Chapter 338 - 338: Seido Takes Action II
The ball pierced through the infield like something that had been fired rather than struck.
The Sensen second baseman's body and his awareness of the situation came apart in that moment, one knowing where the ball was going and the other having no available time to act on the knowledge.
His eyes tracked the landing point and the subsequent bounce with perfect clarity. His legs contributed nothing. By the time the signals had completed the journey from his brain to his feet, the ball was already past him and the play was over.
"It went through!"
The commentators assigned to the game had not been conserving their vocabulary.
They had watched a great deal of high school baseball across a great many tournaments, and the specific quality of what Yuuki had just produced was landing on them with the weight of genuine rarity.
The exit speed off the bat, the flatness of the trajectory, the complete absence of defensive response from a fielder who had been positioned correctly and simply couldn't match the pace of the ball, all of it added up to something they were reaching for language to describe.
The comparison that emerged, spoken with conviction, was that this was more impressive than the home run hitting that had made a previous Seido cleanup batter nationally famous. Different in kind, different in what it demonstrated, but at least equal in what it said about the player behind it.
The name Yuuki Tetsuya, the commentators agreed with some certainty, would not remain obscure for much longer.
No outs. Runner on second base.
Zhang Han stepped into the batter's box.
The section of the stands occupied by his particular supporters registered his arrival with a response that was categorically different from how the rest of the crowd processed a lineup change. For most spectators, the fifth batter stepping up represented a continuation of a game they were watching. For this group, it represented the specific moment they had come to see, the one their attention had been pointing toward since the first pitch.
Zhang Han was aware of this. He had grown up playing for Matsukata, where the support structure was built around the team collectively and the individual players were components of a shared identity rather than objects of personal devotion.
The people cheering for him now were cheering specifically for him, their hopes organized around a single person rather than distributed across a roster. The warmth of that was not something he had developed a detached relationship with, regardless of how composed he appeared from the outside.
He settled into the box and turned his attention to the mound.
Maki.
A name that had not appeared anywhere in Zhang Han's junior high experience, and a player who had apparently been sitting on a bench somewhere in that same period, accumulating the raw material for what was now standing sixty feet away from him at 190 centimeters tall.
Zhang Han had a specific kind of appreciation for that trajectory. He understood, from the inside, what it looked like when ability and circumstance and the right stimulus converged to produce something that hadn't been visible before. He had been described in similar terms often enough.
The admiration was genuine and completely separate from competitive intention. On this field, against this pitcher, the two things existed in different compartments.
In the dugout, Kuramochi watched the crowd's response to Zhang Han's appearance with an expression that communicated his feelings without requiring words.
Miyuki provided an explanation anyway.
"If you also appeared on magazine covers and had a face that worked for that purpose, I think your fan count would be comparable."
Kuramochi processed this response, determined it was unhelpful in every respect, and returned his attention to the field.
Zhang Han stood in the box and waited.
Across the field, Ugai emerged from the Sensen dugout.
He walked out with the unhurried pace of someone who had made a decision and was not in a hurry to apologize for it, crossed to a position where his signals could be clearly received, and gave his instructions to the field.
The Seido dugout felt the shift before it materialized.
Maki, who had looked at Yuuki Tetsuya and thrown his best pitch directly at the problem, did not look at Zhang Han and throw anything at all.
The first pitch was outside. Then another. Then another. The balls accumulated without any of them entering a zone Zhang Han could swing at, the sequence communicating Ugai's calculation clearly and without ambiguity: the confrontation that had been accepted against Yuuki was not being accepted here.
The final pitch completed the sequence.
Zhang Han took his base.
No outs. Runners on first and second base.
The fans who had arrived specifically to see Zhang Han swing a bat sat with the particular frustration of people whose expectations had been precisely and deliberately denied. In the Seido dugout, the feeling was more complicated.
The intentional walk confirmed something that Coach Kataoka had identified weeks ago and had been preparing for since: as Zhang Han's fame increased, the decisions made against him would increasingly look like this one.
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