to it. The top of the order had found ways onto base, and once they had, Yuuki and Zhang Han had done the rest. The system worked. It wasn't the same system as before, but it didn't need to be.
What came next was a separate problem. As Seido continued to win and accumulate attention, the decisions opposing teams made would evolve. Yuuki and Zhang Han would face more intentional walks. The batters ahead of them would need to develop their on-base skills to maintain the pressure that the whole arrangement depended on.
And the cleanup combination itself would need to keep finding ways to be dangerous even in the situations opposing teams specifically designed to neutralize them.
The potential was there. The current version of the team was not the finished product.
But what it was, even now, was enough to work with.
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