Total score: one to zero.
In the Seido dugout, the three players who had been told to sit carried an energy that had gone noticeably flat since the first pitch. Before the game began, there had still been a thread of possibility to hold onto, however thin. As long as the game remained close and the situation became desperate enough, there was always the chance that Coach Kataoka would reach for his best options.
That window had closed. The score was moving in the right direction, the team was managing without them, and the probability of any of the three seeing the field today had dropped to something essentially theoretical.
Keeping their spirits up under those circumstances was its own form of mental discipline, and the fact that none of them had fully collapsed was evidence that their psychological foundation was reasonably solid.
Isashiki Jun expressed the group's general feeling in the most direct terms available to him.
"Real shame. We're letting these guys off easy."
The complaint carried some honesty in it. His presence in the lineup would have made Hakuzan's afternoon considerably worse. And with Yuuki and Zhang Han adding their weight to the combination at the top of the order, Hakuzan's players would have been navigating a scenario that offered them very little room to operate.
"Ping!"
The ball climbed into the outfield and landed safely, and Itai had extended the inning in a way that continued to demonstrate the uncomfortable truth the Hakuzan catcher was increasingly struggling to rationalize.
Even with the three core starters sitting unused in the dugout, Seido was still hitting balls into the outfield consistently enough to put runs on the board. The version of this lineup that had been described before the game as a half-strength arrangement was not playing like half of anything.
The second run scored.
Then Masuko came to the plate.
Whatever conversation had been happening in the stands about Seido's post-graduation offensive capabilities, whatever doubts had accumulated around the question of whether the lineup could sustain its reputation without Azuma Kiyokuni's presence at the center of it, Masuko addressed all of it with a single swing.
"Boom!"
The force behind the contact produced a sound that made several long-standing Seido supporters sit forward involuntarily, the muscle memory of the previous season responding before their conscious minds had finished processing. The ball traveled well over a hundred meters and came down in the left field stands.
Home run.
The dugout came alive in a way it had not yet in this game.
The concern that had been circulating since the senior class graduated was genuine and not without basis. Two strong hitters were manageable, in theory. An opposing pitcher could commit to one of them and work around the other, making calculated decisions based on who was on base and what the situation required.
The problem became meaningfully harder with three. With three legitimate threats arranged in sequence, the tactical math of avoidance and confrontation became much more difficult to execute cleanly.
Azuma Kiyokuni's absence had left that third position empty in a way that no obvious candidate had filled. The discussion around the team had returned to that gap repeatedly since the summer, and the general conclusion had been that the team would be somewhat diminished as a result.
Masuko had just submitted a counterargument.
The shadow of Azuma Kiyokuni's approach was visible in the swing, in the commitment behind it, in the complete absence of hesitation at the moment of contact. For the people watching who had been in the stands during the games those third-year seniors had played, the visual produced something between recognition and relief.
The inning closed with a four-run cushion. Miyuki had reached base without converting it into a run, which earned him the predictable observation from familiar teammates about his selective motivation with the bases empty. But the damage was already done.
Four runs ahead, Tanba walked back onto the mound for the bottom of the third inning and pitched like a different person from the one who had occasionally struggled to find consistency in previous outings.
The high-breaking curveball came out of his hand with the authority of something that had been waiting for the right conditions to emerge fully. His fastball sharpened alongside it. When the offense produces for a pitcher with Tanba's particular psychological architecture, the returns are immediate and visible.
Hakuzan's batters came in already carrying the weight of the four-run deficit, and that weight made the curveball look even more impossible than it actually was. Three outs arrived with minimal resistance.
From the bench, Isashiki watched and delivered his assessment.
"His luck is something else. I always thought yours was the best on the team, but Tanba might actually have you beat."
Zhang Han shook his head.
"I don't think it's only luck. When the team has the lead, Tanba-senpai is genuinely reliable. His high-breaking curveball, when it's working, is not something many batters in Tokyo can hit right now."
He meant it honestly and without flattery.
Tanba's situation was one Zhang Han had observed with more attention since becoming part of the pitching conversation himself. The talent was undeniable. In terms of pure pitching ability and natural gift, Tanba likely surpassed Hidezawa. The characteristics that defined his pitching were unusual enough and difficult enough to replicate that ordinary comparisons didn't quite fit. Three prestigious school programs had extended invitations to him coming out of junior high, despite him having been a substitute, not a starter, at his middle school program. The raw material had always been there.
The problems were separate from the talent.
His stamina had a ceiling that revealed itself past a certain pitch count, and the self-destruction that followed was not a gradual decline but a sudden change of state. More pressingly, sustained pressure from the opposition worked on him differently than it worked on most pitchers. A team that targeted him with patience and made him work through long at-bat sequences could reach something fragile underneath the surface ability. He knew this about himself. Knowing it had not given him the tools to change it, because the root of it was temperament, and temperament was not a technical problem with a technical solution.
Zhang Han, as a batter first, had shared Azuma Kiyokuni's private skepticism about whether Tanba could carry the burden of the Ace position over a full tournament run. That skepticism had not entirely resolved. But watching him from the other side of the battery, from within the pitching conversation, Zhang Han had also seen what happened when the conditions aligned in Tanba's favor.
The high-breaking curveball, deployed at the right moment against a lineup that hadn't seen it and couldn't manufacture an adjustment in real time, was enough to dominate an at-bat completely. The talent in that pitch alone was sufficient to make an opponent helpless when everything was working.
Right now, everything was working.
The fourth inning proceeded from the bottom of the order, and three more runs came home across it. The fifth inning followed, adding another three. The scoreboard reached ten to zero, and the arithmetic of the mercy rule came into range.
Ten runs ahead after five innings meant the game could end if Hakuzan failed to score in the bottom of the fifth.
The bottom of the fifth inning opened with Hakuzan's cleanup hitter stepping to the plate, facing a Tanba who was still operating at the same elevated level he had been carrying since the third.
The stands watched with a specific kind of attention, waiting to see how quickly the ending would arrive.
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