The first round of the Autumn Tournament had brought the Seido High School Baseball Team face to face with Seisenji, and the pre-game data had given the Seido players genuine reason for caution.

Three practice games. One run allowed. And that single run had come from a fielding error behind the pitcher, which meant Nishikawa himself had not surrendered a single earned run across all three outings. When the Seido players had sat with that number honestly, not one of them was fully confident their own team could replicate it. They could guarantee a win against most opposition. They could not guarantee they would hold an opponent to one run or less.

Seisenji had actually done it.

That was worth taking seriously, and the Seido players had taken it seriously coming into the game.

But as the innings began to unfold, the picture shifted.

The opposition was disciplined and clearly well-prepared. Nishikawa’s pitching had its own character, and the defense behind him moved with a practiced urgency that reflected genuine effort. None of it was fake. But the gap between what Seisenji could do and what Seido brought to a game was becoming increasingly apparent with every at-bat.

“Third batter. Center fielder. Isashiki Jun.”

Isashiki had been watching Nishikawa carefully from the moment the game started, and what he had identified wasn’t a pitch in the strike zone to punish. It was the pitch outside it, the one thrown with a secondary purpose, the one meant to create an opportunity elsewhere on the basepaths. He recognized the intention behind it and swung anyway.

“Ping!”

The ball landed cleanly in the gap between the shortstop and second base. The Seisenji fielders had clearly drilled for exactly this kind of situation. Both of them moved immediately, both of them dove, both of them arrived close enough to make the attempt look dangerous.

Neither of them caught it.

The ball skipped past both outstretched gloves and rolled into the outfield grass.

In the stands, the Seido supporters who had been watching with a mix of excitement and lingering uncertainty about this new roster finally exhaled.

The third-year players were gone. Azuma Kiyokuni had gone. The offense that had lit up Koshien seemed, from the outside, like it might have left with them. But this team was answering that question in real time, and the answer was coming back clearly.

No outs. Runners on first and second.

The fourth batter stepped in.

Yuuki Tetsuya.

On the mound, Nishikawa felt the weight of the moment land fully. He had prepared for this matchup more thoroughly than any other. Before the game, he had run through simulation after simulation of how to approach each Seido player with a meaningful history, and for every one of them, he had found at least a conceptual path through. For most of them, he had found two or three.

For Yuuki, every simulation had ended the same way. The ball got hit. There was no version of the matchup where Nishikawa had found an approach that reliably produced an out. Something about Yuuki’s ability to locate the ball, to identify exactly where it was going to be and position his bat accordingly, made him resistant to the kind of strategic sequencing that Nishikawa relied on. It wasn’t raw power that made him difficult. It was precision combined with patience, and that combination didn’t have a clean answer.

No outs. Runners on first and second. The third batter had just extended the inning without making an out.

Nishikawa looked at Yuuki standing in the box with that expression that gave away absolutely nothing, and made his decision.

He nodded to Ueki.

Ueki stood up, stepping to the side of the plate and holding his mitt out to the right, leaving the entire strike zone wide open.

“Ball!”

“Ball!!”

“Ball!!!”

“Ball!!!!”

“Take your base.”

Four pitches. None of them thrown anywhere near the zone. Yuuki walked to first base without a word, without any particular change in expression, as if this outcome had been entirely expected.

The stands went quiet for a beat, then came back with a considerable amount of noise.

The fans were trying to work out the logic. Intentionally walking Yuuki at this point meant loading the bases with nobody out, and the person standing in the on-deck circle was not a mystery. Everyone in the stadium had seen what Zhang Han had done at Koshien. His numbers against Osaka Kiryuu alone had been extraordinary. Choosing to avoid Yuuki and hand the ball directly to Zhang Han was a decision that required either an extremely specific plan or an unusually high tolerance for risk.

Zhang Han himself felt none of the irritation that might have been expected. Being passed over in favor of a confrontation with him wasn’t something that landed as an insult. It was, if anything, the opposite. It meant the opportunity had arrived on better terms. Bases loaded, no outs, a pitcher who had been forced into a difficult position and was now facing a hitter he couldn’t avoid.

He stepped into the box and looked out at Nishikawa.

He could see it from the setup. Nishikawa wanted to actually pitch, to show what he had, to find out for himself what would happen when someone finally stood in and let the ball come. None of the previous Seido batters had done that. Every one of them had found a way to avoid the direct confrontation, using what the situation offered rather than what they preferred.

This was the moment Nishikawa had been waiting for.

Zhang Han was happy to give it to him.

The pitch came in. The speed was moderate, but the movement on the ball was genuine and unusual. Something in the rotation told Zhang Han the pitch was going to drop, and it was going to drop later in its path than a conventional breaking ball would. A pitcher who could generate that kind of late movement without elite velocity was someone worth paying attention to.

Zhang Han had paid attention.

And then he swung.

The swing had a low arc to it, a golf-style motion that caught the ball at the bottom of its drop, generating lift rather than fighting the pitch’s natural direction. The contact was clean and immediate. The crack that came off the bat had a particular quality to it that made people in the stands turn instinctively toward the sky.

The ball climbed.

It kept climbing.

It crossed the infield, cleared the outfield, passed over the warning track, cleared the wall, and continued traveling until it landed somewhere beyond the stadium entirely, out of sight from every person watching.

For a long moment, the stadium held its breath.

Then it did not hold anything quietly at all.

“A grand slam! Seido High School leads five to zero!”

Five to zero.

A single swing. Four runs. The game’s outcome, if it had been in question before, was no longer in question now.

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