ＥＸ－1
The distinction between the words “youth” and “young man” is fairly blurry. Normally, a person is a youth until fifteen and then is a young man for the latter half of their teens through their early twenties. However, current juvenile laws considered someone a youth until the age of twenty, so as always, the definition is not set in stone. At present, an eighteen-year-old could be called both a youth and a young man, but there was a proposed revision to laws to consider people youths only up until the age of eighteen. If that were to pass, then the definitions would solidify a little.
Right now, a man who was at that somewhat-ambiguous age of being either a youth or a young man was walking through town. He was 170 centimeters tall, which hadn’t changed from a year ago, so he probably wouldn’t get any taller. He weighed sixty kilograms and was somewhat baby-faced. He had a pretty good-looking, symmetrical face if someone were to look closer, but he wasn’t out of the territory of average, and he had an air of a random bystander about him.
However, the young man was a little different from your average person. Because he’d been involved in several incidents in the past year, he had appeared on television, and his grades in PE had also gotten a lot better. He had, in fact, been summoned to another world as a hero before.
In all honesty, that world’s power levels were far too inflated, and he hadn’t ended up being much of a hero at all. Even so, the abilities and strength he’d gained in that other world were significant, and after returning, it was almost as if he’d discovered that it was nearly too much for one person.
Next to him walked a beautiful young girl with pink hair. Her face was as well ordered as a doll’s, and she was almost otherworldly. Her skin was incredibly smooth and white, and her fingers were slender. She wore a one-piece dress that they’d bought at a nearby store, and it really fit her, but she was in no way planning to be a pirate king.
As a matter of course, she drew stares and was showered in attention as a natural reaction to her beauty, though mysteriously, no one paid any attention to her oddly colored hair. It was strange. Pink hair stood out ridiculously well against the backdrop of Japan. Even outside of Japan, strawberry-blonde hair was rare. Not to mention, her hair wasn’t strawberry-blonde at all. It was straight-up pink. That was nowhere close to a blonde that was slightly reddish and could be seen as pink in some lights. However, there were none of the telltale signs of a wig or her hair being dyed. She seemed so impossible it was almost as if a 2D character out of some story or game had jumped out into real life.
The young man’s name was Minamijuuji Sei. The young girl’s name was Virgo. Sei was a true-blue Japanese person, but he had the unbelievable history of having fought in another world. Meanwhile, Virgo was a visitor from that other world.
At the moment, she wore a bracelet given to her by the master she served that warped others’ perceptions of her. To others, she still had pink hair, but they were made to not question it at all.
These two budding youths had taken an interest in one another as they fought together two years ago, and they officially became an item a year later after everything was over. They were currently in the middle of a date, and Virgo was making brave but low-key moves to try to get Sei to hold her hand. Sei, for his part, answered well.