The Ezono School Festival

The massive Ezo Agricultural School Festival becomes Hachiken's proving ground. Drawn into organizing the equestrian club's events and a school-wide pizza project, he overextends himself, takes on too much in his eagerness to be needed, and physically collapses from exhaustion, forcing a hard lesson about limits, delegation, and why he keeps sacrificing himself for others' approval.

The Ezono Festival arc pushes Hachiken's defining flaw into the open. The school's enormous annual festival is a logistical undertaking spanning livestock exhibitions, food stalls, equestrian demonstrations, and a ban'ei draft-horse race. Hachiken, desperate to feel useful and validated, volunteers for everything: he helps coordinate the equestrian club's contributions, spearheads an ambitious project to build a stone oven and produce pizza from scratch using ingredients raised and grown at the school, and shoulders countless small tasks nobody else wants. His city-honed efficiency makes him genuinely valuable, but his inability to say no and his deep-seated need to earn his place lead him to take on far more than any one person can handle. The arc climaxes with Hachiken physically breaking down, collapsing from sheer exhaustion. This breakdown is a turning point. It exposes the psychology beneath his helpfulness: he equates his worth with usefulness because his father taught him that only winners and high achievers matter. His friends' reaction is instructive. Rather than praising his martyrdom, they are angry that he hid his limits and refused to lean on them. The lesson he absorbs, that relying on others is not weakness and that he is valued for who he is rather than what he produces, is one of the most important emotional beats in the series. The pizza project itself, a full farm-to-table loop using the school's own wheat, tomatoes, cheese, and pork, also crystallizes the manga's celebration of agricultural self-sufficiency and the dignity of producing food from the ground up.