When Maki walked back into the dugout, Ugai’s face had reorganized itself into the particular arrangement of deep wrinkles that appeared when he was genuinely pleased. He looked at his first-year pitcher with the expression of someone whose investment had just returned something beyond what they had dared to project.

“Excellent work.”

“Yes, Director.”

Maki’s response was economical, but the feeling underneath it was not. From his first day picking up a baseball through every practice session and every game since, he had not experienced something that felt quite like this.

The specific combination of elements: a full-strength Seido lineup in front of him, his own pitching functioning at the level he had been working toward, and the result confirming that suppressing them was something he could actually do.

If the Seido batters had been easy to handle, the satisfaction would have been hollow. A childhood image shattered rather than confirmed. But they had not been easy. The three at-bats had accumulated fourteen pitches.

None of the contact had been clean enough to produce a base hit, but the batters had been working, gathering information through every sequence, adjusting their reads incrementally, making him earn each out. He had felt the pressure in each at-bat as a real thing rather than a formality.

That pressure was what made the three outs worth something.

In the Seido dugout, the analysis of what they had just faced was already underway.

Kuramochi, Kominato, and Isashiki had each brought their observations back to the bench. Isashiki’s contribution came attached to the kind of commentary that required some filtering, but the substance was consistent with what the others had reported. After consolidating the accounts, the picture assembled itself.

The height was the foundation of everything. At over 190 centimeters, Maki’s release point was significantly elevated compared to any pitcher in the tournament so far, and his delivery had been constructed specifically to maximize that advantage.

The small stride was the key element: by shortening his stride, he kept his release point high rather than allowing it to drop toward the conventional position that taller pitchers often defaulted to. The ball left his hand from a height that altered the geometry of its flight path in ways that batting practice against normal pitchers did not prepare a hitter for.

A ball thrown from an elevated release point and arriving in the strike zone did not travel along a horizontal line. It traveled diagonally, descending at an angle. The practical consequence was that the batter needed to locate not a line to intercept but a point: the precise three-dimensional intersection where their swing plane and the ball’s actual flight path would meet. Timing and angle and power all had to converge on that single point simultaneously. The margin for error on each variable was reduced.

“His control isn’t precise enough to consistently hit the low part of the zone,” Miyuki said, with the tone of someone noting a fact rather than offering comfort. “If he could reliably place the ball low in the strike zone, the descent angle would be steeper and that intersection point would be even harder to find.”

He left the implication to complete itself, and it did.

The second inning brought Sensen to the plate, and Maki was their leadoff batter.

The second-year upperclassmen looked at the lineup card and then at the field with expressions of moderate disbelief. Their team’s Ace was also their cleanup hitter, and the performance of the previous half-inning had made this combination feel less surprising than it might have otherwise. Still, the concentration of that much ability in a single first-year player was a thing to sit with.

“How did someone like this not get recruited by a powerhouse program?”

Miyuki shook his head. The answer was simple from his perspective: during junior high, Maki had not been visible enough for that kind of attention. Their paths had not crossed in competition, and Miyuki’s understanding of the junior high circuit during that period didn’t include any significant profile for someone matching Maki’s description.

The second-year upperclassmen looked over at Zhang Han.

“His team’s pitcher when I played them in junior high wasn’t Maki,” Zhang Han said. “Maki was on the bench.”

He remembered the player clearly, because a figure of that height was not something the eye passed over easily. But the game situation had not called for Maki to pitch, and whatever was emerging from him now had been less developed then.

A late bloomer, then. Or something closer to late development: a player whose tools required more time and more stimulus to fully surface.

The second-year upperclassmen exchanged glances with the particular expression of people working through an irony they had been living inside without fully appreciating it.

Their own team had exactly this template. Zhang Han’s junior high career had not placed him in the top tier of his generation in Tokyo by conventional measures. He had been moderately known, not heavily recruited beyond Seido’s interest, not the obvious top prospect that hindsight would later suggest he should have been.

Then he had arrived at Seido and everything about his trajectory had changed. First-year starter. Koshien. Two records broken. Super Rookie designation from the tournament organizers.

The players who had been uncertain about Zhang Han’s potential before his first season had no remaining uncertainty. Looking at Maki now, with that context established, the disbelief required less effort.

Some players were simply built on timelines that conventional scouting didn’t capture. That was not a revelation. It was just easier to accept from a position where one had already watched it happen.

Maki stepped into the batter’s box.

Miyuki and Kawakami treated the at-bat with the full weight it deserved. Nothing in how they approached the sequence suggested that a first-year batter warranted less caution than any other concern on the field. The previous inning had already settled that question.

The sequence was carefully constructed, working corners, varying the approach, giving Maki nothing comfortable to commit to.

Then Kawakami’s second pitch drifted.

Not dramatically. The intended target was the outer edge, and the ball arrived approximately twelve centimeters inside of that target, which placed it well within the center of the zone rather than at its margin. The difference between a pitch that works and a pitch that doesn’t, in a sequence like this, is often smaller than that.

Maki swung.

The contact was full and clean, the kind of contact that large players who have developed their mechanics produce when the location is where their swing is optimized to find it. The ball left the bat with the sound of something that would not be caught in the infield.

It wasn’t.

It carried to the outfield stands and landed there.

The scoreboard moved for the first time.

In the stands and in the Sensen dugout, the reaction was immediate and loud, the release of tension that had been building since the first pitch. Sensen had manufactured a run through their own offensive capabilities against a Seido battery that had been operating with genuine care.

The first run of the game belonged to Sensen Academy.

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