"Swish!"
The white ball cut through the air, and standing inside the hitting box, Zhang Han felt the difference immediately. Watching Sawamura pitch from the sidelines was one thing. Being on the receiving end of it was something else entirely.
The ball itself wasn't the kind that was difficult to hit in the conventional sense. It didn't overpower you with speed or pin you back with sheer force. The problem was everything else. When the baseball entered the strike zone, something shifted in its trajectory, a clean, unmistakable change in direction that arrived at the last possible moment, much like a slider but not quite like any slider Zhang Han had seen before.
He had predicted the path. He had read it as well as he could from the moment it left Sawamura's hand. And the change still caught him off guard.
"Thwack!"
"Strike!"
Miyuki caught it cleanly and let his gaze drift over to Zhang Han for just a moment. He had expected this. Zhang Han had not swung at the first pitch, and that told Miyuki everything he needed to know about the kind of attention being paid on the other side of the plate.
This was going to be harder to work with than Azuma-senpai had been.
It wasn't about the swing itself. Azuma Kiyokuni's raw hitting power wasn't something Zhang Han could simply match or surpass on a pure strength basis. The difference was in the person. Zhang Han, once his focus locked in, removed the openings that other players left behind almost without realizing it. There were no moments of carelessness to exploit, no personality quirks that could be turned against him the way Azuma-senpai's competitive pride could be nudged and redirected.
The media had taken to calling Zhang Han something like "Mr. Clutch," and while there was a lighthearted quality to the nickname, it pointed at something real. He did not let things fall apart when they mattered. He was the kind of player who became more reliable as the stakes climbed, not less.
Against Azuma Kiyokuni, you could wait for a careless moment or use his temperament to set something up. Against Zhang Han, neither of those paths existed. And knowing that Azuma-senpai had already been struck out by Sawamura, Zhang Han was even less likely to treat any of this casually.
"Look at our genius hitter being this careful!"
Miyuki threw the taunt out anyway, knowing full well it probably wouldn't land.
He hadn't quite noticed when his investment in this had shifted from simply helping a visitor to something closer to full partnership. At some point during the afternoon, he had stopped thinking of himself and Sawamura as separate parties and started thinking of them as a unit. That was why he kept pushing, kept working the signals, kept looking for any edge worth using, even the slim ones.
"Interesting."
Zhang Han's response to the taunt was exactly what Miyuki had anticipated. Unmoved, and almost appreciative.
Because the more Zhang Han observed, the more he found to appreciate. There wasn't a single straightforward fastball in what Sawamura had thrown. Every pitch arrived with some form of irregular movement, and none of those movements were the same as the one before it. What made it even more remarkable was that each delivery looked identical at the point of release. From the outside, every pitch appeared to be a fastball.
The explanation, as far as Zhang Han could work out, came down to the arm. Sawamura's joints were more flexible than what you typically saw, and when he threw, his arm moved with a whipping quality that added spin to the ball in ways his mechanics couldn't account for on their own. That extra spin was what produced the irregular changes, and because those changes came from the body rather than from deliberate technique, they were genuinely difficult to anticipate.
Zhang Han had played in national tournaments at Matsukata. He had made it to Koshien in his first year at Seido. He had seen a great deal of baseball for someone his age.
He had never seen a pitcher quite like this.
In terms of development, Sawamura had probably reached somewhere below thirty percent of what he was actually capable of. The foundation was raw and largely untrained. But even at this stage, the pitching was threatening in a way that went beyond what the surface mechanics suggested. Not just to ordinary hitters, but to someone at Zhang Han's level.
He had heard about Azuma Kiyokuni being struck out and had quietly chalked most of it up to carelessness or coincidence. Standing in this box now, he revised that assessment. There had been elements of both at play, almost certainly. But the pitching itself was genuine. Sawamura's ability was real.
A short distance away on the edge of the field, Yuuki Tetsuya watched with his arms folded. One eyebrow moved slightly.
"This pitcher is not as simple as he looks."
For someone as sparing with words as Yuuki, that observation carried a great deal of weight.
The duel continued.
Zhang Han let the first pitch go past without swinging, reading, cataloguing, building the picture. On the second, he identified what he thought was his window and committed to the swing.
The ball's movement was larger than he had accounted for. The bat caught it, but only at the edge, sending it spinning foul.
Zhang Han's expression settled into something harder. Colder.
He had given Sawamura significant credit coming into this. He had told himself he was taking it seriously. And he had still missed clean contact. That meant his credit had not been generous enough.
This was more complicated than he had allowed for.
There was a way through it, and he could see it clearly enough. The movement on Sawamura's pitches only happened as the ball entered the strike zone. A hitter who stepped forward early, making contact before that final window, could get to the ball before the change arrived. The physics of it were straightforward.
But Zhang Han had no interest in doing that.
Azuma Kiyokuni had seen the same solution and declined it for the same reason. To step forward and steal the ball before it could do what it was supposed to do was to avoid the pitch rather than beat it. For a high school hitter going up against a middle schooler, taking that kind of shortcut felt like it undermined the whole point. If they were going to win, they would win honestly, against Sawamura's best pitch, met in the most direct way possible.
No shortcuts.
The third pitch came in with noticeably more pace than the previous two.
The partnership between Miyuki and Sawamura had been finding its rhythm with every exchange, and now, having sensed even the slightest shift of momentum in their favor when Zhang Han fouled the last one off, Miyuki pushed the advantage without hesitation. He put down the signal for the same location as before.
It was a calculated decision. Even if Zhang Han read the location, Sawamura's movement on any given pitch was never exactly the same as the last. The same zone, different break. There was no reliable way to simply know what was coming and swing accordingly.
In the hitting box, Zhang Han saw it developing. Same location, incoming. Against any other pitcher, that kind of repetition was an invitation. Against Sawamura, it was a trap wearing the clothes of an invitation, and he knew it.
He waited. He watched the ball travel the full distance, tracking it into the zone, waiting for the movement to reveal itself.
This time, the change was subtle. A slight drop, downward, without the dramatic lateral shift of the earlier pitches.
Zhang Han's eyes caught it the moment it happened.
The bat came through.
"Ping!"
The contact was solid and clean, the kind of sound that doesn't need anyone to explain what happened. The white ball launched off the bat and carried out over the field before most of the watching players had fully processed that the swing had taken place.
Zhang Han straightened up and looked toward Miyuki with an expression that gave nothing dramatic away.
"It seems I got lucky in this first round."
He said it with complete composure, as though the outcome had been narrower than it looked and he thought it was worth saying so.
Standing in the crowd nearby, Azuma Kiyokuni's expression darkened considerably.
He had needed three confrontations before getting the home run. Zhang Han had done it inside a single duel.
"I hit it out on my third try," he muttered, working through the arithmetic with visible reluctance. "Zhang Han does it in his first. Doesn't that make me look terrible?"
Tanaka glanced at him sideways.
"What do you think?"
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