A Star Quality That Can't Be Hidden
"I'm sweating here. Stop clinging to me so much."
But Ye-eun clearly had zero intention of listening to a word I said, and had now graduated to sitting outright on my lap. I notice it every single time, but she really, genuinely loves sitting on my lap.
She even wrapped my arm around herself, then flashed a satisfied, goofy little smile.
At first there had at least been the pretense of player management—that she was the manager, after all. These days that excuse had fully morphed into just snuggling up next to me and acting cute. Not even trying to hide it, are you, Lee Ye-eun.
Cho Sang-bin had just finished his at-bat and strolled into the dugout, only to be greeted by the scene before him. He let out a hollow laugh and walked right past without a word. Even those guys have given up at this point.
I turned my head toward the other side of the dugout, and things over there were just as bad. Lim Song-ah, ears glowing scarlet, was massaging Kang Min-hyuk here, there, and everywhere. Sure, a starter who'd just pitched deserves some maintenance—but that was clearly personal interest at work, no matter how you looked at it.
She'd been carefully watching me and Ye-eun hanging all over each other since the last few games, and apparently learned nothing but the bad parts. And through it all, Kang Min-hyuk seemed completely unfazed. Wait, no reaction even when she's massaging that part of his thigh?
Watching this endlessly fascinating spectacle of couples with zero situational awareness stirred up a strange feeling in me, so I immediately looked down at Ye-eun instead.
"Hey. Tone it down during a game, will you?"
"Nope."
Ye-eun, apparently starved for attention for all of five minutes, had gone straight for a kiss mark on my neck. Who are you, a neglected child?
"If you leave marks like that, they're gonna show when I go out to play."
"So what? I'm stamping my seal on what's mine. Besides, looking at our batting order, it's gonna be a while before you get any fielding time anyway?"
She had a point. At this rate, the game was mercy-rule territory.
Wirye Jeil High 13 : 0 Pyongyang Hanbit High
An absolutely demolished scoreline. Thanks to that, there wasn't a single shred of tension left in the Jeil High dugout.
Smack!
And so our lineup cycled through inning after inning while Ye-eun and I goofed around. Then Oh Se-hyeong smacked a crisp base hit for the first time in ages—only for it to be snagged on a diving play by the outfielder's glove.
At long last, our marathon of an offensive half came to an end, and it was time to switch sides.
"What'er ya doin'? You plannin' on coverin' first base at the same time or somethin', yu?"
And there stood Nam Kang-min, right in front of me—trying to get ready for defense—and Lee Ye-eun, who was now clinging even harder for no reason.
The other guys can't manage a peep because they're scared of Ye-eun, I guess. Leave it to you to have the guts, huh.
At first I couldn't understand a word Nam Kang-min said, but these days I can mostly follow along.
What he'd just said translated roughly to: 'You're supposed to be playing first base. Are you telling the pitcher to cover first for you while you mess around like this?'
"Ye-eun, move over a sec. I've got a game to play."
"Hmm... then hold still just a moment."
And then—smooch.
"Hey!"
"There. Now go."
Ye-eun kept giggling to herself like something was the funniest thing in the world. I asked her to move so I could get ready for defense, and instead of the neck, this time the lip-stamp landed square on my mouth. She's being extra hands-on today, isn't she.
For now, I tugged my undershirt up as far as it would go to hide the mark on my neck. Though I had a feeling one good swing and it would slip right back down into view.
The truth is, today's game was never supposed to be this lopsided. Even amateur baseball clubs are usually decent teams, hand-picked within their regions—and while their depth is another story, their starters often have lineups that don't lose much to specialized baseball programs.
The reason amateur clubs so often pull upsets in the Round of 256 of the Bonghwangdaegi, only to fold easily in the Round of 128 or the Round of 64, is mostly this: by the later rounds, their starters are either worn out from previous games or barred from playing due to appearance limits.
Even in the Regional Rounds, where games are played in the provinces, tradition dictates that when an amateur club is matched against a specialized baseball program, the specialized team travels as the away side.
Which meant Wirye Jeil High's baseball team had to board a bus before dawn and travel all the way to Pyongyang just to play against Pyongyang Hanbit High.
Factor in the disadvantage of a long road trip, plus the fact that any opponent would run their full starting lineup for their first tournament game, and there were honestly plenty of reasons to feel uneasy about guaranteeing a win.
"Min-hyuk! Nice pitching!"
And Kang Min-hyuk blasted every single one of those worries into orbit.
A top speed of 139 km/h with an average of 133? Against amateurs, that's plenty fast.
Breaking balls with ambiguous movement and off-kilter timing? Against ordinary hitters, those are legitimate out-pitches. And since every single one of Kang Min-hyuk's breaking balls comes out of the identical delivery, they're that much harder to pick up.
In the end, not one Pyongyang Hanbit hitter managed anything against his pitching; the entire lineup went down meekly in order. The only baserunners came off a couple of defensive errors—so no perfect game, and honestly, that was the only consolation to be found.
Since those baserunners reached on errors, the perfect game was gone, but the no-hitter was still live. Coach, however, made the bold call to pull Min-hyuk in the ninth and bring in Ha Kyung-woo. Apparently a no-no against amateurs doesn't mean a thing to him.
That guy laid on the complaints so thick before the game, then went and played baseball all by himself. I read it in the manga—if he keeps doing this every game, he's the one who wins it all in the end anyway. If it's that easy, why don't you try it yourself?
Anyway—if the defense was essentially a one-man show by Kang Min-hyuk, then on offense, the single biggest contributor turned out to be, of all people, Coach.
I know what you're thinking: what does a coach even contribute to hitting? But before today's game started, Coach demanded a batting approach that was the exact opposite of his usual philosophy.
"You boys, don't just hack away today. Work the count as deep as you can. If you can, use the full swing—stay aggressive with your cuts too."
This from the man whose usual gospel is strikeouts are fine, swing from your gut when you feel it and pray for luck, and if you've got the skill to attempt a check-swing, you'd be better off just hitting a single. A request completely unlike him.
But an order was an order, so our batters dug in and stretched their counts as long as possible, grinding out every at-bat against the pitcher.
Kwon Ji-wook in particular—that relentless bastard—executed the instructions to absolute perfection, once working a count to fifteen pitches. Then he trotted to first on a walk. It's genuinely amazing that's even possible when you commit to it.
And because we were all working the pitcher deep per Coach's orders, the other side started showing cracks almost immediately.
Their starter—nowhere near Min-hyuk's command, granted, but throwing balls at roughly Min-hyuk's velocity and holding our offense in check decently well—began showing visible fatigue from the third inning on.
Granted, "third inning" sounds tame, but with our hitters biting and hanging on that viciously, his pitch count had already blown past sixty.
His stuff was never that great to begin with, and once the fatigue set in, he got hammered. The reliever who came in gassed out even faster than the starter had, and the next guy they just planted on the mound—his stuff was nothing to write home about either.
And so Pyongyang Hanbit High, who had held us to a single run through three innings, gave up twelve more after that and collapsed in a heap.
I was so amazed the plan had worked this precisely that I asked Coach how he'd figured it out.
"You think I've got this many years of baseball smarts for nothing? Looked at their preliminary records—they were burning through a lot of pitchers. And their runs allowed climbed pretty steadily as games went late. So what does that tell you?
It doesn't mean they've got a deep staff because the pitching's good. It means the so-called starters gas out fast, and the guys behind them are trash."
He even added that it was strange in the first place for an amateur club to have that many pitchers—that they were probably just throwing whoever onto the mound, proper hurlers or not.
Take each piece on its own and it's all common-sense, logical reasoning.
But he hadn't even watched those few preliminary games himself—judging an opponent's strategy from box scores alone takes both experience and serious nerve.
Every time I see this side of him, Coach seems far superior to that coach from the manga. The fact that a man like this was rotting away at a middle school because he came from the corporate leagues—that's probably why Jeil High's baseball program was never any good.
Long story short, a matchup that already had a talent gap became even easier for all these reasons, which is how we ended up bludgeoning them one-sidedly with zero tension whatsoever.
"Striiiike three! You're out!"
With the umpire's ringing out call, the bottom of the ninth was over. Ha Kyung-woo had struck out all three batters that inning. Clean and efficient. I like it.
When I got back to the dugout, Ye-eun—still wearing that dreamy little smile—greeted me warmly. What on earth has her so giddy today?
"Hey. You seem unusually happy today?"
Normally when I say something like that, Ye-eun refuses to answer and just tells me to figure it out myself. But out of curiosity I asked anyway, half expecting the usual—and against all odds, she answered easily.
"Come to think of it, this is the first time I've ever traveled somewhere with you."
"Travel?"
We've known each other for how many years? No way.
"Didn't you and I go to Mount Geumgang last year? Isn't that travel? And there's plenty more where that came from."
"Those were family trips, all of us together. I'm talking about real travel—just the two of us, going somewhere alone."
Just the two of us?
"Coach said we get about five hours of free time until the bus leaves after the game. So the second we're done, let's head straight over. It's supposed to be a café on the Taedong River—"
So by Ye-eun's logic, even tagging along on an away game—where travel wasn't even the point—and spending five hours of free time together counts as a first? And there's really never been any other time I went out somewhere alone with her?
Uh... school trips... we didn't have those in middle school. Field days and outings... did those even come with a full hour of free time? And everyone always clustered off with their own friend groups anyway. A day trip somewhere, just us... nope, that never happened either.
It's true, then.
"...I'm sorry."
"Hm? For what?"
Ye-eun's too sharp to have missed what I meant—which, like she'd said before, means she just doesn't want to hear me apologize.
In moments like this, there's only one right answer.
"Hey, Kim Yi-seon, what do you think you're— put me down!"
I scooped her straight up into a princess carry and planted a light kiss on her cheek. She pretends to hate it, but she's secretly a princess at heart and absolutely melts for this kind of royal treatment. My dignity and my shame can just wait outside for a moment.
And sure enough, told not to say anything yet smiling even brighter, Ye-eun glowed.
"So what? I'm stamping my seal on what's mine."
When I tossed her own words right back at her, she finally burst out laughing, loud and unashamed. That's more like it.
At the same time, the teammates around us—apparently having reached the absolute limit of what they could bear—were all staring at us with expressions of pure horror. Don't care.
"What? What, what. If you can't stand the view, don't look?"
If it bothers you that much, go get good at baseball yourselves.
"You've completely lost whatever scrap of situational awareness you used to have, you know that?"
Sung In-hoon said it in a tone of genuine astonishment, like it had graduated past shock into admiration. Yeah, honestly? I didn't know I had it in me either.
Kim Yi-seon, for his part, endured the stares of his teammates and carried on as if he had every right to behave that way. The problem was that his teammates weren't the only ones watching.
For one thing, there was the opposing team. Their dugout sat directly across the field, barely a stone's throw away—of course they could see. Kim Yi-seon's vision had simply narrowed too much for him to consider the obvious.
The members of the Pyongyang Hanbit High baseball club, still burning with the heat of youth and passion, felt their fighting spirit crumble alongside their fury at the sight.
The opposing coach briefly considered lodging a protest—but it was happening in the opponent's own dugout, and it clearly wasn't meant as a provocation. Complaining felt almost beneath him.
So he simply swallowed it all inside and filed no formal objection. If Kim Yi-seon ever found out about this much, he'd have died of embarrassment. But even this wasn't the end of it.
There was one more set of witnesses to the scene: the Pyongyang Hanbit High broadcasting club.
"Wow. Do they think this is their own living room or something?"
"Judging by how they're acting out in the open, imagine what they'd do in private."
Thanks to their genuinely decent broadcasting equipment and cameras, they were watching the opposing dugout in crisp high definition. The baseball club might not be a specialized program, but the school itself was a fine one, so the broadcasting club's gear was top-notch.
The contrast between the scene unfolding in the opposing dugout on their monitors and the game playing out right in front of them was irony itself.
Our school's boys were screaming through tears and snot that they could still win this, while the team across the field had a boy and girl eating each other's faces in broad daylight. If this isn't tragedy, what is?
Watching it, you couldn't even work up anger—just a hollow, defeated feeling. The gap between amateurs and pro-track players might be huge, but wasn't Wirye Jeil High supposedly one of the weak teams? From over here, there wasn't a hint of crisis. There wasn't even tension.
"Still, you've gotta admit the picture's different."
"No kidding. Why is that guy even playing baseball?"
And that couple cooing at each other right now were truly, genuinely people who lived in a world of their own. Going by what the camera was catching, you honestly couldn't tell whether this was a baseball game or a still cut from a teen drama.
The way the girl looked at the boy especially—honey practically dripping from her eyes. And... wow. There went the Hanbit broadcasting club cameraman, feeling a twinge of deprivation he didn't need to feel.
"Eh. I guess they really love each other, huh. Enough with the opposing dugout and the batter's box—get the field. Side's switching."
But they were, after all, an officially sanctioned school broadcasting club. They held no malice, and there was no ulterior motive behind filming the opposing dugout.
They simply didn't have enough cameras, and their shooting angles were limited—so when filming the batter's box, certain angles unavoidably captured the opposing dugout, and their camera quality happened to be so good that useless footage like that got recorded in perfect clarity.
"Sunbae, should we cut this part in editing?"
So the club's junior was asking the club president—the sunbae running things now—whether this section needed to be trimmed out separately.
"What editing? We lost this bad—there's no way we're posting the game video to the school's official channel. If you really want it, put it on your personal channel as portfolio material or something."
The whole point of this shoot had been footage for the school's promotional YouTube channel. But a game only goes up if you lose respectably—beaten this thoroughly, maybe the final scene would survive, and the rest was unusable.
When the sunbae more or less waved him off—it's dead footage, do what you want with it—the junior cameraman nodded absently. He was just messing around with game footage for a personal portfolio anyway; nothing would come of it. Too much hassle to trim. He decided he'd just upload the whole thing in one piece.
Over the next five hours, I served up a full-course Pyongyang date, packed to the brim, that left Ye-eun thoroughly satisfied. And honestly? I had a pretty great time too.
We won the game, Ye-eun's mood was sky-high—wasn't that a perfect ending? I basked in that full, warm sense of satisfaction as I greeted the bright morning sunlight.
We had plenty of time before our next appearance in the Round of 64, so Coach had given us the day off. Which meant... maybe this time I should take Min-ah out somewhere? If it was just Ye-eun every time, she'd sulk no matter how much she pretended otherwise.
Lost in that thought, I was making breakfast alone in the empty house, my parents already off to work. Today's menu: a salad, tofu, and a simple omelet. To lift my mood, I even pulled a shot of decaf and savored a slow, unhurried morning.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
Then the pounding on the front door shattered the morning's peace. Who on earth at this hour? I opened the door, wondering—and there stood Min-ah.
Perfect timing, I thought, and broke into a grin.
"Min-ah, want to go somewhere together tod—"
"Oppa. Have you seen this?"
But Min-ah had no time for anything I had to say, cutting straight to the point in a rush.
She thrust her smartphone at me, and on the screen was a short YouTube video, about five minutes long.
And the view count and comments were exploding.
I didn't even need to press play to know exactly what footage it held. The thumbnail gave it away, didn't it? A shot of me holding Ye-eun and kissing her cheek.
Min-ah took one look at my dumbstruck expression and seemed to grasp roughly what had happened.
"Haa... I take it you hadn't seen it. Should I call Ye-eun-sunbae over too?"
I nodded at her words, thinking:
This might be a bigger problem than I thought?