Diamond No Ace: The Strongest Hitter Has Arrived

Inashiro's preparation left nothing unexamined.

Every key player on the Seido roster had a detailed profile. Even significant substitutes had been documented. The depth of the scouting operation reflected the depth of the program itself: backed by Tokyo's player pool, sustained by more than a decade of strong results, Inashiro had built an infrastructure that most programs in the country could not match at the organizational level.

Finding practice opponents to simulate Seido's pitchers had taken a single afternoon. A sidearm pitcher approximating Kawakami's delivery, a high-angle curveball pitcher standing in for Tanba, both sourced from within Inashiro's own deep roster. The simulations were imperfect, but they were more than sufficient for timing calibration and pitch recognition work.

Zhang Han's pitching presented the least difficulty to prepare for.

Beyond the fastball velocity, the left-handed delivery was still early enough in its development that the pitch repertoire remained limited. A pitching machine set to 145 kilometers per hour was enough. Get comfortable with the speed, and the rest followed.

With the pitching preparation handled, Harada turned the evening's remaining work toward Seido's batting lineup.

He watched Narumiya across the table and tested the preparation he had supposedly done.

"Recite it."

Narumiya had a history of absorbing only partial scouting information, and Harada had stopped assuming otherwise without verification. If Narumiya could retain half the data on a normal opponent, it was a reasonable night's work.

This was not a normal opponent.

Narumiya sat up and went through the lineup without consulting the sheet.

"The First Batter, Kuramochi, is extremely fast; once he gets on base, he's a very troublesome opponent. But his hitting ability is average; as long as we don't give him a chance to get on base, two-thirds of his ability is wasted."

"The Second Batter, Kominato Ryosuke-senpai, is very persistent and one of the most difficult guys to deal with. But his physique dictates his lack of power; a hard Fastball should be able to force him."

"The Third Batter, Isashiki Jun-senpai, likes to play unconventionally, often hitting unexpected balls. He's also a relatively difficult opponent, but his ability to handle breaking balls, especially sharp ones, is average. When facing him, we can use breaking balls throughout. It'll be a pleasant surprise for those guys on the Seido High School Baseball Team."

"The Sixth Batter, Miyuki, once someone gets on base, his hitting average looks quite impressive. However, it's just that when someone is on base, the pitcher has fewer choices, making it easier for him to guess the pitching. As long as we don't let batters get on base, he's nothing to fear. Even if someone gets on base, we can do the opposite and trick him."

"The Seventh Batter, Masuko-senpai, has incredible swing power; once he connects with the ball, even if it's not a direct hit, the baseball will fly very far. But he's best at hitting Fastball, especially inside Fastball, and his breaking balls are also average. We can completely use outside pitches and breaking balls to deal with him."

"The Eighth Batter, if nothing unexpected happens, will be their pitcher. Whether it's Tanba-senpai or Kawakami, their hitting ability is average and not to be feared at all."

"The Ninth Batter, Sakai. He looks quite intimidating, but his hitting ability is also very average. Even if I only use Fastball, I don't think he can hit my pitching."

Harada listened to all of it and could not find a significant gap in the coverage. He gave a quiet internal acknowledgment that Narumiya had done more preparation than he had been given credit for.

"You really studied this time."

"An opponent who already beat me once. Did you think I was going to walk in unprepared?" Narumiya said it flatly, but his hands had closed into fists on the table.

The loss in the summer tournament had not softened with time. If anything, the distance had made it more defined. Narumiya had spent two weeks processing it before returning to practice, and Harada had watched the return closely enough to see that something fundamental had shifted.

The eyes were different. What had been competitive before had become something with a harder edge.

"You left out two players."

Narumiya's expression changed.

The two players not mentioned were the ones he had been circling around since the conversation began. Yuuki Tetsuya, fourth in the order, captain, the most consistent hitter on the Seido roster. And Zhang Han, fifth, the player whose name had been the most discussed in Tokyo baseball since Koshien ended.

Both of them had hit Narumiya's pitching in the summer tournament.

"Honestly," Narumiya said, after a pause that was longer than his previous answers had required, "I've spent significant time on them and I can't produce a reliable solution."

He did not look particularly comfortable saying it. For a pitcher with his track record and his sense of his own ability, acknowledging the absence of a clean answer was not a natural posture.

"But I won't lose to them on the field."

He said it with the quality of a statement rather than a prediction, as though the outcome had already been decided in some internal accounting that the field results would eventually confirm.

Harada felt a specific kind of relief that had nothing to do with the words themselves. The team's data files included entries on Yuuki and Zhang Han's tendencies and possible weaknesses. He and Narumiya both knew those entries existed. Neither of them put significant stock in them.

Players of that caliber at Koshien, surrounded by the best competition in the country, facing scouting operations from every strong program they played against, had not been effectively targeted. If a clean weakness existed that could be reliably exploited, it would have been found and used already. The absence of that discovery said something about whether the weakness was actually there.

Narumiya stood up, stretched, and left the room humming something to himself. Harada and his roommate exchanged a look and said nothing, both shaking their heads slightly at the particular composure their Ace carried into situations that would make most people visibly anxious.

Facing the strongest offensive lineup in the country, about to pitch in a game that had been consuming him since the summer, and he was humming on his way back to bed.

What they did not know was that Narumiya was not sleeping.

He lay in the dark under his blanket with his eyes open, and the summer semifinal played back across his memory in the specific detail that significant losses retained. The sequence of hits. The moments where the outcome shifted. The particular feeling of being hit hard in a way that had not happened before.

It had been the first time.

He had made a specific promise to himself in the days after it, lying in a similar darkness, that it would also be the last time.

He had not expected the rematch to arrive within the same calendar year. But it was here, and it was Saturday, and the players he had been thinking about since August were going to be standing sixty feet away from him in less than thirty-six hours.

Seido High School Baseball Team. Miyuki. Zhang Han. Yuuki.

He was ready for all of them.

Across the week that followed, Seido trained with the controlled intensity of a team that understood what was coming and had decided to meet it prepared rather than hopeful. By Friday evening, the first-team players had cleared the practice facilities early. Tomorrow required fresh legs and clear heads, and staying late served neither.

Zhang Han sat alone under a streetlamp, a notebook open on his knee, organizing what he had been thinking about all week into something he could use.

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