The Nth Confession
"I... I like you, Miss Mitsuki!"
The trembling voice rang through the after-school classroom.
The sun had already sunk low, staining the view outside the windows orange, and a breeze drifting in through the open windows stirred the curtains at the back of the room in slow, lazy waves. With nearly everyone gone, the classroom was quiet—it was, if anything, a rather decent setting for a confession.
I quietly studied the boy standing before me, head bowed deep.
His hands were clenched into fists so tight that faint veins stood out on their backs, and from his ears down to his neck, his skin had already flared a deep red. It looked like he'd worked up the courage to say those words over quite a long stretch of time.
Well, this is awkward.
I did remember the boy's name. Same grade, different class, I think. We'd crossed paths a few times in the hallway, and just last month we'd talked once in the library, but beyond that we had no particular connection.
And yet—a confession.
I still couldn't wrap my head around it.
Tilting my head slightly, I gave the boy's face another once-over. He wasn't bad-looking. If anything, he was reasonably put-together, tall, and by all accounts decent-natured—the kind of guy who apparently had a pretty good reputation among the girls.
But.
That was all beside the point. If the question was whether I liked him, the answer had been decided long ago.
"That's a shame. But no."
The corners of my mouth lifted slightly as I said it, and the boy's expression froze solid.
"...Huh?"
Did he not hear me?
I leaned lightly against the desk by the window and said it again.
"The liking-you thing. I don't."
The boy stared at me blankly.
"I don't like you."
This time he definitely understood. The hope and nervousness that had been mingled on his face drained away in an instant.
Honestly, I did feel a little sorry for him. A very little. But I couldn't very well give an answer I didn't mean. Weren't you doing someone worse by accepting a confession you had no feelings behind?
At least, that was how I saw it.
"...I see."
The boy bowed his head limply.
Deciding there was nothing more to say, I picked up my bag from where I'd left it on the windowsill. This much should have wrapped things up cleanly. Dragging it out any longer would only make things awkward for both of us.
"See you around, then."
I gave a small wave and started toward the classroom door—and a voice called out from behind me.
"W-wait, just a second."
I turned back with my hand still on the door handle.
"Yeah?"
The boy looked even more tense than before.
"Then... could we at least be friends?"
"...Friends?"
"It's fine if you don't like me right away," the boy said, swallowing hard. "I just want to get to know you better. Even a little."
His face was so earnest that I faltered for a moment.
Friends, huh. Well, sure. That much was nothing. We went to the same school, and I had no reason to dislike him. I nodded without much thought.
"Sure. Friends is fine."
The boy's eyes went wide, and I smiled. The face that had looked dead just moments ago—like his whole world had ended—brightened in a flash.
How does he like me that much?
I found it a little fascinating. I'd rejected him not a minute ago. Still, it was none of my concern. This time I really did step out of the classroom.
"See you tomorrow."
I had just closed the door and made it a few steps down the hallway when—
"UWAAAAAH!"
A bizarre scream erupted from behind me.
I stopped walking.
What now?
It had come from that classroom I'd just left. I considered going back for a peek, but quickly gave up on the idea. There'd been no pain in the scream, and I had no desire to walk back in and make things weird.
I went down the stairs as planned.
And.
Right then, I had no idea—no idea whatsoever—just how dangerous what I'd just done was, in this world.
My name is Nanase Mitsuki. Second-year student at Private Seiran High School. And in this world, a famously beautiful girl.
That's not me bragging—it was simply an objective fact.
Soft, snow-white hair that fell all the way to her waist. The side locks grew unusually long and tapered outward, so that from the front, they looked exactly like fox ears sprouting from her head. The first time I looked in a mirror, I genuinely thought they were real ears and reached up to touch them. Of course, it was just hair.
Her eyes were a vivid crimson. The outer corners tilted slightly upward, and her mouth had a way of naturally curving as if she were smiling, so that even the smallest softening of her expression made her look like she was teasing you.
And then there was her figure.
"...This is a bit much."
That was the first thing I'd said upon standing in front of that mirror.
She was tall for a girl, with a slender waist—and, by contrast, a chest and hips that were almost comically full. Wearing the school uniform shirt pulled the fabric taut across her chest, and the skirt only emphasized the dramatic gap between her waist and hips.
Honestly, if I'd seen a body like this in a manga, I'd have just shrugged and chalked it up to the artist's taste. But when it became my body, the story changed. It was inconvenient. Heavy. Something I had to think about every time I moved. Every time I went down the stairs, I found myself wanting to cup my chest with my hands for no good reason.
She lived her whole life carrying these things around?
I honestly had to admire how the original Nanase Mitsuki had sprinted around without a care in the world.
Ah—of course, I hadn't been Nanase Mitsuki from the start. Not as far as my memories went, anyway.
I used to be an ordinary man. I went to school ordinarily, liked games and manga ordinarily, and among them, I rather enjoyed a rom-com manga called Our Spring Has Not Ended Yet.
And then one day, I opened my eyes—
And I was Nanase Mitsuki.
At first I thought it was a dream, which was fair enough. I'd woken up to a cascade of snow-white hair spilling into my field of vision, and the moment I sat up, my chest swayed with a heavy, startling weight. I yanked the blanket off in shock, then pulled it right back over my head. Then I pulled it off again.
No matter how I looked, I was a woman. And a very womanly one at that.
Crazy.
That was the only thought I could summon at the time. Checking the mirror on the vanity made it worse. Red eyes. White hair. Side locks jutting up like fox ears. And an utterly, unbearably familiar face.
I knew that face. I'd seen it dozens of times in a manga.
Nanase Mitsuki. The nickname readers had given her in the original: the Fox Girl. A name earned because every single one of her actions seemed to bewitch the people around her.
She was kind to everyone. Her sense of personal distance was strangely, impossibly close. When someone got flustered, she'd lean in even closer on purpose. She'd say things with absolutely no meaning behind them in exactly the way that invited misunderstanding—then smile.
For example:
"I like being around you. It's comfortable."
Things like that. Said normally, it's something you could say to any friend. But when Nanase Mitsuki closed the distance until her face was right in front of a guy's, staring at him with those red eyes as she said it—well, that was a different story entirely.
She'd shake men to their core like that, and then when they inevitably confessed, she'd turn them down with a smile. And so, over and over within the story, absolute hell broke loose. Guys who liked Mitsuki picked fights with other guys. Girls got jealous. At one point, two male students actually came to blows over her.
And Mitsuki herself just sighed as she watched it all.
I didn't do anything.
The readers' comments were unanimous.
You did the most, you know.
I'd even upvoted that comment myself. And that same me... had become that very Mitsuki.
It was truly an absurd turn of events.
Well, whatever.
I accepted reality faster than you might expect. Crying and wailing about being in a woman's body for days on end wasn't going to fix anything. I didn't even know if there was a way back to my original world, so the only thing I could actually do was live on in this body. And the conditions weren't bad.
The family was rich. Her parents were alive and well. She was smart. She'd never caused any trouble at school. And above all—this world was a rom-com manga I already knew inside and out.
No incidents where people lost their lives. No monsters. No psychic powers. No apocalypse. The most serious events were things like the protagonist and a heroine wandering into the wrong rooms on the class trip, or holding hands at the culture festival. In terms of survival difficulty, it was the lowest tier possible.
As long as I keep my head down.
Things might actually turn out pretty well.
There was exactly one problem: this body's relationships.
The original Nanase Mitsuki charmed far, far too many men. To be precise, she acted without any particular intent, and the men simply fell for her on their own. Within the story proper, there were no fewer than three scenes of some barely-named male student confessing to her, and once you counted every officially smitten male side character, the number got pretty steep.
The fans even had a running joke about it.
'At least half the boys in Mitsuki's class have had a crush on her at some point.'
When I read that, I'd assumed it was an exaggeration.
Then, one week after transmigrating, I'd received two confessions. Counting today's, that made three.
"...So it was true."
I muttered it without meaning to on the walk home.
What had I even done? Honestly, nothing at all. I'd never toyed with anyone the way the original Mitsuki did, never leaned close to a guy's face and smiled some suggestive smile. If anything, I'd been as careful as I possibly could. I avoided being alone with male students. Kept my distance so there'd be no accidental contact. Almost never complimented anyone.
And yet, here came the confessions.
The boy today said it all started because I'd fetched a book for him in the library.
I got him a book, and that did it?
When I heard that, I was genuinely dumbfounded. It was on a high shelf, so I just grabbed it for him. He was shorter than me, that's all. How does that turn into love?
As I walked, I caught sight of my reflection in the glass of a shop window. White hair swaying faintly in the breeze. Those pointed side locks moved exactly like fox ears, and the moment my gaze met those red eyes, I found myself staring without meaning to.
"...It's the face, isn't it."
That was the most likely culprit. She was beautiful—honestly. No, past that. She was excessively beautiful. Back when I was a man, if I'd passed a girl like this on the street, I'd have turned around for a second look at minimum. And on top of that, there was the body.
I let out a small sigh and readjusted my bag strap. Still—there was a way forward. I just had to be even more careful from now on. Say only as much as needed. Keep my distance from the boys. Don't smile at them. Don't play the nice girl for no reason.
Above all, it was best not to get tangled up with the major male characters from the original story at all.
I knew how the original went. Who fell for whom. What incidents unfolded. I even roughly remembered at which points the relationships began to tangle. There was no reason for me to insert myself into any of it. I'd let the story flow as written and stay far away. Survive like that until graduation, and I was done.
Perfect.
Okay.
I made a small, quiet vow to myself. Never, ever bewitch another man. That was the one and only rule I needed to keep.
And that was the exact moment it happened.
"Mitsuki."
Someone called my name from behind. A familiar male voice. I turned around on reflex—and the moment I confirmed the face walking toward me, my expression hardened.
Black hair. Tall. ...A face even I, a former man, could admit was handsome. The boy I'd seen countless times in the original. The male protagonist of Our Spring Has Not Ended Yet.
Kamiya Ren.
"Why'd you leave without me?"
Ren came right up to me and, with practiced ease, plucked one of my bags out of my hand.
"...What are you doing?"
"You looked like you were struggling."
"I'm not struggling."
"Yeah?"
Without the slightest care, Ren slung the bag over his own shoulder and fell into step beside me.
Close. ...Far too close. I sidestepped away by one pace.
Ren moved one pace after me.
What is this guy's problem?
I stepped away again. Ren gave me an odd look.
"What's with you?"
"...Nothing."
And this is the guy I moved houses for, just to be childhood friends with.
Because childhood friends always lose. This time too—it absolutely had to be that way.