Chapter 252: The First Inning Showdown
Crush him, Narumiya!
Among those Narumiya had invited, the loudmouthed Yabe — the only substitute — was shouting encouragement for their ace just as crazily as the others.
"Knock it out, Tetsu!"
Everyone could tell that the game had now reached its first major turning point.
Well, okay — some outsiders didn't get it. Ichiro and his group were still wondering why the atmosphere had suddenly turned so intense. Luckily, Oogami was there to explain.
"Now that they've lost a run and Narumiya's shaken, this is the perfect chance to hit his decisive pitch!
And the only ones who can do it are…"
Miyuki looked toward the field.
"Only you two!"
"Here it comes — change-up!"
Miyuki, Sendo, and the whole Seidou bench were watching that pitch with unblinking eyes.
Tetsu had guessed it too. In fact, Harada himself knew the batter would be expecting it. But as Sendo thought — even if you know it's coming, that's what makes it a finishing pitch.
Harada had never lost faith in this ball.
When Tetsu swung, he realized the ball was dropping.
For a right-handed hitter it moved like a screwball, sinking near a lefty's knee — far too away for a righty to reach. And it was too late to adjust his stance.
Smack!
"Strike!"
"Batter out!"
"Ah!"
"Eh?!"
Several Seidou players gasped aloud.
"Not only does it mess up timing — it drops like a screwball too? So that's Narumiya's change-up!"
Miyuki's eyes widened; he hadn't expected it to be such a nasty pitch.
"I see! So this was what he was hiding all along! No wonder you can't hit that on the first try!"
Sendo actually looked delighted.
Many on Seidou's bench gazed gravely at the pitcher's mound — where Narumiya stood tall, looking down on everyone with a cold, godlike smile.
"Perfect. Only a pitcher of this caliber deserves to make me lose sleep last night."
Because of the distance, the spectators couldn't see the movement of the pitch clearly; to them, the drop didn't look that dramatic.
"It's not over yet, Narumiya! Don't slack off!"
Harada's thoughts echoed silently.
"Batting fifth, center fielder — Sendo-kun!"
"Come on, be surprised already, won't you, Yaka! Acting so relaxed — is that really fine?!" Narumiya turned toward the waiting area, speaking arrogantly to himself as he looked at Sendo.
Sendo rose calmly as his name was called.
As Tetsu walked past him, he patted Sendo's shoulder — knowing his junior didn't need any words of encouragement.
"Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun! Hey!!!"
"Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun! Hey!!!
… Knock it out, Sendo! Sendo! Sendo!"
"They're even using the same cheer as for Yaka! No originality at all! I told you — I'm gonna make you cry!"
Narumiya's gaze never left him, his mind replaying that exchange where Sendo had verbally cornered him earlier.
Sendo exhaled softly — "Hoo…" — and readied himself.
"If I can take him down here, even if they're leading by one, the momentum will completely swing our way.
Let's start with this pitch."
"Yeah, Yaka's just too cautious! But he ignored the signs last at-bat — if he does that again, we'll have a spat for sure! What a troublesome senpai."
Narumiya nodded outwardly but cursed inwardly.
If Harada knew, he'd probably grab him by the ear and yell, "Who's the one that's actually troublesome, huh?"
"I hate to admit it, but against you I can't afford to hold back at all… Still, making you cry — that hasn't changed!"
"Kh!" With a sharp stomp, Narumiya wound up.
Whoosh!
"Hmm!"
Sendo watched the ball whistle toward him, swinging the bat through the air.
"Slider?"
Ping!
Thunk!
"Foul ball!" — It went out past third base, kicking up a spray of sand.
"So fast! What an unbelievable first-year!" third baseman Yoshizawa muttered, staring at the small crater where it landed.
"Damn it!" Narumiya kicked at the dirt. He didn't even know whether he was angry at being surprised or at letting the ball get hit at all.
"He really reminds me of Ozawa…" Sendo thought, remembering Ozawa from the old practice game against Sakura Women's College.
From the sidelines, Ozawa scratched her nose awkwardly, remembering just how embarrassing she had been back then.
"But this time my body didn't move too early — I read it as a breaking ball. So the difference in velocity really makes it harder to judge the pitch type, huh?"
He reflected on his swing, realizing his instinct wasn't as exaggeratedly sharp as others claimed — and that the unknown tends to get over-hyped.
"Thanks to you, I think I'm starting to understand how my body's instincts work — why I could identify pitches so fast before. Now come on, give me something even tougher!"
Seeing that taunting look from the batter's box only enraged Narumiya further.
"Next pitch, full power! It doesn't have to be a strike — that guy always swings at bad ones! Let's steal a strike count!"
Luckily, Harada agreed to call for a straight fastball. If it had been a breaking ball, Narumiya might've thrown it wild out of sheer anger.
With overwhelming dominance, he unleashed his full power pitch!
Whoosh!
"So fast — and it's so close!"
Ping!
Smack!
"Foul!"
"Whew, that was close — almost a pop-fly! After that high-quality slider, another fastball?! From inner corner to outer — and the speed gap too! So strong! But… that just makes it even more exciting! I can hear my usually steady heartbeat pounding loud and clear now! This thrill — I can't get enough of it! The joy of facing a powerful opponent… it's making me breathless! Where will the next one go? Outer corner? Splitter? Or a… chaaange-up~?"
Sendo stretched his arm straight toward Narumiya, holding the bat with one hand at a right angle, left hand near his mouth — his calm heart now fully ignited.
For the first time, the usually composed Sendo wore a smile he couldn't suppress.
"Sendo's smiling? Why?" Ota frowned — he couldn't understand that feeling.
Only someone who had never met a true rival before could.
That pure, heartfelt smile of joy.
"He's been waiting for this kind of showdown for a long time. I bet this is the first time in his life he's felt this way," Miyuki said with a grin.
"He's cornered now — no way he'll back off. Even if it's a bad pitch, he'll swing. Doesn't need a strike, just make him bite."
"Strike him out, Narumiya!"
"You've got this, Sendo!"
"Knock it out!"
"Narumiya!"
"Sendo!"
Narumiya lifted his leg, stepped, and threw with full force.
"No matter how much of a monster he is, after a 150 km/h fastball, there's no way he can keep up with this pitch — it's not even aimed at the strike zone."
"Here it comes — the change-up after being cornered!
Sendo!" Miyuki clenched his fist nervously. The ball was low — too low to be a strike, and not off by much.
For someone like Sendo, who wasn't good at judging balls and strikes, this was a definite temptation — especially when pressured.
Honestly, it wasn't that Coach Kataoka didn't want him to learn pitch recognition — it's just that for a beginner like Sendo, every new skill was already a huge leap. There wasn't time for such fine-tuning. And with how well he'd been performing, it hadn't seemed necessary.
Smack!
"...!"
"Ball!"
"No way! Most people would've swung at that!" Narumiya shouted from the mound.
"Why? Three different pitch types at three different speeds — he shouldn't have had time to analyze it! And he was cornered — wasn't he afraid of a called third strike?!" Harada stared in disbelief.
"Ball! Seidou's No. 5 batter, Sendou, despite being cornered, calmly identified it as a ball and didn't swing!"
"Whoa!!!"
Even more than Harada, the entire crowd was stunned — hundreds of them.
"For some reason, the Seidou bench is erupting in shock!" the announcer exclaimed, bewildered.
"That Sendo, he actually…"
"He actually didn't swing at a bad pitch!"
The Seidou cheering section wasn't just surprised — some were nearly crying.
That showed how hopeless Sendo's swing judgment usually was.
"Unbelievable! I didn't think Sendo could tell apart such a 'hard-to-judge' pitch!" Ota said in awe.
In truth, the pitch wasn't that hard to distinguish — it just barely missed below the strike zone. For Sendo, it could've gone either way.
The real difficulty was the speed gap among the three pitches. Just as Harada thought, with that much variation, most people couldn't possibly adjust — they'd already be struggling just to identify the pitch type, let alone time the swing. Under pressure, it was even harder.
That's why no one could understand how Sendo managed to hold back.
In reality, for Sendo—who relied heavily on instinct—the difference in pitch speed barely affected him, at most reducing his reaction time by a fraction of a second.
The second pitch had been harder to adapt to mainly because of the slider's movement and the space it created. It was fast, inside, and unexpected.
Even for a long-limbed batter like Sendo, who'd trained to overcome his weakness against inside pitches, there simply hadn't been enough time to adjust to such a high-quality slider on the first encounter.
But as Sendo's form sharpened with each moment, that handicap was rapidly fading.
This next pitch had nothing to do with any of that—it was simply that Sendo had decided not to swing at change-ups, which were tough for him to hit.
That ball had clearly looked like a bad one.
Just because he couldn't always tell balls from strikes didn't mean his brain wasn't working—he'd just never cared before because he could usually hit them anyway.
But now he was facing a rival who made his blood boil with excitement.
Facing Narumiya, Sendo even felt his usual tendency to drift off disappearing.
"I see it clearly, Sendo!"
The cheering section finally reacted. They realized this was a key moment and tried not to shout in ways that might distract him.
Too late to fix that, perhaps—but at least Sendo wasn't like that idiot Sawamura.
That was their honest thought.
In truth, Sendo had already felt their noisy energy—but it didn't bother him one bit.
"Seriously, they underestimate me too much. Do they really think I'm that idiot Eijun?"
Of course he couldn't resist muttering a jab.
"No matter why he didn't swing… after two inside pitches—a fastball and a change-up—and if you count the first slider, which broke in from the inside too,
his focus must be locked on the inner corner now, right? Then let's finish him with a high-speed slider to the outer corner!"
Harada's reasoning wasn't wrong.
The first three pitches had been perfectly sequenced—making full use of Narumiya's horizontal break and speed variation, pulling the batter's attention inward.
A hitter focused on the inside corner would have trouble reacting to anything outside.
But Sendo was the exception.
His dynamic vision was simply too good, and pitch-speed differences affected him far less than normal.
Only the change-up's wide speed gap still challenged him.
Now, Sendo was combining instinctive reads with rational adjustments.
That blend gave him tremendous resilience against every pitch type.
During the short breaks between pitches, he analyzed his approach while deliberately erasing the lingering effects of those inside throws.
"There's no way he'll give me an easy pitch when I'm behind in the count. I can't just take a walk—let's play this out to the end!"
"About time, Yaka! Now get off my field, you infuriating bastard!"
"Sendo!!!"
"Narumiya!"
Whoosh!
"Straight down the middle? A missed pitch?"
Sendo gripped the bat tightly, his weight already shifting forward.
Swish!
The ball broke sharply; Sendo's pupils widened, but by then, his body had already taken over.
Ping!
Smack!
"Foul ball!"
"Whew, close one! Almost got taken out there! That swing was full of luck! Didn't expect that slider to start from the middle or outer edge and then break so sharply—it ended up both far and low!"
"Whoo…"
The substitutes and bench players outside were even more tense than Sendo himself— they even exhaled in unison, perfectly synchronized, without meaning to.
"These pitches are dazzling… Even if it's a miss, I can't relax! There's no time left to observe anything—
it's down to a one-shot duel!Whatever pitch comes next, if it's hittable— I'm not holding back!"
Whoosh!
Suddenly, a fastball powered by Narumiya's entire body came roaring in—bold, fearless, and completely unexpected.
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