Diamond No Ace: The Strongest Hitter Has Arrived

Saturday arrived clear and cold.

The sky was a deep, unbroken blue, and the sun was high but delivered no warmth. The autumn wind moved across the field with a sharpness that announced the season had fully arrived. Zhang Han noticed it the moment he stepped outside, the contrast with the summer tournament sharper than he had expected. Different players, different weather, different weight to the day.

The game had drawn the third-year seniors back.

Azuma Kiyokuni appeared with a belly that had grown considerably since his last visit. The draft announcement had apparently resolved whatever had been keeping his appetite in check. Coach Kataoka had already spoken to him about it privately, delivering the kind of assessment that left nothing unclear: professional baseball was not as demanding about physique as other sports, but there were still limits, and a body that had moved past those limits was a body that might not see the field once a professional contract began.

Azuma had taken the warning seriously and put in real effort toward managing it. The effort had produced five additional kilograms across the month. The belly, previously approximating a six-month pregnancy, had advanced to something closer to eight.

Before Zhang Han left for the stadium that morning, Azuma had found him specifically.

"We're coming to watch today. Don't embarrass us."

The people coming with him were Hidezawa, Yamada, Captain Tanaka, and several others who had essentially moved on from the baseball team in the organizational sense but had not moved on from it in any other sense. The fact that they had arranged their schedules to be in the stands for this particular game communicated something that no direct statement was required to express.

Zhang Han thanked him and meant it.

Fifteen minutes before the first pitch, the Seido bus arrived at Hachioji Stadium.

The stands were nearly full.

Hidezawa had come separately and arrived to find no available seats, which he registered with visible surprise. A capacity of nearly ten thousand people, and most of it occupied before the game had even begun. He kept his head down and moved toward the edges of the crowd when someone nearby started looking at him with the expression of a person who was working through a recognition.

Being identified in a packed stadium before a game of this magnitude was not the kind of attention the third-year seniors wanted. They were past their playing days at Seido. The attention today belonged to the players still on the field.

Even with that understanding, finding standing room in the corner sections took some effort.

Fujio from Baseball Kingdom Magazine arrived and encountered the same problem. He eventually settled for squatting in a corner of the front section and accepted it as the cost of the assignment.

The attention made sense once he thought it through. On paper, this was a Tokyo quarterfinal in the Autumn Tournament, a stage that typically drew modest crowds compared to the summer's national stakes.

But the two programs involved were not typical quarterfinal participants. Inashiro Industrial had just demonstrated against Teito that they were operating at a level beyond what their bracket position suggested.

Seido had spent the previous two games making their own case. The result was a game that carried the particular weight of an early elimination of one of the two programs most likely to represent West Tokyo at the highest level.

The team that lost today was going home.

When the Seido players walked onto the field in their uniforms, the response from the stands was immediate and sustained. Individual names cut through the general noise as distinct calls: Yuuki, Zhang Han, Miyuki, the three who had accumulated the most visible followings over the course of the season.

Kuramochi heard the calls for everyone around him and registered the absence of his own name in the mix. He stood on the field in the moment before warmups began and sat with the specific feeling of a person who has identified exactly where they are in a hierarchy and found the location uncomfortable.

He did not linger in the feeling. There was a game to play.

Before the players moved to their positions, Coach Kataoka turned to Yuuki at the front of the group.

"Let's do it once."

Yuuki looked at him for a moment, not quite certain he had heard correctly.

The Seido team cheer had a specific history attached to it. It was famous precisely because it was not deployed casually. It carried a weight that the team had to be prepared to carry before shouting it made sense, and Coach Kataoka had not called for it since the new roster had taken shape. Using it prematurely, before the team had the substance to back it up, would make the words hollow.

That he was calling for it now said something specific about how he viewed the current team.

Yuuki understood immediately and agreed without hesitation.

The players gathered in a circle in the dugout, Yuuki at the center. The stands around them had not quieted, but the circle itself had a stillness inside it.

Yuuki took a breath, raised his thumb, and pressed it against his chest.

"Who are we?"

"The King, Seido!"

"Who shed the most sweat?"

"Seido!!!"

"Who shed the most tears?"

"Seido!!!!"

"Are you ready to fight?"

"Oooohhh!!!!"

"Bearing pride in our hearts, we only have one goal! The National Championship! Let's go!!!"

"Oooohhh! Oooohhh! Oooohhh!!!!"

Every player in the circle raised a finger toward the sky. The gesture was the same one generations of Seido players had made before them, and the weight of that continuity was present in how it landed.

In the stands, the Seido supporters who recognized what they were watching felt it move through them in a way that the scoreboard would never capture. Several of them were already wiping their eyes before the warmup pitches had been thrown.

The team that had just shouted that cheer was ready.

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