Dammit! I have to accelerate, have to go faster. So fast I can break through every wall in the virtual world and even the real world and go somewhere without people! Fast!
The racquet cut through the air with a whoosh. The ball, now nothing more than a beam of light, grazed Haruyuki’s cheek, passed behind him, and vanished. The words GAME OVER dropped down accompanied by a silly, sad trombone sound effect and bounced around on the court. Without glancing at his blinking high score, Haruyuki turned back to the panel to restart the game, head hanging.
At that moment, a voice suddenly rocked Haruyuki’s sacred hiding place.
“Oh!! So this is where you locked yourself up!!” The screech was so high-pitched it was like lightning bolts in his ears, or rather his brain. Stiffening his back with a start, Haruyuki turned around to find a student avatar in the same animal class as his.
Even so, it didn’t have the slightest bit of the silliness of Haruyuki’s pig. The slim, supple cat was covered in silver fur tinged with purple, with blue ribbons tied on one ear and the tip of her tail. It hadn’t been put together from scratch right from polygons, but each of the parameters had clearly been tinkered with.
A touch of anger rose up in her golden eyes, and the cat opened wide her mouth with its small fangs and cried out again, “Lately, you’ve just disappeared the whole lunch hour, Haru, so I came looking for you! Games are great and all, but you don’t have to play this kind of lame game, you know. You should come and play with the rest of us!”
“…I can do what I want. Leave me alone.”
Haruyuki tried to leave it at that and return to the court, but the silver cat stretched her neck out and peered at the GAME OVER display. “Huh, what’s that…level one fifty-two, score two million six hundred thirty thousand?! You’re…,” she shouted in an even higher voice—
Amazing!
Or at least that’s what Haruyuki was briefly, faintly hoping for when the cat betrayed him abruptly.
“An idiot! What are you even doing, skipping lunch for this?! Come down right now!!”
“…I don’t want to. There’s still half an hour left for lunch. You go.”
“Well, if you’re going to be like that, I’ll just have to use force.”
“Go ahead if you can,” Haruyuki answered under his breath and clenched his racquet tighter.
There was no “collision detection” in avatars in the school network. Under the pretext of preventing improper behavior, students were not permitted to touch the avatars of other students. So naturally, forcing another person to log out was completely out of the question.
Sticking her slim tongue out as far as it would go, the cat avatar shouted, “Link out!”
She disappeared immediately, leaving a swirl of light and a ringing noise in her wake.
Once the pest had finally gone, Haruyuki blew a vague sadness out his nose in a short breath. That was when it happened.
An impact, a thud—no gentle love tap—struck his head, and the surrounding scene faded away. From the other side of the darkness, the real world returned, a point of light zooming up around him. Feeling his own weight pressing on him heavily, Haruyuki blinked frantically and tried to focus his eyes.
He was in the boys’ washroom stall where he’d started. But instead of the blue-gray door that should have been before him, Haruyuki saw something unexpected.
“You…Wha…?”
Standing, arms crossed and imposing, in front of him was a lone female student. The ribbon on her blazer was green, showing that she was in seventh grade just like him.
Her physique was small, weighing in at less than a third of Haruyuki’s mass. Her short bangs were pulled up to the right and held there with a blue pin. Her large, asymmetrical eyes—outlined by small, catlike lids—burned with anger, glaring at Haruyuki.
Her left hand held a small basket while her right was stretched out directly above Haruyuki’s head and clenched tightly in a fist. Seeing this, he finally understood why he had been suddenly yanked out of his full dive. She had punched him with that tiny fist, and the impact had activated the safety on his Neurolinker, which had then automatically disconnected.
Normally, the safety was activated when your shoulders were shaken or someone called out to you in a loud voice, and nervous girls would set it so that they linked out the second anyone got within a meter of them. The fact that Haruyuki hadn’t noticed the intruder until she hit him on the crown of his head was because he had hidden himself in the toilet stall and dropped the safety to the lowest level.
“Y-you!!” Haruyuki shouted, stunned, at the only girl in the school he could talk to without panicking. “What are you doing?! This is the boys’ toilet! And I locked the door…Are you stupid or something?!”
“You’re the stupid one,” Chiyuri Kurashima, Haruyuki’s childhood friend, strong enough to climb over the partition wall in the boys’ toilet still in her skirt, shot back contemptuously as she slipped a hand behind her to unlock the door.
Bouncing out of the stall with a light movement, she finally smiled faintly at Haruyuki, who was squinting involuntarily at the sunlight slipping off her chestnut-colored hair. “Come on, come out already,” she urged.
“…Fiiiiine.” Swallowing a sigh, Haruyuki yanked himself up, causing the toilet lid to creak. He followed Chiyuri toward the door, asking the question nagging at him. “…How’d you know I was here?”
She didn’t answer right away. “I was on the roof, too. So I followed you,” she informed him briefly after sticking her head out of the boys’ toilet and checking the situation outside before stealing into the hallway.
Which meant…
“…You saw?” Haruyuki mumbled, arresting the foot that was about to step out of the washroom.
Chiyuri looked down like she was trying to find the right words, leaned back against the interior wall, and then finally nodded sharply. “I won’t butt in with them anymore. If that’s what you want…I don’t have much choice. But you should at least eat. It’s bad for you not to.” A somehow forced smile graced her face, and Chiyuri held out the basket in her left hand. “I made you a lunch. I can’t guarantee it’ll be good, though.”
I’m pathetic, Haruyuki thought.
His own mind, always trying to find something other than pity in the things Chiyuri said and did, was deeply and unrepairably pathetic.
Because Chiyuri had a proper boyfriend. Another childhood friend, the opposite of Haruyuki in every way.
His mouth moved on its own, and Haruyuki heard himself say in a strangely flat voice, “Leftovers from the one you made for Taku?”
Chiyuri’s face clouded over abruptly. Unable to see her eyes under those tightly furrowed brows, Haruyuki dropped his gaze to the floor of the hallway.
“No. Taku eats the school lunch. This…it’s just sandwiches—ham and cheese—and potato salad. It’s your favorite, right?”
Haruyuki tried to gently push back the white basket entering his field of view. But his sluggish, real-world meat body knocked the basket out of Chiyuri’s hand in a sudden jerk far removed from his intention. The moment it hit the ground, the lid popped open, and from inside the light blue parchment paper, neatly triangular sandwiches flew out—one, two—and fell apart.
“Ah!”
Instinctively, he went to apologize, but inside his brain, it was suddenly hot, and the words he should have uttered refused to take shape. Unable to even lift his head, he stepped backward, still staring at the floor, and cried out as he turned aside, “N-no thanks!!”
He felt the acute desire to log out of this place right away, but that was clearly impossible. If only he could at least have fled desperately…but his real body was thick and good for nothing; he couldn’t even escape the small, sobbing voice behind him.
Lower than low, Haruyuki ignored his afternoon classes and the homeroom that followed, dashing out of the classroom as if fleeing the scene. Banishing from his mind the voice telling him that he should go wait for Chiyuri outside
her classroom two doors down or at the school gates or somewhere along the road home, he made a break instead for his other hiding spot, the library.
Spaces like libraries had functionally ceased fulfilling their original roles long ago. However, there were some grown-ups who thought that, just like the school itself, paper media was essential to a child’s education, and the walls were lined with the spines of brand-new books set atop bookcases that could only be considered a waste of space and resources.
But then, thanks to this attitude, he was guaranteed precious personal space within the school, so he couldn’t complain. Carrying two or three books for camouflage, he locked himself up in one of the reading booths along the wall and stuffed his body into the narrow chair before executing the order for a full dive at a volume just barely loud enough for the Linker to catch.
Precisely because it had only been a few minutes since classes ended, the school net was deserted. He needed to hole himself up in his usual refuge while the net was still empty, and he cut through the grass at top speed to climb the tree building.
Naturally, the virtual squash corner was bare. To be honest, he would have preferred a bloodstained battle game to this simple racquet sport to banish the gloominess in his heart, even temporarily, but given that he couldn’t connect to the global net, he was stuck with the school net and its limited selection of gaming apps.
Although his hunger was already more than he could bear, he didn’t feel like going home straightaway. He had no idea what he should do, what he should say if he ran into Chiyuri on the way home. Well, first off, he should apologize, but he wasn’t so sure he could make his mouth do what he wanted it to.
That day, it was just like this.
On the verge of remembering another time a long time ago when he had made Chiyuri cry like that, Haruyuki shut his eyes tightly. Keeping them closed, he brought his right hand up to the control panel and logged in.
Fumbling, he gripped his racquet, changed the orientation of his body, and faced the court before opening his eyes and trying to beat back the heaviness in his heart using the ball that dropped down when—
Haruyuki froze.
The primary colors of the 3-D font in the center of the court displayed a different number from the one he remembered.
“Level…one sixty-six?!”
More than ten levels higher than the one Haruyuki had achieved just a few hours earlier.
For a second, he wondered how this could have happened given that scores are managed by student ID, but he soon figured it out. Because Haruyuki had been forcibly logged out when Chiyuri hit him on the head, the game had been disengaged with him still logged in. So someone could have picked up where he left off and destroyed his score.
However…
Someone other than him getting a score like this?!
The one thing that had kept Haruyuki’s pride from crumbling completely was his VR game technique in the full dive environment. Obviously, this didn’t include quiz and board games, where winning depended on how smart you were, but when it came to shooters or action or racing games where what mattered was how fast your reflexes were, it was a point of pride for Haruyuki that there wasn’t a soul in school who could best him.
But he never made a show of this. Since elementary school, he’d had it drummed into his head—often painfully—that nothing good came of making himself conspicuous. Up to now, he’d been of a mind that he didn’t actually need to confirm his superiority, but…this awe-inspiring squash score…
Just then.
A voice behind him. Not Chiyuri’s. It was a girl, but her voice was lower and sounded smooth like silk. “So you’re the one who got that ridiculous score?”
Turning around trepidatiously, Haruyuki saw: a dress inlaid with silver in the darkness. An umbrella piercing the floor like a cane, a sword. Snow-white skin and inky black eyes. Kuroyukihime.
Even though she was an avatar, there was not even the faintest hint of digital about her appearance, almost a type of extreme beauty. The most popular person in school moved forward noiselessly. A faint smile playing across her red lips—the only part of her entire body with any color—Kuroyukihime continued, “Don’t you want to go further, boy…to accelerate?”
If you do, come to the lounge at lunch tomorrow.
Leaving just these words to linger, Kuroyukihime abruptly logged out.
The time her avatar had existed in Haruyuki’s field of vision was likely not even a full ten seconds. The event was just too impossible; he could even have believed it had been a bug on the local net server or an illusion, but the incredible score still floating above the court was real enough.
Unable to muster up the desire to try for a new high score, Haruyuki ended his dive and sat in the library reading booth, staring off into space. Three lines looped endless in his ears. Kuroyukihime’s tone was not like that of a regular girl their age, but he didn’t feel it was out of place in the slightest given her incredibly powerful presence. It actually made him see at least part of the reason she was so tremendously popular, not just with the boys but with the girls as well.
Haruyuki finally left the school on wobbly legs, his body essentially on autopilot as he made his way home. Had it not been for the traffic prediction display in the audiovisual mode of his Neurolinker, he likely would’ve been run over at least two or three times.
When he arrived at his deserted luxury condo in Koenji, Haruyuki immediately warmed up a frozen pizza, scarfing it down with a soda. His parents had gotten divorced ages ago, and though he lived with his mother now, she never got home before midnight. He only ever saw her when she gave him his lunch money just as he was about to leave for school.
His once-empty stomach now full of junk food, Haruyuki retreated to his room. Normally, he’d do his routine check on the global net, run around a battlefield in Europe for a few hours, and go to bed after giving his all to his homework, but today at least, he didn’t feel like doing anything. Maybe because too many things had happened his brain felt heavy, as if it were swollen, and Haruyuki flopped down onto his bed after taking off his Neurolinker.
His sleep, though, was nothing particularly restful. The sneers of Araya and his gang, Chiyuri’s tears, and Kuroyukihime’s mysterious words played over and over in his head, turning up in his dreams, toying with him.
Don’t you want to go further…to accelerate?
The Kuroyukihime in his dream was not her avatar but the actual vice president of the student council. Even though he had only ever seen her onstage at school assemblies with an aloof, expressionless look on her face, for some reason in his dream, a mischievous, almost inviting smile curled up at the corners of her lips, and she whispered in Haruyuki’s ear. Come here.
2
Right, it was all a dream. Including the meeting on the local net yesterday, Haruyuki thought as he entered the classroom the next day (a Wednesday), having come to school with a glum face as always.
Araya and his thugs kept sending Haruyuki prank mails during a class that was more déjà-vu than anything else. Being shaken down for lunch two days in a row was a first; the order was the same yakisoba and cream melon buns as the previous day. Do they really like them that much? Haruyuki wondered, closing his mail and rising out of his seat as the lunch bell rang.
Sluggishly, he headed not for the rooftop where Araya had summoned him but the lounge next to the student cafeteria on the first floor of the school.
Unlike the closely packed, long, cheap tables that littered the cafeteria, refined, round white tables were arranged spaciously around the semicircular lounge. With its unbroken view of the trees in the courtyard dyed in autumn colors on the other side of its large window, the lounge was without a doubt the most elegant space at Umesato Junior High School.
Thus, it was an unwritten rule that grade-seven students were not allowed to use it. The ribbons and neckties of the students gathered around the tables were all blue (grade eight) or dark red (grade nine), with not a spot of green to
be found.
Half of the students were laughing and chatting with cups of coffee or tea in one hand while the other half, eyes closed, had entrusted their bodies to the tall-backed chairs. They weren’t sleeping; they were on full dives in the school net.
Haruyuki first hid his large body awkwardly behind the decorative plant at the entrance to the lounge and peered around the room. He half believed she would totally not be there because the thing yesterday was a dream…but…
“…She’s here…”
He gulped down air unconsciously. At a table by the window in the very back of the lounge was gathered a particularly conspicuous group. Six students, grades eight and nine, comprised the assemblage, and when he really rubbed his eyes and looked, Haruyuki found that he knew all their faces. Likely all student council members. Each of them, boy and girl, was comely in a different way.
Among them, the one with the strongest presence was a girl with a blue ribbon wearily flipping the pages of a hardcover book. Her straight hair, nearly down to her waist, was a jet black rarely seen these days, while the legs peeking out from her dark gray pleated skirt were wrapped in similarly black tights. For some reason, even the open-collared shirt under her blazer was a brilliant black. No mistake, this was the most popular girl at Umesato Junior High: Kuroyukihime.
If you moved in a straight line, the table in the back was probably no more than twenty meters from the lounge entrance. But to Haruyuki, the distance might as well have been infinite. There was absolutely no way he could undertake the hazardous journey of cutting through the seniors to get there.
Do a right about-face and get out of here. Buy the bread and the yogurt at the cafeteria counter, and take it to Araya and them on the roof. Then hide out in the toilet in the second school building and kill some empty hours in a single-player game on the local net.
Shit. Dammit. I’ll go.
Clenching his teeth, Haruyuki came out from behind the plant and stepped into the lounge.
It was no persecution complex; the eyes of the seniors gathered around the tables definitely held hints of reproach and displeasure. He might have gotten a pass if he had just started school or something, but halfway through the second term, he should have been fully aware of the rule that grade-sevens were not allowed.
Kuroyukihime’s Return Page 2
