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.