The first class after lunch was PE. April was the month of physical evaluations, so they had to run laps the whole time. Even as a second year, the routine was the same. Kai was not quite athletically gifted. If he were to grade his abilities on a very generous curve, he’d put himself somewhere below average.
Also, he was slow.
As someone skilled at action games, he should’ve had good reflexes, but things didn’t seem to work the way he intended when it came time to move his entire body.
“...Whoa. What if I’m, like, Kirito?”
He once suggested that to Jun in a melodramatic tone. But as someone who never read the source material for Sword Art Online, she just gave him a look of abject confusion. He supposed that anime-only fans wouldn’t catch the nuance...
However, he was definitely feeling the results of his exercise. Heh, I’m the man who threw ten thousand punches in a month in Fitness Boxing. I’m built different. Kai mentally patted himself on the back. He figured he’d only get exasperated sighs if he boasted to anyone else, so he kept it to himself.
Once class was over, everyone dragged themselves back to the boys’ locker room. The locker room was a small, standalone building off to the side of the gym. It was well-maintained, with the rows of lockers inside it sparkling clean, a far cry from the den of filth and musk that you’d expect. That just went to show that this private school took its athletics seriously.
“Spill the beans, Nakamura. You got five seconds to tell me when you got on Nocchi’s good side. Capiche?”
“Hey now, Kishimoto. I don’t think you need to talk like a bully to get answers...”
“Up yours, Satou! Dammit, Nakamura, what’s a dork like you gettin’ chicks for?!”
“I-It’s not like that! I just see her every now and then since I know Jun.”
“And I’m already jealous of that, ya dweebenheimer! Please, ya gotta introduce me sometime, I’m beggin’ ya!”
“I’ll say something to Jun next time I see her...” One thing.
“Nakamura... you’re a god!”
Kai shared a pretty pointless conversation with Kishimoto and Satou as they got changed. That’s why he was unaware of what was hurtling at him from behind.
An instant...
Yes, it happened in an instant. Kai took a blunt force to the back of the head. He lurched forward, and his forehead collided with the locker.
“Ow... ch...”
He swung around to assess his surroundings and pieced together that a basketball had been thrown at him.
“Sorry ’bout that, otacreep. My hand slipped.”
It came from Matsuda, who was loitering with his crew around the window. His words were apologetic, but none of them tried to hide their snickering. It was just a cheap provocation, but Kishimoto and Satou were already shaking in their boots. Students these days go their whole lives without ever being in a real fight. And Kai was no exception.
You wanna go, Matsuda? Against the ten-thousand-punch legend himself? He could pump himself up all he wanted, but his knees were rattling. And Matsuda’s gang? Beating the crap out of weaklings was their specialty.
“Rest of you can scram,” said one of Matsuda’s cronies.
“We only got business with these here geeks,” said another.
Matsuda’s cronies, Takeda and Umeda, had sinister sneers on their faces as they feigned niceness to the rest of the boys. As usual, they yammered like idiots who probably couldn’t even tie their own shoes (in Kai’s biased opinion).
But that’s all he needed to make them finish changing and leave all the quicker. They didn’t want to get wrapped up in this. And they certainly didn’t want to earn the ire of the group at the top of the class food chain, so they left Kai’s group behind and ran for their lives. None of them thought they were being cold.
Soon, only Kai, Kishimoto, and Satou were left. It was like they were staring down a pack of hungry wolves, and their appetite for blood was palpable.
“Nakamura. You. Me. After school.” Matsuda left no room for questioning in his demand.
“You know what’ll happen if you don’t show, right?”
“You’re all goin’ through hell ’til the day you drop out.”
“You wouldn’t do that to yer friends, wouldja, Nakamura?”
The three cronies all cackled like hyenas. Kai couldn’t so much as breathe in the face of such brazen cruelty. The cold sweat dripping from his forehead wouldn’t stop.
How did he get himself into this mess? Kai knew only one thing. It was that escape was not an option. He couldn’t risk taking Kishimoto or Satou down with him. And that was that.