I’m watching on a POS phone so I may be mistaken on that. But it looked to me like he was cutting in the direction of the ball’s flight.
I watched it in slo mo on the computer I use to surf the net. Took a while to load, but what I saw clearly showed him with the blade moving toward the ball as the ball came toward him, and then cutting it in two.
The blade did not seem to be quite at 90 degrees to the path of the ball; probably more like 70 or 80 degrees when the two connected.
My suspicion is that he practiced a lot, knew where the ball was going to be, and went of the sound of the machine starting to launch, instead of a visual signal.
Sounds are processed much faster by the brain than are visual cues.
This sort of thing amounts to a parlor trick.
I have done similar things with “trick shooting”. They call it “trick” shooting for a reason.
He is probably a master with the sword, but I doubt that he is magical.
Some people are simply talented; combine it with long, hard, practice, and you can get results that most find hard to believe.
Jerry Miculuk does some amazing things with handguns.