Seifer didn't lose a single ounce of his confidence. He'd been working on a way to answer a counter like this, and now was as good a time as any to give it a field test. Seifer brought his baton-arm forward to meet the incoming swing from Zack, luckily for him his opening thrust was a feint and so adjusting for a different attack was relatively easy to do. But like with many of Seifer's tactics, this was not something to take at face value. A split moment before his arm's movement, he loosened his grip on the Struggle Bat handle and let it fall into a backhanded grip. This sort of swing could come faster and with less of a tell than fronthanded swings, at the cost of losing some reach and swing power, not that Seifer needed either of those at this moment. A quick change of grips like this was actually the same tactic that had ultimately done Seifer in at the finals last year. Clearly he'd learned from that defeat and decided to "borrow" that strategy for himself. Though not without adding his own modification to it.

There was one final reason for Seifer's preference for holding his weapon straight and forward. It often allowed him to use his baton-arm as a makeshift measuring stick in order to more easily calculate and the reach of his opponent's swings and react accordingly. This was doubly the case for opponents whom Seifer had fought before, such as Zack, since that meant Seifer already had a decent idea of how far Zack could reach with his swings. And so, the speed of the backhanded swing combined with Seifer's method of calculating his opponent's reach made catching Zack's swing with his baton rather easy.

After catching Zack's baton against his own, Seifer used this moment of closeness to attempt the modification he'd made to the strategy he borrowed. The Struggle Bats all had handles that ended in a hook shape. Already holding his bat backhanded, Seifer moved to grab hold of Zack's bat using the hook end of his handle and tried to force the bat out of Zack's hands. A disarmed opponent would make for easy pickings, and an easy win.