Seido's newer players had taken the field, and the Seisenji dugout responded to this development with something resembling relief.
The players who had come up through Koshien had been something else entirely. Watching them on television had given a certain impression, and standing on the same field as them had revealed that the television impression had been considerably understated. Those players carried a quality that was difficult to name and impossible to ignore, something that went beyond their recorded statistics and lived in the way they moved and made decisions. Facing them had felt like competing in a different category of game.
These new players looked different. Physically imposing in their own right, clearly not people to take lightly, but without that particular weight that the Koshien veterans carried. The contrast was noticeable and, for the Seisenji players, genuinely welcome.
On the mound, Nishikawa had arrived at a similar conclusion through his own calculations.
Five runs down was not a position from which the game could realistically be recovered. He had known before the first pitch that this was the most probable ending. The gap had simply arrived faster than he had imagined it might. But his teammates had prepared themselves for exactly this, and the speed of the collapse hadn't broken them the way a slower unraveling might have. There was something almost liberating about losing badly and quickly. The weight of possibility, of the maybe, dropped away, and what remained was simply the game.
Nishikawa made his own quiet peace with it. The home run Zhang Han had hit off him was something he would not benefit from dwelling on during the remaining innings. If he let that at-bat continue to occupy his thinking, he would be useless against everyone who came after. Better to set it aside and focus on what was in front of him.
He adjusted his approach and prepared to show the new batters what he had.
"Whoosh!"
The pitch came in slower than the Seido hitters had been bracing for. The pace was unhurried enough that the rotation on the ball was visible, the spin tracking clearly through the air before it settled into the catcher's mitt.
In the batter's box, Masuko Toru stood with his eyes fully open, watching the ball complete its journey without moving his bat.
He let it pass.
The Seido players had done their preparation before arriving at the stadium. Nishikawa's record across three games had been striking enough to generate genuine conversation. Suppressing three separate teams without surrendering an earned run, at a velocity that none of them would have called intimidating on paper, required an explanation beyond raw stuff. The conclusion the team had worked toward was that the movement on his pitches was doing the work his speed couldn't. Something in his delivery was creating subtle, late change that was interfering with timing and making solid contact difficult to produce even when the pitch speed itself was entirely manageable.
They hadn't known exactly what the movement looked like before facing it.
Zhang Han's at-bat had answered that question for everyone watching.
The message he had communicated through his actual swing was cleaner than any scouting report could have been. Don't guess. Don't commit early. Wait until the ball has finished doing what it's going to do, and then hit it. The bat speed had to be fast enough and the decision had to be decisive enough to make contact after committing that late, but that was a question of ability rather than approach.
The reason previous teams hadn't arrived at the same solution, the Seido players had discussed, probably came down to one of two things. Either they hadn't thought of it, or they had thought of it and couldn't execute it. Nishikawa's velocity, modest as it was relative to the top tier of high school pitching, still moved through the zone fast enough that waiting as long as possible before committing required a specific kind of timing and confidence that most hitters didn't simply have available.
The batter now standing in the box was a particular case. Since arriving at Seido, under Yuuki's influence, Masuko had been putting in swings by the hundreds every day. His timing had been calibrated through sheer volume of repetition, and the particular challenge of waiting on a 120 kilometer per hour pitch until the last possible moment was well within the range his practice had built toward. The movement, once it revealed itself, became a target rather than a disruption.
The second pitch came in.
Masuko waited, tracked the ball, watched the subtle break emerge, and swung with the uncomplicated commitment of someone who had decided exactly what he was doing and had no interest in second-guessing it.
"Ping!"
The ball arced outward and fell into the outfield grass. Two Seisenji outfielders moved hard toward the landing spot, determined and quick, arriving a fraction of a second late and watching the ball bounce in front of them rather than into their gloves.
In the Seido dugout, the reaction was immediate.
Zhang Han watched with a quiet smile. Masuko carried something of the third-year seniors in the way he went after a pitch. No hesitation, no calculation at the moment of commitment. Just the swing, with full weight behind it. It was a quality Zhang Han recognized and respected.
The eighth batter, Sakai, stepped in with the same approach in mind.
He waited as long as he could, identified the movement, and committed. The contact he made was real and well-timed, but the ball found the outfielder's glove anyway rather than the gap.
"Thwack!"
"Out!"
Two outs. Runner on second base.
That was how it went with new players finding their footing in their first official game. Some produced immediately. Some ran into the ordinary variance of a sport where even good swings didn't always produce hits.
The Seisenji players absorbed the out and felt a small but genuine lift.
Zhang Han watched without much expression.
Masuko and Sakai were good players. In an ordinary high school program, they would have been defining presences, the kind of batters that opponents prepared for and feared. In the Seido lineup, their capabilities placed them toward the lower end of the regular roster. That wasn't a criticism. It was simply the nature of a program that had accumulated the depth it had.
And even they had waited on Nishikawa's pitching long enough to make meaningful contact.
That fact said something important. Nishikawa's primary weapon, the movement that had shut down three full teams in the round-robin, had been decoded. Once a puzzle like that was solved, it tended to stay solved. The Seido batters knew what to look for now, and that knowledge wouldn't go away.
Seisenji's defense was disciplined and their effort was genuine. But if the spiritual center of their game plan was a pitcher whose best pitch was now being timed reliably, the question of how long they could sustain meaningful resistance had a relatively short answer.
"Ninth batter. Outfielder. Asou Takeru."
Asou had been a cleanup hitter at his middle school program before joining Seido, and Coach Kataoka's interest in his hitting was not casual. The expectations attached to this at-bat were real.
Asou stepped in and handled it cleanly, putting a base hit into the field and extending the inning without drama.
Two outs. Runners on first and third.
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