Note: Just felt like releasing Today’s Second Chapter with the first One, Tell me your thoughts. Should I release both at a time or spacing them out is fine.

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Standing closer, Zhang Han could observe with far more precision.

When Sawamura released his second pitch, Zhang Han finally understood why Azuma Kiyokuni hadn’t swung at the first one.

The ball moved. Not in the way a deliberate breaking ball moved, with the clean, trained arc of something practiced and refined. This was different. The trajectory shifted in ways that felt almost accidental, darting and bending as though the ball itself hadn’t quite decided where it was going.

Zhang Han hadn’t seen many examples of this, but he could piece together a great deal just from watching the reactions of the three people involved. Azuma’s stillness at the first pitch. Miyuki’s quiet intensity behind the plate. The young man on the mound throwing with full conviction, completely unaware of what made his pitches so difficult to read.

The conclusion was straightforward. Sawamura hadn’t specifically trained to throw breaking balls. These erratic variations weren’t a technique he had developed. They were simply part of how he threw, an inherent quality baked into his mechanics rather than something learned.

There was a name for pitchers like this. Quirk ball pitchers, they were called. Players whose unrefined, non-standard throwing motions produced balls that darted unpredictably, not because of deliberate spin or grip adjustments, but because the irregularity was built into the delivery itself. Zhang Han had heard Ono Binchi mention such pitchers before in passing. He had never actually watched one throw until this moment.

In terms of raw pitching talent, Sawamura was already in a different league from Zhang Han, and Zhang Han knew it plainly.

His own talent had never really been in the craft of pitching itself. What he had was rapid development. In a short window of time, he had pushed his ball speed and control far enough that he was representing Matsukata Little League on the field by his first year of junior high. That kind of accelerated progress had its own value.

But it also had a ceiling, and he had hit it sooner than he would have liked. Once his ball speed and control reached a certain point, the rate of improvement dropped sharply. Toujou, a year behind him, had closed the gap and eventually taken the Ace position. There were other factors involved, certainly, but the core of it was simple enough: Toujou’s pitching wasn’t significantly weaker than Zhang Han’s, and whatever head start Zhang Han had carried, it hadn’t been enough to last.

The one advantage Zhang Han had genuinely held over his junior was mentality. Having been a starter from his first year, he had accumulated experience and composure that Toujou hadn’t yet built. That steadiness was why Ono Binchi kept turning to him in critical situations. A pitcher who didn’t make mistakes under pressure was worth more than one who was slightly more talented but rattled easily.

That truth, understood clearly and acknowledged honestly, was what had eventually led Zhang Han to accept the coaching staff’s recommendation. He lacked true pitching talent. Rather than grinding away toward mediocrity on the mound, it made more sense to invest everything into becoming the kind of fielder who could reach the very top.

Sawamura was the opposite of him in almost every relevant way.

How his development would unfold from here was still an open question. But the talent he was carrying right now was undeniably top-tier. Ball speed and control could be trained. Even without exceptional natural ability, a pitcher could work toward 135 kilometers per hour and learn to hit corners consistently enough to compete. They were difficult ceilings to reach without elite talent, but they were reachable.

If Sawamura developed those things, and layered them on top of the quirk ball quality he already possessed without even trying, then what he could become was not hard to imagine. Zhang Han could see it. Takashima Rei and the coaching staff would see it too, if they hadn’t already.

A natural breaking ball.

Zhang Han felt a genuine pang of envy, brief but honest. No wonder Miyuki was throwing himself into this with such unusual investment. Sawamura was an unpolished raw gem, and even the smallest amount of proper shaping would send light through him in every direction.

What Zhang Han didn’t yet know was that Sawamura’s natural talent extended further than just the quirk ball. His instincts for ball speed and control were better than they appeared, and the quirk ball itself was not as simple as the ordinary version of that quality. But even without knowing any of that, Zhang Han had already seen enough to recognize that Sawamura was qualified to become a serious force for Seido. Given the right development and a bit of luck, reaching the Ace position by his third year was not out of the question.

As a future rival on the path to the mound, Sawamura was exactly the kind of opponent that made the journey worth taking.

Zhang Han found himself wondering, not for the first time, whether his left-handed pitching would eventually be capable of standing up to that.

The thought was still turning in his mind when the duel in front of him produced a new result.

Miyuki had apparently issued some kind of provocation toward First-string, because Azuma Kiyokuni swung at the second pitch. The ball came off his bat as a foul. The irregular movement, somewhere between a changeup and something harder to categorize, was proving more difficult to handle than it looked from outside the batter’s box. But that wasn’t the detail that bothered Azuma most.

What bothered him was that the ball kept finding the spots he liked least. No matter how he adjusted his stance beforehand, the pitch seemed to locate his weakness with unsettling accuracy. Miyuki was behind every call, and standing there being picked apart by his own teammate felt like a particular kind of indignity.

He genuinely had not realized, when they were still on the same side of the field during regular practice, that Miyuki was capable of being this calculated.

The third pitch arrived in another uncomfortable location. Azuma had been stoked by Miyuki’s comments, and the thought of simply making contact hadn’t crossed his mind. A clean single wouldn’t satisfy anything. What he needed was to put the ball over the fence, to hit something that left no room for argument or provocation.

He swung with everything.

“Boom!”

The force of it stirred the air in the hitting area into something close to a small whirlwind. The bat connected, and the ball launched skyward in a long, soaring arc that gave everyone watching the same immediate impression: it was going out.

It didn’t go out.

The ball came down roughly twenty meters short of the fence.

“An outfield long hit!”

Azuma Kiyokuni declared this without any visible embarrassment, as though the definition of the result was simply a matter of whoever spoke first.

“If one of our fielders had been out there, it probably would have been caught,” Miyuki said flatly, making his disagreement with that interpretation entirely clear.

On the mound, Sawamura stood with a visible jolt running through him.

He had actually hit it that far. And that fast. Sawamura put himself in the shoes of someone watching from back home in Akagi, and by the standard of anyone he had ever played with, a ball struck like that would have been more than enough for the batter to round all the bases and come home.

The thought sat heavily for a moment.

“Again!”

He demanded it anyway.

Behind the plate, something close to quiet despair settled into Miyuki’s expression.

Azuma-senpai had not changed his grip between pitches. He hadn’t stepped forward prematurely or committed too early to a swing. Against Sawamura, he had not yet come close to showing his full capability, whether out of a refusal to dignify the matchup with his best effort, or simply because he hadn’t yet taken it entirely seriously.

Even so, he had been reading Sawamura’s pitching more clearly with every exchange. The patterns were becoming familiar. If Sawamura pushed this any further, the one who ended up learning a hard lesson would not be Azuma-senpai.

And if Azuma-senpai landed a genuine home run at this stage, the damage to Sawamura might not be something that faded easily. A moment like that, delivered at the wrong time to someone still forming their sense of themselves as a pitcher, could leave a mark that lasted far longer than the afternoon.

“That’s enough for now. Let’s continue.”

Takashima Rei stepped in at exactly the right moment and made the call with quiet authority. She had visited Sawamura’s home. She had met his family and understood something of how they were built. With the kind of easygoing, unshakeable personalities that household seemed to produce, she found it genuinely difficult to picture anything leaving a permanent dent in that young man’s spirit.

Still, there was no reason to test the theory unnecessarily.

Azuma Kiyokuni dropped his argument with Miyuki without ceremony and turned his gaze toward the pitcher’s mound. His expression had gone flat and unreadable.

Two rounds. One strikeout. One ball put into deep outfield territory.

He had not expected this outcome. Not even close.

Since the day he had been recognized as the strongest high school hitter in the country, a certain arrogance had settled into him. He didn’t consider it entirely unjustified. His skill had already grown beyond what most high school competition could meaningfully test, and his focus had shifted almost entirely toward the professional level waiting ahead of him.

That was the lens through which he had approached this, casually, from a distance, as something that didn’t require his full attention.

He hadn’t expected an unknown country boy to push him to the edge of that complacency.

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