Story 2 of the Depth Charge Series. Even When the Pitch Was Impossible, She Found Her Path in Life
As work will be busy, I have uploaded the next chapter in advance. I appreciate your understanding.
Below is a first-person account by Isoko herself, at my request.
The day I lost to Nozomi, the air was suffocating. Not hot. Not thick. Just... wrong. Like the atmosphere itself had decided to hold its breath, waiting to see what I would do. Every breath is a struggle, thick with sweat and pressure. The crowd is a wall of noise, but I don’t hear it. My world is the rectangle of dirt, the circle of white, and the girl on the mound.
Nozomi.
We’re down by one. Bottom of the last. My run ties it. My run wins it. I’d already taken her deep once—a beautiful, arcing shot off what she must have thought was her best pitch. I can still feel the sweet vibration in my hands. Now, she looks tired. Her submarine arm slot is a gimmick. A sideshow. I point my bat at her, a reminder. I see you. I own this.
My eyes lock onto her catcher, Tsuyako. They don’t exchange signs. Just a tap. A gesture. They think they’re being subtle. They think they have a secret.
I dig in. My grip is sure. I’m looking for her fastball, that sneaky rising thing from the depths. I’ll send it even farther this time.
Pitch One.
Her windup starts. But it’s different. Her glove-side arm sweeps across her body in a wide, distracting arc—a curtain closing. It’s new. It’s… hiding something. For a split second, I lose the ball. Then it’s on me, exploding from behind that curtain. Fastball. But I’m late, fooled by the motion. I foul it straight back.
Fine. A feeler. 0-1.
Pitch Two.
I adjust. I’ll ignore the glove. Watch the release point. Here comes the windup, the same sweeping shield. I track it, ready for the fastball, my body coiled for the rise.
The ball emerges. Same trajectory. Same launch point.
I swing.
And it vanishes.
My bat cuts through empty air with a helpless whoosh. The ball, impossibly, has fallen off the edge of the world. It thuds into the catcher’s mitt like a burial.
Strike two.
I freeze. My blood turns cold. What… was that? It looked identical. It started identically. But it died. It’s not in her arsenal. It can’t be. I glance back at her. Nozomi’s face is stone. She doesn’t smirk. She just catches the return and looks in for the next sign. As if she hasn’t just broken reality.
Pitch Three.
The fastball. High and tight. I jerk back. It’s a message. I own the plate too. 1-2. The count is in her favor, but a new, greasy fear is in my gut. What is that pitch?
Pitch Four.
This is it. The showdown. Tsuyako sets up low and away—fastball location. I see the shield again. The same sweep. My brain screams, “It’s the vanishing one!” But my eyes see the fastball trajectory. My muscles, trained on a thousand pitches, are torn.
I commit.
For twenty feet, it’s a fastball. Then, in the space of a blink, it’s not. It doesn’t sink. It plummets. A stone dropped from a cliff. My swing is a desperate, lunging apology at something already gone.
“STRIKE THREE!”
The sound that leaves me isn’t a curse. It’s a breath of pure, stunned disbelief. The bat feels dead in my hands. I don’t look at my dugout. I don’t look at the crowd. I stare at the dirt near the catcher’s feet, where that… that thing… must have landed.
One out. They got their first out.
And for the first time all season, I walk back to the bench not angry but unmoored. She didn’t just beat me. She showed me a door to a room I didn’t know existed, and she closed it in my face.
The game isn’t over. But my certainty is.
***
The locker room is a tomb of polished metal and damp concrete. The distant, muffled roar of the championship ceremony throbs dully through the walls. I don’t hear it.
I sit on the bench, still in my dirt-stained uniform, staring at my hands as if they belong to someone else.
They look like hands that should have done something.
They didn’t.
“Hey… are you okay?”
My teammate’s voice is soft. Hesitant. Like she’s afraid to touch something broken.
I don’t look up. I turn my hands over instead, examining the calluses and the still-tight grip etched into my fingers.
The grip that held nothing but air.
“I couldn’t even touch it.”
She exhales quietly. “No one could. That last pitch was just…”
“No.”
The word cuts out of me before she can finish.
“You don’t understand. I didn’t even come close. Not once.”
I finally look up. My eyes feel wide, unblinking, filled with something deeper than frustration.
“It was like swinging at a rumor. At something I imagined. My eyes said fastball. Every instinct—every year I’ve played—said fastball.”
My fists clench until my knuckles bleach white. Not anger. Just a desperate attempt to feel something solid again.
“And then it was just… gone. Like it never existed.”
I stare at my hands.
“How do you hit something… that doesn’t follow the rules?”
No one answers. The silence swallows the distant cheers whole. My teammates stare at their cleats, the floor, the lockers—anywhere but at me. There is no answer. There is only the memory of a ball that fell off the edge of the world.
***
The metallic ping and thud are the only heartbeats in the humid air. I’m drenched in sweat. My swings are weaker now, stripped of violence—mechanical. Hollow. Something inside me feels scraped clean. My friend from the golf club watches from the fence for a full minute before speaking.
“You’ve been here every waking hour since the game.”
I don’t stop. The machine whirs. A low ball is fired.
I swing—hard, downward.
Miss.
The ball thuds into the back net.
“I’m figuring it out.”
“By doing the same thing over and over?” she asks. “You’re not even hitting the ones down the middle anymore.”
“I’ll get it eventually.”
Another ball. Another grinding, desperate swing. A foul tip.
She sighs and unlatches the gate. “No, you won’t. Not like this. You’re just carving the mistake deeper. Come with me.”
“I need to practice…”
“You need to stop practicing. For one afternoon. Real air. A horizon that isn’t a net.”
I finally stand still. The bat droops in my hands. I look at her—really look—and see the concern I’ve been ignoring.
“Please,” she says softly. “I’m tired of watching you try to exorcise a ghost.”
The machine whirs behind me, useless. My shoulders slump—not in defeat, but in the first honest admission of fatigue.
“One afternoon.”
I lean the bat against the fence. It’s not a solution. But it’s the first step away from drowning.
***
The late afternoon sun stretches long shadows across the turf. I sit rigid on a bench, eyes fixed on nothing. In my head, the same loop repeats endlessly—the whoosh of my bat, the thud of the ball in the catcher’s mitt. The ghost pitch.
“Ugh,” my friend mutters as she sets up. “I hate sand shots. My nemesis.”
She takes a slow practice swing. The club drops unnaturally low—then sweeps upward in a smooth, shallow arc. Something flickers in my dead stare.
“Wait.”
She pauses. “Hmm?”
“What was that swing?”
“Oh. A bunker shot. When the ball’s buried. You don’t hit the ball—you hit the sand under it. The sand lifts it.”
“Do it again.”
She blinks. “…Okay?”
She demonstrates again. Slow. Deliberate. Low takeaway. Rising follow-through. I stand before I realize I’ve moved. My hands drop, then rise, mirroring the arc. Not a baseball swing. A scoop.
“Are you… copying my golf swing?” she asks.
My eyes feel too wide.
“That pitch,” I say. “It doesn’t just sink. It plummets. Like it’s falling into a hole.”
I swing again. Lower. Harder.
“What if I’m not trying to hit where it is…”
Another swing.
“…but where it’s going to be?”
“In the dirt.”
She frowns. “I really don’t think that’s how baseball works.” The fog in my head snaps into focus.
“Can I borrow a club?”
***
The wedge feels wrong in my hands. Blasphemous. I lower the club head almost to the ground. Every coach’s voice in my head screams protest. High hands. Level swing. Drive through the zone. I ignore them. I swing. Low start. Upward sweep.
“That is the most wrong baseball swing I have ever seen,” she says.
“I know.”
I reset. Lower. Higher.
“But what if ‘wrong’ is the only thing left?”
A voice behind us cuts in—our teammate, the stats nerd, her bag slung over her shoulder.
“What… what is she doing?”
“Having an existential crisis with a golf club,” my friend says.
The nerd squints. “Wait. That motion…”
She pulls out her phone. Scrolls. Stops.
“It looks like cricket.”
I freeze mid-swing.
“What?”
She shows me the screen. A batter drops to one knee. bat flat on the ground. A sweeping arc through dirt-level space. The breath leaves my body. There it is. The motion my body had been groping toward blindly. Codified. Real.
“It’s for attacking low bounce,” she says. “Really low.”
Silence.
“You’re going to try to hit a baseball like it’s a cricket ball,” my friend whispers.
“I’m going to hit her pitch like it’s a cricket ball.”
The nerd grins slowly. “This is either brilliant… or you’re about to get laughed out of the box forever.”
I hand the club back.
“Good. I’m tired of being respectable.”
“…and helpless.”
***
That night, my room becomes a cave of light. Cricket videos. Golf mechanics. Physics diagrams. The championship match, I rewind the video. Nozomi's hand. Right before the shield sweeps across. Her thumb shifts. The index finger adjusts. There. I check another clip. Another Depth Charge. The same motion. A tell. She doesn't know she's doing it. But I do. I draw a line beneath the strike zone.
HER ZONE.
2:47 AM.
My roommate squints at me from the doorway.
“What are you doing?”
“Learning cricket.”
“We don’t have a cricket team.”
“I know.”
“Then why…”
“Because cricket already solved a problem baseball pretends doesn’t exist.”
***
One month of practice. My stance looks alien. The coach hates it. He lets me do it anyway.
“Fine,” he says, tapping my back foot. “If you’re going to be insane, at least be balanced.”
I smile. I’d rather be insane than helpless. I'm carrying a 50-pound punching bag and twenty feet of rope. My golf club friend helps me rig it.
"You're sure about this?" she asks.
I adjust the height. Lower. Lower still. Six inches off the ground.
"I'm not sure about anything," I say. "But I have to try."
She steps back, looking at the absurd setup—a heavy bag hanging at shin height in a batting cage.
"You know you look completely ridiculous, right?"
"I know."
I pick up my bat.
"But ridiculous is better than helpless."
I swing. Miss completely. Again. Bat scrapes dirt. Again. Grazes the bag, no power.
Again.
Thud.
Contact. The bag barely moves. But I felt it—the upward scoop, the bat rising through the contact point. Different from every swing I've ever taken. Wrong. But maybe wrong is right. Fifty swings. Three solid contacts. My forearms are screaming. I go home and ice them.
Day Two.
Fifty swings. Seven contacts. Day Three. Fifty swings. Twelve contacts. My hands are blistering in new places. Not the normal batting calluses. These are from scooping. From rising. I tape them and keep going. The motion is becoming natural. Not automatic—not yet. But my body is learning. Drop low. Weight on back leg. Hands near dirt. Explode upward. Scoop through. Follow-through high.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Rhythm.
My stats nerd friend watches from outside the cage.
"You're making contact 60% of the time now," she says,
checking her notes.
"That's not good enough."
"Against a stationary bag? That's incredible progress."
She pauses.
"Against an 81 mph pitch that drops three feet?
That's... I don't know what that is."
I reset my stance.
"That's what we're about to find out."
Thud.
***
Coach finds me in the cage. 9 PM. He doesn't speak. Just watches.
I swing. Contact.
Again. Contact.
Again. Contact.
Twenty consecutive hits on the bag. He finally speaks.
"Your back foot's sliding."
I stop mid-swing. Look at him. He walks into the cage. Adjusts my stance.
"Plant it. You're losing power on the rise."
I try again. Cleaner contact. The bag swings harder.
"Better."
He pulls up a chair outside the cage.
"Again. Fifty more. And for God's sake,
ICE your forearms when you're done."
I grin despite the exhaustion.
"Yes, Coach."
He shakes his head.
"You and that Nozomi girl. Both are completely insane."
My forearms have changed. Muscles I didn't know existed are now visible. The upward scooping motion against heavy resistance, two hundred reps a day, has rebuilt me. I flex my hands. New calluses. Different placement. The trainer wraps my oblique.
"This motion isn't natural for baseball," she says.
"Your body's compensating. The rotation is straining.…"
"I know."
"You need to rest."
"I can't. I need to practice more."
She sighs. Wraps tighter.
"If it gets worse, you stop. Immediately."
I nod. We both know I'm lying.
Week four.
My stats nerd friend sets her phone timer.
"Thirty seconds. As many clean contacts as you can.
No misses count."
I nod. Drop into stance.
"Go."
Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud
Continuous. Fluid. No wasted motion. The bag swings wildly. I adjust. Keep hitting. My breath is controlled. Heart rate steady. The motion is MINE now.
"Time!"
I stop. Breathing hard but not gasping. She stares at her phone.
"Twenty-three."
Silence.
"Twenty-three clean contacts in thirty seconds."
She looks up.
"You're ready."
I look at the bag, still swaying. Two thousand reps. Maybe more. I stopped counting.
"Yeah," I say quietly. "I think I am."
ONE MONTH: The stance stops feeling alien.
THREE MONTHS: I stop missing straightforward fastballs.
SIX MONTHS: Coach stops flinching when he sees me practice.
***
I felt I was ready to go after the impossible pitch. But I couldn't wait for a tournament draw to put us in the same bracket. I needed to know if it worked. Not against a machine, against HER. So I did something unprecedented. I asked my coach to arrange a practice match. With Nozomi's school. He looked at me like I'd lost my mind.
"You want to challenge them? Directly?"
"I want to test myself against her pitch. I need to know if four months of work means anything."
He made the call.
Three days later, we had a practice match scheduled. I was standing in the on-deck circle, watching Nozomi warm up. She hadn't changed. Same submarine slot. Same impassive face. In the same way, she caught the return throw like it was beneath her to acknowledge the applause.
But I had changed.
I stepped into the box.
Bottom of the seventh. Two outs. My team is down by one.
The dirt felt different beneath my cleats. Not softer. Not harder. Just... mine. I'd earned the right to stand here again.
Nozomi looked at me.
Not through me. Not past me. At me.
For the first time in a year, she acknowledged I existed.
Then she sat.
The sign is from Tsuyako. A single finger. Fastball.
Her right hand gripped the seam.
Wait.
Her thumb shifted. Just slightly. A micro-adjustment, invisible to anyone who hadn't spent three weeks staring at freeze-frames at 3 AM.
There.
Her right hand shifts… There. Her back shoulder dips… Both tell. It's coming. I remember the cricket video. The batter dropping low, then sweeping upward. Like a phoenix rising from ashes. I drop into position.
Committed.
It dies.
I drop.
I sweep.
Tink.
A dribbler.
An out.
And I grin like I’ve won everything.
“I touched it,” I say, breathless.
Nozomi stares at the dirt.
Tsuyako jogs to the mound.
"She knew it was coming."
Nozomi stares at her right hand. The grip.
"A tell," she says quietly. "I have a tell."
She looks toward the dugout.
I'm laughing with my team.
Nozomi's expression doesn't change.
But her eyes sharpen.
"Interesting."
She turns back to the plate.
"Let's see if she can do it again."
***
The lights hum softly.
“You lost,” my friend says.
“I know.”
“But you’re smiling.”
“I made contact.”
The nerd groans. “You’re enjoying this.”
“Of course I am.”
I open my car door.
Same time tomorrow?"
She shakes her head. "You're insane."
I smile.
"Yeah."
I look back at the field. Nozomi is still on the mound. Not angry. Not dismissive. Curious. Like she's already planning her counter.
"But I'm not helpless anymore."
And neither, I realize, is this over. The arms race has just begun.
This report was written by Isoko herself at my request. After your rematch, I asked her to document her process. She agreed on one condition: that you receive a copy. I believe she wants you to know what you inspired.
Use this information as you see fit.
Respectfully.
Name: Hoshino Isoko.
Age: High school 3rd year
Position: Slugger, Cleanup Batter.
Batting: Right-handed
Throwing: Right-handed
Height: 166cm
Special Skills: Relentless research and unconventional adaptability
Character Profile
In One Sentence:
"A seeker who never gives up, even in the face of impossibility.”
A girl who was once completely shattered by Nozomi Riksuko (wielder of the Depth Charge). Struck out on 4 pitches, never even making contact with the bat once. From that humiliation, she rose through a method no one could have imagined. She sought answers outside of baseball and fused techniques from golf and cricket, abandoning common sense to challenge "the impossible pitch."
Her Belief: “If you can’t beat them, don’t join them; study them, then find a way.”
TARGET PITCH: “Depth Charge” (Submarine Split-Fork Variant)
Swing-and-miss rate vs. Depth Charge: 100%
Perceived pitch trajectory: Fastball (81 mph)
Actual vertical break: -37"
Contact quality: None
New swing plane: +12° upward launch (vs. standard -5°)
Contact zone lowered to 6" above ground.
Successful contact vs. Depth Charge: “1/1 (dribbler)”
Projected contact rate at game speed: ~40%
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Physical Stats
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Power ████████░░ 80/100
Speed ██████░░░░ 60/100
Contact ████████░░ 80/100 (Post-Phoenix)
Endurance ██████████ 92/100
Arm Strength ██████░░░░ 60/100
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Mental Stats
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Analysis ██████████ 99/100
Obsession ███████░░ 85/100
Adaptability ██████████ 91/100
Pressure ████████░░ 85/100
Strategy ██████████ 96/100
Special Techniques
Rising Phoenix (ライジング・フェニックス)
┌────────────────────────────┐
│ Difficulty: ★★★★★ │
│ Power: ★★☆☆☆ │
│ Accuracy: ★★★★☆ │
│ Stamina Cost: ★★★★★ │
│ Practicality: ★★★★☆ │
└────────────────────────────┘
【Overview】
An unprecedented batting technique that fuses
golf's bunker shot with cricket's sweep shot.
Starting with the bat nearly touching the ground (15cm height),
She scoops upward in an arc to intercept extreme low pitches.
【Development Period】 4 months (over 2,000 repetitions)
【Success Rate】
・Stationary target: 77% (23 successes in 30 seconds)
・Live action: Unknown (only 1 confirmed contact vs. Depth Charge)
【Physical Cost】
・Forearm hypertrophy
・Chronic oblique strain
・Formation of unusual calluses
【Weaknesses】
・Sacrifices power (fly balls difficult)
・Cannot handle high pitches
・Requires reading pitch tells
Tell Recognition (テル認識)
┌────────────────────────────┐
│ Difficulty: ★★★★☆ │
│ Accuracy: ★★★★★ │
│ Practicality: ★★★★☆ │
└────────────────────────────┘
【Overview】
A technique to predict pitch type from the pitcher's
unconscious movements.
For the Depth Charge:
1. Right-hand thumb adjustment (grip change)
2. Slight back shoulder dip
When both are confirmed, 90% accuracy in identifying
the Depth Charge.
ANALYST NOTE:
“The subject has developed a cricket-inspired sweep mechanic to intercept extreme vertical drop. High injury risk, but tactically viable. Recommend monitoring forearm strain.”
