Even the Way It Comes In Is Slow
Slow… even the way it comes in.
"This guy's ridiculously slow?"
As if they'd been waiting for those words, the chat window exploded.
Diamond, Master — and now Iron? What the hell was Iron?
"What's Iron?"
What came back wasn't an answer. It was mockery.
I8fit? What the hell was that abbreviation? I couldn't understand a single thing they were saying.
"What's I8fit?"
"What's skill gap?"
Oh, for fuck's sake — did you seriously need to know all this crap just to play a game? So what if I was bad? So what if I didn't know?
Anyway, what they were saying was that I was about to get completely dismantled by this guy, right?
I didn't feel any particular need to argue back. I just focused on the pitcher.
I'd show them.
In the meantime the pitcher wound up and fired again, and the ball he'd put everything into slammed heavily into the catcher's mitt.
Strike, two!
The chat flooded again. It was all pure snark, so I just ignored it.
Even back in real pro baseball, no matter how loud the stadium got, every last bit of mockery always cut through with perfect clarity. If anything, this kind of situation felt familiar.
Moments like this, you couldn't afford to overthink. Just look at the pitcher in front of you. Just focus on the next pitch.
I ran through the same routine again — stamped the ground three times with my lead right foot, then raised the bat vertical and leveled it at the pitcher.
The pitcher didn't seem particularly bothered. Whatever my routine looked like, the result so far was that I hadn't reacted to either of his pitches.
The first two had both been fastballs. Would this one be a breaking ball? Or another heater?
The pitcher drove his left foot forward and whipped his right arm through with everything he had.
So he was going to settle it with the fastball — no wasting pitches dancing around. Personality showing through.
But this was the third time I'd seen it. And for all that heavy sound, it wasn't actually that threatening.
I snapped my left elbow tight against my ribs. The tip of the bat stood sharp as a honed blade.
As the ball charged in, I turned nothing but my hips.
"Slow."
One. Two.
"…Even the way it comes in."
Three.
CRACK!!
Like cutting down a charging enemy at the waist — I swung through a clean arc and drove the ball.
The shot ripped between first and second like a bullet, rolled all the way to the fence, and while the fielder fumbled for a beat I settled comfortably onto second base.
I glanced over at our dugout. The guys who'd been sitting around with zero expectations, just waiting for their own turns to bat, were staring at me with blank, stunned faces as I casually peeled off my pads on second.
"You awake now?"
When else was I supposed to run my mouth?
The ball had been fast, sure. Under the premise of "at the amateur level," that is.
Anything under a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour never felt particularly quick to me. And they expected me to struggle against a pitch barely clearing a hundred and forty, with no lower-body weight behind it?
Not a chance in hell.
Even then, take away that fastball and the pitcher had nothing left. Guys who charged in trusting nothing but velocity were surprisingly easy prey. Smack that precious heater around two or three times and they ran out of ways to compete — kept running away outside until they eventually self-destructed.
But if there was one thing I hated about baseball as a game, it was this: no matter how much a single hitter ran wild, you couldn't hard-carry alone.
Four at-bats, three hits, four steals. You could fairly say I'd played the entire game by myself.
Right after I got on with a hit in my third at-bat, I'd stolen second and then immediately third in consecutive steals, forcing a scoring chance into existence — and the hitters behind me couldn't even put a single ball in the air to bring a run home.
That fastball that was a low-level joke to me was fire-breathing magic to the other eight batters. And because not a single runner had ever been on base ahead of me, I never scored either.
At the end, desperate to salvage something from a game that just wouldn't break, and with no runners on anyway, I tried a full swing for a home run. The ball felt clean off the bat — but it just wouldn't carry all the way out.
I was short on power.
Five to nothing.
This wasn't a game we should have lost like that.
I finished the match with a bitter taste in my mouth and logged out.
"Haa."
The moment I pulled off the Connector, the scorching rush of sprinting through dust and roaring crowds, the pleasant weightlessness of traveling through some star-strewn corner of the universe — all of it vanished without a trace.
There was only a girl lying on a bed. And that girl's arms and legs were still pale and fragile as sugarcane stalks that would snap if you hit them once.
"…Not enough power."
Embarrassing as it was to say out loud, I had been a slugger who chewed through the KBO — a walking ecosystem destroyer, a nickname that fit me perfectly. Even as a woman, the contact ability to put bat on ball, the pitch recognition, the instincts that decided whether a steal attempt lived or died — all of that still worked inside the game.
A user's actual baseball skill transferred as-is. Which meant the Irons in this game really were bottom-of-the-barrel at baseball in real life, and anyone sitting at Diamond or Master in-game probably had real ability you couldn't just dismiss.
I picked up my phone and looked up the ranking system. In BoL the ranks were called "tiers," and there were nine of them: Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, Grandmaster, Challenger.
So the problem, right now, was this:
"Main-account baseball skill is Challenger. Physical is Iron."
I couldn't fully express my ability through this body.
That said, a little more digging turned up something useful — female users' pitch velocity in-game got a 1.25x weighting to match male players' speeds, and because women were biologically disadvantaged in raw force when throwing or swinging, similar small weightings applied to those details too.
"So I just work out like hell."
Bump the intensity a little past what I normally did, and I could drag this physical up to Challenger level soon enough.
The thought was enough — I decided to move immediately. The second you tell yourself "starting tomorrow," nothing ever gets done.
I opened the drawer under the bed to change into workout clothes, and—
"…Oh."
A baseball uniform came out. Next to it, a glove stuffed in crumpled.
So this girl had played baseball too? For someone who had, her physical ability was pathetic.
"…I'll figure it out as I go."
Complicated, headache-inducing questions could wait. For now I'd start with the foundation of all conditioning work: running until it hurt.
The workout clothes clung a little strangely to my legs, but that would probably help more than hurt, so I didn't mind. I put on a sports bra top and jersey and stood in front of the full-length mirror in the corner of the room.
Through the natural light-brown bob that just brushed her shoulders, the eyes looking back were beautiful enough that even mid-autograph your gaze would snag and hold. The face was the kind that, with a little effort, would have guys lining up.
But what hit my eyes first was the skin gone pale from too little sun — and the arms and legs gone thin from too little training.
"What the hell are these forearms…"
Way too weak. God damn it.
On impulse I brought a hand to my chest. I tried squeezing some force into my sternum, but the soft mass that had become the symbol of womanhood just squished and yielded under my fingers.
"Weak. Pathetic."
I needed to pack this full of muscle.
I was steeling myself with that resolve and heading for the door when—
Bang.
Without any warning the door flew open and my mother walked in.
"Ah— uh, Mother…"
The next place my consciousness locked onto was the Connector sitting on the bedside table.
I leave the house to my freeloading NEET daughter and she just lies there gaming. That harmful headset has to go.
I could see the future where my baseball dreams got smashed to pieces with perfect clarity, so I scrambled into damage control.
"Uh, Mother, I think there might be some kind of misunderstanding here. If you go check the kitchen, the dishes are washed extremely clean. Of course every household has its own way of doing dishes, but, hmm, talking about dishwashing actually reminds me of a story from when I was a man living in the dorms. Back then I was trying to steam sweet potatoes in the dorm and completely burned the bottom of the pot black. I scrubbed that charred bottom like crazy trying to get it clean. And what I realized then was that using a ton of dish soap doesn't actually mean you're good at dishwashing. So today when I did the dishes I was careful about conserving soap, and—"
Somehow the explanation was turning into a full anecdote when—
"I saw you did the dishes."
"J-just as you saw, nice and clean…"
"Why didn't you dry them!!"
WHAM!
With no time to dodge, the fragile ADC took Malphite's ultimate full-on and went flying.
"Puheng?!"
Washing the bowls was supposed to be the end of it!
Around the same time Pi Anta was getting deleted by Malphite's ultimate in the real world, she was also catching a beating on Ballpen — the biggest community where Baseball of Legend players gathered.
The reason being:
A smurf-account accusation.