"Their cleanup hitter bats left," Satoshi said, scrolling his phone with his thumb. "Hit .380 in fall ball. Mostly singles. Weak opposite-field swing, can't catch up to anything above 135."
"Nobody asked," someone said from the middle of the bus.
Satoshi kept going. "Their ace throws mid-120s with a slider that hangs. WHIP was 1.6 in the fall prefectural. That's basically an invitation."
The bus was built for Japanese high schoolers. Kai's knees pressed into the seat back in front of him and his head grazed the ceiling when he sat up straight. He'd given up on straight ten minutes ago and was folded into the window corner, legs angled into the aisle, one knee blocking the path to the rear seats. Daiki had taken the seat across from him and was asleep, arms crossed, cap pulled low.
Golden Week. The highway was empty, the towns along the route half-shuttered. Holiday banners hung from lampposts outside convenience stores. The bus smelled like vinyl and the rice balls Chihiro had distributed from a cooler near the front. She'd counted them twice and checked the equipment bags three times before they pulled out of the school lot. Catcher's gear, medical kit, extra balls, radar gun case. Her clipboard had a checklist and she'd gone through it with a pen that clicked.
The field they pulled into was on the edge of a town Kai had never heard of. Concrete bleachers. No shade. The infield dirt was lighter than Minamisaki's, packed hard and cracked at the edges. A handful of parents sat in the bleachers behind the home dugout, folding fans working against the late-morning heat.
The opposing team was already warming up along the first-base line. Their pitcher threw from a high three-quarter slot, arm stiff through the delivery. Their fielders chatted and moved in the loose way of a team that knew this was a holiday game and nothing more.
Kai walked to the visitor's mound. The rubber was narrower than Minamisaki's. The slope broke differently under his back foot, steeper near the edges, flattening out toward the plate in a way that shifted his balance point forward. The dirt around the rubber was dry and fine. He dug his toe in and the ground gave like sand.
Ōno set up behind the backstop with the radar gun. Takagi stood in the third-base coaching box, hat tipped back, hands in his back pockets.
Kai threw his warmup pitches. Daiki crouched and gave a low target, outside corner. Fastball. Fastball. Fastball. The decision had been made before they'd left. Practice games were fastball-only. The knuckleballs stayed packed away, invisible, a weapon nobody outside the team would see until they had to. Coach's rule. Daiki had agreed without needing the reason explained. Kai hadn't cared either way.
His arm was fresh. The seams sat against his fingertips and the ball left clean on every throw, the pop of Daiki's mitt carrying across the quiet field. Someone in the opposing dugout said something. Kai caught the shape of the word without the meaning. Tall, probably. Or big. The sounds were familiar by now even if the vocabulary wasn't.
The first batter stepped in. Right-handed, compact stance, bat waggling high.
Daiki's mitt went up. Inside fastball, chest height. Kai set, lifted, unwound. The ball was past the batter before his front foot landed. Pop. Called strike. The batter looked at the umpire, then at Kai, then back at the umpire.
The second pitch was low and away. The batter swung late and the bat caught air. The third was inside again, riding up under the hands. Swing and a miss. Three pitches, three strikes.
Kai walked behind the mound, rubbed the ball, stepped back on. The next batter lasted four pitches. Groundball to short. Takeda fielded it clean and threw across. The third batter fouled one back, fouled another off his shoe, then watched a fastball paint the outside edge. The umpire's hand went up.
Three batters, ten pitches, the inning gone like a light switching off. The same in the second. Daiki kept the game simple, calling fastballs to different quadrants, moving the target a hand-width each time. Kai hit the glove and the batters swung through or didn't swing at all. By the end of the second inning, the game felt over and it was barely started.
His arm was fine. The shoulder rolled loose, the release was clean, the ball did what his hand told it. He could feel the velocity sitting in the high 140s from the way the ball exploded off his fingertips, the backspin tight and even. Ōno was writing in his notebook behind the backstop.
The third was the bottom of the order. Batters seven, eight, nine. The weakest part of any lineup, and this team's bottom third swung like they were guessing where the ball might go. The seventh batter fouled one back, then went down on two straight fastballs he couldn't catch up to. Eight and nine were quicker. Nine batters up, nine batters down.
Kai walked off the mound and Ōno met him at the dugout steps. "147, 148, 146," he said, tapping the notebook page. "Consistent. Good."
Satoshi leaned over from two seats down in the dugout. "Their seventh batter swung at a pitch that was still accelerating. I don't think he knows what 148 looks like."
"Nobody does at this level," Takeda said. He was cleaning dirt from his cleats with a stick. "I've got nothing to do out there."
The fourth inning started and the lineup turned over. The leadoff man again, and this time the mound felt different. Not wrong. Just heavier. The slope, which had been a surface he pushed off, became a surface he stood on. His stride shortened without him deciding to shorten it.
The leadoff batter had seen him once already, and it showed. He got the bat on the first pitch, a foul tip that buzzed Daiki's mitt. Fouled off two more, fighting, then went down on a fastball that tailed in on his hands. But he'd made Kai work. Seven pitches for one out instead of three.
Kai pushed harder on the next batter and the velocity was back for a swing and a miss, but his shoulder carried a drag that hadn't been there an inning ago. Friction. A door hinge asking for oil.
He finished him. The next one lined a single to left, the first hit of the game. The ball had left Kai's hand looking like the pitch before it, same slot, same delivery. But slower. The batter's timing caught up.
The runner took a wide turn at first. Shimazu threw the ball in from right field and someone yelled something at Kai. The words came fast, slurred, shaped differently from the Japanese he'd been learning from textbooks and Daiki's patient translations. A verb he almost recognized. Something about covering. Or backing up. He took two steps toward first base.
"No," Shimazu yelled again, louder, hands cupped around his mouth. The same syllables, the same slurred vowels.
Kai stood halfway between the mound and first, looking from Shimazu to Takeda and back. Takeda pointed at the mound with his glove. "He's telling you to back up the throw. Not go to first." Standard Japanese. Kai understood every word.
Laughter from the dugout. Kai walked back to the rubber. The textbook Japanese in his head and the Miyazaki Japanese on this field were still different languages, and his legs had no dictionary.
The cleanup hitter flew out to center on the first pitch, Inoue drifting under it at a walk, and the inning was over.
The fifth was slow. The ball left heavier, the pop in Daiki's mitt arriving a half-beat later than it had in the first three innings. He could feel it in the weight of his arm, the release point slipping forward, each pitch carrying less of the thing that had made the early batters flinch. The Miyazaki heat sat on his shoulders and the back of his neck like a wet towel. Daiki adjusted, moving the targets to the corners, asking for location instead of power. A groundball. A pop fly. The batters were still overmatched. But the margin had closed.
Kai walked off the mound after the fifth and Coach met him at the dugout steps. "How's the arm?"
Kai looked at his pitching hand. The seam marks were pressed into his fingertips. His shoulder sat lower than it had at the start, the joint heavy in a way that was new. Not pain. Weight. He'd thrown seventy pitches in Regensburg and felt fine. But Regensburg didn't have this heat, this air that sat on his skin like warm water. And his body was longer now, the shoulder joint carrying leverage it hadn't carried six months ago. Seventy pitches in Miyazaki was different. His body was done.
"Heavy," he said.
Coach nodded. "Abe's got the rest. Good work today."
Abe was already warming up in the bullpen, arm moving at the steady pace of a pitcher who'd been waiting his turn. Kai sat down. Aoi Hasegawa had a towel, an ice bag, and a bottle of water arranged on the bench. She held out the ice. He pressed it against his shoulder and the cold cut through the heat.
The team won. Kai didn't watch the last innings closely. The opposing lineup looked different against Abe, timing adjusting, balls landing in gaps that had been empty when Kai was on the mound. But Abe held. The final score was comfortable and forgettable.
After the game, Coach sat beside Kai in the dugout with the iPad. He scrolled past the early innings, the easy strikeouts, the velocity readings in the high 140s. Stopped on the fourth. The overlay showed Kai's stride length shrinking, the release point drifting forward, the gap between his third-inning mechanics and his fifth-inning mechanics visible in color-coded lines that diverged like a road splitting.
"You have five innings right now," Coach said. He tapped the screen where the velocity curve dropped. "We need nine by July."
The bus ride back was quieter. The team had won and nobody needed to talk about it. Kai leaned into the window corner again, his left shoulder wrapped in the ice bag, the melt soaking through his shirt.
Sota took the seat across the aisle. He didn't say anything. He held out a rice ball, wrapped in cellophane, leftover from the morning cooler. Kai took it. Tuna. He ate it with his right hand while his pitching arm rested against the ice.
Sota ate his own and looked out the window at the passing town, the shuttered shops, the empty schoolyards. The bus engine hummed through the floor. Outside, the heat had settled into something that didn't punish but didn't leave.
The bus stopped at a convenience store on the way back. Bathroom break. Half the team filed out. Sota appeared beside Kai at the vending machine outside, pointed at a can with a label Kai couldn't read, and said something Kai caught half of.
Kai bought it. White and fizzy. The first sip was sweet and slightly sour and unlike anything he'd had before. Carbonation and milk. He looked at the can.
"Calpis," Sota said, grinning. "You don't have this in Germany?"
Kai took another sip. It wasn't bad. It wasn't good. It was Calpis, and now he knew what that was.
They stood at the vending machine while the holiday town was quiet around them. Two kids who didn't quite fit, a second-year foreigner and a first-year who'd ride the bench all summer, sharing a rest stop and a drink that tasted like nothing from home.
Back in Minamisaki, the team scattered from the bus. Kai walked through the town toward the Nishimura house with Daiki and Coach, his bag over his right shoulder. Nobody talked. The afternoon had gone soft and warm.
At the door, Kai kicked off his shoes and his shoulder reminded him it existed. Haruka looked at the ice bag soaking through his shirt and said something to Coach that made him shake his head.
"Three more practice games in May," Coach said. "The summer qualifier draw is June 15."
Six weeks. The number sat in the hallway between them, heavy as Kai's arm.