Tanaka rolled his eyes.

“What do you think?”

Azuma Kiyokuni went quiet for a moment, and then something clicked behind his eyes.

“I was wondering why that kid was so eager to step in. Turns out he had already started planning to take power before the new team was even formed.”

Captain Tanaka stared at him.

They had been teammates for almost three years. In all that time, Tanaka had always taken Azuma Kiyokuni for someone who moved through life carelessly, unbothered by the kind of details that required patience to notice. He had apparently misjudged him entirely.

The man’s imagination, it turned out, was vivid enough to script a full television drama.

“How did you even arrive at that?”

“Does it need to be spelled out? Once we graduate, the new captain will obviously be a second-year. The Director already talked to you about recommendations, didn’t he? I put forward Yuuki. Either way, the captain’s spot won’t go to a first-year. But the cleanup hitter position is a completely different story.”

Yuuki Tetsuya had performed with his usual quiet reliability throughout the Summer Tournament and Koshien. No obvious cracks, no collapse under pressure, and in several moments where the team needed steadiness most, he had delivered it. His contributions were real and consistent.

But consistency, compared to spectacle, was easy to overlook. Zhang Han had broken two Koshien records in his first year. He had hit home runs. He radiated the kind of presence that cameras and highlight reels were drawn to naturally. When it came to sheer impressiveness, and when you stacked the home run numbers and the record-breaking moments together, Zhang Han had a genuine argument for the cleanup hitter position.

Their batting averages and on-base percentages were close enough to make the case even more complicated.

Before Azuma Kiyokuni laid it out, Tanaka hadn’t thought about it in those terms. Now that he had, it was difficult to dismiss.

The Director was not someone who felt obligated to follow convention for its own sake. If he decided a first-year was the right fit for cleanup, a rule that said otherwise wouldn’t stop him from making that call.

“I recommended Yuuki for captain as well.”

Tanaka said it plainly, without particular enthusiasm. That wasn’t a reflection of how he felt about Yuuki’s qualities. If he was being straightforward with himself, Yuuki Tetsuya’s personality leaned too far inward for the captain role to suit him naturally. A captain needed to carry the team’s energy outward, and that wasn’t instinctive for someone built the way Yuuki was.

But among the second-year players, the honest answer was that there was no one better suited for the position. Yuuki carried a quiet kind of authority among his peers that didn’t need to be announced. His baseball ability was beyond question. For the Seido High School Baseball Team at this particular moment, he was the most appropriate choice available, and that was the standard Tanaka applied. Not who was best in an ideal sense, but who fit what the team actually needed right now.

That was how Seido had always approached selecting a captain. Their own graduating class was proof of it. Tanaka had been given the role, not Azuma Kiyokuni with all his hitting power, and not Ace Hidezawa with all his presence on the mound. Coach Kataoka had looked at the group and decided Tanaka was the right fit for what the team required, and he had made that call without sentimentality.

It had worked out well enough. Even before Zhang Han and Miyuki had joined as first-years, the Seido High School Baseball Team had already been building something real. Their arrival had accelerated everything, cutting off detours that might have cost the team an entire season or more. Teams that had once been running level with Seido found themselves falling behind in ways they couldn’t fully account for, outpaced by a growth rate that two particular first-years had made possible.

None of this, however, was anywhere near the front of Zhang Han’s mind.

He had no idea that his two seniors had just constructed an elaborate internal drama around his future position in the team’s batting order. He was, at this moment, fully absorbed in the exchange still unfolding on the field.

“Do you want to keep going?”

He directed the question at both of them, Miyuki behind the plate and Sawamura on the mound. The home run had already happened. What Zhang Han wanted to see now was what came after it. Whether the young man on the mound had the kind of spirit that absorbed a hit like that and kept moving, or the kind that quietly began to deflate once the scoreboard shifted.

Sawamura stood on the mound and looked at the players in front of him, the field around him, and seemed to be processing something that went beyond the at-bat.

“Every one of them is like a monster. This is the standard of a prestigious school.”

He said it without bitterness, more like someone reading a sign at the edge of a world they hadn’t known existed before today.

Back in Akagi, Sawamura had never once believed that he and his companions were inferior to anyone. His reasoning was uncomplicated and completely sincere: everyone had two legs and one stomach, so who was afraid of whom? Under his leadership, the Akagi Junior High School Baseball Team had taken on a real shape. They had fought hard, and they had earned the attention of several high schools in Nagano Prefecture, all of whom had extended recruitment offers to Sawamura specifically, willing to take him in as a special recruit without requiring him to sit the entrance examination.

Those offers had all quietly disappeared after an incident in his final summer tournament. A slapping incident that didn’t need to be dwelt on, but that had shut those doors before he could choose whether to walk through them.

Not that he had been planning to accept. Those schools had wanted him alone. His teammates weren’t part of the offer, and even if he could have joined a stronger program without friction, his companions would have found themselves sitting on the bench, watching rather than playing. He couldn’t have agreed to that. He was their leader first, and that responsibility came before any personal opportunity.

But the fact that those invitations had come at all had left a mark on him. It had confirmed something he had suspected but never had outside validation for: his pitching was valued. He had real talent. He had genuine strength.

That belief had been a foundation for everything since.

And now, standing on this mound, looking out at this field, something in that foundation was shifting.

He had spent his baseball life in a small pond. He had believed it was a big one. Today, for the first time, he could see the ocean.

And with it came a realization that settled into him slowly and without mercy. No matter how hard he and his friends from home pushed themselves, they would never reach the level of the players standing in front of him right now. The gap was not one that hard work alone could close. It was a difference of level, of resource, of environment, of everything. With his companions beside him, baseball would remain a beloved part of life, but it would never be more than that. It would never take them anywhere like this.

There is a particular kind of despair that comes not from failing to see the end of a road, but from seeing it clearly and knowing you cannot reach it. That is the heavier version. That was what Sawamura felt standing on the mound in that moment, his worldview rearranging itself piece by piece.

“Again!”

He said it anyway.

Even as the things he had held most dear were being quietly dismantled inside him, he did not step back from the mound. He did not look for a way to end the afternoon gracefully. He turned and faced it directly.

A smile came to Zhang Han’s face, slow and genuine.

In that moment, everything else around him seemed to lose focus.

“Good.”

The duel that followed ran sixteen pitches in total. Zhang Han swung nine times and let seven go. Of the seven he didn’t swing at, only one had been deliberate observation at the start. The other six had been pitches he simply couldn’t make clean contact with, balls that broke at angles too sharp, trajectories that would have produced fly balls or infield grounders no matter how well-timed the swing. He had watched them travel into Miyuki’s mitt with the particular frustration of a hitter who had read the pitch correctly and still had no good answer for it.

Of the nine swings he did take, not all of them found the barrel cleanly either.

************************************

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