The third sester ended, and Zhang Han and his teammates were already second-year students.
Zhang Han had not put much effort into his studies, but his grades ca back good regardless. His classmates stared at his report card with expressions of genuine confusion.
"You never seed to study much. How are your grades this good?"
Kuramochi asked, puzzled.
Zhang Han shrugged with visible smugness.
"As a student, how can it be acceptable to fail an exam?"
Kuramochi's expression darkened further. This guy was always like this — infuriating people without any apparent effort or consequence.
"It's not like you needed to score that high!"
He looked at the paper again. Zhang Han had ranked 8th in class and 43rd in the entire grade. Definitely at the top. Tokyo schools did not hand out Good Student awards or similar certificates, but if they did, Zhang Han would have been on the list without question.
"No choice," Zhang Han said pleasantly. "This is probably the difference in IQ."
Kuramochi looked like he had swallowed sothing unpleasant and could not spit it back out.
Both Zhang Han and Seido had been going through a rough stretch recently, though that was not sothing you could read from his report card.
Zhang Han himself had hit a personal slump and was temporarily searching for his form in the second team. The first-string had also suffered consecutive setbacks in practice matches throughout the sester.
Coach Kataoka and Vice-principal Takashima Rei had gone to considerable lengths to arrange eight strong opponents for them, hoping the results would rebuild confidence.
Seido had been fortunate in at least one respect. Toward the end of the third sester, many teams hoping to participate in Spring Koshien were actively hunting for strong practice partners.
Teams that had already qualified were naturally off the table as opponents — on the Koshien field, they could easily beco direct competitors, and nobody wanted to hand a future rival useful information. Seido, which possessed genuine top-tier strength but had not made it into the Spring tournant, beca a highly sought-after partner as a result.
Invitations arrived from every direction.
Kataoka could not accept all of them. He and Takashima Rei reviewed the requests carefully and selected eight opponents that would provide the most value for where Seido currently stood. The underlying purpose was clear between the two of them — show the players that even without a Spring Koshien berth, their strength was still at a national level. They had nothing to be ashad of. They still belonged among the best in the country, and these matches would prove it.
Unfortunately, Seido's players were not destined to receive that ssage cleanly.
The practice matches did not go according to the intended script.
They lost three of the eight. They won the remaining five, but none of those victories ca without difficulty. The process of every single ga had been hard-fought in a way that made the wins feel more like relief than celebration.
Kataoka and Takashima Rei could not accept the results. They had wanted to do sothing good for the players, to send them into the new year with their confidence restored. Instead, the matches had complicated everything they had hoped to simplify.
Reflect. Reflect. And reflect again.
The players had no choice but to comply. They sat with the ga replays and watched themselves carefully, looking for answers. And honestly, after watching, most of them felt their performances had not actually been poor. The question of why they had lost anyway remained genuinely difficult to answer from the inside.
Looking at the three teams that had beaten them told most of the story.
Osaka Kiryu — the Sumr Koshien champion ,Inashiro Industrial — the team that had defeated them in the Autumn Tournant and gone on to represent Tokyo, And the Kanagawa champion and Kanto Tournant runner-up.
There was not a single program in that group that was not a top national powerhouse. Kataoka had only agreed to face them at all because of longstanding relationships between the programs. Under any other circumstances, scheduling voluntary practice matches against opponents that strong would have been considered looking for trouble.
The scores had been 11-7, 9-6, and 4-3. Seido had competed in all three. They had not been humiliated. They had put runs on the board and made the gas close. But that was how it went sotis — strength mattered enormously, and so did timing and luck, and in those three matches, the combination had not landed in Seido's favor.
The deeper problem, though, was the pitching.
All three pitchers had been carrying issues that had persisted since the Inashiro ga. Against weaker opponents, those issues stayed manageable, concealed beneath the gap in overall ability.
Against equals or better, the problems surfaced all at once and refused to stay hidden. Tanba's sharpness ca and went in a way that could not be predicted. Kawakami still had not fully recovered his confidence in his sinker. Zhang Han was developing rapidly but was not yet at a stage where he could be the consistent anchor the team needed.
The offense had been smooth throughout all eight matches — that part of the team continued to perform at a high level. But offense alone could not carry a team when the pitching could not hold the score within a manageable range. It did not matter how many runs Seido manufactured if the opponent could match or exceed them every ti the ball went to the mound. The fundantal equation of baseball was not being solved, and everyone involved understood it.
The five wins had been equally taxing in their own way. Every one of those five opponents had qualified for Spring Koshien, which ant none of them were soft. Getting through those matches had required genuine effort and a fair amount of fortune.
Asking for comfortable victories against that level of competition would have been unreasonable, and nobody did ask for that. But the uncomfortable reality was that even the wins had not looked the way a nationally ambitious team was supposed to look.
Kataoka and the coaching staff were not satisfied.
Neither, honestly, were many of the players themselves.
Seido's goal was not simply to reach Koshien. It had never been just to reach Koshien. The target was national dominance — the kind of result that put the program at the top of a field that contained Osaka Kiryu, Inashiro, and programs like them. And a team with that ambition could not be grinding out difficult wins against mid-level Spring qualifiers while losing to the top three they encountered.
The gap between where Seido was and where Seido wanted to be was real, and the practice match results had made it visible in a way that could not be explained away.
In the final days of the third sester, Kataoka gathered the entire roster for a rigorous training session before releasing them for the break. He was not going to send them ho for an extended holiday and risk having them co back sluggish and heavy. Whatever physical condition they were in when they left, he intended to be at least maintained.
The break was brief by most standards. Seido's players did not get the kind of extended rest that the ordinary student body enjoyed.
The holiday passed quickly regardless.
A week before the new students were scheduled to enroll, Seido's baseball club mbers began making their way back to the school one by one. So arrived looking sharp, evidence of individual training kept up through the ti off. Others arrived looking exactly like people who had enjoyed every day of the rest they had been given and intended to make no apologies for it.
Zhang Han was among the first group. He ca back with a specific feeling in his body that told him sothing had shifted during the break, though he could not yet say exactly what. The slump he had been carrying through the second team assignnt was not gone, but it was looser, less fixed in place than it had felt at the end of the sester.
There was work to do. That much was clear to everyone returning to that field.
The new school year was about to begin, new students were coming, and Seido's ambitions had not changed even if their recent results had forced a more honest accounting of where they currently stood.
Whatever ca next was going to require more from all of them than anything the previous year had asked for.
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