Nine swings in total. Three of them foul.

That left six genuine exchanges between Zhang Han and Sawamura, stripped of everything else.

Of those six, Zhang Han hit two home runs, one long hit, and one infield hit. The remaining two landed in fair territory, but with Seido’s own fielders positioned on defense, there was at least a sixty percent chance those would have been caught or turned into outs.

By any honest measure, Zhang Han was the clear winner.

If he had been inclined toward the kind of shamelessness Azuma Kiyokuni occasionally displayed, he could have stood up straight and declared that he hadn’t missed a single time. But he couldn’t do that with a clear conscience. In those six exchanges, he had been genuinely beaten at least once, and if the defense behind him had been sharp, twice was a real possibility.

A third-year middle schooler who had never thrown a hardball in a formal setting, pitching with Miyuki behind the plate for the first time, had pushed Zhang Han to that kind of accounting. It was enough to leave a quiet kind of admiration sitting in his chest.

“Truly amazing.”

He said it without any performance behind it. He meant it simply and directly.

And that was just his own matchup with Sawamura. It didn’t include what had happened during the rounds with Azuma Kiyokuni.

For a debut on the Seido High School Baseball field, Sawamura had made an impression that nobody present was going to forget quickly.

“Are you in a rush to head back? If not, I can show you around.”

Zhang Han offered it casually, leaving the choice open.

Sawamura forced himself to nod, despite the fact that his body was sending him very different signals.

It was a strange thing to reckon with. Back in Akagi, pitching seventy, eighty, even over a hundred balls in a single session was ordinary. He had done it enough times that it barely registered as exertion. Today, between the exchanges with Azuma Kiyokuni and Zhang Han, he had thrown somewhere around twenty-seven or twenty-eight pitches in total. Not even thirty.

And he felt completely hollowed out.

If the setting had been even slightly less public, he would have been flat on his back already.

These guys were monsters. There was simply no other word for it.

What made it worse was watching them after the exchanges were done. No labored breathing. No sheen of sweat. No visible sign that anything particularly demanding had just occurred. Not on Zhang Han, and not even on that broad-shouldered senior from earlier. They moved and spoke exactly as they had at the start of the afternoon.

Even Sawamura, naive as he could sometimes be about the wider world, understood what he had just witnessed. Neither of them had been drawing this out or managing their energy carefully. When a pitch wasn’t worth swinging at, they had let it go. When one was worth swinging at, they had swung without hesitation. No conservation, no strategy for endurance.

The results were simply the true difference in their abilities.

Three home runs given up in a short afternoon. The gap between himself and these two was not something that could be described in ordinary terms.

Zhang Han, for his part, was in unusually high spirits. It was rare to come across a junior who held his attention the way Sawamura had, and that energy came through in how he led the tour, his explanations running longer and more detailed than they typically would.

“This is our indoor strength training room.”

Sawamura stepped through the door and stopped.

He turned in a slow circle, taking it in, looking very much like someone who had wandered into a place they hadn’t been prepared for.

The room was not a school strength training facility. It was a professional gym, and not a modest one. It was large, comprehensively equipped, and built with a level of investment that belonged in a different category from anything Sawamura had previously imagined when he thought about school baseball.

“Our school’s training facilities are modeled entirely after professional baseball teams,” Zhang Han said, looking back at Sawamura with an expression that already knew what it would find. “The only real difference is that we don’t have a dedicated game stadium. Our practice field is the right size, but there are no stands or framework around it.”

The admiration in Sawamura’s eyes was exactly where Zhang Han had expected it to be.

He had a theory that truly unmaterialistic people existed in the world, though he had never personally encountered one. What he was confident about was that baseball players with real ambition were not among them. Good teammates, good facilities, a real competitive environment, these things pulled at anyone who genuinely cared about the sport, the same way a new pair of quality shoes pulled at someone who lived for basketball. You couldn’t separate the love of the game from the desire for the conditions that let you play it at the highest level.

“This is too luxurious.”

Sawamura’s voice came out as something between awe and a complaint he didn’t know how to finish.

The outdoor field and the pitching machines had surprised him, certainly. But those had remained within a range he could process. He had heard about schools with serious funding. He knew that well-supported programs had equipment he didn’t have access to in Akagi. The machines at Seido were more advanced and more numerous than anything he had seen, but pitching machines, at least, were a concept he already held in his mind.

This room was something else. It didn’t fit inside the picture he had built of what school baseball looked like. It belonged to a different world entirely, and standing inside it made the gap between that world and his feel suddenly very concrete.

How were you supposed to compete with something like this?

No matter how hard he and his teammates pushed themselves, how many early mornings they gave up, how many evenings they stayed late, the people who trained in a facility like this were working with advantages that effort alone couldn’t overcome. It felt, in a word, unfair.

“You’re basically cheating.”

Zhang Han didn’t laugh it off.

“High school baseball sits very close to the professional level. It’s a sport that belongs to everyone in theory, but the differences within it are sharp and real. A grassroots team pulls off something remarkable every now and then, but the programs that consistently reach the top and stay there are the powerhouses. That pattern doesn’t change.”

He kept his voice even, not unkind, but not softening the point either.

“Koshien has become the most important baseball event in this country outside of the professional leagues. In that context, public schools and grassroots teams are participants. The teams that consistently deliver the competitive games, the ones that professional scouts spend their time watching, are the structured programs built along professional lines. The players who come out of those environments are the ones who get evaluated seriously.”

He paused for a moment before continuing.

“If you want your three years of high school to actually test what you’re capable of, and give you a real sense of your future in this sport, then a powerhouse program is the only honest answer. I heard some things about you from Takashima Rei. You want to make it to Koshien with your friends from home, right?”

Sawamura didn’t respond immediately.

“I’m not saying that to mock you. I actually like that kind of story. It has the feel of a manga protagonist, chasing something against the odds with the people who matter most.” Zhang Han’s expression was genuine as he said it. “But this isn’t a manga. In the real world, that kind of outcome is genuinely rare, and in Nagano Prefecture specifically, it borders on impossible.”

It wasn’t cruelty. It was geography and economics laid out plainly. Nagano was one of the least developed prefectures in the Kanto region when it came to baseball culture. The competitive atmosphere was thin, the financial support for programs was limited, and tourism was the one industry that showed any life. The conditions needed to produce a powerhouse team simply weren’t present there, and that wasn’t anyone’s fault.

“And there’s something else.” Zhang Han looked at Sawamura directly. “You’ve never had professional coaching, have you? Your pitching, from what I’ve been watching this afternoon, is full of flaws.”

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

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