Seido’s first inning on offense had not gone the way anyone in the dugout would have preferred.

The players who had taken the field gave their full effort and got nothing back for it. Akai was proving to be exactly what the pre-game assessment had suggested: a pitcher with genuine ability, operating at a level that made clean hits difficult to produce even for a Seido lineup. Three up, three down, or something close enough to it that the half-inning ended without a run crossing the plate.

The bottom of the first inning arrived, and Hakuzan’s players came to the plate with momentum built from the shutdown they had just witnessed.

In the Hakuzan dugout, before the inning began, Yasuda had done his work.

The team’s catcher and captain had delivered the kind of speech that targeted exactly the right pressure point. Tanba’s Koshien performance had been uneven. His showing in the Tokyo regional tournament before that had not been the stuff of dominant pitching narratives.

As far as Hakuzan was concerned, the most dangerous thing about the Seido lineup was the bats, not the arm standing on the mound right now. And two of the most dangerous bats were sitting on the bench.

The logic was clean and the conclusion was encouraging: there was a window here. Find the opportunity, score first, and deal with what comes after once it arrives.

Hakuzan’s players took the field with genuine belief in what their captain had told them. The stances they adopted in the on-deck area carried the particular alertness of a group that had decided this was a game they could affect rather than simply survive.

Behind the plate, Miyuki settled into his crouch and looked out at the field with careful attention.

He had reviewed footage of this lineup the previous evening. What he had seen hadn’t flagged any individual as especially threatening. But watching film and watching a team actually step up to the plate with this kind of energy were different exercises, and what the film had shown him was already becoming insufficient as a basis for decision-making. Real information required real contact. He would need to read what the at-bats themselves told him.

The more pressing question in his mind was Tanba.

Since Coach Kataoka had publicly handed him the second game, Tanba had been operating at an intensity that had not significantly diminished overnight. The fire had stayed lit. His fighting spirit coming into today was genuinely high, the kind that produced either exceptional performances or tense disagreements with the catcher depending on how the battery handled the collaboration.

Miyuki had a choice to make before a single pitch was thrown. He could impose a systematic, data-driven approach to getting through Hakuzan’s lineup, calling pitches according to percentage outcomes and opponent tendencies. That was the approach that minimized variables and maximized the probability of efficient outs.

The problem was that Tanba was not a pitcher who functioned well when he felt like a mechanism being operated rather than a craftsman making decisions. Suppress his instincts and his confidence, and the resulting compromise would serve neither of them. The knot that would form between them would grow with every pitch he accepted reluctantly, every signal he followed while internally disagreeing.

Better to work with what was actually in front of him.

Miyuki made his call and extended his glove, placing it as a target that communicated something clear and direct: throw your best breaking ball, right here.

Tanba read the signal and felt something click.

He had thrown with Miyuki during the Koshien games, but that experience had been filtered through the anxiety of high-stakes uncertainty and the particular numbness that came from trying to manage nerves on a national stage. He hadn’t been able to feel what was actually happening between them.

This was different. His senses were clear and present.

The realization arrived without announcement: the junior he had found irritating, whose confidence came across as presumptuous, might actually be something genuinely rare behind the plate.

He decided to test the thought.

“Then you’d better catch it.”

Tanba wound up and threw.

At the plate, Hakuzan’s leadoff hitter watched the ball leave the hand and made an immediate read on its trajectory. It was tracking high. His instinct said let it go, and the data his eyes were sending him confirmed it. He held.

The ball broke.

Not a gradual descent. A sudden, significant drop, arriving just in front of the plate and falling through the zone in a way that collapsed the geometry the batter had built his decision around.

He stood completely still, processing what had just happened.

A curveball with that kind of break was something he had not encountered before in any meaningful competition. He had faced pitchers from first-tier programs. He had seen breaking balls that worked. He had never seen a curveball drop at that angle with that severity from a pitch that had spent most of its flight path looking entirely different.

In the stands, a particularly enthusiastic Seido supporter had already begun crowing at the opposing dugout with an energy that probably exceeded what the situation strictly called for. The relative emptiness of the Hakuzan fan section made this considerably less risky than it would have been elsewhere.

Among the more measured voices in the stands, there was genuine reassessment happening.

“First time I’ve ever seen a high-breaking curveball with a drop like that.”

Several veteran fans sat forward slightly, revising opinions they had formed during the Koshien tournament where Tanba’s outings had been inconsistent enough to leave a mixed impression. Coach Kataoka did not give a player the Ace designation casually.

If Tanba had been carrying this pitch the whole time, the inconsistency made a different kind of sense: a pitcher with elite breaking ball ability that hadn’t yet been deployed in the situations that required it most.

“In terms of talent, Tanba is probably among the best current pitchers.”

The personality remained its own separate category of challenge. That part would require patience and repetition and the kind of ongoing negotiation that coaching a strong-willed pitcher always demanded. But the talent was real, and the pitch that had just frozen a capable hitter in the box was sufficient evidence on its own.

What followed was a study in anticipation working against itself.

Miyuki had called the high-breaking curveball exactly once, on the very first pitch. Having seen what it did to their leadoff hitter, the Hakuzan batters who came up afterward could not help but organize their preparation around the expectation of seeing it again. The pitch had been too singular, too dominant, too clearly Tanba’s best weapon for them to simply set it aside.

Miyuki never called it again.

Batter after batter stepped in looking for something that didn’t come, leaving themselves slightly out of position for everything that did. The distraction was invisible and effective, and the inning moved through Hakuzan’s lineup without producing the kind of sustained threat Yasuda had been building toward in the dugout.

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