“Of Course it Does”

13 chapters in, we have our first major timeskip (an Adachi specialty) in Mix.  With the Nikaidou business settled and done with, it’s seems as if the third year of middle school is going to be breezed through pretty quickly, and Meisei High School is where the meat of the story is going to be.

Speaking of which, we still don’t have a really good idea what that’s going to be – in fact, we don’t even know what the title means (at least I haven’t figured it out).  Apart from the setting and the obvious resemblance in faces – which you can’t read too much into with Adachi, as he doesn’t offer up much variety in this area – the links to Touch are still very much an open question.  On that front, we got another visit at the end of the chapter from Ooyama Gorou – who’s apparently moved back to Tokyo, next door to the Tachibanas – but even there, he doesn’t appear to be a character from Touch so his own connections are cloudy at best.

On the field, Sou has taken the role as Captain and Touma as the Ace, but the rest of the team is a ragtag bunch of first and second-years, with a clueless math teacher (boning up on baseball by reading Adachi manga – as usual, Adachi-sensei is the master of self-promotion) as substitute coach.  Sou initially orders Touma to throw nothing but breaking pitches because the team needs work on defense (no one would be able to hit his fastballs) – and possibly so as not to make Nikaidou and his father look bad too soon (not that they don’t deserve to).  When Touma gets serious he tosses a no-hitter with relative ease, though he remains unimpressed with doing so in a 7-inning game.

Touma seems to have more of a surety about his own talent than Uesugi Tatsuya or Kou Kitamura, sometimes bordering on cockiness.  While Touma is a classic Adachi lead in many ways, this is a bit of a shift for him, and an interesting one.  Other possible plot complications are Nishimura’s continued interest in Otomi (I think she’s ticketed for Touma, but what I haven’t figured out is whether Sou is pushing them together or will be horrified when it happens – if he lives) and the fact that Ooyama has a daughter, one who has love interest written all over her.