The text message read: "Hey, junior. I heard you'll be coming to Seido later. Miyuki never explains things clearly, so to keep you from misunderstanding Seido as a place that doesn't care about its players' health, I should explain. We were mainly responsible for Chris's injury. When someone bears the burden of winning alone, with no one to share it, that's when he chooses to hide an injury. In the end, it was because teammates like us couldn't help him. The coaches didn't know. If they had noticed, they definitely wouldn't have let Chris push himself so hard."
"Bzz—" Kōshū's phone vibrated. He picked it up, looked at it for a full minute, then finally replied.
"Hey, who are you texting?" Lang Zhi asked from beside him, puzzled, but Kōshū gave no response.
He wrote back: "Hello, senpai. Since I'll most likely be attending Seido High School later, I wanted to learn about life at Seido beforehand. In your opinion, what is life in the Baseball Club like?"
"To be honest, it's extremely hard. To make the starting lineup, to improve further, you have to train relentlessly every day. If I had to evaluate that kind of life, becoming stronger physically and gaining more trust from your teammates are both more comprehensive measures of its value than simply whether you win or lose. I'm already a third-year now, and I don't regret spending these years immersed in baseball at all."
After receiving such an "adult-like text message," Kōshū sat up and exchanged quite a few messages with him.
Over at Seido, after everyone had finished bullying Miyuki, they turned to see Kusunoki eagerly replying to messages on his phone.
"What's going on? You too? What's this kid talking to you about?" A group of bored grown men crowded around one