Diamond No Ace: The Strongest Hitter Has Arrived

No outs. Runner on first base.

And the runner was Kuramochi.

In the Sensen dugout, Ugai had stopped pretending the smile was comfortable. His hand had found his jaw and was working at it with the unconscious persistence of someone whose mind was running faster than his expression could keep up with.

The situation had turned against them earlier than he had wanted. Not because Maki's pitching had been solved, which it hadn't. A bunt from the right-handed position, executed by a player who had spent the entire tournament building a data trail specifically to make that bunt credible, was not a failure of pitching. It was a trap that had been constructed with patience and sprung at the right moment. Ugai could recognize the craft in it even while absorbing the consequences.

The consequences were what concerned him.

Kuramochi on first base was not the same problem as an ordinary runner on first base. His speed converted a standard baserunning situation into a threat that multiplied with each pitch thrown. The next two batters in the Seido order were Kominato and Isashiki, neither of whom could be dismissed as manageable. If either of them reached base, the inning would arrive at Yuuki and Zhang Han with runners already on, and the option of walking both of them would produce exactly the situation Ugai was working to avoid: bases loaded, nobody out, the middle of Seido's lineup still intact and waiting.

"Get a double play. Find a way."

He said it knowing it was not a clean solution. It was a less bad option among options that were all carrying some level of risk. The alternative was to give Seido a run through careful pitching and hope to limit the damage to one, but Seido's current morale made passive acceptance of a gift look like wishful thinking. They were not going to cooperate with that plan.

So: double play, and if that failed, manage the situation pitch by pitch and accept that a confrontation with Yuuki or Zhang Han might eventually become unavoidable.

What Ugai was most committed to preventing was Maki being driven to a direct confrontation with both of them in a situation where the pressure was at its maximum. The calculation he ran was clear and consistent. When the probability of an unfavorable outcome exceeded a certain threshold, passion was not a valid input into the decision.

Baseball tactics were mathematical before they were emotional. The best method was the one most likely to solve the problem. Romanticism about head-to-head confrontations was a luxury that a team in Sensen's position could not afford.

Zhang Han and Yuuki, sitting in the Seido dugout, probably assumed they would get another chance against Maki. From Ugai's position, he intended to ensure that assumption never came true.

On the mound, Maki received the instruction and felt it land differently than a restriction. The Director's trust in him to execute the double play strategy, rather than being sheltered from the dangerous situation, was itself a form of confidence, and it produced the opposite of caution. His fighting spirit concentrated itself. The next pitch would be sharper than the last one because the situation demanded it, and he was the kind of pitcher who rose to meet demands rather than managing around them.

Kominato Ryosuke stood in the box and took his read.

The opponent's energy was unmistakable. Whatever Maki was feeling on the mound, it was coming through in the quality of his preparation, the particular focus behind his eyes. An opponent who brought that kind of concentrated intent to a confrontation was, in Kominato's private assessment, worth admiring.

Admiration and concession were different things.

He settled into his stance and began watching for information.

Maki went into his delivery, and the moment the ball left his hand, Kuramochi was moving.

The steal had begun.

What struck Kominato in the fraction of a second that followed was that the Sensen players did not react the way players reacted to something they hadn't anticipated. There was no urgency in their movement, no adjustment of positioning in response to a surprise. The cold clarity that appeared briefly in Maki's eyes was the tell. They had known this was coming. The pitch location, the sequence setup, all of it had been constructed around the expectation that Kuramochi would run, and the play had been designed specifically to use that run against him.

Kuramochi was running into a trap.

Kominato processed this and acted.

The pitch was outside the strike zone. Under normal circumstances, taking the ball was the obvious choice, and taking the ball would allow the trap to close around Kuramochi cleanly. Kominato extended his front foot, shifted his weight, and stretched his body into a line that brought his bat into range of a pitch that had no business being hittable from his starting position.

The geometry of what he was doing should not have produced contact.

It did.

The Sensen catcher watched the ball that had been traveling toward his glove get redirected by a bat that had extended itself into a zone it had no conventional right to occupy. The contact was not clean. It was not meant to be clean. It was meant to be contact, and it was.

The ball came off the bat and landed in the infield, and Sensen's fielder recovered it quickly and threw to first base. The throw beat Kominato by a comfortable margin. One out.

But the original target of the play was no longer where the play had been designed to catch him.

Kuramochi had taken second base before the throw home had become a realistic option, and he had not treated second base as a destination.

The dust he left behind him pointed toward third.

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