Bottom of the first, two outs.
Zhou Hao lined a single, plating yet another run.
Scoreboard: Seidou 6 – Seiko 2.
In the blink of an eye, Seidou had flipped a two-run deficit into a four-run lead, and the roar from the stands was deafening.
More than ninety percent of the spectators wore Seidou blue.
The students already knew what their team could do; the adults had come to see the "super-talented first-year" they'd heard so much about. They hadn't even laid eyes on Seidou's new pitcher yet, and already the offense alone looked capable of bulldozing anyone in their path.
Had this been the opening round, the crowd might have expected a rout.
But this was the West Tokyo quarter-finals—every club that reached this stage was supposed to be a heavyweight.
That made Seidou's domination all the more terrifying.
Zhou Hao was stranded at third, and Seiko finally escaped with the third out, but the mood in the stadium had already shifted. Luck couldn't keep saving Seiko forever… right?
Top of the second
Seiko's batters came up with fire in their eyes—only to discover that Yoshida had settled in.
Now that the right-hander had found his rhythm, his national-level stuff was on full display. Three hitters went up brimming with confidence and trudged back like scolded roosters. Three up, three down in under five minutes.
"Side retired! Switch it up!"
Bottom of the second
Leading off for Seidou was the No. 2 hitter—and their own ace on the mound—Yoshida. Peeved about striking out earlier, he gripped the bat like he intended to launch the ball clear out of Jingu Stadium.
Just then, Seiko called time.
Their exhausted ace trudged off, replaced by a hulking relief pitcher.
"Now entering: No. 11, Yamamoto Nojuchi, right-handed pitcher."
The man who climbed the mound looked less like a ballplayer and more like a walking cliff face—over 190 cm tall and tipping the scales near 120 kg.
"Where'd they find this guy?" someone in Seidou's dugout whispered.
"Should've joined the sumo club," another joked.
Coach Kumakiri remembered the first time he'd met Yamamoto.
Bigger than anyone his age, yet painfully self-conscious, the boy had been shunned by both the basketball and sumo teams. Kumakiri, obsessed with power hitting, had seen raw potential—the kind that could blow a ball clear across the infield on pure bat speed alone. Yamamoto gladly joined; nobody else had offered him a home.
Turns out his bat wasn't special. But when Seiko experimented with pitching, the mountain moved—fast. Yamamoto's fastball wasn't just heavy; it looked like an avalanche.
"Show them what you've got, Yamamoto!" Kumakiri muttered.
Yoshida dug in.
Yamamoto reared back.
Boom!
The baseball thundered toward the plate like a runaway boulder. Yoshida's pupils dilated; it felt as though the mound itself were sliding toward him. He swung—
Ping!
The connection sounded clean, but the ball ballooned straight up.
Seiko's catcher flipped off his mask, settled under it, plop—out!
Before Seidou's bench could process it, their No. 3 hitter, Yūki, and their clean-up man, Tōshinori, were retired just as easily.
A three-pitch strikeout.
A jam-shot pop-up.
Another weak fly.
Three up, three down—Seiko's answer to Seidou's barrage.
Seiko's dugout erupted. Players mobbed Yamamoto as if they were grade-schoolers surrounding a superhero.
"That pitch was insane!"
"Bet Seidou thinks they're dreaming right now!"
Six runs in the first, none in the second, and Seidou's heart of the order shut down by a pitcher nobody had scouted?
For a moment, the momentum—just a sliver of it—tilted back toward Seiko Academy.
And that, perhaps, was the real terror waiting beneath the mountain's shadow.
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POWER STONE!!!
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