The game had barely ended before the Seido players were moving back toward the field.
Yuuki, newly installed as team captain and already settling into the role with a naturalness that surprised even him, delivered the official word without much ceremony.
"Team custom says no practice scheduled on game day afternoons. Everyone just needs to be in the strategy room by seven-thirty tonight to go over tactics for the second game."
Being a captain, it turned out, was not the complicated undertaking some people made it out to be. With the coaching staff's full support behind him and a roster full of players who were fundamentally self-disciplined, his actual job in most situations was to relay instructions clearly and get out of the way. Nobody was creating problems. Nobody needed to be managed. The players were going to do what the players were going to do.
Which, in this case, was practice.
Not one of them had any intention of taking the afternoon off. The game against Seisenji had not come close to scratching the competitive itch that daily training had built in them. Their bodies had developed an appetite for intensity, and a five-inning rout against a team with modest offensive capability was not what that appetite was looking for. If they didn't put in more work now, the surplus energy would become its own kind of problem.
Groups formed naturally, teammates gravitating toward familiar partners, and within minutes the field was occupied again.
The retired third-year players were already out there.
Several of them had stayed connected to the field in the weeks since graduation, drifting back to practice with the team during the gaps in their academic schedules. Some were preparing for the professional draft. Others had their eyes on university programs that would keep them in the sport. Whatever direction they were heading, baseball wasn't leaving their lives in the near future, and maintaining their physical condition by training alongside the current team was the sensible thing to do.
Azuma Kiyokuni spotted Zhang Han coming through the gate and was on his feet before Zhang Han had finished walking in.
"Back already? Must have been a comfortable win."
Zhang Han gave him the short version. "Sixteen to zero. Five innings."
He left it at that. The fuller story involved a pitcher who had been more interesting than the scoreline suggested, a first inning that had gotten somewhat out of hand before the coaching staff signaled restraint, and a level of strategic misdirection in Seido's own batting approach that had kept Nishikawa perpetually off-balance. None of that needed to be explained to Azuma Kiyokuni. The score was the score, and dressing it up with context would look like making excuses for an easy win.
Zhang Han was not someone who narrated his own performances for appreciation.
"That team ran into you rookies who don't even know how to ease off the gas," Azuma Kiyokuni said, with the tone of someone delivering a verdict they found mildly amusing.
Zhang Han smiled and said nothing.
The team had held back. Considerably. Particularly Zhang Han himself, whose last two at-bats had been studies in artful underperformance. But pointing that out would require explaining the deliberate nature of it, and explaining that would require talking about himself at length, which was not something he had any interest in doing.
He let the comment pass.
"Is the opponent for the second game confirmed?"
"Not yet. We need the other game's results first. But from what we already know, it doesn't matter which team comes through. Neither of them changes the expected outcome."
These were not dark horse programs or programs with sudden surprising depth. The bracket had continued to be kind in the way that drawn brackets sometimes were.
Azuma Kiyokuni's expression shifted into something between a grin and a warning.
"You little guys have been lucky. When do you play Inashiro or Teito?"
"If the bracket holds, the fourth game."
"You'd better be careful when that comes around. Those aren't the teams you've been facing."
Zhang Han didn't take offense at the phrasing. He also didn't disagree with the substance. The early rounds had served up opponents who could not genuinely stress-test the current team's capabilities. Winning comfortably against Seisenji told you something about Seido's baseline, but a baseline measured against modest opposition had limited predictive value.
The honest truth was that neither he nor anyone else on the current roster fully knew what this version of the team was capable of when matched against opponents of comparable strength. The number of variables in play since the roster overhaul was significant. The only real way to find the answer was to play the games that asked the question properly.
"Don't bring up the sensitive stuff," Tanaka said, drifting over along with Hidezawa and a few other third-years. "Other new teams are in the same position. They've had half a month more of training at most. It doesn't change the fundamental situation."
The circle that formed wasn't arranged by anyone. It simply happened, players from the first and second years gravitating to the same spot where the graduating seniors were standing, Miyuki and Yuuki and Tanba finding spaces naturally alongside Kominato and Isashiki, until Zhang Han was standing at the center of a group that represented both where the team had been and where it was going.
From behind the wire mesh along the edge of the field, Maezono watched.
He gripped the wire in front of him without noticing he was doing it. The circle was not somewhere he belonged yet. That fact settled in him somewhere between a wound and a motivation, sharp and clarifying. One day. That was the whole thought, complete and sufficient.
"Whatever comes your way, I believe you'll handle it."
Tanaka looked around the group, and something in his expression belonged to a person who had spent a year and a half watching a roster full of uncertainty transform into something he felt genuinely comfortable trusting with the team's future.
He remembered what Yuuki and Kominato and Isashiki and the others had looked like when they first arrived. Green in every sense of the word, earnest and unformed, requiring more supervision than confidence. He had not always been certain that the future of Seido High School Baseball was in reliable hands.
Looking at them now, that uncertainty was gone. The growth had been real. Not just physical and technical, but the kind that showed up in decision-making and composure and the way a player carried themselves in difficult moments. And the two first-years who had arrived last year, who had seemed at the time like additions to an already-assembled team, had become something more central than that.
Today's Seido was stronger than the version Tanaka had been part of, not weaker. If there was a single honest concern to carry forward, it was the relative depth of the pitching staff, and even that was more a future consideration than a present crisis. The offense was what drove this team, had always driven it, and that core remained formidable.
"Keep going. We'll be right behind you."
The magnanimity in Tanaka's voice was completely genuine, and the players around him responded to it.
"Thank you, senpai."
"When you play Teito or Inashiro, we'll be in the stands."
"Don't embarrass yourselves," Azuma Kiyokuni added. "And don't start crying if things get hard."
The people who knew him understood the translation without needing to think about it. The concern was real. The delivery was simply characteristic.
"We will!"
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