"It's up to you."
"Blast it out of here!"
In the senior team's dugout, and among the second and third-year players gathered around the field, the excitement was enormous.
The old alumni watching found it remarkable.
"When did that kid become the public enemy of the entire Seido team?"
"No wonder everyone's wound up. Three full innings without a run. I've never seen a freshman welcome match like this."
"His pitching doesn't look fast. So why can't the batters hit it cleanly?"
"There has to be another reason. One or two pitches being mishit could be coincidence, but this many in a row? There's something about his pitching that we're not seeing."
Even the casual observers outside the field could tell something was off.
Most of the freshman players simply thought Sawamura was impressive. Among the senior team, only a handful had identified exactly what was happening.
Setting aside Zhang Han and Miyuki, who already knew, there were six people who truly understood the mechanics behind Sawamura's pitching.
Coach Kataoka, Coach Ochiai, and assistant manager Takashima Rei. And on the senior team's side, Chris, captain Yuuki Tetsuya with his arms crossed, and Kominato Ryosuke, squinting at the mound.
Everyone else, including the rest of the first string, had a vague suspicion but nothing more. Insight, after all, was its own kind of talent.
Amid his teammates' cheering, Zhang Han stepped into the batter's box.
Everyone around him treated it as the most natural thing in the world. Zhang Han himself found it strange. A group of second and third-year upperclassmen had been pushed this far by a first-year junior, and now they were placing all their hopes on him, still not quite settled even as they cheered him on.
That silly pitcher on the mound still had no idea what he had done.
But he had created something genuinely remarkable.
Even Coach Kataoka's gaze toward Sawamura had shifted.
In truth, Kataoka had noticed Sawamura's unusual qualities long before today. Among pitchers without formal training, non-standard forms sometimes produce naturally moving pitches that opponents struggle to read. Some pitchers like this dominate high school baseball on the strength of a single such pitch. Others have weaker versions of the same quality, and after hitters have seen it a few times, the effect disappears.
Sawamura's naturally moving pitch came from two sources: his naturally flexible shoulders and wrists, and the absence of any formal training to standardize his mechanics. Kataoka understood this clearly.
What he hadn't been sure of was how much genuine potency Sawamura's pitch actually carried.
The results in this game had surprised him considerably.
Two and a half innings pitched. Not a single run allowed. Only one base hit given up, when Masuko had gotten his powerful swing fully through the ball. For a naturally moving pitch without sharp late break, a clean, committed swing was precisely the vulnerability. That Masuko had gotten to it was not unfair. But even so, Kataoka and the others had to acknowledge that the quality of Sawamura's pitch was very high. Not top-tier, perhaps, but extremely high-level for what it was.
Different from Furuya Satoru's pitching in every way, and yet equally promising.
Kataoka had already settled on a training approach for Sawamura in his mind.
Sawamura himself was thinking about none of this. He was entirely absorbed in the confrontation directly in front of him.
Zhang Han.
Up to this point, Zhang Han had made only one mistake in this entire game, and that had been a deliberate one. Beyond that, his performance alone had been enough to make every freshman in attendance look at him with something close to awe.
In Sawamura's personal ranking, Zhang Han was the King. The highest card in the deck. The strongest boss he had to get through.
Facing him, Sawamura gave everything he had.
He took a breath, lifted his right leg high, and brought it down hard. As his center of gravity shifted forward, his arm came through like a whip and the ball left his hand.
The players watching felt a jolt the moment the ball was released.
Especially those who had already had their suspicions. Seeing this pitch from Sawamura put everything into focus. Their guess had been right. What he threw was not a standard fastball. It was a naturally moving pitch that shifted in front of the batter, disguised as a fastball until the last possible moment.
They still didn't know exactly how he threw it. But to do it with fastball mechanics and fastball velocity was something worth a genuine thumbs-up.
In his previous pitches, the movement had been subtle enough that batters only sensed it rather than saw it. But this pitch, thrown with everything Sawamura had, made the ball visibly wobble as it approached home plate. And the wobble was not small.
Before they could watch any further, Zhang Han had already moved.
Seeing him begin his swing, several thoughts crossed Chris's mind in quick succession.
Too risky.
The movement was this late, this large. Even Zhang Han would struggle to adjust in time.
The next moment, Chris felt himself go quiet inside.
Zhang Han's swing was as fast as lightning. As the ball shifted, the bat followed it. The bat found the center of the ball precisely on its changing path and drove it.
"Ping!"
"Whoosh!"
The ball came off the bat far faster than it had arrived.
It climbed straight up into the sky, heading toward the net at the back of the field.
Then everyone watched something that seemed genuinely impossible.
The ball went through the net.
Not off it. Through it. When the ball disappeared beyond the net, it left a hole behind it.
Most of the players were too far away to see the hole clearly. But they all saw the ball pass through.
What kind of force did that take?
The second and third-year players erupted anyway. This had gone beyond the scope of the game. They were simply cheering for a home run that deserved to be cheered.
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