Showdown Mode
‘Eokpal… who is that?’
Pi Anta clicked her tongue, regretting that she hadn’t at least run a search before opening her mouth.
Better late than never. She picked up her phone and looked him up.
“Just typing ‘Eokpal’ brings him right up.”
In this Earth’s 2040, where the baseball player Jeong Taesik had never existed, full-dive baseball games had completely replaced classic baseball. The way searching “Faker” pulled up Lee Sang-hyeok, typing the nickname “Eokpal” into a portal was enough to surface his profile in seconds.
“Right-handed, huh. And he hits from the left.”
A right-hander practicing the left-handed batter’s box wasn’t unusual, and it wasn’t important information at the moment either, so Pi Anta just nodded dryly to herself.
What she zeroed in on was that he was the number-two starter for the Seoul Hustlers—a pro team sitting around second or third in National Mode—and that he was a classic overhand pitcher who released the ball from above the shoulder, roughly ear height.
“Looks like he’s got some real arm strength. Control-focused style, maybe?”
Considering that the one and two spots in a rotation were usually filled by foreign pitchers, a domestic arm holding down the number-two slot meant he was a pretty solid pitcher—talent on par with an import.
Any fan who watches even a little baseball would know this guy.
Eokpal’s reply came from exactly that same place.
He had every right to find it absurd.
Even without measuring him against her previous world, Pi Anta’s tier was Iron, and Eokpal’s was Master.
But that was exactly why Pi Anta felt she needed to confirm it all the more.
There was no hidden meaning. She meant it in the purest, most literal sense.
She couldn’t guarantee a win. But she thought the odds of a guaranteed loss were even thinner.
Eokpal, for his part, was equally certain he couldn’t lose.
Honestly, they didn’t even need a real contest. Logging in at the same time and standing side by side would have been enough to clear up the misunderstanding. But that cocky attitude of hers only made him more determined to settle it on the field.
From Eokpal’s perspective, Pi Anta’s words didn’t even qualify as bluffing. And fair enough.
Her swing looked clean, sure—but the other party’s tier was still Iron.
People who’d never actually stood in a batter’s box against pro stuff might think that, with a lucky bounce, even an amateur could put a pro pitch in play.
Absolutely impossible.
An amateur froze solid the moment a pro pitcher ran a ball even slightly inside—couldn’t even bring themselves to start the bat. Coldly speaking, you didn’t need a breaking ball. It was the same feeling as the first time you got behind the wheel: plenty of space on both sides, and you still flinched like you were about to scrape the car. You hunched up, terrified of taking one off the body.
And Eokpal wasn’t just any pitcher. He was the number-two starter on a domestic pro team.
Pi Anta’s words didn’t even register as bluster. They sounded like a joke, pure and simple.
And yet that Iron-tier hitter was weirdly calm, as if she had something to lean on.
He’d expected her to be selfish. Instead she was surprisingly considerate, even had a bit of sense about her.
Fiddling with his phone in a dark room, Eokpal smacked his lips, puzzled.
“What a hard person to read.”
Sometimes she came off arrogant. Other times she was almost gentlemanly.
Does she just react differently depending on the situation?
He was swallowing that uneasy feeling and about to wrap up the conversation when—
“Wh—what?!”
Every message they’d exchanged so far got shoved clean off the screen by a single reply.
Eokpal had never received a text that filled the entire phone display. He was genuinely rattled.
And it was still too early to be shocked.
“Ugh, please stop…!!”
He hadn’t asked, and he didn’t care!
Eokpal killed his phone notifications.
And when he checked the messages a few hours later—
Amazingly, there wasn’t a single “Why aren’t you reading this?” reaction among them.
She was genuinely, purely dumping out everything she wanted to say for the sole purpose of chatting.
“What even is this…”
Eokpal was starting to feel a little afraid.
The next morning.
“Thank you for coming out this early.”
Standing on the mound with his back to the AI fielders, Eokpal gave a light bow toward the batter’s box.
Pi Anta nodded from the plate. Unlike Eokpal, her face was hidden behind a mask—not because she’d changed any settings, but because wearing a mask that covered the face was the default in-game.
And even with that mask over her mouth—
Pi Anta’s mouth kept right on working.
“It’s fine. An athlete’s supposed to be diligent. Honestly, ten in the morning is a great time—morning stretch, warm-up, breakfast, then right into swing work. I do a hundred swings in the morning and a hundred at night. On a bad day I add another hundred at night, up to three hundred max. And the reason I do that is—”
“N-no. Please stop.”
Eokpal waved both hands in a hurry, cutting off the monologue.
This kid… she wasn’t just playing a character?
It wasn’t a chatterbox gimmick. It was real. She looked like she could talk for two days and three nights if she felt like it, so Eokpal resolved to handle the business and clear out as fast as possible.
“You know Showdown Mode, right?”
“Not in detail. Is it like a one-on-one mode?”
“Yeah, basically.”
BoL had been out for over a decade, and somehow there still existed a twenty-something in Korea who didn’t know Showdown Mode—the crown jewel of the game. Eokpal found that freshly amazing, but he explained it kindly all the same. At least she didn’t seem to be pretending not to know.
“Pitcher and batter go one-on-one the same way, but you can set the win conditions. Say, a certain number of hits and the batter wins. Or a certain number of outs and the pitcher wins. That kind of thing.”
Pi Anta had assumed it was just a mode where you charged in headfirst. She let out a quiet “Ohh” of genuine appreciation.
Eokpal eyed her for a moment with a doubtful look, then made his offer.
“I’m a pro, so—if you get even one hit, I’ll count it as your win.”
“One hit?”
“Yeah. I won’t count just putting it in the outfield as a win, though. Honestly, I think you could manage that much.”
From Eokpal’s side, that was meant as a compliment.
Being able to send a pro team pitcher’s ball into the outfield, at the absolute bottom of the amateur tiers—that was real talent. A little lip service of that sort.
“Sure. Let’s do it that way.”
Pi Anta nodded more readily than he’d expected.
Eokpal stood on the mound and worked the rosin bag. Even in virtual reality, the white powder scattered vividly on the wind, and the feel of rosin-dusted fingers catching the seams of a baseball was as familiar as the real thing.
Pi Anta stepped into the left-handed batter’s box and stamped the dirt—pak, pak, pak—three times. Then she raised the bat vertical, pointed it at the pitcher, and sighted down the barrel once.
A thoroughly provocative batting routine.
Eokpal didn’t particularly care.
Honestly, he hadn’t even done any scouting.
Just don’t forget to grab the video.
That was the most important thing to him.
Still, while he was at it, letting her feel the wall of the pros firsthand might be fun.
First pitch… yeah. A sinker.
Eokpal found the seams inside his glove.
A reverse-spin sinker looked, from a left-handed batter’s eye line, like it was coming down the middle—then ran away outside and dropped off a cliff. Meeting a proper reverse-spin pitch at the amateur level was rare enough that she might jump out of her skin and sit right down after seeing it.
A little mean, maybe. But sometimes you need a cold, hard look at where you actually stand.
Twenty-one at-bats, sixteen hits, twenty-three steals?
Those were numbers you could post beating up on amateurs. At the pro level, not a chance.
“Here we go!”
Eokpal took a light windup and let it fly.
White rosin powder burst off the ball as he released—
and the pitch that had been tracking toward Pi Anta’s body suddenly bent its path toward the middle, knifing into the heart of the zone.
Wha—
He didn’t even get the chance to savor that smug little thought.
“Flat. And sloppy.”
CRACK!!
Pi Anta’s bat came around like a freshly honed blade.
Following the grain of the ball as it tried to run away—as if she’d expected it all along—she drove it clean, carrying every bit of that spin with it, and the ball flew all the way to the fence and thudded into it.
Tuk. Tuk. Tuk.
The sound of the ball rolling across the barren field carried on, and Eokpal still couldn’t process what had just happened.
He stared at the fence with a blank, stunned expression—
and Pi Anta, running through that signature batting routine again, muttered under her breath.
“Eokpal. Right-handed pitcher, left-handed hitter. Breaking balls he can throw: slider and sinker. Heavy sinker reliance—and I’m a lefty, so a sinker that runs away was the perfect call, right?”
Pak. Pak. Pak.
She stamped her front foot into the dirt again.
“Figured you’d try to mess with me a little, too.”
And the last beat of the routine.
She raised the bat that had just produced that vicious line drive, set it vertical—
and took dead aim at the pitcher on the mound.