By the third face-off, everything felt different to Sawamura.
The change wasn't subtle. Before, Azuma Kiyokuni's power had been loud and open, spilling out naturally without any deliberate effort to contain it. That rawness had made it readable, in a way. Sawamura had been able to feel it, track it, brace against it. He had even managed to convince himself, somewhere in the back of his mind, that he had seen the full extent of what this broad, seemingly soft-bodied senior was capable of.
He had been wrong about that. Badly wrong.
Because the version of Azuma Kiyokuni standing at the plate now was nothing like the one from before. The aggression was gone from the surface. He stood quietly, loosely, giving off almost nothing. And somehow, that stillness was far more frightening than the open volcano had been. It was the difference between watching something erupt and standing at the base of a mountain that hadn't moved yet, knowing full well that it could.
What was it like to face a volcano that could go off at any second?
Sawamura found out without even throwing a pitch. The sweat came first, running down his forehead before he had wound up even once. He noticed it with something close to disbelief. He had only thrown around ten pitches all afternoon. The heat alone didn't explain it. But there it was, and the drops weren't small.
Behind the plate, Miyuki settled into his crouch and took stock of the situation with quiet clarity.
He didn't think Sawamura had a realistic path to winning this exchange. A fully committed Azuma Kiyokuni was a different kind of problem entirely. If Azuma-senpai had obvious exploitable weaknesses when he was locked in, the Seido lineup would never have posted the numbers it did against Osaka Kiryuu at Koshien. The home runs hadn't come by accident.
But Miyuki was Sawamura's partner in this, at least for now, and that meant doing his job regardless of the odds.
In this state, Azuma Kiyokuni most often made his best contact on pitches thrown to his strong zones. That was precisely the logic Miyuki flipped. If any window existed at all, it lived in the opposite direction, in the locations Azuma least preferred. It was a thin margin to work with, but it was the only one available.
The remaining question was whether the young man on the mound could actually trust him.
Miyuki put down his signal and watched.
Sawamura's eyes lit up the moment he read it.
He didn't question it. He didn't hesitate or give any sign that he was second-guessing what he'd been asked to throw. The idea of going directly at the opponent with his best pitch, no evasion, no calculation, just the truest version of what he could do against the strongest version of what was standing across from him, clearly delighted him in a way that bypassed nerves entirely.
He nodded once, with full seriousness, and threw.
Miyuki, watching him do it without a flicker of doubt, felt something shift quietly in his chest. He wasn't sure exactly what to call it, but it was there.
A partner who trusted your calls completely, without reservation, without needing to be convinced. Even if catching what he threw was a project in itself, that kind of trust wasn't something Miyuki took lightly. If Sawamura actually enrolled at Seido next spring, he thought, the receiving end of that partnership would never be dull.
"Whoosh!"
The ball left Sawamura's hand and immediately drew every eye on the field.
Zhang Han didn't need to be standing at the plate to see it. Even from his angle, the break was impossible to miss. The baseball dropped sharply just before it reached the zone, bending in that unmistakable way that only a certain kind of natural talent could produce without being taught.
Remarkable. Genuinely remarkable.
A pitcher who possessed that kind of movement, developed properly over time, had no visible ceiling from where Zhang Han was standing.
Then Azuma Kiyokuni moved.
There was nothing wasted in it. No flinch, no adjustment, no visible moment of recalculation. He simply read the drop as it happened and accelerated his swing to meet it, the bat finding the ball at the precise point where it had finished moving.
"Ping!"
The sound was quieter than any of his previous swings. There was no theatrical explosion of force this time, no tornado stirred up in the hitting zone. The power was simply concentrated, packed into the contact point and transferred cleanly into the ball.
The white ball climbed. It cleared the fence. It carried another ten meters past it before it came down.
Home run. No debate, no room for interpretation.
And the most unsettling part of it was how little effort it had appeared to cost him. He looked like a man who had done something routine, not something exceptional.
"Do you want to keep going?" Azuma Kiyokuni rested the bat on his shoulder and fixed his gaze on Sawamura with cool detachment. "Though it would help if your pitching were a little more decent."
He wanted to see it. Whether that fire the young man had been carrying would survive contact with reality.
Sawamura's head dropped.
For a long moment, nobody said anything. Those watching exchanged glances, gauging whether what they were seeing was the beginning of a collapse.
Then Sawamura raised his head.
There was no disappointment in his eyes. None at all. What was there instead was the same thing that had been there from the very beginning.
Pure excitement.
"Of course I want to keep going!"
Something shifted in Azuma Kiyokuni's expression. He lifted his bat back into position, and just like that, the earlier energy was back in full.
"Don't come crying to me when I start hitting everything you throw. Even if you beg on your knees, I won't let you off that mound."
He had to admit it, privately, without any intention of saying it out loud. That young man had something real in him.
But the reading was done now. He had figured out the pitching. Catching up to that kind of break was genuinely difficult, but getting a hit whenever he chose to? That was no longer a question.
"Let's stop here."
Takashima Rei's voice came in cleanly, and she meant it.
She was satisfied with where things had landed. Azuma Kiyokuni had found his footing again, his pride intact and his competitive edge restored. That was enough. Letting this continue served no one.
Because underneath Sawamura's fearless surface, there was something Takashima Rei understood from having visited his home and spent time with his family. He had real resistance, quiet but present, about leaving home and coming to study in Tokyo. It wasn't something he advertised, but it was there. If that resistance met a complete and humiliating defeat right now, he might walk away from Seido entirely.
She had invested too much in this for it to end here. He was the future Ace she believed in. She was not about to let one afternoon undo that.
Azuma Kiyokuni was irritated by the interruption. But his love for the team ran deeper than his appetite for the win, even if he would never say so in those words. He had already recognized, without admitting it openly, that Sawamura could be a serious asset to Seido down the line. Demolishing the kid's confidence for personal satisfaction wasn't something he could justify to himself.
"Fine. I'll spare your life this time."
"Who's scared of who? Let's go again."
Sawamura, apparently immune to the generosity being extended to him, pushed back on instinct.
That was too much.
Azuma Kiyokuni had made his peace with restraint for the team's sake, but being provoked directly to his face was a different matter.
He was done holding back.
"Why use a butcher's knife to kill a chicken?"
Zhang Han stepped forward before anything could escalate further. His voice was calm, almost conversational, but it cut cleanly through the tension.
"Since you've already seen through his pitching and made your point, senpai, could you leave the rest to me? I'll take over from here."
Takashima Rei exhaled slowly, the tension releasing from her shoulders in a way she hadn't realized she was holding.
Things were back on track. Finally.
She and Zhang Han had talked through this day in detail more than once in the lead-up to it. The plan had been clear. The only thing she hadn't accounted for was Sawamura crossing paths with Azuma Kiyokuni mid-scolding, which had sent the afternoon careening off-script in every direction.
But Zhang Han was here now, and order was being restored.
Sawamura turned and looked at the person who had just stepped in.
"Who are you?"
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