The clock had just hit 8:15 AM when Shido arrived at school. He checked the class list posted in the hallway and then headed to the classroom that would be his home for the next school year.
“Year Two… Class Four, huh?”
After the spacequake turned this region into a wasteland thirty years earlier, the area had been redeveloped as a test city with cutting-edge technologies. Raizen High, the public school Shido attended, was one product of this.
In addition to the facilities that seemed impossible for a public school, both the interior and exterior were in pristine condition, since the place had only been built a few years earlier. Naturally, it featured the latest in underground shelters, seeing it was on the site of a disaster.
Perhaps that was the reason for the institution’s low acceptance rate. Shido had struggled to get in when he’d decided to take the entrance exam solely because the school was close to his house.
“Hmm.” He quietly groaned and then looked around the classroom for no particular reason.
There was still some time before homeroom, but a fair number of his classmates were already seated at their desks. Some were chatting happily, excited to be in the same class, while others sat alone, looking bored. He couldn’t see too many familiar faces.
He decided to check the seating chart on the blackboard.
“Shido Itsuka.”
He heard a quiet, inflectionless call from behind him.
“Hmm…?”
Curious about the owner of this unfamiliar voice, he looked back and saw a slender girl standing there.
Her hair skimmed her shoulders, and she looked like a doll, which caught Shido’s attention. It was hard to imagine anyone would object to that. It was like her parts had been precision machined to perfection. At the same time, her face was completely devoid of anything that could have been called an expression.
“Um…?” He checked to see that there were no other Shido Itsukas in the area. After he confirmed he was the only one, he raised an eyebrow, pointing at himself. “…Me?”
“Yes.” The girl gave him the tiniest nod as she looked directly at him without any emotion whatsoever.
“H-how do you know my name?”
She seemed confused by the question. “You don’t remember?”
“…Uh.”
“I see,” she noted, without sounding particularly dejected. She walked over to a desk near the window, where she drew back her seat, pulled out a thick engineering book, and began to read.
“Wh-what the…?” Shido scratched his cheek and furrowed his brow.
This girl acted like she knew him, but where had they met?
“Hi-yah!” A perfect karate chop slammed into his back.
“Oof!” He rubbed at the sore spot. “Ow! What do you think you’re doing, Tonomachi?!”
He knew the culprit immediately.
“Oh-ho! You seem to be in good spirits, sexual beast Itsuka!” Instead of commenting that they were lucky to be in the same class, Shido’s best friend, Hiroto Tonomachi, crossed his arms and leaned back, cackling, showing off his toned body and spiked hair.
“Sex… What?” Shido frowned.
“Sexual beast, you dirty boy. I let you outta my sight for one second, and you turn into a horndog. When did you get all chummy with Tobiichi, huh?”
With a huge grin, Tonomachi slipped an arm around Shido’s neck.
“Tobiichi…?” Shido asked. “Who’s that?”
“Don’t play dumb. You were literally just talking to her.” Tonomachi jerked his chin in the direction of the window seats. And the girl sitting there.
Maybe she sensed Shido’s eyes on her, because she lifted her head from the pages of her book and turned toward him.
“…” Shido held his breath and looked away awkwardly. Tonomachi, meanwhile, smiled and waved.
“…” Without reacting to either of them, the girl returned her gaze to the publication in her hands.
“See? Check that out,” Tonomachi said. “The most difficult girl in the school. They call her Permafrost, Cold War, Kacrackle. How the hell did you reel her in?”
“Huh…? Wh-what are you on about?”
“No way. Don’t tell me you seriously don’t know.”
“…Hmm. I don’t remember her from last year.”
Tonomachi threw his hands up with a surprised look on his face, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He was always overreacting to everything.
“It’s Tobiichi,” he said. “Origami Tobiichi. Super genius. The pride of our school? You never heard of her?”
“No. Never… So she’s pretty great, I guess?”
“It’s not a matter of being great,” Tonomachi informed him. “She always gets the highest marks in our grade. And on the mock exams, her score was wild—number one in the whole country. Brace yourself to drop a rank in this class.”
“Huh? Why would she be in a public school?”
“Dunno. Maybe some kind of family sitch?” Tonomachi shrugged dramatically. “And it’s not just that. She’s a killer athlete, and she’s turning into a real cutie. She was number three on last year’s Thirteen Most Dateable Girls list, y’know? You didn’t see that?”
“I didn’t even know such a list existed,” Shido replied. “And thirteen? Why would they pick such a random number?”
“The girl who put together the list was number thirteen.”
“…Ohhh.” Shido smiled wanly. Apparently, she just had to be on the list.
“By the way,” Tonomachi continued. “There were three hundred fifty-eight boys listed for the Most Dateable Guys.”
“That many?! Coming in last means would mean you’ve made it onto the Least Dateable list! Who decided on three hundred fifty-eight? Was it the person who ran the poll?”
“Yeah. Some people seriously don’t know when to give up.”
“And what number were you, Tonomachi?”
“Three hundred fifty-eight.”
“You’re the one who put it together?!”
“Apparently, my love feels ‘suffocating,’ I’m ‘too hairy,’ and the space under my big toenail ‘probably stinks.’”
“That is the Least Dateable list!” Shido cried.
“Well, to be honest, the guys at the bottom didn’t get a single vote. It was like a contest to see who had the least negative points.”
“That’s some kind of self-inflicted torture! You could just not do it, you know!”
“Relax, Itsuka. You got a vote from someone who wanted to stay anonymous, so you were fifty-two.”
“What am I supposed to say to that?!”
“Well, the general public said you ‘don’t seem that interested in girls’ and that you’re ‘probably gay.’”
“You didn’t have to tell me that!”
“Calm down, man. For Best Couple, the shippers chose you and me for number two.”
“That doesn’t make me happy at all!” Shido wailed, unable to hold back. Unfortunately, he was morbidly curious about who ranked as the number one couple.
Tonomachi didn’t seem bothered by it (or rather…he seemed like he had already moved past it), and he crossed his arms as if to say they should get back to the point at hand.
“Anyway, it’s no exaggeration to say that Tobiichi is the most famous person at school. The fact that you don’t seem to know her, Itsuka, does come as quite the surprise to your good pal Tonomachi.”
“Ugh, could you please drop it?” Shido groaned. No sooner had he done so than a familiar bell chimed, reminding him that he still hadn’t checked where his desk was. “Whoops.”
Following the seating chart on the blackboard, Shido set his bag down in a spot in the second row from the window and looked around.
“…Oh.”
In an odd twist of fate, his desk was right beside that of their grade’s leading lady.
Origami Tobiichi closed her book before the bell finished ringing and tucked it away in her desk. Then she looked forward, displaying a beautiful profile of impossible precision.
“…”
Feeling a little uncomfortable, Shido turned his attention to the chalkboard.
As if on cue, the classroom door rattled open. A woman with a small build wearing thin-rimmed glasses stepped inside, marching up to the podium at the front of the class.
He heard the other students whispering around him.
“It’s Tama…”
“Aah, we got Tama.”
“For real? All right!”
The chatter seemed to be positive overall.
“Good morning, everyone,” the woman said, her voice lilting and slow. “I will be your homeroom teacher for the next year. My name is Tamae Okamine.”
Licensed educator in charge of social studies, Tamae Okamine (aka Tama) bowed to the class. Her glasses slid forward—they must not have been the right size—and she hurriedly pushed them back up with both hands.
Even her harshest critic would assume that she was the same age as her pupils upon seeing her youthful face and small build. She was a student favorite, given her generally easygoing personality.
“…?”
While Shido’s classmates grew more excited, his own face stiffened. Origami was now staring hard at him.
Their eyes met briefly, and he hurried to look away.
Why on earth was she looking at him? Well, it wasn’t like she wasn’t allowed to look at him, and she might have been looking at something on the other side of him, but either way, he felt flustered by the whole exchange.
“…Wh-what is going on…?” he muttered, too quiet for anyone else to hear, a trail of sweat running down his cheek.