The Terrifying Newbie
“Let’s settle this.”
“If you take even a single strikeout off me, I’ll count it as your win.”
The light in her eyes beyond the bat brimmed with pure fighting spirit.
That competitive fire punching straight through the avatar sent a chill racing down Eokpal’s spine, the same gut-clenching dread a pitcher feels when the bases are loaded with no outs in the bottom of the ninth and the cleanup hitter steps in.
What kind of newbie is this? She’s really Iron…?
She had read the pitch type and location, then swung from the perfect stance.
This was a warning.
Come at me straight or get publicly humiliated.
The message landed so clearly that Eokpal’s heart dropped—yet at the same time, something deeper began to boil.
“All right. Let’s do this.”
The instinctive hunger that surges when you face a real powerhouse, the reckless guts that make you charge in even when it looks stupid—Eokpal had that in spades too.
Meanwhile, around the same time.
For the Ballpen users who had spent the entire night spinning wild conspiracy theories and setting the boards on fire, ten in the morning might as well have been the crack of dawn.
Normally at this hour the board was a chaotic scatter of overnight baseball debates, flame wars, and the random post-match write-ups from people who had stormed off to settle “who’s the real baseball illiterate” with sudden challenge matches. The mods—nicknamed “armbands”—would be grimly stomping out every post laced with curses and family insults like they were putting out leftover embers.
Today, though, the board was already buzzing at ten.
No—buzzing was too mild. It was roaring, posts flooding in so fast you could almost feel the heat.
The reason:
You can even spectate? So it’s not a smurf account then?
He’s down 1–0 right now?
Eokpal had stepped up with a full public explanation, and Pi Anta had answered the call.
But even that alone wouldn’t have set the Ballpen boards ablaze at ten in the morning.
The real kicker was this:
They were already facing off—and Pi Anta was winning.
She actually said that
Of course Pi Anta was not the god of baseball.
But she was even less of a baseball illiterate.
Pi Anta-nim…. what even are you….
As the boards started looking dangerously overheated, the mods began debating whether they needed to step in—but after that post, Ballpen suddenly went quiet again.
Most of the users who had been feeding the fire had all logged into the game at once to spectate the duel.
Meanwhile.
Eokpal stood speechless, staring at Pi Anta frozen in her follow-through like a golfer who had just crushed a perfect drive.
No way…
He had jammed a pitch inside—something he usually considered a little dirty.
A pitcher who can’t throw inside is only half a pitcher, but a pitcher who can paint the inner half at will is ace material.
Obvious, really. If you can’t go inside, you’re forced to live on the outer half and run away. You lose every chess match with the hitter.
But just the threat of a fastball on the hands freezes hitters solid and makes the whole cat-and-mouse game so much easier.
One of the classic lines between amateur and pro is whether you can handle the inner half. Amateur pitchers are too scared of hitting the batter to even try it; amateur hitters flinch and shrink away the second they think they might get plunked.
So in plain terms:
Eokpal’s strategy of living exclusively on the inner half should have worked. That was the normal outcome.
But the girl was different.
She didn’t flinch. She didn’t scare.
She didn’t even blink—just thought, So it came inside this time, and started preparing her next move.
That terrifying calm made Eokpal feel like he was the one being backed into a corner.
“Wh-what the…”
The reason inside pitches are hard isn’t only that a slight miss plunks the batter.
One tiny mistake and the ball drifts right over the heart of the plate and becomes pure meat for the hitter.
“You missed your spot.”
Pi Anta calmly admired the ball she had just crushed, lowered her bat, and looked back at Eokpal.
“That’s 2–0.”
“Kh…”
“Two left.”
In a normal game a hitter might face the same pitcher three or four times.
Baseball is a .300 sport.
A hitter who connects three times out of ten is considered solid.
The same math applies against any single pitcher: face him three times and get one hit, and the hitter wins the series. Four times and one hit is a draw.
Eokpal had already lost two of four plate appearances. A pitcher could still claim “bad matchup” at that point.
But lose three of four and it’s an undeniable talent gap.
Lose all four…
That’s a league gap.
You’re playing against someone who shouldn’t even be drinking the same water.
Eokpal clenched his jaw and fretted the ball inside his glove. He steadied his breathing, looked toward the box, then pulled off his cap and swept his gaze across the empty stands just to clear the frustration—
Huh…?
They weren’t empty.
When he actually looked, the seats behind home plate were packed with users who had come to watch.
He couldn’t hear what they were saying.
But Eokpal could feel it.
They were watching him.
And they were expecting him—
as a proper pro number-two starter—to crush this Iron girl flat so she would never dare act out again.
They were cheering for that.
On a normal day, during a real game, that would have been welcome.
Do I look that desperate already?
Cheering is meant to give strength. It’s a kind of prayer that you’ll dig deep and find something extra.
People don’t usually feel the urge to cheer for someone who’s supposed to win easily. In other words—
Even to outsiders,
Eokpal was losing to Pi Anta.
—I don’t lose anything if I lose, but if Eokpal loses it looks pretty bad, right?
Those words hadn’t been empty bluster or a puppy’s reckless bark.
They had been sincere.
The girl had already finished analyzing Eokpal and concluded she could beat him four times out of four.
She was certain, based on cold data.
“This is no joke. Seriously.”
Yet what filled Eokpal’s chest wasn’t humiliation so much as excitement and anticipation.
Where the hell had she been hiding until now? Why was a hitter like this buried in the Iron depths?
He didn’t fully understand it yet.
But this was an opportunity.
Was this how scouts felt when they found a high-school kid who could carry a franchise for the next decade?
First he would give this duel everything he had.
The second it ended he would call the scouting team as fast as humanly possible.
I just found a hitter I wouldn’t trade for two ten-win pitchers.
He wanted to quit the game right then and make the call, but this moment meant something deep to Eokpal too.
A pure clash of competitive fire against a power hitter who showed no weaknesses—no standings, no personal stats, nothing else in the way.
The hitter locked eyes with him. That batting routine of hers, holding the bat like a sword and aiming it at the pitcher, was starting to feel genuinely frightening.
No—exactly speaking, it would have been frightening against any other hitter.
Eokpal was starting to enjoy himself.
He wanted to break that girl’s confidence just once.
So the first pitch would be a sinker that came in tight enough to look like it would hit a lefty, then suddenly dove back over the heart of the plate at the last second.
If it was located well, there was no way she could react. Even if she made contact it would be a ground ball.
Whether this one pitch landed or not would decide who controlled the flow of the at-bat.
Here we go.
He rubbed the seams a couple of times inside the glove.
Steady breath. Hands together in the glove at his chest.
Left leg back.
High kick almost to the chest—
then a powerful drive forward.
From the plant foot into the hip.
Hip into the waist.
Then the shoulder.
Then the elbow.
Every muscle and joint in his body fired in one direction, pouring every ounce of rotational force into the fingers gripping the ball.
And finally—
from the fingertips—
into the seams—
“Gyaaaaaah!!!”
Rosin exploded in a white cloud from his hand as the reverse-spinning ball screamed toward Pi Anta at terrifying speed.
It was supposed to break sharply into the inner half of the strike zone right before it hit her body—
…except.
Thud!
“Ugh?!”
It hit her.
The spin was perfect, but the location had been just a little off.
Eokpal pulled off his cap and tipped it toward Pi Anta in apology. But then—
“You dirty bastard!”
“Wh-what…?”
Somehow a massive misunderstanding had just been born.
“A pro loses twice and then plunks someone on the first pitch?”
“I-I already apologized!”
While Eokpal was still flustered and stammering, Pi Anta huffed and yanked off her cleat. He was still wondering what the hell she was doing when—
“Look at this shameless son of a bitch!”
She flung the bat aside and charged the mound like a rocket.
Pi Anta came flying in like José, launching herself exactly the way Lee Sin dives in for a resonant strike after locking onto the sound wave.
“Hey Eokpal, two dollars!!”
She planted a perfect double side-kick.
Thwack!
“Puheng?!”
That evening.
A video rocketed onto the real-time trending list of the video platform OneTube.
The thumbnail showed Pi Anta mid double side-kick, her face blacked out for privacy.