Diamond No Ace: The Strongest Hitter Has Arrived

Miyuki's hit had set three runners in motion simultaneously, and the question of what each of them would be able to do with the opportunity was resolving itself in real time.

Miyuki and Zhang Han were not the primary concern. Both had read the play early, both had good speed, and the ball's landing point had given them sufficient time to advance without putting themselves in danger. The outfielder's recovery, however quick, arrived too late to threaten either of them.

Yuuki was the question.

He had started running before most observers had finished processing the contact off Miyuki's bat, reading the outfielder's angle and the ball's trajectory simultaneously and determining in that fraction of a second that the ball was not going to be caught. The early break was the difference between a play that was possible and a play that wasn't, and Yuuki had taken it without hesitation.

His speed was not the most remarkable on the Seido roster. That distinction belonged to a group of three players whose athleticism placed them in a different category of movement. But Yuuki running at full speed was not slow in any absolute sense, and he was currently running at full speed, his approach to third base carrying the momentum of someone who had already decided that the bag was not the destination.

The third base coach watched two things at once: the ball's position in the outfield and Yuuki's position on the base path. The calculation running in the coach's head was not complicated in its components, but the margin was narrow enough that the conclusion was not obvious.

The hit had traveled approximately sixty meters. Sensen's outfielder had recovered it cleanly and was preparing to throw. From that position to home plate was a distance that even reliable arms occasionally misjudged, and the throw would need to be accurate to a precise location under time pressure. Yuuki's remaining distance to home, once he touched third, was something just over twenty meters, coverable in roughly three seconds at his current pace.

The timing was close. Not impossible for Sensen. Not comfortable for Seido.

The coach made the call.

Yuuki touched the third base bag and accelerated.

What happened next was not what anyone had anticipated.

Instead of throwing directly to home plate, the Sensen outfielder threw to second base.

The Seido dugout registered this with a brief moment of confusion. The play had seemed to present one obvious option, and the throw had gone somewhere else. The answer arrived almost immediately, before the question had fully finished forming.

The second baseman caught the relay throw, pivoted, and threw home.

Two shorter throws instead of one long one. The distance each player was responsible for dropped from sixty-plus meters to approximately thirty apiece. At thirty meters, control was substantially more achievable than at sixty, and the combined time cost of the additional exchange was measured in tenths of a second rather than full seconds.

The teamwork required was precise and had to be executed without hesitation, but if both players did their jobs correctly, the result was a throw that arrived at home plate faster and more accurately than a single long throw would have.

Yuuki arrived at home plate.

The ball arrived at home plate.

The Sensen catcher received the relay and swept his mitt across Yuuki's body in a single motion that left no ambiguity about what had happened.

"Slap!"

"Out!"

The stadium went quiet in the specific way of crowds absorbing something unexpected, the silence lasting only a moment before the conversations began breaking out across every section simultaneously.

"What was that? Too fast, I couldn't follow it."

"The relay was perfect."

"That teamwork was something else."

There was a quality in the admiration that crossed the usual boundaries of partisan support. The Seido supporters in the stands had been rooting against this outcome, and most of them found, testing their honesty, that they couldn't speak dismissively about what they had just watched.

Sensen had executed a relay throw under pressure with the precision that the situation required and the timing that the situation demanded. The result was fair, and the execution behind it deserved acknowledgment regardless of which dugout you were sitting in.

"I didn't expect Sensen to be capable of something like that."

"This is the quarterfinals for all of Tokyo. At this stage, there aren't any genuinely weak teams."

In the Seido dugout, the silence had a different texture. The run that had seemed as close to certain as a run could be without crossing the plate had just been taken away, and the out that replaced it was a secondary concern to the specific weight of that disappearance. They had been able to see the score changing and had watched it not change.

The inning did not recover from the moment. Sensen retired the next two batters efficiently, and the sides changed with the scoreboard still reading one to zero in Sensen's favor.

Top of the third inning. Sensen's offense.

Kawakami returned to the mound carrying the combined frustration of the failed scoring opportunity and the anger it had produced in him. He converted both into something useful.

His control in the third inning was sharper than it had been in the second. The first two Sensen batters saw sequences that gave them nothing comfortable to commit to, and both ended their at-bats having swung through pitches they had been manipulated into chasing. Two strikeouts, clean and deliberate.

The third batter made contact, catching a pitch slightly off-center and lifting it toward third base. The trajectory was high and easy to track, and it descended directly into Masuko's glove without requiring him to move more than a step to receive it.

Three outs. Change of sides.

The score remained one to zero. The game was not yet halfway finished, and the margin between the two teams on the field was considerably smaller than the scoreboard suggested.

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