Author Note: Decided to do a small drop of chapters as to quickly finish this match and get towards the end of this Volume. Hope you enjoy.

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Bottom of the third inning. Seido back on offense.

The previous half-inning had not gone the way anyone in the Seido dugout had wanted, and Maki had returned to the mound carrying the confidence of a pitcher who had just watched his defense execute a perfect relay throw to preserve his lead. The scoreboard still read one to zero, and the inning began with Maki retiring the first batter on strikes, then the second, then the third.

Three up, three down. Four strikeouts in the inning.

The enormous figure on the mound had become something different from what the Seido players had been prepared for when the game began. The home run and the solid defensive execution had established Sensen as a team operating with genuine purpose, and Maki at the center of it was the clearest expression of that purpose.

His release point, his stride mechanics, the specific geometry of how his pitches arrived at the plate from that height, all of it was combining into a problem that resisted the usual adjustments.

In the stands, the more knowledgeable section of the crowd was working through the physics of it.

“From that height, the ball doesn’t travel in a flat line toward the batter. It travels on a diagonal. That changes what the batter has to hit. It’s not a line anymore, it’s a single point, the exact intersection of the bat and that descending trajectory. Everything has to be right simultaneously: timing, angle, power. Miss any one of them and you’ve missed the pitch.”

The general conclusion the fans were reaching was that this was legitimately difficult for everyone in the Seido lineup, not just the batters who had already struggled.

Yuuki had managed to find it once. The consensus was that Zhang Han probably could as well, given sufficient at-bats to calibrate. But Sensen had already demonstrated they understood this, and their response was to ensure that neither of those two got sufficient at-bats in dangerous situations. Walk them when runners are on. Let the other Seido batters try to solve Maki instead.

The logic was sound. Whether it was sufficient was the question the game was still answering.

Bottom of the third inning, second time through the order. Kuramochi stepped into the batter’s box on the right-handed side.

Maki looked in from the mound and exchanged a brief signal with his infielders. The pre-game preparation that Ugai had organized had covered Kuramochi’s switch-hitting tendencies with the specificity of a coach who had spent considerable time with the available data.

From the right-handed position, Kuramochi’s bunt rate across recorded games was effectively zero. The profile pointed clearly toward a direct swing.

The infield positioned accordingly.

Maki delivered his pitch with the short stride and high release that had been making life difficult for every Seido batter since the first inning.

Kuramochi squared.

The Sensen infielders, who had not moved forward in anticipation of a bunt because the data told them not to expect one, found themselves standing in positions that were suddenly wrong for the situation in front of them.

“Ping.”

The bunt was not an improvisation. It was the conclusion of a process that had begun at the start of the tournament, a deliberate pattern of behavior from the left-handed position designed to establish a reliable data trail that opposing teams would trust. Right-handed, he never bunts. The data was real because he had made it real, specifically so that this moment could exist.

The Sensen third baseman reacted. He was well-trained and his response to the unexpected contact was quick by any reasonable standard. He moved forward, fielded the ball cleanly, and turned toward first base with a calculation already running in his head.

Then he located Kuramochi.

Four or five meters from the bag, already.

The calculation concluded instantly: the throw would not arrive in time. The third baseman held the ball and stood there absorbing the result of a play that had been designed and executed across multiple games specifically to produce this outcome.

“Safe!”

No outs. Runner on first base.

The reaction from the Seido dugout had a quality of specific satisfaction mixed with the more general relief of putting a runner on against a pitcher who had been making clean baserunners feel scarce. Kuramochi jogged to the bag with the expression of someone whose plan has worked exactly as intended.

Sensen’s strategy of avoiding Yuuki and Zhang Han and concentrating their competitive energy on the other Seido batters was logical in the way that many strategies were logical: it was built on a reasonable set of assumptions about what those other batters could and couldn’t do.

The assumption contained the problem.

Takashima Rei did not recruit players to fill gaps in a roster without evaluating what those players actually were. Every player currently in the Seido starting lineup had come through a selection process that was specific and demanding, had competed internally against a roster full of players with similar profiles, and had survived that competition to earn their position.

The players Sensen was treating as the softer targets in the lineup were not soft. They had abilities that hadn’t yet been fully displayed in this tournament, partly because the previous opponents hadn’t been capable enough to require them.

Sensen was capable enough.

The conditions for those abilities to emerge were now present, and the bottom of the third inning was where they were beginning to do exactly that.

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