Miyuki’s confirmation landed in the bus with the weight of something that had been suspected but not verified.

Kuramochi leaned forward with the particular intensity of someone who had identified a piece of information they intended to extract fully.

“He actually invited you?”

Miyuki nodded. No point in deflecting now that the subject had been opened.

“Third year of junior high, around this time of year. He came with the players who are now at Inashiro.”

The list assembled itself in the listeners’ minds as he said it. Carlos. Shirakawa. Yamaoka Riku. Yabe. The names that Miyuki had listed minutes earlier, now reframed not as players on an opposing roster but as people who had been standing in front of Miyuki Kazuya with a proposal.

Several of the Tokyo-based players responded out loud before they had finished processing it.

“What kind of team would that have been?”

The answer was obvious enough that nobody needed to say it. Among first-year high school players in Tokyo, excluding the players who had come out of Matsukata Little League, the Inashiro roster had captured a remarkable concentration of the talent that had been distributed across the junior high circuit.

The assembly had not happened by accident or by the passive operation of Inashiro’s recruitment reputation. It had been actively constructed by someone with a specific vision and the personal appeal to make that vision persuasive.

“Who else could pull something like that off except Narumiya Mei?”

The question was rhetorical, and everyone knew it. Narumiya’s combination of ability and personality produced a magnetism that most people found difficult to say no to, which made Miyuki’s refusal more interesting rather than less.

The bus filled with the particular imaginative exercise of players putting themselves in a situation and wondering what they would have done. The honest assessment, running quietly through most of the people present, was that refusing would not have been easy.

The collective gaze found Zhang Han again, as it had been doing periodically throughout the conversation.

Isashiki voiced the question that was sitting in several minds.

“Both of them are pitchers. Narumiya wouldn’t have invited someone competing for the same position.”

Another teammate offered the Matsukata connection as an alternative explanation. Narumiya had built his team around beating Matsukata’s players, which meant inviting them would have worked against the original logic of the project.

Both theories had internal consistency. Neither could be confirmed.

Zhang Han looked out the window and said nothing.

He had his own version of the answer, and it was not one that required outside speculation to arrive at. The reasoning was simple and had two components.

The first was whether Narumiya had personally approved of him as a player. Zhang Han had faced him directly at some point during the junior high circuit and had not been outmatched, which meant Narumiya probably had a realistic assessment of what he was capable of. Personal approval was likely not the obstacle.

The second component was the actual mechanism by which the invitation system worked. Narumiya was not the admissions director of Inashiro Industrial. He could not unilaterally extend recruitment offers.

The players who had gathered at Inashiro had gotten there because Inashiro’s recruiting apparatus had reached out to them, and Narumiya had added his personal appeal to what was already a formal institutional offer. For Zhang Han to have been part of that group, Inashiro would first have had to want him.

Inashiro had not invited him. Not during the period when it would have mattered. None of the West Tokyo powerhouses had. The interest that eventually changed his path had come from a private tryout at Ichidai Third High School, which had opened the door that Takashima Rei had walked through shortly afterward.

The counterfactual was something he occasionally allowed himself to consider in idle moments, usually without arriving anywhere useful. If Inashiro had invited him, and if Narumiya had extended his personal appeal alongside the institutional offer, would he have gone?

The answer he kept arriving at was no, and the reasoning was specific.

At that point in his development, he had not yet understood that his pitching had reached a ceiling that conventional improvement could not raise. He had been operating with the assumption that continued work would produce continued growth, and the thing he had wanted most was to become an Ace pitcher.

Going to Inashiro and standing behind Narumiya Mei on the pitching staff hierarchy would have meant accepting a secondary role in the position he cared about most. That was not a trade he would have made willingly, regardless of how compelling the vision was or how impressive the assembled roster looked.

The rivalry was where his path with Narumiya had always been pointed. Not teammates building something together, but competitors measuring themselves against each other in the games that decided things.

He kept all of this to himself and watched the city move past the window.

The bus arrived at Akita Stadium before the game had concluded, which produced a small collective relief from the players who had been anxious about missing everything.

“We made it.”

They jogged up to the stands, and the arrival of a group in Seido uniforms was noticed quickly by the people already seated around them. The conversation that rippled through the surrounding spectators reconstructed the earlier game through secondhand information: nine to one, seven innings, mercy rule. Zhang Han’s name attached to the grand slam in the manner that names attached to significant moments.

Isashiki registered his feelings about this with characteristic directness.

“You’ve really become something, kid.”

The envy in his voice was genuine rather than performative. He and Zhang Han had joined the first team at roughly the same time, which made the divergence in their public profiles a thing Isashiki was aware of in a way that players who had arrived at different times would not have felt as personally.

Zhang Han accepted the comment without responding to it in any substantive way.

On the field below, the game was in its final stages. Narumiya Mei was on the mound, and the scoreboard read seven to four in Inashiro’s favor. The final strikeout came while the Seido players were still finding their seats, Narumiya’s arm completing its motion and the batter’s swing producing nothing.

Seven to four. Inashiro advances.

Zhang Han looked at the score and sat with a small, specific confusion.

Four runs given up by Narumiya Mei was not a number that fit the profile the summer tournament had suggested for Inashiro’s current configuration. The roster Miyuki had described was supposed to represent something historically strong, a concentration of talent that should have produced dominant results. Four runs against that pitching across a full game was a number that demanded some explanation.

The first five innings had apparently been where all four runs had come in. The final stretch had been shutout baseball. That pattern had a specific shape to it: a team finding its way into a pitcher’s approach over the first half of the game, and the pitcher adjusting and closing the door in the second half. It was not a picture of dominance. It was a picture of competence under pressure.

He was still working through what it meant when movement in the infield caught his eye.

Narumiya was celebrating with his teammates, and the high-fiving had the specific energy of a team that had won a game that was genuinely contested rather than a game they had controlled throughout. Then Shirakawa’s eyes moved to the stands, and whatever he said to Narumiya redirected his attention upward.

The blue and white uniforms were visible from the field.

Narumiya’s expression shifted into something sharper and more focused when he located them.

“Good. We found each other sooner than expected.”

The voice carried well enough that several people in the nearby stands caught the words even if the full statement was directed elsewhere. The intention behind it was not ambiguous.

“Next up is the biggest name in Tokyo hitting. Let’s see what they’re made of.”

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

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