The game reached the third inning with the score still 3-2.
Something had changed in Tanba after Azuma's home run.
The humiliation of watching the ball clear the fence off a pitch he had thrown out of pride rather than strategy had apparently shaken loose whatever had been restricting him. He came back out for the second inning noticeably different.
His fastball had its sharpness back. His high-breaking curveball, the pitch that had always been his most distinctive weapon, was moving with a precision and late break that the coaching staff had not seen from him since before the Inashiro game.
Coach Kataoka, serving as umpire for the day, watched it develop across the two innings and made the call to pull Tanba after his work was done. As he took the ball from him, he spoke quietly but directly.
"If you can maintain this state, then the ace of this baseball team will still unquestionably be you."
It was not false encouragement. Kataoka meant it technically. Tanba's height produced a naturally steep angle on his fastball — a diagonal drop from high to low that, when combined with genuine velocity and the high-breaking curveball, created a combination that few hitters found comfortable.
That combination, once reliable and repeatable, would put Tanba ahead of the other pitching options. The path was there. Kataoka could see it. Whether Tanba would walk it consistently was still the question.
The first-string took their turn at bat in the third inning.
Kuramochi led off and went down against Hidezawa's pitching without making much of an impression. The comparison with Yuuki, Isashiki, and Miyuki — all of whom had gotten hits in the previous inning — was difficult to avoid and more difficult to dismiss. The gap was real and visible, and Kuramochi filed it away with the particular internal intensity of someone who had decided to do something about it.
He was not going to let Miyuki widen that gap further while he stood still.
One out. Nobody on base.
Kominato Ryosuke stepped in next.
He had been fooled in the first inning by the pace of Hidezawa's fastball, committing early and paying for it. He had spent the time between that at-bat and this one thinking carefully about what he actually needed to do. The conclusion he reached was simple.
Stop trying to make contact. Foul everything.
Hidezawa threw his pitches and found, to his visible confusion, that nothing was producing the result he expected. Kominato was not trying to hit. He was not trying to work the count in any conventional sense. He was simply redirecting everything foul with the focused patience of someone who had decided that surviving the at-bat mattered more than anything else.
Chris, calling pitches from behind the plate, was genuinely surprised. He had been away from Seido for a handful of months. In that time, Kominato Ryosuke had apparently become someone who could neutralize Hidezawa through pure refusal to cooperate.
Hidezawa was one of the best pitchers Seido had produced in recent years. Across the Koshien tournament, excluding the final against Osaka Kiryu, his total runs allowed had not reached ten. He had buckled strong hitters from programs across the country. He could not get Kominato Ryosuke out.
The at-bat ran to nine pitches. On the ninth, Hidezawa tried one final time to trick him into chasing something outside the zone.
Kominato watched it go by.
"Thwack!"
"Ball!"
"Four balls — walk!"
The silence that followed was the specific kind that came from watching something that did not fit anyone's prior understanding of what was possible.
One out. Runner on first base.
The first-string players felt something familiar in the configuration — a runner on base, Zhang Han coming up, the game in the balance. It was close to what the Inashiro game had looked like in its critical moments, except this time Kominato had not been retired. The base was occupied.
Zhang Han walked to the plate.
From the small cluster of girls who had specifically come to watch the intra-squad game, the reaction was immediate and enthusiastic. Seven or eight of them, each producing enough volume to account for considerably more, began calling his name in unison.
"Zhang Han! Zhang Han!!"
In the dugout, his teammates watched with focused attention that had a different quality from general curiosity. They wanted to see what he would do with this.
Zhang Han settled into the box. He took a breath. Then he raised his bat and pointed it at Hidezawa.
Several of the watching seniors reacted immediately.
"Who does he think he is, challenging a senior like that?"
The protest was cut off by the people around them.
"Don't say things you don't understand."
Nobody who had watched Zhang Han practice over the past months was confused by the gesture. This was not provocation. Zhang Han had been replaying the strikeout against Narumiya in his head for days.
Standing in this box, with a real pitcher in front of him and something to prove to himself, he was putting his intention on the table. He had rehearsed this moment internally more times than he could count.
Hidezawa received the declaration with a slight nod and threw with full effort.
Zhang Han did not swing.
He watched the ball come in and tracked it all the way.
Someone in the group of watchers called it before the ball reached the glove.
"Changeup!"
The recognition moved through the observers with a ripple of surprise. Nobody had expected Hidezawa to have developed the pitch to that level in the time since he had officially stepped back from the team. The third-year seniors had retired from competitive play and continued working.
The current first-string had been carrying a week of low-grade guilt about their own commitment. Seeing the gap between those two choices expressed in the quality of a single pitch made several of them look at themselves less comfortably.
Zhang Han had not swung. He appeared to be waiting for the pitch to pass.
Then he moved.
He had timed it all the way to the last possible moment, waiting until the ball was fully within reach before committing. The bat came through in a motion that contained no hesitation anywhere in it.
"Ping!"
The ball climbed immediately and kept climbing. Zhang Han released the bat as it left his hands, and when the result was clear, something appeared on his face that had been absent for the better part of a week.
He smiled.
The moment it happened, nearly everyone at the scene experienced a brief interruption of their normal functioning. The combination of the smile, the setting, the result arriving at the same instant — it produced a collective pause that nobody had quite planned for.
The ball traveled all the way to the backstop netting, rippled through it, and bounced back.
"Home run! Two-run home run!!"
3-2 became 4-3. The first-string had taken the lead.
The third inning of the intra-squad farewell game had produced a reversal.
People who had not quite believed the new Seido first-string was capable of that — against this particular group of opponents, in this particular emotional context — had to recalibrate something.
In the innings that followed, both sides traded back and forth without either pulling away. When the third inning ended, Kataoka began rotating substitute players in from both rosters, and the tone of the game shifted accordingly.
The seniors, freed from the more serious competitive pressure, moved into something closer to celebration mode. An extra year of development and continuous offseason work made itself visible in the way they handled the remaining innings — comfortably, demonstratively, with the relaxed authority of people who no longer needed to prove anything.
The final score was 11-14. The new first-string had lost by three runs.
But the final score was not really what the day had been about. The true contest had lived in the first three innings, and in those innings — against opponents who were widely considered unbeatable by the current team, in the aftermath of a loss that had knocked the first-string sideways — the newly formed Seido had come from behind, taken the lead, and demonstrated something.
Two months old as a unit. Still incomplete in important ways. Still carrying gaps that the loss to Inashiro had made visible.
And yet they had beaten the seniors who had built everything they were standing on.
That was the thing nobody had quite expected to be able to say by the end of the day.
************************************
Upto 50 Chapters In Advance At: P@treon/Vividreader123