One Man, an Army (1)

Min-ah and I exchanged a silent conversation, eyes only, her pupils blown wide—whatever drowsiness had gripped her scattered the moment she saw that shocking scene.

When I asked with my eyes whether I could go, she nodded quickly, shooing me off with a pat on the back. I sprinted to our team's dugout, still in my street clothes.

A match official tried to block me—no players allowed during game operations—but one look at my face and he waved me through. I kicked open the door to the player waiting room, where a low, anxious murmur filled the air.

"Nam Kang-min!"

"Aigoo, you scared me. What, you want me to go see the Grim Reaper for real?"

The teammates around him watched with worried faces while the Coach hovered over his phone, deep in a call somewhere. Even in the middle of all that chaos, there was Nam Kang-min cracking jokes the second he saw me. The doctor hadn't arrived yet—Lim Song-ah and Ye-eun had only just brought over first-aid supplies and ice packs, and that was it.

This reckless punk. When the runner breaks for second, you slide too—that's how it works. You don't plant yourself in the baseline all the way to the end and eat a bat for it. No wonder his receiving had always looked shaky, camped so far in front of the plate.

"What were you planning to do with that hand, sticking it out there without a shred of fear?"

"Do with it? It's attached just fine, see?"

His relentless joking made my chest tighten. What else could I possibly say to a guy who was actually hurt?

"Can't do miyt work like this, so catchin' a bit in front's the only way to make it hurt less, y'know. Guess I got a mite too greedy. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Right embarrassing, this."

By the time he finished, I'd lost whatever anger I had left. I just let out a sigh and slumped down onto the bench beside the other guys.

"There now, that's enough out of me. Go on, get back out there."

"You just took a bat to the hand—what exactly about that is fine?"

"Look over yonder at yer girlfriend. Soon as she's next to you, her eyes're practically spittin' fire."

Nam Kang-min gently pushed aside Ye-eun, who was pressing a cold compress to his hand, and hauled himself up from his seat. Then he made for the door.

"Kang-min. Where do you think you're going?"

"Coach, it ain't like I died. And if I keep sittin' here, who knows what the crowd'll think. Least I can do is step out and give 'em a wave."

He said it flatly and was out on the field before anyone could stop him. The other players and the Coach scrambled after him, too late.

"See there? Hurtin' some, but nothin' worth dyin' over!"

He waved to the crowd in the stands, then walked over to the batter who'd hit him and even stopped by the mound to exchange a few words with Kang Min-hyuk before slowly making his way back.

"Aigoo, this hurts like hell just waving. When's that ambulance gettin' here, anyhow?"

He kept the clown act going, but I could see the bruise spreading purple-blue across his hand. This guy really was made of something stubborn.

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

Nam Kang-min's act had tried its best to loosen the mood, but the stadium had already frozen over. The roaring heat from minutes ago might as well have been a lie—all that remained was a low, uneasy murmur.

The batter who'd delivered the blow had been substituted out—shaken, or perhaps ejected—and a new hitter stepped into the box. Meanwhile, back on our mound, Kang Min-hyuk walked in like nothing had changed.

The Coach, having seen the whole thing up close, asked Kang Min-hyuk whether he wanted to be pulled as well.

"I can keep pitching, sir."

With Nam Kang-min injured and the game delayed so long, his shoulder should have gone cold—yet Kang Min-hyuk had kept up his shadow pitching through the entire delay, making his intent to stay in the game unmistakably clear.

So the pitching problem was settled, for now. What remained was the question of who was going to catch.

"Taeko. Be honest with me. Is Jun-soo ready for game action?"

"...Honestly, Coach, he's nowhere near ready to throw even a single inning on a stage this big."

The first-year catcher was out, then. Between his raw skill and the fact that he'd never gotten real playing time, throwing him suddenly into a tournament as huge as the Bonghwangdae would be asking for disaster.

Which meant we'd have to find a position player who could handle catching—and that, too, was an ugly option.

"There's usually at least one position player on any roster who can fill in behind the plate. How do we not have a single one? If all he needs to do is catch the ball, it should normally be the first baseman..."

Before I converted to pitcher, our team's starting first baseman was me. And after the conversion? Dae-hyun. If we put him behind the plate, balls would squirt past him left and right—I'd bet my left arm on it.

We'd had the other position players practice catching now and then for emergencies, but back then every single one of them had been hopeless at it.

"I guess it has to be me, Coach."

"Right... Kyung-woo, get ready to put the mask on."

And so, after all that circling, the temporary catcher would be Ha Kyung-woo. Fitting for an ace who'd come up through a small-town middle school—he was the ultimate utility man, a guy with no position he couldn't play.

Besides, kids with strong arms usually get tried at both catcher and pitcher early on, and sure enough, Kyung-woo apparently had catching experience.

The problem was what losing him to the mask would do to the team. Jeil High's paper-thin squad had finally started to creak.

Kyung-woo was one of only five pitchers on our team who could actually take the mound. Even with me and Kang Min-hyuk shouldering the starts, neither of us could throw complete games every single outing, and we needed relievers behind us without fail.

Giving that role to Jun-soo was risky—the kid lost his composure whenever he came in late in a game—and Kang-chul was the type whose young nerves made you nervous handing him truly critical moments. Which meant Ha Kyung-woo had been, in practice, our one and only reliable arm out of the bullpen.

If that Kyung-woo now had to catch, forget managing the pitching staff. We'd be setting pitchers on the mound and praying.

The game ended on Kang Min-hyuk's perfect game. A perfect game is a monumental achievement, but with everything that had happened, nobody had been in much mood to celebrate at the time. The press, at least, made plenty of noise about it.

Ha Kyung-woo had looked surprisingly solid behind the plate, and it turned out the opposing team had been rattled by Nam Kang-min's injury even more than we had—their remaining hitters showed no fight at the plate whatsoever, which made the win an easy one.

And then the silver lining: the medical exam showed Nam Kang-min's injury was nothing serious—no threat to his career, nothing career-threatening at all.

"Tweren't nothin'. Just a nasty bruise in the muscle. Doctor says give it two weeks and it'll be good as new."

Even so, two weeks. Taking a bat square to the hand and coming away with nothing worse than muscle damage was a genuine stroke of luck—but two weeks meant he'd miss not just the semifinal, but the final as well, should we get there.

"Good. Take the chance and rest. You haven't missed a single game, you know."

Catcher isn't quite as punishing as pitcher, but it's still a position that burns through stamina. That Nam Kang-min had held it down all this time without sitting out even once was honestly remarkable.

I set down the fruit basket I'd brought for the hospital visit, quietly stepped out, and closed the door behind me. Just in case, I'd made sure he stayed admitted for the day—and told him to get a full work-up done, too.

Then I asked the Coach, who'd come along, a single question.

"Coach. The next game—what's the plan?"

"...I never expected Kang-min back for it, but hearing it out loud makes it real, doesn't it. What choice is there? Kyung-woo catches again."

The Coach's face had gone stiff as stone. His worry was plain to see.

"Yi-seon. You know who our semifinal opponent is?"

Did I ever. We'd drawn a genuinely nasty one.

"Gwangmyeong High, right?"

"That's the one. Of all the teams."

Gwangmyeong High. They'd been in the manga too—knocking Wirye Jeil High out of the Bonghwangdae in the second-year arc, then returning in the third-year arc as proof of how much stronger everyone had gotten.

Put that way, they sound like a classic power-meter punching bag—but right now, at this exact moment, they were more dangerous than anyone else in the bracket.

Gwangmyeong High. Among fans who really follow high school baseball, Gwangmyeong occupies a very peculiar niche.

The prevailing wisdom goes something like this: a season where Gwangmyeong does well is a season where high school baseball has gotten weaker; a season where Gwangmyeong struggles is a season where the level is high. In other words, they're treated as a living power meter.

A big reason for that reputation was the man who'd held the manager's chair at Gwangmyeong for ages—Manager Park Myeong-gil.

"Is the prep for the Wirye Jeil match all in order?"

"Yes, Manager. We've finished checking the condition of every starter scheduled for the next game. No issues across the board—though Yo-han's coming down with a cold, so we're giving him some rest."

Then came the sheet of paper the coach passed along and the manager received. The batting order for tomorrow's game—and there, the starting pitcher slot.

"The organizers want the starting lineup submitted within a few hours."

At that, the manager glared at the paper for a moment as if weighing something, then scribbled down the roster in a few quick strokes and handed it back to the coach.

"Manager—you're running the right-handed platoon?"

"I am. If a switch hitter's arms are equally good, then the smart play is to force him to use only one of them and grind him toward overload."

Manager Park Myeong-gil spoke as though he was already aiming his gun straight at Kim Yi-seon, tomorrow's starting pitcher.

And this was exactly why Gwangmyeong performed its power-meter role so faithfully.

At Gwangmyeong High, the concept of a "starting hitter" was deliberately blurred—the school embraced platoon operations taken to an extreme.

Manager Park Myeong-gil had a pet philosophy: baseball is a team sport. Rather than one or two brilliant star players, what mattered was the game management of a prepared team. The purest distillation of that belief was Gwangmyeong's radical platoon system.

Where a typical high school locks in nine everyday starters with a few substitutes rotating in as backups or pinch hitters, Gwangmyeong—judged purely by playing time—had as many as eight starter-caliber right-handed hitters and seven left-handed ones.

A manager's tendency, when a hitter's skill clears a certain bar, to prioritize platoon splits over trusting any specific everyday player.

And did they treat pitchers any differently?

"How many arms in the pitching group are ready for tomorrow?"

"The five who threw last game are mostly recovered. You can consider all nine effectively available."

The manager nodded, satisfied.

This was Park Myeong-gil's pitching philosophy. Rather than appointing a true starter, he yanked pitchers early and often, expecting everyone to throw full-effort as if they were relievers. And when possible, the lefty-righty games with hitters came as a bonus.

It might look similar to what Wonsan Sadae bu High had done before, but it was a little different. Over there, pitch counts ballooned dodging kill shots and wore the pitchers down; here, pitchers got swapped out fast regardless of whether their pitch count was low or high.

To be fair, it's a strategy with real value in short-series formats. If everyone throws at full effort like a reliever rather than pacing themselves as a starter, you can suppress runs accordingly.

But at the high school level, where the gap between an ace and a substitute is a canyon, it's a scheme that's nearly impossible to pull off.

And so we arrive at Gwangmyeong's strangest trait of all. Manager Myeong-gil neither gave his aces special treatment nor particularly favored them. He was, instead, a master coach who brought in as many merely-decent players as he could and raised every one of them to a consistent standard.

It's the kind of manager who could only exist because he was a character in a manga—and yet with this exact method, he'd stamped out countless B-tier high school players over the years.

Naturally, ace-caliber players avoided Gwangmyeong over playing time and spotlight, while mid-tier players actively sought it out—which had the happy side effect of keeping the school's player pipeline running smooth.

Where most teams stack one A-tier player, two or three B-tiers, and wallpaper the rest of the roster with C-tier filler, Gwangmyeong abandoned the A-tier entirely and built its whole squad out of B-tiers alone. It was the kind of vivid, character-driven school that could only exist in a manga.

"This Kim Yi-seon fellow throws quite well, I'll grant... but baseball isn't a game you play alone. Wouldn't you agree?"

"That's right, Manager."

"One man gone—Kang-min—and suddenly there's not a single thing that holds together, from the batting order to the pitching staff."

The Coach scratched at his head in frustration, the assembled starters for tomorrow's game spread out before him. His stress was plainly eating at him.

"For the batting order, Il-sung moves up to the three-hole for once and everyone else shifts up a spot. Kyung-woo slots in at seven."

Ha Kyung-woo nodded along, noncommittal. Being the ultimate utility man meant he could field any position decently—but he was still a pitcher first, and his hitting wasn't exactly his selling point.

In a sense, the biggest hole Nam Kang-min left behind might not have been his glove at all. It might have been his bat.

"And as for tomorrow's pitching... Jun-soo, you should rest."

"Excuse me? I'm completely fine, sir! Even against a right-handed platoon, I can handle them!"

Jun-soo insisted he was good to go, but the Coach shook his head.

"Even so, facing a lineup with eight right-handed hitters is too heavy a burden for you, Jun-soo. And if we win this one, the final is still ahead of us—pitchers are something you have to conserve."

Only four pitchers left in the stable. You could laugh at the man worrying about the final before we'd even won the semifinal—but our squad was thin enough that selling our future for the present would leave us truly without answers.

Even if Jun-soo felt confident, throwing a lefty sidearmer who struggles against right-handed batters out as the opener against a team like Gwangmyeong—which tailors its platoon with obsessive, opponent-specific precision—would simply be wasteful.

If we reached the final, the Coach's judgment would prove right. And if we fell here, well—runner-up or semifinalist or champion, losing is losing. Having come this far, we had no choice but to make the optimal choice for a title.

Jun-soo wanted to play, but accepted it with the attitude of a kid who understood the logic if not the desire. Then the Coach turned his full attention to me and Kang-chul.

"Which means the two of you are responsible for tomorrow's entire game on the mound. Hoo... I hated to put this kind of pressure on you, but there's no help for it. You can do it, right?"

I answered lightly, like it was nothing.

"Don't you always? You never let us off the mound without at least seven innings from one of us."

That, at least, seemed to reassure the Coach a little. With everything said, he sent the players off to rest and dismissed the meeting.

One by one, the guys filed out of the baseball clubroom. I stood there watching them go for a while, then was the last to turn off the lights and head for home.

"Kim Yi-seon."

And there, on my way home, stood Kang Min-hyuk in the middle of the school hallway.

"You pitched yesterday—shouldn't the guy who started be resting? What brings you here?"

Leave it to the original protagonist of the manga to stand there backlit by the sunset, milking the atmosphere for all it was worth. Why was his face so intensely serious?

"Kim Yi-seon. Are you confident?"

I'd asked what he wanted, and he'd answered my question with a question. That's a lousy habit, you know.

But he'd gone out of his way to come to school on a rest day to ask, so I figured I owed him an answer.

"Is that even a question? When the ace of Jeil High takes the mound, we win. Period."

We'd cruised through games on our second starter alone, and we'd made it to the final four. With the ace pitching? A win was as good as guaranteed.

Kang Min-hyuk stared at me for a moment like he couldn't believe what he'd just heard—then snorted a laugh, smacked me twice on the shoulder, and walked off.

"Right. I'm counting on you."

He left wearing a face that looked, for once, unburdened. Counting on me, huh. That doesn't suit you at all, you know. In the manga, you never trusted your teammates—you clenched your teeth and did everything yourself. I know better than anyone.

Which is exactly why I could understand the anxiety underneath. He couldn't even take the field right now, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠and our team's situation wasn't exactly rosy.

But even so, compared to Wirye Jeil High in the manga, this was nothing. Didn't Kang Min-hyuk tear Gwangmyeong apart single-handedly with the deck stacked that heavily against him? Then what excuse do I have?