Naomi had helped Ruri in here and was waiting for her to recover. The top half of her face was hidden underneath a damp handkerchief.
Her breathing seemed a little shallow. Naomi could see her mouth moving slightly. After a moment, he realized he was staring at it and jerked his eyes away.
“I’m not good with heights,” Ruri groaned softly.
That seemed like an understatement, considering she’d only been less than a meter above the ground. If someone ever took this girl up to the observation deck of the Kyoto Tower, she might just drop dead on the spot.
“Everyone has their weaknesses,” Naomi said gently. “From now on, why don’t I put back all the books on the top shelves?”
“All right,” Ruri replied, pushing herself up to a sitting position. “I’ll focus on the bottom shelves, then.”
Naomi really thought she should rest a little longer. He found himself starting to reach out toward her. But he didn’t have the guts to touch her, so he ended up pulling his hand back indecisively.
“The bottom shelves have a lot of oversized books. Those things are really heavy. I’ll do them, too.”
“I’ll take the middle shelves, then.”
Naomi found himself looking for a reason to argue, but couldn’t find any. “Okay, that works.”
Ruri nodded and reached out for the juice pack Naomi had bought her from the vending machines in the school store. “Thank you for this, by the way.”
She took a long, long drink of juice through the straw for what felt like thirty seconds straight. She must have good lung capacity, Naomi thought.
Leaning back in the chair in his room, Naomi gazed absently at his smartphone screen.
“Splitting up the job that way was incredibly inefficient,” said Sensei from somewhere above him. He’d popped up in Naomi’s room a little earlier, as suddenly as always. “First, we had to sort out the middle shelf books from all the others. And I wasted tons of time going up and down that ladder constantly. But it forced us to communicate. We had to work together to get it done, you see? Looking back on it now, I think that was a turning point.”
“Yowch!”
Out of nowhere, the crow attacked Naomi. Its three legs unleashed a fearsome barrage of kicks at his head.
“Are you listening?”
“Sorry! Wasn’t paying attention! Gah!”
Naomi’s apology didn’t halt the assault. He had to drop his phone to protect his head.
“What are you smirking about, anyway?” Bending down, Sensei examined the screen of the fallen phone.
“I wasn’t smirking,” Naomi protested, but it was too late now.
The screen was displaying his WiZ friends list, which now contained the name Ichigyou Ruri.
He’d finally managed to add her today.
Ruri had only gotten her first smartphone upon entering high school, and she didn’t have much of an interest in it. She’d been carrying it around without really using it. Now that they were talking more, Naomi had volunteered to help her get the hang of it; while teaching her how to use WiZ, he’d showed her how to add him as her first friend.
Naomi was happy to have her name in his phone. And it was even better knowing that his name was the only one in hers. He couldn’t have described exactly what he was feeling, but it was definitely nice.
Despite his protests, he probably had been smirking. But he’d worked hard for a solid month to get this far. He felt like he’d earned the right.
Looking up at Sensei, he found the man was smiling.
“Hey, good for you.”
It was rare to get that kind of encouragement from this man. Naomi’s mood was suddenly downright buoyant.
“It’s all thanks to you, Sensei!”
This was true, of course. Naomi was entirely reliant on that Ultimate Manual. As long as he followed its descriptions to the letter, he would always get the results that it described. A few weeks ago, he could barely have spoken to Ruri, and now he had her as a contact in his phone. That would have been impossible without Sensei’s help.
Things weren’t so rosy when it came to the God Hand. His effort wasn’t producing predictable results. He was still deeply anxious about whether he’d be able to play his role when the time came.
But this part was different. He was making steady progress. As long as he carried out his instructions to the letter, he would keep getting closer to Ruri.
Sensei told him what to do, and he played the role he’d been assigned. All he was doing was following orders, really.
But still…this was a victory they’d won together. It made him really happy.
“What do we do next?” Naomi asked excitedly as he bent down to pick up his phone.
“We keep at it,” said Sensei with a smile. “We do what we need to do.”
For once, it felt like they were on the same page.
“Try to calm down, though. I don’t want you getting impatient on me.” Sensei opened his notebook and began flipping through it. That battered old thing had the future inside it—the future as it was meant to be. It was kind of awe-inspiring.
“As long as you keep this up, it’s going to work out in the end. You’ve got a cheat sheet from the future, remember? You’re guaranteed to win her over.”
Despite Sensei’s words of caution, the words win her over got Naomi’s blood pumping a little faster.
It was hard not to be impatient. Soon, he was going to have his first girlfriend ever.
7.
NAOMI WATCHED as the words June 25th were scrawled on the library’s whiteboard. It was a date about three weeks in the future.
The chairman continued writing, adding four words in large letters: Charity Used Book Sale.
“The book sale is our single biggest event of the year. Anyone heard of it before?”
A number of hands went up around the room, including Ruri’s; Naomi held his hand up hesitantly a moment later. Maybe one-third of the committee members knew about the sale, from the look of things.
“Yeah, that seems about right. It’s not really a big event.” The chairman didn’t seem particularly upset by this, fortunately.
“Starting today, we’re going to be collecting used books to sell on the 25th. We’ll set up donation boxes in the library and the classrooms and ask everyone to donate whatever they can. Of course, we don’t want anything too beaten up…”
Once the basic explanation was complete, they began dividing the committee up into teams, each with different responsibilities. People moved around the room seemingly at random, but a large group quickly formed around Kadenokouji Misuzu.
At one point in the discussion, she’d casually dropped the following remark: “Sometimes the salesclerks dress up in cute outfits for stuff like this, right?”
It had been intended as an offhand comment, but a bunch of committee members had instantly latched on to it and were getting excited. Certain students began muttering the words salesgirls and cosplay and rejoined the meeting with intense focus.
Naomi had no intention of joining that group, but he did feel a small spark of excitement. Any costume Misuzu wore would look adorable by default, and it would probably attract plenty of customers to the sale, too.
Fighting against the current, Misuzu pushed her way over to Ruri.
“You should dress up too, Ru!”