Usazawa is up next in the batting order. You might wonder why the coach has placed him there, given the fact that he’s never been shown to be particularly fast.
He had no need to be fast, of course. There’s really only one person around you would be well advised to run away from fast…but Usazawa has special privileges with her, due to luv and such. So he’s one of the few pupils of Yuri Shinkai Gakuen who doesn’t have to make a quick get-away even when Mopey draws near.
And of course, undue haste wouldn’t work well with goth aesthetic sensibilities*, anyway. Maintaining sinister dignity requires maintaining dignity first, and running fast rarely looks particular dignified. And it looks even less so when wearing robes, since Usazawa wouldn’t have much alternative to pulling them up and holding them there when trying to run, and that wouldn’t look dignified, at all.
So Usazawa has tight limits regarding his walking pace…but, fortunately, he can make up for this with a different mode of travel, thanks to his familiarity with the Dark Arts. Turning into a swarm of bats to travel is fast and lets you ignore obstacles – plus it exudes tons of sinister dignity. Perfect. And while the administration doesn’t like him to do it inside the school, nobody could reasonably prohibit bats on a cricket field, it would make the game even harder to figure out.
All that being good and well, he has to go and ruin the whole ‘sinister dignity’ thing with the handpuppet, as usual. Sigh.
More on Thursday.
* extremely heightened as they are