A sad string of letters sat there next to the list of universities he was trying for. There were no As or Bs present. It was all Ds and Es.
Kazama Shinji let out a melancholy sigh as he continued to gaze at his report card from the national mock exam. He’d read it over and over again since this morning, but the results hadn’t changed. Not that he’d really expected them to—it’s just that they didn’t feel real to him yet.
He knew the exact causes of his downfall: the English section had been full of phrases he’d never learned; World History was all ancient South American stuff, which he’d told himself would never come up; worst of all was Classic Literature, which had been focused on The Tale of Genji.
I mean, The Tale of Genji? Really? That frivolous work of a love-obsessed chick who lived a thousand years ago?! You can’t judge modern young people based on whether or not they understand some ancient playboy’s list of conquests! Shinji found himself thinking.
But there was no point in resenting it. This was the world he lived in—results were everything, and the results of his year-end mock exams were awful.
“I’m done for...” he sighed. The situation was dire. It was January of his third year of high school, and the Center Test was next week. He laid his report card on his desk facedown, then looked around the room, glassy-eyed.
It was lunchtime in class 3-4, and a nervous energy hung over the room. Some students were working hard on entrance exam preparation, while others were napping due to exhaustion from their studies. A group of girls who’d taken the mock exam with Shinji were pressing each other for their results, while a small number of boys were playing card games, acting like they didn’t care about entrance exams at all.
Some of those present already had jobs or college referrals lined up, but most of them were in limbo, and nebulous anxieties seemed to cling to them like wet silk. There was something that was always hanging over them, and it wasn’t just graduation-related stress. The students of class 3-4—formerly class 2-4—hadn’t laughed in a long time.
Chidori Kaname and Sagara Sousuke... It had been a whole year since they’d gone missing.
The writers and reporters had eventually stopped buzzing around the school gate. The repairs to the school building had been finished by summer break. The year’s culture and athletics festivals had concluded, and the school had settled into an uneasy sort of silence. There were no more disruptive explosions, no more of Kaname’s lectures echoing through the hallways, no more screams from students caught up in some commotion or other, no more barking from Ms. Kagurazaka over the school’s PA system...
It was a normal school again, just as it had been before Sousuke had come...except that the student council president, Hayashimizu Atsunobu, had graduated, and the principal, Tsuboi Takako, had transferred to another school towards the end of last year.
Tsuboi’s transfer had been an amicable affair with no blame cast; it simply seemed impossible for her to remain at Jindai High School after all that had happened.“I wish I could have stayed here longer,” she had lamented to the students at the closing ceremony in March. “I wish I could have stayed here as principal until the friends you’re so worried about have returned. No matter how many months, how many years it takes...”
Her words had been a kind of farewell to Chidori Kaname.
But to Shinji, the phrase “until they returned” had no reality to it. This wasn’t just some ordinary kidnapping, and the Japanese police were helpless. He’d heard that, given the nature of the situation, Kaname’s status on her record had been indefinitely changed to ‘on hiatus,’ so on the off chance she did return, she’d be able to start again from her second year... But with all of her old classmates about to graduate, would she even want to come back?
Meanwhile, everyone knew now that Sousuke’s record had been faked, so there was no chance of his ever returning (even the word ‘returning’ felt odd). But none of them could forget the vow he had made to them a year ago: “I will bring her back.”
But was that even possible? As a military geek, Shinji knew a fair bit about the world Sousuke came from: armies, intelligence organizations, terrorists... He knew better than your average high school student how huge and dangerous and strong they were. No individual, no matter how capable, stood a chance against them.
To bring Kaname back, Sousuke would need a network of connections, a wealth of funding, and the best allies possible. Moreover, if this “Amalgam” Sousuke had talked about was real, then they must be unspeakably powerful. Shinji wasn’t aware of their existence, not even as an urban legend. There was no way Sousuke would be able to learn Kaname’s whereabouts from a clandestine organization with that kind of influence. In fact, it occurred to Shinji from time to time that the most likely scenario was that Sousuke was dead.
Since the day Sousuke had left, Shinji had spent a lot of time searching the Internet for traces of his old friend’s activities. If he was out there somewhere making trouble, Shinji thought he might be able to pick up hints about it at the very least (this had also helped him get his mind off his entrance exams, though he’d gotten some good English practice in the process.) But nothing had come up during any of his searches. That, too, was only natural—there was no way a high school kid searching on a home computer would be able to track down an organization like that.