Three days had passed since the game ended.
The boys of Seido High School Baseball Team had not yet found their way out of the shadow of the loss.
It was not that they lacked strength. It was mainly that they were bewildered. That was how high school baseball worked — no matter which tournament, no matter how far you had come, once you lost, you lost everything. The season closed around you like a door shutting, and then you were left alone with the silence and the taste of it.
In the summer, Seido had won the West Tokyo Regional Tournament and carried that flag all the way to Koshien. The teams they had eliminated along the way had all gone through exactly this. They had each retreated to their corners and done the hard, private work of absorbing defeat. Now the situation had reversed, and it was Seido's turn to learn what that felt like from the inside.
During practice, Zhang Han could see it clearly in his teammates. The distraction. The absence of the usual sharpness. Their movements went through the motions without conviction behind them.
He felt the same way himself. He could not find motivation for anything. The image of standing in the batter's box against Narumiya Mei and swinging through the changeup kept replaying without his permission.
He knew what the strikeout meant about where he still needed to grow. He should have been motivated by that. He was putting in extra practice every day, staying late, working past the time when everyone else had packed up.
But when he picked up the bat, the feeling was not there. The natural rhythm that had come so easily in previous extra sessions was absent, and he could not locate what had changed.
How did it just end?
In the summer they had played through to the Koshien quarterfinals. That ending had not hit this way. This one did. It settled on the chest with a particular weight that made everything feel slightly less real.
The third-year players had officially retired from the team, but most of them continued showing up to practice alongside the first-string anyway. Azuma Kiyokuni in particular had been working with a visible urgency.
He had entered the draft and trained accordingly — the results visible in the changed shape of his body. Twenty or thirty percent of his body fat had been shed through sustained effort. He looked noticeably trimmer.
Trimmer being relative. He still carried the kind of build that suggested a gestational timeline of five or six months.
He looked at the listless underclassmen around him during practice and ran out of patience quickly.
"You boys. It's one defeat. One. Are you going to let it end you? You still have chances ahead of you. Pull yourselves together. If you keep dragging around like this, go home and cry in your rooms — you don't belong on a practice field."
The first-string players felt something stir in response to being spoken to that way. But the feeling did not resolve into anger. It could not go anywhere useful, because they all knew clearly that Azuma Kiyokuni was not speaking from cruelty or dismissal. He genuinely cared. You could not get angry at someone for that.
Azuma Kiyokuni looked at them sitting there, not even rising to the bait, and threw his hands up.
"You're like dough. I'm reprimanding you and you just sit there. What is wrong with you."
He was genuinely at a loss.
His own experience of defeat had felt different. He and his peers had faced losses in earlier tournaments without ever reaching Koshien. Each one left behind unwillingness and a specific kind of determination — the resolve to come back better and find a way through. Those feelings had been simple and clear. He had never experienced whatever was currently sitting on these younger players.
What were they thinking? Didn't they want revenge? Didn't they want to go further?
Former captain Tanaka listened to the frustration and offered the explanation quietly.
"They're not like us. They've already experienced Koshien. They arrived at this season already carrying something. When we lost back then, it felt like the expected outcome — we were still reaching for something we hadn't touched yet. For them, failing carries several times the weight. They already knew what it felt like to be there."
He paused.
"It's the same as the World Cup. Germany and Brazil both feel pain when they lose. But can that pain be the same? They both lost. The experience is completely different."
Azuma Kiyokuni stared at the younger players for a long moment.
"So what do we do?"
"Some things they have to work through themselves," Tanaka said. "I believe they will. They'll figure out what their current actual strength is. They'll figure out how harsh the environment they're competing in truly is. They'll figure out what they actually want to do going forward."
"I don't have your patience to sit here and wait for each of them to figure it out individually."
Tanaka thought for a moment.
"There might be a way to accelerate it," he said. "I have a suggestion."
He laid it out. The third-year upperclassmen around him heard it and agreed unanimously, without needing much time to consider.
That afternoon, they went to find Coach Kataoka and presented it to him.
Kataoka listened with visible interest.
The following morning, when all the players gathered for practice, he looked out at the tired, unfocused faces in front of him and made the announcement.
"This Saturday morning, we will hold an intra-team practice game. A farewell game for the third-year players."
A farewell game.
The players processed this. A farewell game was held every year, but typically in November. It was only October. Moving it up by a month was unusual.
Yuuki raised the question that was sitting in most of their minds.
"Will we follow the usual arrangement? Using some substitutes, like before?"
The unwritten rule of farewell games was understood by everyone on the roster. They were intended to give the graduating players a proper sendoff, and since the graduating players were not always a match for the current first-string on paper, there was a quiet tradition of the first-string managing the gap — not going easy exactly, but not making things unnecessarily difficult either.
Azuma Kiyokuni cut that thought off before it could fully form.
"Don't get carried away. We don't need anyone to go easy on us."
The idea was almost funny to him. With the first-string currently running at the bottom of their emotional range, he privately believed the third-year players had a genuinely good chance of winning outright. The morale advantage alone was significant.
"Let's just play and see."
Azuma Kiyokuni. Hidezawa. Tanaka. The third-year roster was deep with genuinely formidable players. In a real game played straight, the current first-string could not claim a confident victory. That was simply the honest assessment.
Zhang Han looked at the third-year upperclassmen with a slightly apologetic expression.
There was one obvious gap in their lineup though. He did not have to say it directly for everyone in the vicinity to understand what he meant.
The catching position.
As long as that gap existed, the third-year players were going to struggle to compete at the level they needed to in a real game format. A strong battery was the foundation of everything else, and without a catcher who could hold the game together, the most talented pitching staff in the world only went so far.
"Of course we have our catcher."
The voice came from somewhere in the gathered crowd before anyone could respond to Zhang Han's unspoken point. A figure had appeared that had not been seen for a long time, emerging from among the players as though he had simply been there all along and was only now making himself visible.
************************************
Upto 50 Chapters In Advance At: P@treon/Vividreader123