Chapter 357 -
The suckling pig incident had a formal conclusion.
Zhang Han found himself sitting across from several second-year upperclassmen who had organized their grievance into a specific demand: two runs scored in the game against Inashiro, or the matter of disrespecting a senior would remain officially unresolved. The logic connecting the penalty to the offense was not entirely linear, but the seniors' tone made clear that the specifics were secondary to the principle of the thing.
Zhang Han's private assessment of the demand was that it assumed conditions he could not guarantee. Narumiya Mei and the roster surrounding him were not opponents against whom runs could be scheduled in advance. Promising a specific number against that pitching staff was the kind of commitment that sounded simple and was not.
The seniors' position remained firm. Coach Kataoka and Takashima Rei were occupied with film review in another room and were not available as an appeal process.
Zhang Han, operating on the principle that agreeing to something unreasonable in the short term was preferable to negotiating against people who were not interested in negotiation, accepted the terms and moved on.
Whether he could actually deliver on the agreement was a problem for next week.
Later that evening, Coach Kataoka gathered the first-team players for a formal review of the Inashiro footage. The analysis confirmed what the game's structure had already suggested to anyone watching carefully: Inashiro had not shown everything.
Their starting pitcher for the first five innings had been Hirano, a second-year, who had traded runs with Teito in a game that remained genuinely competitive for most of its duration. The Inashiro lineup had been productive but had not been operating at maximum intensity. Then Narumiya Mei had taken the mound in the sixth inning, and the game had changed character immediately.
From the sixth inning onward: no hits. No runs. Clean, dominant baseball against Teito's lineup, which was the East Tokyo champion and a Koshien Sweet Sixteen program.
The room absorbed this in silence.
"The King of East Tokyo couldn't even get a hit off him?"
The disbelief in the question was genuine. Nobody had walked into the meeting expecting to find that Inashiro had been sandbagging against a quality opponent while still winning comfortably, but the footage made the interpretation difficult to avoid.
Takashima Rei offered the context that the raw observation required.
Teito had experienced Koshien earlier in the year and was working through the same roster transition problem that all programs faced when moving from a summer lineup into an autumn configuration. The players who had been the cohesive unit at Koshien were not fully the same unit now.
New relationships, new internal hierarchies, different combinations of players in situations that the team hadn't practiced together long enough to execute automatically. Against an Inashiro program that had been building its current cohesion across the same period, the gap in team integration had been consequential.
The assessment was intended to provide perspective. The players received it and immediately applied the same reasoning to themselves, which was not the direction Takashima Rei had intended the thought to travel.
Seido faced the same integration problem Teito had faced. The Koshien roster was not the autumn roster. The new combinations had been practicing together for less time than ideal. The hidden weaknesses in the current team's functioning, the places where the gears didn't quite mesh yet because the pieces hadn't worked together long enough, were things that nobody in the room could fully enumerate because they hadn't been revealed yet. Only a genuinely capable opponent would reveal them, and the most capable opponent currently on the schedule was the team they had just watched dominate Teito.
The mood in the room moved in a direction that was not useful for preparation purposes.
Zhang Han looked around at his teammates and made a decision.
"No one actually knows how the comparison shakes out until we play. Our individual talent level is not obviously below theirs. Narumiya brought in strong players, but so did Seido. Miyuki and I aren't exactly footnotes in Tokyo junior high baseball."
He said it without preamble and without the qualifying language that would have softened it into something less than a direct statement.
The teammates considered it and found the logic held.
The instinct to treat Inashiro as an overwhelming force had been building since the first mention of Narumiya's assembled roster, but the honest accounting of the individual talent on both sides of the upcoming game was not the accounting of a team about to face something completely beyond its level. Yuuki. Kominato. Isashiki. The second-year core was legitimate. The first-year contributions had been documented across three tournament games and were not speculative.
The comparison on paper was not a comfortable one, but it was not a concession either.
Coach Kataoka stepped in with the timing of a coach who understood when a player had said the right thing and when following it up would dilute rather than reinforce it.
"Individual strength is comparable. How it performs on the field is what matters. We find that out by playing."
The room responded the way rooms responded to Coach Kataoka when he confirmed what players had already started to believe. The energy shifted from anxiety toward the more productive variety of competitive anticipation, the kind that motivated preparation rather than paralyzed it.
The subsequent discussion moved into specifics.
Offense was the part that produced relatively less concern. The belief was shared across the coaching staff and the player group that the Seido lineup, given sufficient at-bats against any pitching, would produce runs.
Narumiya was exceptional and the data on him was daunting, but the Seido batters had faced exceptional pitching before and had found ways through it. The grand slam against Maki's curveball, the line drive that had pierced Fuyuan's infield, the patience and contact work that had worn down pitchers across the tournament: there was a body of evidence that the lineup was capable of what it would need to do.
Defense was the part that kept the coaching staff awake.
More specifically, pitching.
Three pitchers had performed across three games. Each had demonstrated something genuine. Kawakami's command and composure against Sensen had been the most complete performance, but the opponents in those games had not been Inashiro Industrial's lineup. The relevant question was not whether the pitchers were good in absolute terms but whether they were good enough to limit a lineup that had been assembled specifically to be the best offensive group in Tokyo.
When Coach Kataoka and the assistant coaches mapped the three pitchers against the names in Inashiro's batting order, the assessment was not optimistic.
Carlos. Shirakawa. Yamaoka Riku. Yabe. Narumiya Mei batting somewhere in the order.
Against that group, with the defensive support Seido could provide, the number of runs the pitchers could be expected to prevent across seven innings was a number that required honest examination rather than hopeful projection.
"Scoring runs is achievable. Limiting theirs is the question we don't have a clean answer to yet," Coach Kataoka said. "We need defensive strategies that go beyond what we've been running. Foolproof ones."
The team spent the rest of the evening working on what those strategies might look like.
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